Free will is an illusion created by the physical processes in your brain, it is prerequsite for the sense of self. Whatever decision you make you were always destined to make it, or as Eienstien put it; "a man cannot will what he wills". There are two arguments for the existance of free will, both of which I find unconvincing, (1) the existance of a supernatural soul, or (2) matter itself has free will.
"Free will" is not an illusion. "Free will" is a philosophical and legal concept, while determinism is a physics concept. Treating these as opposites is a bit like doing likewise with the color blue and the taste of winegar. Of course you get nonsensical results if you use a nonsensical scale.
Besides, it's not like the non-determinism would result in any freer will. After all, under determinism your mental state is the function of your previous mental state and sensory inputs, while under non-determinism it's the function of pms, sensory inputs and a random number.
So no, free will does not require either of your two arguments, and in fact has absolutely nothing to do with them.
If one generation of parents over the entire world broke the god myth at the same time as they break the santa/easter bunny myth, there would essentially be so little religion left in the world that we could confidently say that the 2000 year long nightmare was a thing of the past.
Current religions might or might not be finished. I doubt that, since people would still read about religion in history books, and some would believe. But even if they disappeared, new ones would simply rise to replace them. After all, whether the reason religions exist is human psychology or constant intervention by supernatural beings, neither would be affected by your scenario.
Of course, it's entirely possible that people would turn their religious feelings towards philosophies like Stalinism or Fascism, but let's not dwell on such a nightmare scenario.
However if one country has a colony on the moon; the whole MAD equation changes. Suddenly instead of "everyone dies", the result is "hey, if everyone on earth dies; I and my 144000 other colonists on this base will own everything!!!!"
Where "everything" means "ashes". Furthermore, 144001 people is not sufficient to hold all the skills required for modern technological society, which in turn is required to survive on Moon, so you and your fellows would still die. Also, Moon lacks many of the elements needed for said technology, so you'd need to arrange a space program which alone would require more than those 144001 people. And, finally, the fleet required to transport 100000+ people from Earth to Moon might also have something to say about your plan.
If you shoot below the escape velocity of lunar, you wont reach that point...
Wrong. Escape velocity is the velocity at which the apex of your arc rises to infinity. Earth is not an infinite distance from the Moon, and the transition point is even closer, thus you need less than escape velocity of Moon to reach Earth from the Moon.
These are the people who will work late when needed, spend free time learning the new products and procedures, and don't require someone to hold their hand.
In short, the kind of idiots who burn themselves out working for free in the hopes of getting paid for all their unpaid overtime someday.
It would have taken a couple decades longer, been safer, gotten better value for the money, and maybe resulted in a space program which actually established a base there instead of just collecting rocks?
Or, more likely, it would still be the realm of science fiction. Or do you really think you're going back there anytime soon?
But if this is really a big concern, I wonder if it's practical to zero the memory after a PC is shutdown. Kind of a background routine. Or maybe even short all the lines to drain the stored charges.
Why would you sell computers with such features? Are your customers terrorists?
This "excuse" didn't work at the Nuremberg trials. Why should it work today?
It didn't work at the Nuremberg trials because that judged the head Nazis, those who were the authority figures. The average concentration camp guard - you know, the people who actually dragged other people into gas chambers - got away with it precisely because they were simply following orders.
Not that that really matters. Nuremberg trials are ancient history, and genocides since then have mostly gone completely unpunished. The "normal" course of things is not that your excuses don't work, it's that you don't need excuses.
The top 1% owns about 40% of the wealth and pays about 40% of the taxes. The point was that the rich are paying their fair share, not that they are paying more than their fair share.
This forgets the fact that a human must eat. A poor person spends almost all of his income in basic maintenance. A rich person does not. For a poor person, any tax changes to what quality of food he may afford, while for a rich person it does not change that, or even what luxuries he can afford; no, for a rich person tax only changes a few numbers on his balance book, and has no effect whatsoever on him.
That is why progressive taxes exist, and why the progression should be as sharp as possible.
In all systems expect for galactic clusters, the forces binding particles together (gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces) are strong enough to keep inflation from affecting the distances between particles. So, clusters of galaxies are moving away from one another, but electrons aren't pulling away from protons.
However, it means that electrons are in an accelerating motion towards the nuclear core (beyond what they would be in a non-expanding universe). Shouldn't this cause photons to be emitted? Or, alternatively, would this affect electron orbitals? And in either case, would this affect the expansion itself?
Though isn't there a point (going by the heat death theory), that space-time expansion will overcome the electromagnetic forces? Or is that too controversial still?
You're talking about the Big Rip, and controversial or not it would explain why Internet hasn't worked well for me for the past few days...
Einstein's theories dictate that nothing can go as fast as c.
Actually, no: they are based on the observation that the speed of light relative to you doesn't change as you accelerate, which of course means that you can never catch it.
And of course your statement is incorrect anyway, as light is something and goes as fast as c. So do all massless particles, for that matter. So do chances in electromagnetic and gravitational fields.
Relativity says nothing about faster than c.
Relativity states that to go faster than c is to travel in time. In other words, things going faster than c will violate causality. That's pretty much up there with point out that something results in perpetual motion engines, as far as strength of refutations go.
Like a lot of lunatic environmentalists, he's anti-libertarian and anti-democratic.
Seeing how libertarianism itself is anti-democratic - by advocating moving all power from elected representatives to whoever has the most cash - I see nothing wrong or insane in being anti-libertarian. I certainly wish that "Feudalism 2.0: Libertarianism" got stomped out once and for all, seeing how I'm more likely to be a serf than a lord in such a system.
I already live somewhere that's not going to be flooded any time in the next few tens of millions of years.
If coastal areas get flooded by water, then everywhere else will get flooded by refugees. And losing all the harbours and the rest of low-area infrastructure might also slightly affect your lifestyle. So might the collapse of agriculture resulting from shifting climate patterns.
Climate change to the point of flooding coasts may or may not happen, but if you really think that it happening wouldn't affect you just because you're living at high altitude, then you're an idiot.
It could be the same number every year for 5 years in a row and still be random, just like you can throw "6" several times in a row with dice and it does not mean that the dice are loaded.
The odds of throwing 6 twice in a row in an honest dice are 1 in 36. The odds of throwing it thrice in a row are 1 in 216. The series continues 1 in 1296, 1 in 7776, 1 in 46 656, 1 in 279 936 and 1 in 1 679 616. At some point the reasonable conclusion chances from "mere coincidence" to "loaded dice"; and as this example shows, sometimes mere 8 data points are sufficient to establish this.
It's all very good to observe this process but since there is little we can do to stop it, at least we should make an effort to observe and document it properly to see if someone can come up with a plausible, reproducible explanation for it.
"Increasing amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere trap heat, which causes ice to melt" is a plausible explanation. No explanation is repeatable, unless you happen to have a spare Earth somewhere.
Putting alarmist, or worse, rabid green "spin" on it is only going to discredit the research in the long run.
As opposed to oil industry spin of "greenhouse effect isn't real, we didn't cause it, you can't prove anything"?
The reason that the Internet was such a powerful engine for innovation, is exactly because it had excess capacity, and the ability to support new applications. If all Internet traffic is now to be relegated to the scraps of bandwidth remaining from so called "managed services", it is dead for all practical purposes.
And that's just fine, as far as powers-that-be are concerned. Free exchange of information threatens both political and commercial interests, and as the Wikileaks affair shows, it's even a threat to the Three Letter Evils. That's why it will be taken down by them, and there's nothing you can do to stop that.
I hope you've enjoyed it, for the Internet is simply too good to last.
But forcing this sort of complexity on new market entrants will just entrench the existing players and be bad for the web.
The complexity is already there. As you noted yourself, browsers already implement multiple rendering modes/engines based on what they detect the content to be. Version numbers simply allows this to work simply and reliably, thus removing the need for any new browsers to implement complex heuristics to guess what to do with the content.
It's not like a browser has to respect the version number, it simply makes it possible to behave correctly.
We _want_ people to create new web browsers!
Why? Does it really serve anyone's interests to have multiple almost-but-not-quite-compatible HTML renderers / Javascript virtual machines? All it does is make the lowest common denominator even lower, and force developers to use massive compatibility libraries to deal with the incompatibilities and missing features. And lack of version numbers is going to make things even worse by adding another source of ambiguity.
Except in practice, web authors _don't_ mean it when they write a doctype, so browsers assume that they should ignore it anyway and guess (or rather render per the latest version of HTML they support). So in practice, version-numbering your HTML is just playing pretend.
No, browsers don't do that; rather, they use the doctype - which includes the HTML version number - to figure out how to render the page. Google "quirks mode" for details.
There are also philosophical reasons for not having a versioned HTML; I'm happy to describe those if you're interested.
he problem this addresses is that, because the standards in fact are evolving now, the public snapshots are usually treated as out-of-date but the browser vendors and other major players, so coding to the publicized snapshots itself doesn't provide the most reliable method of assuring behavior today, much less 5 years from now.
All of that is true. And none of that chances the fact that it makes sense to declare how you want a particular document to be interpreted. I understand that the browsers 10 years from now might not be able to interpret current web pages properly; but I'd rather they at the very least had the option of doing that, by reading the HTML version number and doing their best effort translation.
If you specify that your page is HTML 2.0 and serve it up as text/html, not a single modern browser will render it per the HTML 2.0 spec text (such as that is).
But they will know what I meant. That's the key here - to allow the browsers know what I the Web Page Maker was trying to say, rather than try to guess. That is why version numbers are necessary.
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"Free will" is not an illusion. "Free will" is a philosophical and legal concept, while determinism is a physics concept. Treating these as opposites is a bit like doing likewise with the color blue and the taste of winegar. Of course you get nonsensical results if you use a nonsensical scale.
Besides, it's not like the non-determinism would result in any freer will. After all, under determinism your mental state is the function of your previous mental state and sensory inputs, while under non-determinism it's the function of pms, sensory inputs and a random number.
So no, free will does not require either of your two arguments, and in fact has absolutely nothing to do with them.
Current religions might or might not be finished. I doubt that, since people would still read about religion in history books, and some would believe. But even if they disappeared, new ones would simply rise to replace them. After all, whether the reason religions exist is human psychology or constant intervention by supernatural beings, neither would be affected by your scenario.
Of course, it's entirely possible that people would turn their religious feelings towards philosophies like Stalinism or Fascism, but let's not dwell on such a nightmare scenario.
Where "everything" means "ashes". Furthermore, 144001 people is not sufficient to hold all the skills required for modern technological society, which in turn is required to survive on Moon, so you and your fellows would still die. Also, Moon lacks many of the elements needed for said technology, so you'd need to arrange a space program which alone would require more than those 144001 people. And, finally, the fleet required to transport 100000+ people from Earth to Moon might also have something to say about your plan.
Wrong. Escape velocity is the velocity at which the apex of your arc rises to infinity. Earth is not an infinite distance from the Moon, and the transition point is even closer, thus you need less than escape velocity of Moon to reach Earth from the Moon.
Even with the ballast being under lunar gravity as well?
In short, the kind of idiots who burn themselves out working for free in the hopes of getting paid for all their unpaid overtime someday.
Namely, that he's an idiot who went into a lot of debt to get a piece of paper that doesn't matter beyond letting everyone know it ?-)
Or, more likely, it would still be the realm of science fiction. Or do you really think you're going back there anytime soon?
Why would you sell computers with such features? Are your customers terrorists?
Cue the usual excuses about it being simply too difficult to offer broadband in such a big country as the United States.
Somewhere far beyond a bunch of ghostly settlers are looking at their descendants very, very ashamed.
It didn't work at the Nuremberg trials because that judged the head Nazis, those who were the authority figures. The average concentration camp guard - you know, the people who actually dragged other people into gas chambers - got away with it precisely because they were simply following orders.
Not that that really matters. Nuremberg trials are ancient history, and genocides since then have mostly gone completely unpunished. The "normal" course of things is not that your excuses don't work, it's that you don't need excuses.
This forgets the fact that a human must eat. A poor person spends almost all of his income in basic maintenance. A rich person does not. For a poor person, any tax changes to what quality of food he may afford, while for a rich person it does not change that, or even what luxuries he can afford; no, for a rich person tax only changes a few numbers on his balance book, and has no effect whatsoever on him.
That is why progressive taxes exist, and why the progression should be as sharp as possible.
However, it means that electrons are in an accelerating motion towards the nuclear core (beyond what they would be in a non-expanding universe). Shouldn't this cause photons to be emitted? Or, alternatively, would this affect electron orbitals? And in either case, would this affect the expansion itself?
You're talking about the Big Rip, and controversial or not it would explain why Internet hasn't worked well for me for the past few days...
Actually, no: they are based on the observation that the speed of light relative to you doesn't change as you accelerate, which of course means that you can never catch it.
And of course your statement is incorrect anyway, as light is something and goes as fast as c. So do all massless particles, for that matter. So do chances in electromagnetic and gravitational fields.
Relativity states that to go faster than c is to travel in time. In other words, things going faster than c will violate causality. That's pretty much up there with point out that something results in perpetual motion engines, as far as strength of refutations go.
Seeing how libertarianism itself is anti-democratic - by advocating moving all power from elected representatives to whoever has the most cash - I see nothing wrong or insane in being anti-libertarian. I certainly wish that "Feudalism 2.0: Libertarianism" got stomped out once and for all, seeing how I'm more likely to be a serf than a lord in such a system.
Oh great, then we'll get to save the New Irish Bankers too.
If coastal areas get flooded by water, then everywhere else will get flooded by refugees. And losing all the harbours and the rest of low-area infrastructure might also slightly affect your lifestyle. So might the collapse of agriculture resulting from shifting climate patterns.
Climate change to the point of flooding coasts may or may not happen, but if you really think that it happening wouldn't affect you just because you're living at high altitude, then you're an idiot.
The odds of throwing 6 twice in a row in an honest dice are 1 in 36. The odds of throwing it thrice in a row are 1 in 216. The series continues 1 in 1296, 1 in 7776, 1 in 46 656, 1 in 279 936 and 1 in 1 679 616. At some point the reasonable conclusion chances from "mere coincidence" to "loaded dice"; and as this example shows, sometimes mere 8 data points are sufficient to establish this.
"Increasing amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere trap heat, which causes ice to melt" is a plausible explanation. No explanation is repeatable, unless you happen to have a spare Earth somewhere.
As opposed to oil industry spin of "greenhouse effect isn't real, we didn't cause it, you can't prove anything"?
Not for long. Norway has oil.
And that's just fine, as far as powers-that-be are concerned. Free exchange of information threatens both political and commercial interests, and as the Wikileaks affair shows, it's even a threat to the Three Letter Evils. That's why it will be taken down by them, and there's nothing you can do to stop that.
I hope you've enjoyed it, for the Internet is simply too good to last.
The complexity is already there. As you noted yourself, browsers already implement multiple rendering modes/engines based on what they detect the content to be. Version numbers simply allows this to work simply and reliably, thus removing the need for any new browsers to implement complex heuristics to guess what to do with the content.
It's not like a browser has to respect the version number, it simply makes it possible to behave correctly.
Why? Does it really serve anyone's interests to have multiple almost-but-not-quite-compatible HTML renderers / Javascript virtual machines? All it does is make the lowest common denominator even lower, and force developers to use massive compatibility libraries to deal with the incompatibilities and missing features. And lack of version numbers is going to make things even worse by adding another source of ambiguity.
No, browsers don't do that; rather, they use the doctype - which includes the HTML version number - to figure out how to render the page. Google "quirks mode" for details.
Let's hear them.
All of that is true. And none of that chances the fact that it makes sense to declare how you want a particular document to be interpreted. I understand that the browsers 10 years from now might not be able to interpret current web pages properly; but I'd rather they at the very least had the option of doing that, by reading the HTML version number and doing their best effort translation.
But they will know what I meant. That's the key here - to allow the browsers know what I the Web Page Maker was trying to say, rather than try to guess. That is why version numbers are necessary.