You know, you can pick up a CD/DVD-ROM drive fairly cheap (or free from a friend)... unless someone has a magic new technology that can turn a reader into a rewriter using just a bit of software.
With mass production, running one production line is cheaper than running two. That's why it is entirely feasible that the readers and rewriters are actually identical as far as physical components go, and the only differences are in the control board software. In which case simply patching that software would make the reader into a fully functional rewriter.
It is my firm belief that most people innately know what is right and wrong and when they believe they are being watched they tend to to the right thing.
Nah. They'll tend to do whatever they believe the watcher will approve of. It may or may not be the right thing. This phenomenom is generally known as "peer pressure", and is usually what makes people do the really dumb mistakes.
When my child is old enough to use the computer, my instructions will be simple:
You may use this computer in any manner you like. There will be no attempts to block or filter content.
But I will be monitoring everything you do with it.
Since you are monitoring the use, there obviously are unacceptable ways to use the computer; why else would you bother monitoring ? Since there are unacceptable ways to use the computer, your first claim was a lie. Since you told a lie, you are a liar and can't be trusted.
Maybe you meant well, but the end result of these instruction is: "There are rules which I won't tell you, and if you break any of them, there will be consequences which I also am not telling you." Not a nice position to put anyone in, but a great way to teach slave mentality: "Will whoever has authority over me approve of this action I wish to commit ?"
But I guess teaching people to live with secret laws is neccessary in todays world...
Isn't that essentially what the Montana Freemen tried to do? Declaring sovereignty will get you shot then painted in the media as a wackjob.
Yeah, that's the nasty side of sovereignty: you must provide your own defense, and failing to do that means your neighbours - especially the country you seceded from - will conquer and/or kill you pretty soon. That's something for all the anti-government types to remember: without a government you won't have police force or army either, so you either defend yourself by yourself or die.
We are at war in Iraq because Iraq has oil, and is in a region with huge petroleum reserves. We need a stable platform to get to that oil THAT WE CONTROL.
If and when oil starts running out, you won't be able to maintain control of Middle-East. It's right next to Europe, and near India and China. Even Africa, if it ever gets its act together, is closer to it than you are. If and when any of these powers go for that oil, they will not only be able to stop you from resupplying any troops in the area, but they can do supply easily.
And, of course, there's the little fact that the local populace hates your guts, and you've been unable to pacify the area even without such outside interference.
A way to distribute blog hosting, so that a blog can't be shut down by a strike against a single hosting service. I don't have a solution at hand for that.
What do you mean ? There's tons of distributed hosting solutions out there, from Usenet to BitTorrent.
Heck, if Freenet ever gets its act together and gets over the current "Darknet" fad (which makes it near impossible to get to the network, since you need to know someone already in it, and the end result is a huge hassle with semi-automated IRC bots forming connections) it would be nearly ideal. The routing finally seems to work, and the rising machine power makes Fred's ridiculous inefficiency less of an issue today. There already are several blog-like sites about controversial topics there.
I know I'm going to use my camera more openly in more stores now, though. It's an easy and interesting way to find out the stores attitude towards customers.
How do they know you are a customer and not, say, a burglar planning a robbery, or better yet a potential terrorist planning a bombing ? Their attitude is likely to be one of cold calculation: it is better to risk losing one customer than risk losing the whole inventory or the store blowing up.
Sure, such things are very unlikely, but think of it from the staffs point of view: they lose nothing if a single customer is lost, but could risk being identified as someone who saw the burglar/terrorist preparing for a strike and did nothing. Alway squash any even tiniest bit suspicious activity; it is the easiest way to cover your ass.
That's how it works, and why seemingly idiotic and paranoid practices keep on going: no one wants to risk being the scapegoat if something happens.
Yes, that was the joke. Also moran, to further grind it into the dirt. It's dead. Happy now?
It's not dead which can forever lay, and with strange aeons even death may die. So I say beat on it a little more, and then nuke it from the orbit; it's the only way to be sure.
After all, in Zombified Rurality, the dead beat up YOU!
There's no such thing as a utopia--real or virtual. Suffering is the kick in the pants that forces us to become better people. A utopia is a world where no one has any incentive to become a better person (since there's no suffering), in which case, I'm glad no utopia can exist.
Better people ? All suffering has ever made me do is think of various creative ways to utterly and very painfully destroy the source of that particular incident of it. Never once has it made me better in any way, unless you consider hatefullness, bitterness and cynicism to be better than lack of them.
Suffering doesn't make people better, it makes them worse. It is the kick in the pants which makes us want to take the pain out on someone else. And so the cycle of abuse goes on.
Cold-hearted? Sure. But so is reality.
No, just stupid. Just the kind of crap people come up with when they are trying to explain why bad things are, in fact, good. Pseudo-philosophical bullshit.
What do you think happened to all the large land mammals that were in North America 20k years ago? Humans killed them all off. Yet... somehow... those humans didn't go extinct, or cause some kind of global disaster.
Actually, since they consequently lacked anything to domesticate, they stayed at the hunter-gatherer tribal state for the next 20 000 years and were eventually driven off their land and killed into near-extinction by foreign invaders and their domestication-originated diseases.
You could had picked a better example for your case:).
Suffice to say that Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem turning mathematics world upside down by demonstrating that within a mathematical system there will be propositions that are true, but cannot be proved so by formal proof.
Yes, I know. Now can you answer my question: if you can't prove a particular statement, how do you know it is true ? Or, in other words: does Goedel's theorem give a way to identify a particular statement as belonging to these unprovable true statements (and if such, wouldn't that actually be the proof for those statements ?), or does it simply state that they exist ?
Remember, the original point was about considering particular unprovable statements as facts, not that such statements wouldn't exist.
Without commenting on the validity of the Bible, I have to comment on the validity of some of your arguments.
Due to these late Pleistocene glaciations (some 21,000 years preceding the supposed flood), the mass of the ice has actually depressed the crust of the Earth. That crust, now that the ice is gone, is slowly rising (called glacial rebound); and this rebound can be measured, in places (like northern Wisconsin), in centimetres/year. Sea level was also lowered some 10's of meters due to the very finite amount of water in the Earth's hydrosphere being locked up in glacial ice sheets (geologists call this glacioeustacy).
If the whole Earth was covered in uniform water sheet, would that actually cause a depression ? After all, the rock, being solid matter, and the magma beneath it, being liquid, won't compress significantly under the pressures involved; most likely the glacial depression was made possible by pushing the land mass deeper into the mantle and displacing the magma, which would have the effect of rising the other areas of the world a bit. This isn't possible if the whole globe is uniformly covered; there's nowhere to displace magma to.
Secondly, the Ice Age lasted for thousands of years, while the biblical flod supposedly lasted a few months. Maybe there simply wouldn't be time for significant depression - after all, the rebound is a very slow process, taking tens of thousands of years, so why would the depression be any faster ?
Further, Mount Everest extends through 2/3 of the Earth's atmosphere. Since two forms of matter can't occupy the same space, we have an additional problem with the atmosphere. Its current boundary marks the point at which gasses of the atmosphere can escape the Earth's gravitational field. Even allowing for partial dissolving of the atmosphere into our huge ocean, we'd lose the vast majority of our atmosphere as it is raised some 5.155 km higher by the rising flood waters; and it boils off into space.
Nonsense. The atmosphere is concentrated near Earth because it experiences the pull of gravity like anything else. The air pressure is caused by the weight of air atop you; the air pressure at sea level is greater than that at the top of Everest because there is more air above you weighting down on you. This greater pressure compresses the air, making it thicker. As you go upwards, there's less air atop you, hence less weight, hence less pressure; less pressure means that air isn't crushed into such high density and is therefore less dense. Because air is denser nearer the surface, the majority of Earth's atmosphere is concentrated near the surface.
The gravity at Everest, or even at Low Earth Orbit, is not significantly weaker than at surface. In fact, since the strength of gravity is inversely proportional to the distance to the Earth's center of gravity (which we can assume to be at the geometric centre), and Earth's radius is (according to Google) about 6378.1 kilometers, and the height of Everest is 9 kilometers (to err on the side of caution), the gravity at the top of the Everest is about 0.2 percent weaker than at sea level.
Or see Venus: the planet has less mass than Earth, but far thicker atmosphere.
So, in conclusion: increasing Earth's radius by 9 kilometers wouldn't have any noticeable effect whatsoever on the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, your cleverly presented argument relies upon human logic, and is hence, by your own argument, invalid. Have a nice day.
Unfortunately, your conclusion that an argument that invalidates logic invalidates itself is also based on human logic, and is therefore not a valid counterargument for that argument, since that argument argued that human logic doesn't hold, so any counteragument based on logic rely on the initial argument being false, making them circular arguments ("the previous argument is false if it is false"). The same is true of this argument too, and any rebuttal anyone could make for it.
More specifically, as soon as you assume that God is absolutely omnipotent and therefore even above logic ("not bound by human logic"), it becomes impossible to have any kind of meaningful discussion or debate. Logic simply can't handle things which are not bound by its rules.
Of course, one could go for below-the-belt punch approach and point out that saying "God is not bound by logic" is equivalent to saying "God is illogical" or "God is insane". That should take care of this brand of pseudo-philosophical nonsense arguments.
Finally, if God didn't want humans to be little automata, but denied us education, didn't He pretty much just make a pair of amusing little pets?
One might argue that Adam and Eve did get one Hell of an education, so to speak, one that the rest of us have gotten to share ever since.
At THIS point, their all-powerful 'parent' offers no comfort or assistance, but decides that NOW He would put protection on the one thing that might, possibly, have reversed the change done to them.
Actually, the Fall story says that God gave them clothes. One might also argue that the whole rest of the Bible describes efforts to fix things.
I can't believe how gullible and ignorant so many people are. If you don't believe in a character from a 2000+ yr old book you are somehow less of a person. What a load of BS.
It may have more to do with the fact that the most vocal atheists, the ones who make a big public deal of their atheism, tend to be either contemptuous or outright hostile towards religion - Richard Dawkings being a good example. The ones who simply don't believe in God(s) and don't spend their time preaching about the evils of religion propably exist, but don't stand out so they won't alter the public perception of atheism. Now, if the voter is religious himself, why would you he want to vote for someone who is contemptuous of him ?
Star Wars is a new Beowulf, but we as a culture cannot own it and make it ours. It is now eternal and unchanging, as will be our culture. Another word for eternal and unchanging is dead.
Does not compute philosophically. You'd think a free market idealogue would be against copyrights...
If he were an ideologue, it would not compute. Perhaps he believes in a healthily regulated mostly free market? Perhaps he is more of a moderate rather than an ideologue?
Or perhaps he doesn't believe in free market but figures that enough other people do that it pays to try and manipulate them by mentioning it.
The older I grow, the more cynical I become; the more cynical I become, the more sense the world and the actions of the people in it make. Kinda scary, actually.
Oh please. You seriously think they were making a well considered, constructive criticism of the faculty?
I didn't claim any such thing, now did I ?
Children are immature by definition, and consequently they behave immaturely. That's why they are kept under the power of their parents, so they can be guided and teached, towards "well considered, constructive criticism". This incident, on the other hand, guides them towards knowing their place and shutting their face - a lesson they will remember in adulthood as well.
The little sh** wanted to humiliate his teacher so he could chortle with his cohorts. Frankly, I wouldn't be at all opposed to he and his parents getting sued by the teacher.
Laughing at someone is a legal offense in America ?
Besides, if a teacher, in the course of teaching a classroom, behaves in a way that humiliates her if the behavior comes to be known publically, she only has herself to blame. On the other hand, if she didn't behave inappropriately, then what humiliation has she suffered ?
What he learned (or should have learned, at least) is that actions have consequences. And yes, civilization WILL punish you if you're an ass and affect the rights of others.
What rights would those be, exactly speaking ? To the best of my knowledge, there is no right to not be mocked.
On the other hand, I haven't seen teachers doing anything to stop bullying in schools, which actually affects others rights; specifically, the right to personal safety. But I guess teachers are too busy searching MySpace and YouTube for any perceivable insult and conducting grudge matches with (pre)teenagers for such secondary concerns as protecting the children they have been entrusted with.
One thing you notice in the country when you get back from a trip to the city is the smell of fresh air. And the urge to shower to wash the grime and smog of the city off you.
Unless you don't depend on any other infrastructure, then the whole thing is pointless. Are you independent of electricity, oil, garbage collection, food (local production only), communications,...?
Not to mention law enforcement to keep the desperate starving masses from stealing your food.
And if someone answers with "I've got guns and know how to use them", I'll point out that you'd better know how to make bullets too, and be sitting on a lead mine to put that knowledge into use.
The farmers are in more, not less, shitty situation than urban people if things go to hell, because their main resource (land) is non-movable and non-hidable. Besides, without modern civilization there aren't modern pesticides and nutrients (not to mention machines), so productivity once again drops to the point where you're facing starvation if anything goes wrong. Lack of ability to store food for long periods (no electricity, no cold storage) doesn't help, either.
The best chances you have in such a situation is being part of a large organization which can coordinate its actions effectively to get the resources it needs - such as a gang, for example. Self-sufficiency is simply not possible for a human being, not when you factor in the need for defense too. All disaster survival plans should take this into account and concentrate on maintaining the cohesion of local society, be it a small farm town or a biker gang.
Newsflash: Kids are at school to learn. Anything that interferes with learning in a significant way is a big problem.
And they certainly learned something from this: criticize people who have authority over you and you will be punished. I'm sure they'll remember this lesson when they are adults, too, and the authority is the Government. Then you'll be wondering why people bend over for that Government instead of challenging it.
The fact that Microsoft can't go into the Linux kernel, change some things and call it Windows 2.0 is not a bug, it's a feature.
Actually, it can. Microsoft owns the "Windows" trademark, and can slap it into anything they desire, and nothing in the GPL prevents Microsoft from releasing their own version of Linux kernel (or any other GPL'd software) provided that they comply with the license (make the source code available under the GPL license to every recipient of their version of Linux/Windows kernel without any extra charge).
What Microsoft can't do is release a proprietary non-GPL'd version of the Linux kernel. They are, however, free to release their own version of it under the GPL, the same as anyone else.
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With mass production, running one production line is cheaper than running two. That's why it is entirely feasible that the readers and rewriters are actually identical as far as physical components go, and the only differences are in the control board software. In which case simply patching that software would make the reader into a fully functional rewriter.
Nah. They'll tend to do whatever they believe the watcher will approve of. It may or may not be the right thing. This phenomenom is generally known as "peer pressure", and is usually what makes people do the really dumb mistakes.
Since you are monitoring the use, there obviously are unacceptable ways to use the computer; why else would you bother monitoring ? Since there are unacceptable ways to use the computer, your first claim was a lie. Since you told a lie, you are a liar and can't be trusted.
Maybe you meant well, but the end result of these instruction is: "There are rules which I won't tell you, and if you break any of them, there will be consequences which I also am not telling you." Not a nice position to put anyone in, but a great way to teach slave mentality: "Will whoever has authority over me approve of this action I wish to commit ?"
But I guess teaching people to live with secret laws is neccessary in todays world...
Yeah, that's the nasty side of sovereignty: you must provide your own defense, and failing to do that means your neighbours - especially the country you seceded from - will conquer and/or kill you pretty soon. That's something for all the anti-government types to remember: without a government you won't have police force or army either, so you either defend yourself by yourself or die.
If and when oil starts running out, you won't be able to maintain control of Middle-East. It's right next to Europe, and near India and China. Even Africa, if it ever gets its act together, is closer to it than you are. If and when any of these powers go for that oil, they will not only be able to stop you from resupplying any troops in the area, but they can do supply easily.
And, of course, there's the little fact that the local populace hates your guts, and you've been unable to pacify the area even without such outside interference.
What do you mean ? There's tons of distributed hosting solutions out there, from Usenet to BitTorrent.
Heck, if Freenet ever gets its act together and gets over the current "Darknet" fad (which makes it near impossible to get to the network, since you need to know someone already in it, and the end result is a huge hassle with semi-automated IRC bots forming connections) it would be nearly ideal. The routing finally seems to work, and the rising machine power makes Fred's ridiculous inefficiency less of an issue today. There already are several blog-like sites about controversial topics there.
How do they know you are a customer and not, say, a burglar planning a robbery, or better yet a potential terrorist planning a bombing ? Their attitude is likely to be one of cold calculation: it is better to risk losing one customer than risk losing the whole inventory or the store blowing up.
Sure, such things are very unlikely, but think of it from the staffs point of view: they lose nothing if a single customer is lost, but could risk being identified as someone who saw the burglar/terrorist preparing for a strike and did nothing. Alway squash any even tiniest bit suspicious activity; it is the easiest way to cover your ass.
That's how it works, and why seemingly idiotic and paranoid practices keep on going: no one wants to risk being the scapegoat if something happens.
It's not dead which can forever lay, and with strange aeons even death may die. So I say beat on it a little more, and then nuke it from the orbit; it's the only way to be sure.
After all, in Zombified Rurality, the dead beat up YOU!
Better people ? All suffering has ever made me do is think of various creative ways to utterly and very painfully destroy the source of that particular incident of it. Never once has it made me better in any way, unless you consider hatefullness, bitterness and cynicism to be better than lack of them.
Suffering doesn't make people better, it makes them worse. It is the kick in the pants which makes us want to take the pain out on someone else. And so the cycle of abuse goes on.
No, just stupid. Just the kind of crap people come up with when they are trying to explain why bad things are, in fact, good. Pseudo-philosophical bullshit.
Actually, since they consequently lacked anything to domesticate, they stayed at the hunter-gatherer tribal state for the next 20 000 years and were eventually driven off their land and killed into near-extinction by foreign invaders and their domestication-originated diseases.
You could had picked a better example for your case :).
Yes, I know. Now can you answer my question: if you can't prove a particular statement, how do you know it is true ? Or, in other words: does Goedel's theorem give a way to identify a particular statement as belonging to these unprovable true statements (and if such, wouldn't that actually be the proof for those statements ?), or does it simply state that they exist ?
Remember, the original point was about considering particular unprovable statements as facts, not that such statements wouldn't exist.
Without commenting on the validity of the Bible, I have to comment on the validity of some of your arguments.
If the whole Earth was covered in uniform water sheet, would that actually cause a depression ? After all, the rock, being solid matter, and the magma beneath it, being liquid, won't compress significantly under the pressures involved; most likely the glacial depression was made possible by pushing the land mass deeper into the mantle and displacing the magma, which would have the effect of rising the other areas of the world a bit. This isn't possible if the whole globe is uniformly covered; there's nowhere to displace magma to.
Secondly, the Ice Age lasted for thousands of years, while the biblical flod supposedly lasted a few months. Maybe there simply wouldn't be time for significant depression - after all, the rebound is a very slow process, taking tens of thousands of years, so why would the depression be any faster ?
Nonsense. The atmosphere is concentrated near Earth because it experiences the pull of gravity like anything else. The air pressure is caused by the weight of air atop you; the air pressure at sea level is greater than that at the top of Everest because there is more air above you weighting down on you. This greater pressure compresses the air, making it thicker. As you go upwards, there's less air atop you, hence less weight, hence less pressure; less pressure means that air isn't crushed into such high density and is therefore less dense. Because air is denser nearer the surface, the majority of Earth's atmosphere is concentrated near the surface.
The gravity at Everest, or even at Low Earth Orbit, is not significantly weaker than at surface. In fact, since the strength of gravity is inversely proportional to the distance to the Earth's center of gravity (which we can assume to be at the geometric centre), and Earth's radius is (according to Google) about 6378.1 kilometers, and the height of Everest is 9 kilometers (to err on the side of caution), the gravity at the top of the Everest is about 0.2 percent weaker than at sea level.
Or see Venus: the planet has less mass than Earth, but far thicker atmosphere.
So, in conclusion: increasing Earth's radius by 9 kilometers wouldn't have any noticeable effect whatsoever on the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, your conclusion that an argument that invalidates logic invalidates itself is also based on human logic, and is therefore not a valid counterargument for that argument, since that argument argued that human logic doesn't hold, so any counteragument based on logic rely on the initial argument being false, making them circular arguments ("the previous argument is false if it is false"). The same is true of this argument too, and any rebuttal anyone could make for it.
More specifically, as soon as you assume that God is absolutely omnipotent and therefore even above logic ("not bound by human logic"), it becomes impossible to have any kind of meaningful discussion or debate. Logic simply can't handle things which are not bound by its rules.
Of course, one could go for below-the-belt punch approach and point out that saying "God is not bound by logic" is equivalent to saying "God is illogical" or "God is insane". That should take care of this brand of pseudo-philosophical nonsense arguments.
One might argue that Adam and Eve did get one Hell of an education, so to speak, one that the rest of us have gotten to share ever since.
Actually, the Fall story says that God gave them clothes. One might also argue that the whole rest of the Bible describes efforts to fix things.
If you can't prove them true how do you know they are ? And if you don't know if they are, why should you teach them as if they were ?
So yes, as far as I'm concerned, an unproven mathemathical statement isn't a fact. It is, at best, an educated guess.
Um, how does this system prevent that ? The outsiders don't have RFID tags on them, so they'll be invisible to the system.
It may have more to do with the fact that the most vocal atheists, the ones who make a big public deal of their atheism, tend to be either contemptuous or outright hostile towards religion - Richard Dawkings being a good example. The ones who simply don't believe in God(s) and don't spend their time preaching about the evils of religion propably exist, but don't stand out so they won't alter the public perception of atheism. Now, if the voter is religious himself, why would you he want to vote for someone who is contemptuous of him ?
It is not dead which can forever lie, and with strange aeons, even death may die.
Or perhaps he doesn't believe in free market but figures that enough other people do that it pays to try and manipulate them by mentioning it.
The older I grow, the more cynical I become; the more cynical I become, the more sense the world and the actions of the people in it make. Kinda scary, actually.
I didn't claim any such thing, now did I ?
Children are immature by definition, and consequently they behave immaturely. That's why they are kept under the power of their parents, so they can be guided and teached, towards "well considered, constructive criticism". This incident, on the other hand, guides them towards knowing their place and shutting their face - a lesson they will remember in adulthood as well.
Laughing at someone is a legal offense in America ?
Besides, if a teacher, in the course of teaching a classroom, behaves in a way that humiliates her if the behavior comes to be known publically, she only has herself to blame. On the other hand, if she didn't behave inappropriately, then what humiliation has she suffered ?
What rights would those be, exactly speaking ? To the best of my knowledge, there is no right to not be mocked.
On the other hand, I haven't seen teachers doing anything to stop bullying in schools, which actually affects others rights; specifically, the right to personal safety. But I guess teachers are too busy searching MySpace and YouTube for any perceivable insult and conducting grudge matches with (pre)teenagers for such secondary concerns as protecting the children they have been entrusted with.
You have running water in the countryside ?-)
In corn production deficient Soviet Russia, your nonexistent imaginary sister virtually fucks you!
Not to mention law enforcement to keep the desperate starving masses from stealing your food.
And if someone answers with "I've got guns and know how to use them", I'll point out that you'd better know how to make bullets too, and be sitting on a lead mine to put that knowledge into use.
The farmers are in more, not less, shitty situation than urban people if things go to hell, because their main resource (land) is non-movable and non-hidable. Besides, without modern civilization there aren't modern pesticides and nutrients (not to mention machines), so productivity once again drops to the point where you're facing starvation if anything goes wrong. Lack of ability to store food for long periods (no electricity, no cold storage) doesn't help, either.
The best chances you have in such a situation is being part of a large organization which can coordinate its actions effectively to get the resources it needs - such as a gang, for example. Self-sufficiency is simply not possible for a human being, not when you factor in the need for defense too. All disaster survival plans should take this into account and concentrate on maintaining the cohesion of local society, be it a small farm town or a biker gang.
And they certainly learned something from this: criticize people who have authority over you and you will be punished. I'm sure they'll remember this lesson when they are adults, too, and the authority is the Government. Then you'll be wondering why people bend over for that Government instead of challenging it.
Actually, it can. Microsoft owns the "Windows" trademark, and can slap it into anything they desire, and nothing in the GPL prevents Microsoft from releasing their own version of Linux kernel (or any other GPL'd software) provided that they comply with the license (make the source code available under the GPL license to every recipient of their version of Linux/Windows kernel without any extra charge).
What Microsoft can't do is release a proprietary non-GPL'd version of the Linux kernel. They are, however, free to release their own version of it under the GPL, the same as anyone else.
The GPL doesn't stipulate who, just how.