At least not for the expensive purchases, where saving money might really matter.
I bought my wife a present of her favorite bubble bath on e-bay. When it came, it was somebody else's favorite bubble bath. I got in touch with the sender, who apologized profusely and offered to send the right stuff. It never came. And, I never got my money back.
My friend, on the other hand, purchased a guitar on e-bay only to have it be in far worse condition than advertised. He never got his money back, either.
My conclusion is to never spring big bucks for anything on e-bay.
Nice link! I liked the concept, although the one weak point was the possibility of "prepared frogs" being filled out at home and then finalized at the polling place. That would make vote-buying more likely by having someone hand you a "frog" and a fiver, and then a wink and a nod. There's something about having to *actually pick* your choices that makes you think about what you're doing; it gives a second for the conscience to react.
We used the machines to vote in the MD primaries. I mentioned to one of the poll workers that I was extremely uncomfortable with e-voting, and he just shrugged.
The bottom line is that (IMO), e-voting will win the day because
it looks slicker than paper votes
it's easier on polling officials
the lack of serious recount ability will make all election outcomes final, which will substantially reduce the uproar in contested elections.
In short, e-voting is pitched towards the masses. It's sad, but likely inevitable.
It wasn't a troll. It probably wasn't realistic, either:-). Hypochlorite ion is a strong enough oxidizer that it can pretty much destroy any cell. It is the chemical equivalent of killing deer with a rocket-launcher. There's not a lot that mutation + selection will help with that scenario.
Good question. In philosophy, this is called the Problem of Evil, and is formally posed as: Since evil and suffering exist, then God is either
Not all-powerful,
Not all-knowing, or
Not good in the way we understand goodness.
For a long time, this argument was considered to be the strongest argument against the existence of God. In 1975, Alvin Plantinga published God, Freedom, and Evil, which contains what most consider an adeuqate response to the problem.
His basic argument is that if we posit that God wants to be in relationship to His creation, then He must allow a certain amount of freedom to His creatures. The evil that we see is a result of that freedom.
I'm not totally happy with his solution, being Presbyterian, but most people concede that he has given a viable fourth alternative.
That depends on rate of transmission and rate of lethality. Smallpox falls in the category that you mention, because victims die quickly. AIDS can take years to kill, which means that carriers can keep on giving for years.
Doomsday scenarios with viruses are entirely thinkable. Consider: if AIDS were transmitted via respiration instead of via bodily fluids, the death rate would be catastrophic.
I had a very odd experience once. I went to a Christian School conference with the school that I teach at. There was an entire room filled with "Jesus Junk" -- T-Shirts, bracelets, mugs, etc. Prominently displayed were many, many WWJD? items. At that moment, I had an image in my mind of Jesus turning tables over, saying "you shall not turn my Father's house into a den of theives."
But I chickened out.
My feeling about Christian games is similar: why use Jesus' name as the drawing point for commerce? I can't properly rationalize it.
My feelings about Christian music are more conflicted. Some bands are in it for the money and fame; others for the music; others in order to "make a difference"; still others for the honorable purpose of expressing their thoughts, which happen to be Christian; still others in order to honor God with their musical talents. I can't condemn the genre as a whole, but I sure don't purchase very much of it. (Rich Mullins being a prime exception)
...beginning of the end. This is the good first stab at a systematic approach to bio-engineering, which of course can lead to robust theories. The scary part is the potential for 'virus' creation; it's inconceivable that the technology could be sequestered into "good hands" indefinitely.
The evolutionary aspects of this were also intriguing. This will provide material for a substantial test of Bill Dembski's theories about the limitations of evolutionary algorithms. These theories have become important (if true) in several areas, including NIST's attempt to create self-driving cars.
I almost agree with you... my brain is about to press the 'outrage' trigger about the shoddy physics in movies... until I remember that the relationships between characters are also outrageously flawed. And, the portrayals of political issues are utterly skewed. And, the portrayals of religious issues are hilariously wrong. So then I just toss it all and reach for "OFF".
...seem fairly obvious. First, if one of these devices is at a public terminal, it wouldn't be hard at all to get a.wav record of the transaction; then, I have your password FOR LIFE!
Second, if someone's voice is drastically altered, (s)he would have to find a way to prove identity outside of the voice recognition system.
Third, any technology that might let me verify someone's voiceprint could also be used to generate a false voiceprint. A simple tape recording of you talking could be enough to forge your voice electronically. (Hmmm... cool plot possibilities for a Tom Clancey thriller)
Fourth, my (hypothetical) twin, who probably has an almost-identical voiceprint, is not necessarily to be trusted.
on really humid (100% rel. hum.) days in the tropics, water can hog up to about 7% of the airspace, pushing the other percentages down somewhat.
Re:Proving my point
on
SimChurch
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't think we have sufficiently common ground to even set rules for a debate, much less have one. If you are interested in current arguments, I suggest Googling for J.P. Moreland or Alvin Plantinga.
I think the confusion is yours, not mine. There is a world of difference between agreeing with someone's opinion and respecting their right to be wrong. I'm suggesting that until you demonstrate the latter, you aren't going to get much in the way of useful discussion. You are much more likely to get the mental "Whatever" as people move on to more compelling and worthwhile conversation.
So, how does one interpret the relative silence of Christians on/.? Your view is that Christians are afraid to speak because they know they'll "get bitchslapped out of the "rational discourse" faster than you can say hail mary." Mine is that they've decided it isn't worth their time. So far, you've given me no reason to believe otherwise.
Your comments seem to be designed to demonstrate my point. Consider:
most of the religious discussion I've witnessed on this site is neither thoughtful nor productive
I've seen much that is, so what you really mean is that you didn't agree with the moderators.
...but of course, I wasn't talking about the moderation, but about the quality of the discussion, so your point doesn't follow. You aren't playing by the rules of rational discourse.
No hard feelings; I'm just trying to explain why your comments, which probably seem lucid and self-evident to you, are entirely unconvincing to me. Your comments about religion (which I went back and read) are forceful and sometimes witty, but they don't have a lot of substance. There's nothing in them that challenges me to rethink my position; there is simply scorn and invective.
Fact of life: there are intelligent people in the world that find the arguments in favor of Christianity to be persuasive. You might secretly suspect them to be irrational, but I can assure you that your views are just as irrational to me. This doesn't mean we can't engage in religious discussion, but it does mean that you have to work a lot harder at making yourself truly persuasive to someone who doesn't already agree with you. Obviously, that cuts both ways, which brings me back to my original point: religious discussion on/. rarely rises to the level of hard work needed to be persuasive to the other side.
Regards, Jeff Cagle
I'll bite the troll
on
SimChurch
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
(Hmm..."I'll Bite the Troll" -- might be a good name for a grunge band.) I have no problem arguing for the validity of my beliefs. I certainly have no problem engaging in thoughtful discussion with those who disagree with me. However, I rarely attempt to discuss religion on slashdot because
most of the religious discussion I've witnessed on this site is neither thoughtful nor productive,
those who "comment" upon religion, either pro- or con-, usually begin by assuming that theirs is the only rational possible belief, and
few people who want to comment on religion on this site seem interested in playing by any rules of rational discourse.
The bottom line is that many intelligent people have a well-founded belief in Christianity; many other intelligent people do not. If you are interested in engaging in the best part of the debate, then start with respect instead of contempt, and you'll get the best the other person has to offer.
As you programmers all know, avoiding race conditions is really difficult. The fellow Neumann quoted in the article who said
But Peter Neumann, principal scientist at SRI International and moderator of the Risks Digest, says that the root problem is that makers of critical systems aren't availing themselves of a large body of academic research into how to make software bulletproof.
is overly optimistic; it's theoretically impossible to write a general test to find all race conditions in code. This is a variant of the Halting Problem.
I think my one-line response is that "idea" != "form". It is hard for me to wrap my mind around Platonism in some ways, since I don't entirely buy into it. However, I believe that in the case of something like Justice, Plato would claim that the abstract ideal -- the form -- of Justice does indeed exist, and he would differentiate it from our ideas of justice, which are imperfect copies of that form.
So... if I'm understanding you correctly, I would say that "idea" != "abstract ideal", and the fact that you can conceive of repellent gravity does not imply that repellent gravity is indeed a form; in fact, attractive inverse-square gravity is the form (according to a Platonist). I do believe that Platonists would claim that there is in fact one set of abstract ideals that guide our universe, and that the job of science is to discover them. But a real Platonist could give you a better answer.
Another poster noted that there are two different senses of the word "exist" floating around here.
Exist(1) would mean something like "to have material extent", assuming that those words could be sufficiently defined. In that sense, particles "exist".
Exist(2) would mean -- to a Platonist -- "to be a form", which might or might not involve material extent; Plato was fuzzy on that point.
The problem is now to define precisely what it means to be a form. We certainly use forms in our thoughts all the time; you no doubt discussed triangles and circles in geometry, even though no-one ever actually drew one in class. Some would claim that Plato's 'forms' are simply reflections of universal human thought, while others -- Platonists -- would claim that Plato's forms are part of the underlying abstract structure of the universe. So: Would Pi be Pi if no human ever thought of circles, or if mathematics had developed with a radically different set of axioms? Those who say Yes would deny Platonism; those who say No would be open to Platonism.
The prize of all this discussion is not simply mental mind-blowing, as other posters have suggested. Instead, it is getting at an important question: if we find other intelligence (in this case, computers, assuming that AI is or will be in fact 'intelligent'), will it necessarily be like ours? That is, will other intelligence be intelligible to us? Platonists will say Yes; others will be open to No.
A second prize would be, is there a correct mathematics, one which accurately maps to the abstract structure of the universe? Non-Platonist scientists would say that we simply create models for ourselves. Platonist scientists would say that there are underlying abstract relationships that drive physics, and those relationships can be captured by math.
Topic shift: a third prize is not a position on religion. Some religions are Platonic in flavor, while others are not. Christianity flirted with Platonism in the time of Origen, but has since mostly rejected it.
It has been previously proven that no regular arrangement is more dense that the pyramid. What was unknown was whether some irregular and complicated arrangement might be more dense. See here for more detail.
They did this at Princeton in the 90's, but it wasn't fields, exactly; it was the lawns between the buildings. Many of the diagonal pathways that currently crisscross the McCosh area and the Witherspoon/Blair area were not there in 1988, and were laid down only after enough students decided that walking around the grass was no fun. As a result, trails were blazed... and subsequently paved.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like news reporting on fuel cell technology is consistently
effusive
overblown
and incorrect. I mean this:
A fuel cell is a pollution-free and highly efficient power source and it is expected to be used for automobiles and in households, although its greater cost than that of traditional power sources limits its applications at present.
Plenty of posters have already poked appropriate holes in the incorrect "pollution-free" claim, but what about the overblown "highly efficient" claim? Fuel cell cars have about twice the efficiency of gasoline-powered cars, which is impressive but certainly not the door to energy Utopia.
It feels to me that the writer of this article has an agenda to push fuel cells without giving the reader substantive info about them. My other fuel cell articles are similar. What is the source of the hype? The allure of "new"? Hyped claims by fuel cell developers? Or is it too much to ask that tech writers would actually understand the technologies that they write about? Grrr...
Slashdot Mirror
At least not for the expensive purchases, where saving money might really matter.
I bought my wife a present of her favorite bubble bath on e-bay. When it came, it was somebody else's favorite bubble bath. I got in touch with the sender, who apologized profusely and offered to send the right stuff. It never came. And, I never got my money back.
My friend, on the other hand, purchased a guitar on e-bay only to have it be in far worse condition than advertised. He never got his money back, either.
My conclusion is to never spring big bucks for anything on e-bay.
Nice link! I liked the concept, although the one weak point was the possibility of "prepared frogs" being filled out at home and then finalized at the polling place. That would make vote-buying more likely by having someone hand you a "frog" and a fiver, and then a wink and a nod. There's something about having to *actually pick* your choices that makes you think about what you're doing; it gives a second for the conscience to react.
The bottom line is that (IMO), e-voting will win the day because
it looks slicker than paper votes
it's easier on polling officials
the lack of serious recount ability will make all election outcomes final, which will substantially reduce the uproar in contested elections.
In short, e-voting is pitched towards the masses. It's sad, but likely inevitable.
So ... are *you* Paul Falstad, or did you find the link to his site through other Google? (reason for question: he is an old college friend)
Regards,
Jeff Cagle
It wasn't a troll. It probably wasn't realistic, either :-). Hypochlorite ion is a strong enough oxidizer that it can pretty much destroy any cell. It is the chemical equivalent of killing deer with a rocket-launcher. There's not a lot that mutation + selection will help with that scenario.
Yes, but if you read Winnie-the-Pooh to your daughter, you will know that capital letters can also be used to mark Really Important Things. ;-)
Thanks for the link!
Since evil and suffering exist, then God is either
Not all-powerful,
Not all-knowing, or
Not good in the way we understand goodness.
For a long time, this argument was considered to be the strongest argument against the existence of God. In 1975, Alvin Plantinga published God, Freedom, and Evil, which contains what most consider an adeuqate response to the problem.
His basic argument is that if we posit that God wants to be in relationship to His creation, then He must allow a certain amount of freedom to His creatures. The evil that we see is a result of that freedom.
I'm not totally happy with his solution, being Presbyterian, but most people concede that he has given a viable fourth alternative.
Regards,
Jeff Cagle
That depends on rate of transmission and rate of lethality. Smallpox falls in the category that you mention, because victims die quickly. AIDS can take years to kill, which means that carriers can keep on giving for years.
Doomsday scenarios with viruses are entirely thinkable. Consider: if AIDS were transmitted via respiration instead of via bodily fluids, the death rate would be catastrophic.
I had a very odd experience once. I went to a Christian School conference with the school that I teach at. There was an entire room filled with "Jesus Junk" -- T-Shirts, bracelets, mugs, etc. Prominently displayed were many, many WWJD? items. At that moment, I had an image in my mind of Jesus turning tables over, saying "you shall not turn my Father's house into a den of theives."
But I chickened out.
My feeling about Christian games is similar: why use Jesus' name as the drawing point for commerce? I can't properly rationalize it.
My feelings about Christian music are more conflicted. Some bands are in it for the money and fame; others for the music; others in order to "make a difference"; still others for the honorable purpose of expressing their thoughts, which happen to be Christian; still others in order to honor God with their musical talents. I can't condemn the genre as a whole, but I sure don't purchase very much of it. (Rich Mullins being a prime exception)
...beginning of the end. This is the good first stab at a systematic approach to bio-engineering, which of course can lead to robust theories. The scary part is the potential for 'virus' creation; it's inconceivable that the technology could be sequestered into "good hands" indefinitely.
The evolutionary aspects of this were also intriguing. This will provide material for a substantial test of Bill Dembski's theories about the limitations of evolutionary algorithms. These theories have become important (if true) in several areas, including NIST's attempt to create self-driving cars.
I almost agree with you ... my brain is about to press the 'outrage' trigger about the shoddy physics in movies ... until I remember that the relationships between characters are also outrageously flawed. And, the portrayals of political issues are utterly skewed. And, the portrayals of religious issues are hilariously wrong. So then I just toss it all and reach for "OFF".
...seem fairly obvious. First, if one of these devices is at a public terminal, it wouldn't be hard at all to get a .wav record of the transaction; then, I have your password FOR LIFE!
Second, if someone's voice is drastically altered, (s)he would have to find a way to prove identity outside of the voice recognition system.
Third, any technology that might let me verify someone's voiceprint could also be used to generate a false voiceprint. A simple tape recording of you talking could be enough to forge your voice electronically. (Hmmm... cool plot possibilities for a Tom Clancey thriller)
Fourth, my (hypothetical) twin, who probably has an almost-identical voiceprint, is not necessarily to be trusted.
79% N2
21% O2
1% Ar -- very useful for filling light bulbs with
1% CO2 + Ne + Kr + others
on really humid (100% rel. hum.) days in the tropics, water can hog up to about 7% of the airspace, pushing the other percentages down somewhat.
I don't think we have sufficiently common ground to even set rules for a debate, much less have one. If you are interested in current arguments, I suggest Googling for J.P. Moreland or Alvin Plantinga.
/.? Your view is that Christians are afraid to speak because they know they'll "get bitchslapped out of the "rational discourse" faster than you can say hail mary." Mine is that they've decided it isn't worth their time. So far, you've given me no reason to believe otherwise.
I think the confusion is yours, not mine. There is a world of difference between agreeing with someone's opinion and respecting their right to be wrong. I'm suggesting that until you demonstrate the latter, you aren't going to get much in the way of useful discussion. You are much more likely to get the mental "Whatever" as people move on to more compelling and worthwhile conversation.
So, how does one interpret the relative silence of Christians on
No hard feelings; I'm just trying to explain why your comments, which probably seem lucid and self-evident to you, are entirely unconvincing to me. Your comments about religion (which I went back and read) are forceful and sometimes witty, but they don't have a lot of substance. There's nothing in them that challenges me to rethink my position; there is simply scorn and invective.
Fact of life: there are intelligent people in the world that find the arguments in favor of Christianity to be persuasive. You might secretly suspect them to be irrational, but I can assure you that your views are just as irrational to me. This doesn't mean we can't engage in religious discussion, but it does mean that you have to work a lot harder at making yourself truly persuasive to someone who doesn't already agree with you. Obviously, that cuts both ways, which brings me back to my original point: religious discussion on
Regards,
Jeff Cagle
most of the religious discussion I've witnessed on this site is neither thoughtful nor productive,
those who "comment" upon religion, either pro- or con-, usually begin by assuming that theirs is the only rational possible belief, and
few people who want to comment on religion on this site seem interested in playing by any rules of rational discourse.
The bottom line is that many intelligent people have a well-founded belief in Christianity; many other intelligent people do not. If you are interested in engaging in the best part of the debate, then start with respect instead of contempt, and you'll get the best the other person has to offer.
I think my one-line response is that "idea" != "form". It is hard for me to wrap my mind around Platonism in some ways, since I don't entirely buy into it. However, I believe that in the case of something like Justice, Plato would claim that the abstract ideal -- the form -- of Justice does indeed exist, and he would differentiate it from our ideas of justice, which are imperfect copies of that form.
... if I'm understanding you correctly, I would say that "idea" != "abstract ideal", and the fact that you can conceive of repellent gravity does not imply that repellent gravity is indeed a form; in fact, attractive inverse-square gravity is the form (according to a Platonist). I do believe that Platonists would claim that there is in fact one set of abstract ideals that guide our universe, and that the job of science is to discover them. But a real Platonist could give you a better answer.
So
Regards,
Jeff Cagle
Another poster noted that there are two different senses of the word "exist" floating around here.
Exist(1) would mean something like "to have material extent", assuming that those words could be sufficiently defined. In that sense, particles "exist".
Exist(2) would mean -- to a Platonist -- "to be a form", which might or might not involve material extent; Plato was fuzzy on that point.
The problem is now to define precisely what it means to be a form. We certainly use forms in our thoughts all the time; you no doubt discussed triangles and circles in geometry, even though no-one ever actually drew one in class. Some would claim that Plato's 'forms' are simply reflections of universal human thought, while others -- Platonists -- would claim that Plato's forms are part of the underlying abstract structure of the universe.
So: Would Pi be Pi if no human ever thought of circles, or if mathematics had developed with a radically different set of axioms? Those who say Yes would deny Platonism; those who say No would be open to Platonism.
The prize of all this discussion is not simply mental mind-blowing, as other posters have suggested. Instead, it is getting at an important question: if we find other intelligence (in this case, computers, assuming that AI is or will be in fact 'intelligent'), will it necessarily be like ours? That is, will other intelligence be intelligible to us? Platonists will say Yes; others will be open to No.
A second prize would be, is there a correct mathematics, one which accurately maps to the abstract structure of the universe? Non-Platonist scientists would say that we simply create models for ourselves. Platonist scientists would say that there are underlying abstract relationships that drive physics, and those relationships can be captured by math.
Topic shift: a third prize is not a position on religion. Some religions are Platonic in flavor, while others are not. Christianity flirted with Platonism in the time of Origen, but has since mostly rejected it.
It has been previously proven that no regular arrangement is more dense that the pyramid. What was unknown was whether some irregular and complicated arrangement might be more dense. See here for more detail.
They did this at Princeton in the 90's, but it wasn't fields, exactly; it was the lawns between the buildings. Many of the diagonal pathways that currently crisscross the McCosh area and the Witherspoon/Blair area were not there in 1988, and were laid down only after enough students decided that walking around the grass was no fun. As a result, trails were blazed ... and subsequently paved.
effusive
overblown
and incorrect.
Plenty of posters have already poked appropriate holes in the incorrect "pollution-free" claim, but what about the overblown "highly efficient" claim? Fuel cell cars have about twice the efficiency of gasoline-powered cars, which is impressive but certainly not the door to energy Utopia.I mean this:
It feels to me that the writer of this article has an agenda to push fuel cells without giving the reader substantive info about them. My other fuel cell articles are similar. What is the source of the hype? The allure of "new"? Hyped claims by fuel cell developers? Or is it too much to ask that tech writers would actually understand the technologies that they write about? Grrr...