in other words, wtf are you talking about, you make up some weird idea with no evidence and barely any sense to it and call it a proof? wtf? wow religious people never fail to amaze me with their stupidity.
Its difficult to call the religious stupid when it was a catholic monk who is the father of modern genetics and a catholic priest who first proposed the big bang. Where they stupid too? Further I haven't made any of this up. Its christian theology.
Ok, so you didn't understand. I'll try to spell it out. As an example let's say there are degrees of knowing - "I know X better and better". One day it transpires that one is in 'union' with X, perhaps you can see that by being more than just close to X one can know X best of all.
Union with God, which is what all the major religions are interested in, is like what I;ve described. Evidence becomes immaterial - at the point of union (baptism) the existence of God is self-evident: one participates in the self-awareness of God himself. Its a spriritual reality; so you don't even need a brain for it: babies born without a brain can be baptised and therefore would know God.
Certainly. Presumption isn't always a bad thing, as long as you understand what you're doing.
Look the word up in a dictionary.
Nonsense. Science is a set of methods, or more broadly, it is commonly thought of as the collection of results from applying those methods. None of that includes God (or gods) in any meaningful way. See your history, particularly Francis Bacon.
I refer you to Karl Popper, provisionally. Francis Bacon is so 4 centuries ago. Even the philosophy of science changes its schizo mind a too much to be trusted, quite apart from its 'facts'. You might like to also look up the word "nonsense".
Science and mathematics are the only ones in that "litter" that ever grew up to be more than clueless puppies, actually.
They are conditional on philosophy. Ie, what is "Truth". Neither mathematics nor science even approach that question. They ask the question : "Is this true/untrue respectively?". Its like the difference between an animal and a human: the animal sees the world, the human sees into the world even though it lives within it, and thinks of what might be outside of the world (even beyond understunding). Beat that with your namby pamby science. Scientists are pansies : they can't handle the Truth!!
Religion was stillborn with regard to evidence and reality
So let's say that God reveals himself: let's say he does it by union to the creature. So the creature sees with God's eyes and see's God's reality as if he were God. I've just defined baptism . Even mathematics can't beat that for proof. Science doesn't even believe in proof. Scientists don't beleive in anything, and go on about truth rather too much.
philosophy spends most of its time chasing its own tail.
So it does, and so perhaps it should. I refer you to the essays of Chaitin, the God-son of Godel who proved that mathematics is as arbitary as any other subject. In anycase think of this : take a (hypothetical) all-knowing thing: he will know himself, and if he is all that there is then he is self-referential. St Thomas Aquinas defined the Trinity in terms of self-knowledge. Chaitin is obsessed with self-reference.
Seriously: science really isn't that interesting. Look further. I urge you, even beyonf methemtatics. And if you really believe in truth then question all your assumptions, every single one of them, and don't stop. Christians have to do it all the time. Its tough. Particularly when up against the more knowlegeable and clever.
Reality is what it is, and no amount of reputation, admiration, or even worship, will change the basic facts of existence.
The believer in a nutshell! But where's your proof?
"Nonsense. When there is no evidence for any one item, event or personage, the reasonable default position is non-existence."
That's still presumption.
"If you want to bring the presumption of a god or gods into science, then you have the obligation to bring evidence, theory, repeatability. Without that, you have nothing scientific."
Science isn't the beginning and the end. Even science has foundations, rather like the one's you mention, but also including the existence or non-existence of God. That question comes before science, and isn't part of science. Which would make sense if a God/god/gods created science. Just as philosophy comes before science. And mathemetics.
Science is runt of the litter, but someone put an axe in its cloven foot.
Since he appears to presume the non-existence of God then he is most unscientific. In anycase its debatable whether he does science at all, so perhaps one shouldn't be hard on him for that reason.
"And it still only implies a finite number of universes."
But suggests, to the philosopher/mathematician an infinite number of universes since either none, 1 or infinity seem most likely, anything else is too arbitary, even a prime (ie. which prime, and why that one). Go and refer your self to Hawkings and the other chumps persuing the infinite universe theories.
In anycase you're nit-picking. My original statement is fine.
So that's 1 for not knowing what I'm talking about, and 0 for responding with comprehension
"Since the probability of life in a given universe is astronimically small then since there is no God then there must be an infinite number of universes." [tacit presumption of Stephen Hawking, et al]
"Municipal competition won't kill commercial broadband any more than Linux has killed Windows."
That's a poor analogy. Linux may well kill windows, it just hasn't happended yet because Linux has deficiencies that have slowed its adoption. But broadband is broadband: unless the municiplities offer a severely substandard service, and even if they do, the motivation to pay will be severely underminded.
Lessig's assertion, which really should be couched with "in my opinion", is a typical non-fact that those with ideologies employ. He believes something, and he's willing to use sleight of hand to prove it.
The fact that scientists change their mind is a strength. It is quite true that they are sometimes a little slow doing it.
The trouble is that people are being punished or banned from doing things on the word of these guys because they represent their position(s) as certain, and people believe them. But there is no certainty in science, and so a particular approach based on a scientific authority should not be made compulsory for all; other approaches should be allowed also, even if they contradict the scientific/expert opinion or seem a bit primitive.
Those celebrities may be somewhat off the mark, but so are the experts much of the time, but much more precisely inaccurate than the celebrities being mocked/humiliated in that disgraceful piece of BBC anti-journalism.
If that BBC article had its way the scientists/experts would be legislating. Thank God they are not.
The position on diet and Acne is/was reperesented as proven fact. Five years ago any acne support website would repeat that unlikely factoid (I don't know what they say now).
Fascinatingly Carl Popper, the science philospher that set the modern scientific environment, believed that "the truth content of our theories, even the best of them, cannot be verified by scientific testing, but can only be falsified." [Wikipedia quote, rather than Popper quote]. But the way these experts and scientists go on Popper may as well have not bothered. Popper effectively brought Socrates in to science : "Wisdom is to know that you know nothing". But Popper never got the chance to sacrifice himself with hemlock, and it shows. Everybody goes along with Popper, and yet few act as if he had said anything.
Having read the BBC article I can see some partial truth in the celebrity understanding, and some nonsense coming from the scientists. There is such a thing as clogging the lymphatic system: a certain worm that causes Elephantiasis. and yet the expert was effectively saying that such a concept was a nonsense. Someone should shoot him.
Lets have a quick examination of what the experts have been saying over the years :
Their scientific 'facts' have had us living like vampires to avoid skin cancer; eating margarine - a kind of textured plastic - instead of butter.
eating fruit everyday and out of season despite the lack of nutritional value (fruit gives almost nothing except for vit C and sugar - see liver and kidney for real nutrition) and being completely against hunter-gatherer and evolutionary norms (we need 20,000 years for significant adaption which we're half way through)
eat unprecedented quantities of carbohydrates in amounts rarely consumed by any mammalian species let alone a hunter (cows are not designed for corn/barley, but for grass)
got us to consume large amounts of vegetable oils which, perhaps excepting olive oil, are turning out to be effectively toxic
tried to make us believe that sugar has nothing to do with acne.
avoid eggs because they will induce heart disease due to their cholesterol levels.
The list goes on.
Some of you here will know that I've mentioned many things that these experts have had to admit to having been mistaken. Earlier this year the extra-ordinary news came out that 50 times more people die due to vitamin-D deficiency induced immuno-suppresion than die of sun-caused skin cancer. It turned out that those deadly skin cancers are quite rare.
4 years ago there was an editorial in an american dermatology journal discussing the problem that some of their facts (like acne having nothing to do with diet) appeared to be looking decidely unfactual. Anyone with a bit of common sense could have told them that. I even for myself discovered, on JAMA's website, an older study that mentioned that the main food source of the acne bacteria is triglycerides which mainly comes as a by-product of the metabolism of - you've guessed it - sugar (fructose specifically). It would seem that many bodily cysts are fed by triglycerides and sugars generally. Bacteria doesn't usually go for protein or fats.
It turns out that polyunsaturated oils/fats far from being healthy would seem to be carcinogenic; partly due to their high-speed rancidity problems but also due to a strong immuno-suppressive effect (particularly sunflower oil). They are so chemically active that they are said to be an anti-nutrient as they 'burn' away vitamins in the stomach. Anthropologists could have told us that polyunsaturates only make up a quite small proportion of a natural human diet. But while railing against the creationists (who are stuck on an irrelevancy instead of courageously proclaiming Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven) the same people advise us to eat substances contrary to our evolutionary developement : corn flakes, muesli, cereals generally, quantities of manipulated fruit (large, unnaturally sugary, and out of season), buckets of polyunsaturates, margarine, the nightshade family (tomatoes, potatoes, egg-plant, etc). We aren't eating a farmer diet: we are eating an industrialised diet, and we've had no time to adapt to it.
Up to date doctors these days are telling their patients to switch back to butter as the full and awful consequences of synthetic fats have become apparent. The other day New York banned their use in public eateries.
Six years ago the largest diet study, conducted by the WHO, came to its preliminiary 10 years results, which demonstrated that the more eggs you eat the longer you live. I love eggs, but had restricted myself to 2 a week on the advice of these infernal experts. I felt quite angry.
The sort that needs more than 640K or ram, I should think.
No one needs more than a 6502 processor and 32K of ram; the last 20 years has been an exersize in self-indulgence. And MS Word : pah! Long live WordWise(tm)
There seems to be some confusion over what constitutes freewill.
Philip Pullman (of the Dark Materials trilogy) would have children believe that to be free is to follow your desires, dislocating freedom from will, and so "The Church" (equipped with a magesterium) is oppressive as it teaches against that.
The nutcases in this report seem to have a definition of freewill that follows no convention whatever.
Whether one is born with gay/black/white/pedo/deaf/pizza-faced/straight tendecies, or devlopes a cancer that produces such leanings, has nothing to do with free-will. Obviously you can't choose these tendencies, but its what you do consequently that invokes the business of freewill. Do you follow your desire to kill and maim, or do you resist it? That's what free-will is about. Do you allow self-pity to overwhelm you and take your own life, or not. Do you tell someone who loves you that you love them for the sake of a screw, or forego the pleasure? A virgin is prized within religious cultures because they demonstrate, in the most basic way, self-control and strength of will, and so will make better parents, be trust-worthy, and likely be truly themselves rather than be purely a product of their environment (ie. peer pressure etc). In this scheme the weak is the one who gives in to their desire in advance of the right circumstances. And I'm not just talking about sex.
In a nutshell the religious and the philosopher are talking about 'Self-Control' or 'the ability of overcome ourselves', our desires and our fears. To refuse the sweetest of poisons, or to grasp the nettle of fear for the sake of that which we recognise to be right (which instroduces the twisty problem of self-deception). The brave man is the one who was most fearful of the dragon, but fought it anyway. The one without fear couldn't be said to be brave.
It may turn out to all be in the brain, but it has nothing to do with what this guy is reporting on.
The question actually turns not so much on the workings of the brain but on two questions: 1)is the universe deterministic or non-deterministic, if not then there's a chance of something like freewill possibly existing, maybe. 2)Is there a spiritual/non-material principle, in which case the same applies (having a soul doesn't guarantee free-will).
"Since when did MS support any OS? I mean if I report a bug in Windows XP it won't be fixed."
But really the same applies to a lot of Open Source. I've just switched back to IE with the release of 7 because Firefox is a PITA due to a number of bugs and features that affect basic things (like the clipboard, for example). I have growen to hate Firefox. I looked up these bugs and features and they have been there for a long time, unfixed. And I'm not qualified to attempt doing it myself.
Or features are just missing. As much as I hate Excels crippled and buggy pivot tables OpenOffice doesn't come close in features.
The parent seems to be suggesting that Firebird is an embedded database. It isn't. Its a full-featured industrial-strength RDBMS (ie. proper concurrency etc), usually run as a daemon/service, that is nevertheless suited to embedded applications.
Firebird 1.x could scale to about 100-200 users on late 90's hardware (it wasn't so good at taking advantage of multiple cpus). Firebird 2 should go way beyond that even with the same hardware.
If you take his totally blinkered advice then you must have quite a lot of money, not mind missing a lot of shots because you couldn't carry your camera around with you and ignore the existence of the Fuji F30 and F11 in additon to unforgivably ignoring the excellent prosumer (but non-dSLR) cameras of which there are many.
The fellow should have at least given a nod to prosumer cameras which do enough, for most amateur needs, of what dSLRs offer, and for much less money and much greater portability.
By the way, the reason I mention the F30 is because its one of the few consumer-level cameras that are said to be used by pros for carry-everywhere and no-flash-allowed-or-desired purposes, which is directly pertinant to this issue. For a significant proportion of prosumers it goes far enough to satisfy a number of his reasons for buying a dSLR :
near dSLR image quality - spectacular for this class of camera and price
near dSLR ISO performance - low-noise at 800, usable at 1600, 3200 for small snaps
A&S priority modes for creativity
manual white-balance
metal body
Fast startup (and good all-round performance)
(and a handy bonus : absurd battery life of 580 shots - CIPA)
...while being close to ultra-compact in size and very good value, even cheap in my opinion (currently down to $250 on froogle). The ISO performance side-steps the lack of image stabilisation that's becoming fashionable these days.
You also don't need to spend extra on batteries and a charger as it has a rediculous battery life (CIPA 580), nor on a card reader as it uses USB 2 at 'high-speed'. On the negative side it uses xd cards, but the cost of the fast 'Type H' xd cards evens out since the difference between fine and normal jpegs, in the F30, is so small that one can safely ignore 'fine' and get twice as many photos on the card, rivalling an SD card of twice the capacity when used in other cameras. I'm speaking of direct experience here - I've examined photos that I've taken and the difference is barely discernable at 100% crop (power-lines against a white background).
The guy who wrote that article is just not looking around.
I've used both and I have to say that, rather like IE versus Firefox, MS Office is an awful lot nicer to use. The only reason I use firefox is because I am less exposed to nasties (but, AFAIK, only due to a lack of motivation on the part of their authors).
OO is slow, clunky and awkward.
Having said that what makes me mad is that MS Office has so many unfixed bugs or arbitary limitations affecting essential functionality (thinking particularly of pivot tables, which I use extensively). For a product that costs so much its really inexcusable. So either way I can't win.
Most color blind people are read/green colour blind, which only requires using distinct shades of red and green to cater for. Which kind of colour blindness have you?
I don't want to be ill judged because of a third party's manipulation of my work. If I agree to their manipulation, then fine, but otherwise no way.
Its hard enough judging the intent of another without their words being manipulated.
But if that principle were stretched also to journalism then we might see a very healthy change in the manner in which a reporter presents the words of the story's protagonists and commentators, who are so often misreprented. The final content of the report would have to be assented to by each of the quoted sources.
To continue the analogy : the question of how to dispose of rubbish and whether or not stem cell research is allowable aren't equivalent. There are three big differences that come to mind : firstly the stem cell question is "whether to", not "how to", secondly stem cell is an instrisically moral/ethical question as it deals directly with the nature of man, life, personhood, soul/or-not-soul etc etc, thirdly stem-cell revolves around at least one question that doesn't have an irrefutable answer (unlike your examples) : ie "When does human-life begin?". The answer to that isn't likely to come soon, by science or other natural "processes", and so political or violent resolution is inevitable (possibly more likely with de-politicisation).
The moral/ethical dimension of rubbish collection is incidental not intrinisic. While stem-cell research deals directly with our fundamental nature it would be more than stretching matters to say that that is true of garbage collection.
I also take issue with your claim of the garbage collection (and other relatively trivial processes) have profound effects. In the first place philosophers and logicians would in the main, I think, have difficulty with the notion of something lesser giving birth to something greater (perhaps excepting such unreasonable persons as Hawking, Hume, Mill, Heidegger, Kant etc). At a pinch one might claim "significant effect, maybe worthy of study", but profound?!? I think that word is too weighty for that example. I reckon that profundity is a much higher level concept and not suited to describing the effects of trivial causes. However, in my opinion its unquestionably suited to questions about such things as stem-cell research.
...and I must also take issue with your mixing the word politics and politicians. We are talking about politics not politicians. Politicians may or may not have a profound effect; but that does not take away from the profound importance of politics.
"The Prince" is about power. Politics is about government. If we depoliticise then all we are talking about is power, not government, and so Bloomburg is recommending Machiavelli.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is obviously 1."
Why's that? If the answer is so obvious then one would be compelled by it, but I can't see such an obvious answer.
Its difficult to call the religious stupid when it was a catholic monk who is the father of modern genetics and a catholic priest who first proposed the big bang. Where they stupid too? Further I haven't made any of this up. Its christian theology.
Ok, so you didn't understand. I'll try to spell it out. As an example let's say there are degrees of knowing - "I know X better and better". One day it transpires that one is in 'union' with X, perhaps you can see that by being more than just close to X one can know X best of all.
Union with God, which is what all the major religions are interested in, is like what I;ve described. Evidence becomes immaterial - at the point of union (baptism) the existence of God is self-evident: one participates in the self-awareness of God himself. Its a spriritual reality; so you don't even need a brain for it: babies born without a brain can be baptised and therefore would know God.
Look the word up in a dictionary.
Nonsense. Science is a set of methods, or more broadly, it is commonly thought of as the collection of results from applying those methods. None of that includes God (or gods) in any meaningful way. See your history, particularly Francis Bacon.
I refer you to Karl Popper, provisionally. Francis Bacon is so 4 centuries ago. Even the philosophy of science changes its schizo mind a too much to be trusted, quite apart from its 'facts'. You might like to also look up the word "nonsense".
Science and mathematics are the only ones in that "litter" that ever grew up to be more than clueless puppies, actually.
They are conditional on philosophy. Ie, what is "Truth". Neither mathematics nor science even approach that question. They ask the question : "Is this true/untrue respectively?". Its like the difference between an animal and a human: the animal sees the world, the human sees into the world even though it lives within it, and thinks of what might be outside of the world (even beyond understunding). Beat that with your namby pamby science. Scientists are pansies : they can't handle the Truth!!
Religion was stillborn with regard to evidence and reality
So let's say that God reveals himself: let's say he does it by union to the creature. So the creature sees with God's eyes and see's God's reality as if he were God. I've just defined baptism . Even mathematics can't beat that for proof. Science doesn't even believe in proof. Scientists don't beleive in anything, and go on about truth rather too much.
philosophy spends most of its time chasing its own tail.
So it does, and so perhaps it should. I refer you to the essays of Chaitin, the God-son of Godel who proved that mathematics is as arbitary as any other subject. In anycase think of this : take a (hypothetical) all-knowing thing: he will know himself, and if he is all that there is then he is self-referential. St Thomas Aquinas defined the Trinity in terms of self-knowledge. Chaitin is obsessed with self-reference.
Seriously: science really isn't that interesting. Look further. I urge you, even beyonf methemtatics. And if you really believe in truth then question all your assumptions, every single one of them, and don't stop. Christians have to do it all the time. Its tough. Particularly when up against the more knowlegeable and clever.
Reality is what it is, and no amount of reputation, admiration, or even worship, will change the basic facts of existence.
The believer in a nutshell! But where's your proof?
That's still presumption.
"If you want to bring the presumption of a god or gods into science, then you have the obligation to bring evidence, theory, repeatability. Without that, you have nothing scientific."
Science isn't the beginning and the end. Even science has foundations, rather like the one's you mention, but also including the existence or non-existence of God. That question comes before science, and isn't part of science. Which would make sense if a God/god/gods created science. Just as philosophy comes before science. And mathemetics.
Science is runt of the litter, but someone put an axe in its cloven foot.
Since he appears to presume the non-existence of God then he is most unscientific. In anycase its debatable whether he does science at all, so perhaps one shouldn't be hard on him for that reason.
But suggests, to the philosopher/mathematician an infinite number of universes since either none, 1 or infinity seem most likely, anything else is too arbitary, even a prime (ie. which prime, and why that one). Go and refer your self to Hawkings and the other chumps persuing the infinite universe theories.
In anycase you're nit-picking. My original statement is fine.
So that's 1 for not knowing what I'm talking about, and 0 for responding with comprehension
Science 1, Logic 0
That's a poor analogy. Linux may well kill windows, it just hasn't happended yet because Linux has deficiencies that have slowed its adoption. But broadband is broadband: unless the municiplities offer a severely substandard service, and even if they do, the motivation to pay will be severely underminded.
Lessig's assertion, which really should be couched with "in my opinion", is a typical non-fact that those with ideologies employ. He believes something, and he's willing to use sleight of hand to prove it.
The trouble is that people are being punished or banned from doing things on the word of these guys because they represent their position(s) as certain, and people believe them. But there is no certainty in science, and so a particular approach based on a scientific authority should not be made compulsory for all; other approaches should be allowed also, even if they contradict the scientific/expert opinion or seem a bit primitive.
Those celebrities may be somewhat off the mark, but so are the experts much of the time, but much more precisely inaccurate than the celebrities being mocked/humiliated in that disgraceful piece of BBC anti-journalism.
If that BBC article had its way the scientists/experts would be legislating. Thank God they are not.
The position on diet and Acne is/was reperesented as proven fact. Five years ago any acne support website would repeat that unlikely factoid (I don't know what they say now).
Fascinatingly Carl Popper, the science philospher that set the modern scientific environment, believed that "the truth content of our theories, even the best of them, cannot be verified by scientific testing, but can only be falsified." [Wikipedia quote, rather than Popper quote]. But the way these experts and scientists go on Popper may as well have not bothered. Popper effectively brought Socrates in to science : "Wisdom is to know that you know nothing". But Popper never got the chance to sacrifice himself with hemlock, and it shows. Everybody goes along with Popper, and yet few act as if he had said anything.
Lets have a quick examination of what the experts have been saying over the years :
The list goes on.
Some of you here will know that I've mentioned many things that these experts have had to admit to having been mistaken. Earlier this year the extra-ordinary news came out that 50 times more people die due to vitamin-D deficiency induced immuno-suppresion than die of sun-caused skin cancer. It turned out that those deadly skin cancers are quite rare.
4 years ago there was an editorial in an american dermatology journal discussing the problem that some of their facts (like acne having nothing to do with diet) appeared to be looking decidely unfactual. Anyone with a bit of common sense could have told them that. I even for myself discovered, on JAMA's website, an older study that mentioned that the main food source of the acne bacteria is triglycerides which mainly comes as a by-product of the metabolism of - you've guessed it - sugar (fructose specifically). It would seem that many bodily cysts are fed by triglycerides and sugars generally. Bacteria doesn't usually go for protein or fats.
It turns out that polyunsaturated oils/fats far from being healthy would seem to be carcinogenic; partly due to their high-speed rancidity problems but also due to a strong immuno-suppressive effect (particularly sunflower oil). They are so chemically active that they are said to be an anti-nutrient as they 'burn' away vitamins in the stomach. Anthropologists could have told us that polyunsaturates only make up a quite small proportion of a natural human diet. But while railing against the creationists (who are stuck on an irrelevancy instead of courageously proclaiming Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven) the same people advise us to eat substances contrary to our evolutionary developement : corn flakes, muesli, cereals generally, quantities of manipulated fruit (large, unnaturally sugary, and out of season), buckets of polyunsaturates, margarine, the nightshade family (tomatoes, potatoes, egg-plant, etc). We aren't eating a farmer diet: we are eating an industrialised diet, and we've had no time to adapt to it.
Up to date doctors these days are telling their patients to switch back to butter as the full and awful consequences of synthetic fats have become apparent. The other day New York banned their use in public eateries.
Six years ago the largest diet study, conducted by the WHO, came to its preliminiary 10 years results, which demonstrated that the more eggs you eat the longer you live. I love eggs, but had restricted myself to 2 a week on the advice of these infernal experts. I felt quite angry.
Of course not: I use an emulator.
No one needs more than a 6502 processor and 32K of ram; the last 20 years has been an exersize in self-indulgence. And MS Word : pah! Long live WordWise(tm)
Philip Pullman (of the Dark Materials trilogy) would have children believe that to be free is to follow your desires, dislocating freedom from will, and so "The Church" (equipped with a magesterium) is oppressive as it teaches against that.
The nutcases in this report seem to have a definition of freewill that follows no convention whatever.
Whether one is born with gay/black/white/pedo/deaf/pizza-faced/straight tendecies, or devlopes a cancer that produces such leanings, has nothing to do with free-will. Obviously you can't choose these tendencies, but its what you do consequently that invokes the business of freewill. Do you follow your desire to kill and maim, or do you resist it? That's what free-will is about. Do you allow self-pity to overwhelm you and take your own life, or not. Do you tell someone who loves you that you love them for the sake of a screw, or forego the pleasure? A virgin is prized within religious cultures because they demonstrate, in the most basic way, self-control and strength of will, and so will make better parents, be trust-worthy, and likely be truly themselves rather than be purely a product of their environment (ie. peer pressure etc). In this scheme the weak is the one who gives in to their desire in advance of the right circumstances. And I'm not just talking about sex.
In a nutshell the religious and the philosopher are talking about 'Self-Control' or 'the ability of overcome ourselves', our desires and our fears. To refuse the sweetest of poisons, or to grasp the nettle of fear for the sake of that which we recognise to be right (which instroduces the twisty problem of self-deception). The brave man is the one who was most fearful of the dragon, but fought it anyway. The one without fear couldn't be said to be brave.
It may turn out to all be in the brain, but it has nothing to do with what this guy is reporting on.
The question actually turns not so much on the workings of the brain but on two questions: 1)is the universe deterministic or non-deterministic, if not then there's a chance of something like freewill possibly existing, maybe. 2)Is there a spiritual/non-material principle, in which case the same applies (having a soul doesn't guarantee free-will).
But really the same applies to a lot of Open Source. I've just switched back to IE with the release of 7 because Firefox is a PITA due to a number of bugs and features that affect basic things (like the clipboard, for example). I have growen to hate Firefox. I looked up these bugs and features and they have been there for a long time, unfixed. And I'm not qualified to attempt doing it myself.
Or features are just missing. As much as I hate Excels crippled and buggy pivot tables OpenOffice doesn't come close in features.
Firebird 1.x could scale to about 100-200 users on late 90's hardware (it wasn't so good at taking advantage of multiple cpus). Firebird 2 should go way beyond that even with the same hardware.
If you take his totally blinkered advice then you must have quite a lot of money, not mind missing a lot of shots because you couldn't carry your camera around with you and ignore the existence of the Fuji F30 and F11 in additon to unforgivably ignoring the excellent prosumer (but non-dSLR) cameras of which there are many.
The fellow should have at least given a nod to prosumer cameras which do enough, for most amateur needs, of what dSLRs offer, and for much less money and much greater portability.
By the way, the reason I mention the F30 is because its one of the few consumer-level cameras that are said to be used by pros for carry-everywhere and no-flash-allowed-or-desired purposes, which is directly pertinant to this issue. For a significant proportion of prosumers it goes far enough to satisfy a number of his reasons for buying a dSLR :
You also don't need to spend extra on batteries and a charger as it has a rediculous battery life (CIPA 580), nor on a card reader as it uses USB 2 at 'high-speed'. On the negative side it uses xd cards, but the cost of the fast 'Type H' xd cards evens out since the difference between fine and normal jpegs, in the F30, is so small that one can safely ignore 'fine' and get twice as many photos on the card, rivalling an SD card of twice the capacity when used in other cameras. I'm speaking of direct experience here - I've examined photos that I've taken and the difference is barely discernable at 100% crop (power-lines against a white background).
The guy who wrote that article is just not looking around.
OO is slow, clunky and awkward.
Having said that what makes me mad is that MS Office has so many unfixed bugs or arbitary limitations affecting essential functionality (thinking particularly of pivot tables, which I use extensively). For a product that costs so much its really inexcusable. So either way I can't win.
Most color blind people are read/green colour blind, which only requires using distinct shades of red and green to cater for. Which kind of colour blindness have you?
Is this a joke?
He wasn't removed from power.
He is an interesting dictator, for that and other reasons. Franco is a similar case. Which is pertinant considering the recent movements in Spain.
Full (and pre-mature exposure) is just too dangerous.
Its hard enough judging the intent of another without their words being manipulated.
But if that principle were stretched also to journalism then we might see a very healthy change in the manner in which a reporter presents the words of the story's protagonists and commentators, who are so often misreprented. The final content of the report would have to be assented to by each of the quoted sources.
Censorship as it should be, perhaps.
To continue the analogy : the question of how to dispose of rubbish and whether or not stem cell research is allowable aren't equivalent. There are three big differences that come to mind : firstly the stem cell question is "whether to", not "how to", secondly stem cell is an instrisically moral/ethical question as it deals directly with the nature of man, life, personhood, soul/or-not-soul etc etc, thirdly stem-cell revolves around at least one question that doesn't have an irrefutable answer (unlike your examples) : ie "When does human-life begin?". The answer to that isn't likely to come soon, by science or other natural "processes", and so political or violent resolution is inevitable (possibly more likely with de-politicisation).
The moral/ethical dimension of rubbish collection is incidental not intrinisic. While stem-cell research deals directly with our fundamental nature it would be more than stretching matters to say that that is true of garbage collection.
I also take issue with your claim of the garbage collection (and other relatively trivial processes) have profound effects. In the first place philosophers and logicians would in the main, I think, have difficulty with the notion of something lesser giving birth to something greater (perhaps excepting such unreasonable persons as Hawking, Hume, Mill, Heidegger, Kant etc). At a pinch one might claim "significant effect, maybe worthy of study", but profound?!? I think that word is too weighty for that example. I reckon that profundity is a much higher level concept and not suited to describing the effects of trivial causes. However, in my opinion its unquestionably suited to questions about such things as stem-cell research.
At variance with your definition I had understood that politics is the science of government, not power.
"The Prince" is about power. Politics is about government. If we depoliticise then all we are talking about is power, not government, and so Bloomburg is recommending Machiavelli.