The thing to remember is, the FBI is going to come out of this justifying themselves. Because somewhere in all of that data is going to be something illegal, practically as a given.
But let's forget temporarily about our rights (taking a cue from the judge who signed this)--it had better be a really important crime if the FBI is going to spend the resources to examine an entire datacenter's worth of data. There are more than enough understaffed and unsolved murder cases etc. that if they're doing this to track down the leek of the new X-Men movie (as alleged) I'll be pretty pissed.
There is no reason to worry about winding up friends. Women who are your friends have other women friends to whom they will introduce you or even set you up with. One might even say that making friends with women is exponentially more effective than hitting on them.
Not to mention that 10/10 times any woman who sets you up with one of her friends will in the process try to sell your good qualities first, which sure saves you introverts a lot of time and effort trying to bring those out into the open.
What happened to all the other 'bad cylons'? They won't know what happened at Cavil's base so they'll still be out there hunting down humanity.
Well, they only have the natural life expectancy of a cylon to do so, what with the loss of the resurrection hub. Also, presumably the 'naturally evolved' humans on the 'new earth' have been around for millions of years without being found. After sending all of the spaceships into the sun, the technological signatures the cyclons are accustomed to identifying with humanity no longer exist.
What about the other remnants of humanity on the 12 planets? Was sam's resistance the last group left?
Unless they had a secret store of spaceships, I assume they were trapped there when the cylons left. And they would have died off once they ran out of radiation meds.
# No one got left behind on New Caprica?
The cylon plan once they lost control was to nuke the planet. The Three ultimately did not do this because she found Hera, but it seems reasonable to assume that they would have later nuked it from space once Hera was safe.
How is this a problem? Equations have names (important ones at least)
So how do you find out the name of the equation if you don't know it?
Not only that, but how do you find out the name or nature of some esoteric operator that appears an the equation, but which you've never seen before. Maybe you are looking at a sum of functions, but one of the functions you have no idea about. How can you look it up besides searching for its expression, and how can you do that with an existing search engine?
Most physicists seem to get along just fine.
The point is not necessarily to help people already immersed in the given field. They have a working knowledge generated from thousands of hours of study and collaborative research.
But what if I just want to read a single paper on a very advanced and esoteric topic? Perhaps I am interested in doing a computer simulation. I don't want to have to spend hundreds of hours investigating someone else's field, I just want to pull up the bare minimum of information necessary.
It is not such a wild idea. Lots of people take an amateur or specialized interest in, for example, history. The difference is that it is pretty easy to expand from a certain point of knowledge by searching for related names, places, and dates. It is not so easy to pick up a mathematics paper and pull up the context you need to understand it.
That is only an example, however. I feel that in physics and math I would have almost as much use for an engine capable of understanding expressions and their context as programmers do being able to perform that kind of meta-lookup on code.
Well, undoubtedly sshing into every machine is not the standard solution to such problems, but I would point out that it is both trivial and perfectly functional to write a small shellscript that would do exactly that.
Really what it sounds like you want to do is setup NIS or LDAP and then you can load configuration files from the network instead of the local machine.
For the initial install you can make a kickstart file and/or install from the network if you want an easy way to install the same customized stuff on every machine. (This is much better than ghosting copies.)
You can even roll your own version of the distro CD. Scripts like reconstructor make this insanely easy.
Trying to find mathematics/physics information is often pretty terrible. I mean, if you are just looking for a topic you can generally pull up related papers, but that is about the depth of complexity you are capable of searching for.
Unfortunately there is no convenient (or universal) plaintext notation. If you are doing anything serious you probably use latex markup (e.g., \Psi^{*}\Psi) or something similar to render images of your equations. That's well and good for people who just want to read your paper, but for people who want to do a complex search to find very specific bits of contextual information, it is just about useless.
So if I can hope that Wolfram's goal is to make his company's math and science knowledge base searchable by some sort of contextual framework, then that could be pretty awesome for those of us who would like to penetrate particular aspects of independent fields without having to become experts on the fields first.
Seeing as hulu lets you embed their content like youtube, it is strange if their objection is that in-site ads are being skipped. (And are we back to the AdBlock extension == theft argument?)
Otherwise, I assume the ads embedded in the video are still be played.
The only reasons I can imagine for Hulu to wat to block Boxee are (1) ignorance of their own profit model (2) planning to release their own hardware box, or else partner with someone else in order to get the same vertical monopoly going.
As far as I know public schools are freely accessible after hours, government buildings offer fairly unrestricted access (obvious exceptions), churches are open to everyone as one of their founding tenets, and I can't think of any of these places that you would not be able to get a better survey of from the street... so I really wonder what is being protected.
Will we also impose these limitations on city-scape photography taken from terrace apartments?
You can see this if you use Emacs. Nice though that software is in features, the interface is godawful, and actively prevents anyone new to computer usage or programing from using it.
What would you honestly change? 99% of the feature set is packed up in control sequences. If you're using the GUI at all one would have to wonder why you are using Emacs. Vi doesn't even bother.
I understand the point you are making but Emacs is really not the program to pick on because it has a *fantastic* User Interface for programmers--which is the entire point of the program. No your grandma will not be able to point-and-click her way through writing a new database application, but I think that is ok.
As far as "new programmers" go, I would say (i) if they can't easily get through the included Emacs tutorial, programming is probably not going to work out for them (ii) they should not start off in Emacs anyway. Emacs solves a lot of problems but until you've written your first big program you're unlikely to have much appreciation for its features.
Humans are virtually incapable of making realistic cost-benefit analyses of these type of situations. There is so much genetic material phasing into and out of existence, human beings could not begin to comprehend it all. However, a single species is easy enough to comprehend, and so by being considered at all it gets a fairly disproportionate representation in the grand scheme of earth's ecosystem. (and I guess the 'conservationists' are not so sentimental about fungus as frogs)
I think it is interesting that their long-term solution is either to attack the fungus (basically performing a total reversal of natural selection through human intervention) or to preserve the frogs and provide the frogs with some kind of immunity. Of course, nature *already has* an paradigm for immunity, the principle mechanism of which is to let all the organisms that lack intrinsic biological defenses to be killed off.
IANAL, but I imagine there is a distinction between 'self-incrimination' and 'providing evidence.'
Since he has already admitted that the laptop is his and he is responsible for storing pictures in the encrypted section, the barrier between convicting him and not convicting him is merely whether the photos are retrieved. This could just as well be done by technological means (hypothetically!) as having him give up the password.
The reason for his having a right to retain the password is because this essentially admits his possession and access to the encrypted data. Forcing him to provide it is forcing him to prove his guilt, which is obviously self-incriminating. But since he has already given that testimony, now the password is just a barrier to material evidence the court would like to collect.
I don't think anybody would argue that screening for and treating diseases is wrong.
The methodology of choosing an embryo from a set, however, brings in all the usual abortion-related questions as to whether we consider human life to be sacred once it is has the potential to be conscious, or only when it actually is conscious. In the former case, we are concerned about the welfare of those embryos.
There is also the GATACA issue in which you have screening which is more general than your efforts to intercept bad genes, and people are discriminated against by insurance providers and possibly by other people.
The law of unintended consequences may arise in regard to the genes themselves. Until you have a complete understanding of the relationship between genetics and phenotype (which is an awful long way off) it is not always a given that the genes you are selecting against would have been unhealthy, and it is certainly not a given that the genes you are selecting for are going to produce the best overall combination. What happens if through various unexpected subtleties this compounds to a life of pain for the poor creature you create, or you manufacture a serial killer? Do you have responsibility, or can you just write it off as an innocent mistake? Is it right to experiment when an unconsenting party must bear the consequences for the rest of their life?
I think some of the questions are obviously of critical significance to whether or not certain things should be done, but the answers are also going to frequently derive from personal convictions. Without presenting my own views, I think it is reasonable to at least exercise caution, and temper our zeal for progress with a little moral restraint.
Sorry, but I'm 100% in favor of non-cosmetic Eugenics.
Well, I'm sure they will take your opposition to cosmetic eugenics into account and only make money through non-cosmetic eugenics. (Right?)
My problem (well, one of my problems) is the general healthiness of a society that decides what class of person is allowed to exist. Families in China frequently choose to abort female babies. Even if we decided that was morally ok to do... doesn't it still abet a very unhealthy social view of women?
Maybe you'd feel the same if you knew someone with cancer, diabetes or countless other horrible conditions.
Let's try to avoid being dishonest with ourselves here. We are not talking about curing ailments, we are talking selecting the right future-persons to live. Depending on your views on abortion you may achieve the same goals either way, and it is certainly an argument to consider. But you are totally mixing-and-matching if you are going to make an emotional appeal along the lines of "wouldn't you like it if the people you knew were better?" Yes, I would, but your plan for non-cosmetic eugenics would not have made them better, it just would have assured that they never existed, someone healthier would exist in their stead.
Well, it is not just private prisons, state run prisons are subsidied based on their populations as well, and also charge inmates for their stay, as well as for stationary, envelopes, food, a few other things the inmates can have. I don't know how much that goes for, but if someone is greasing the fund it could be the same problem. And if traffic tickets are any indication even municipalities can be swayed by profit motives.
Then of course there are those big juicy lawsuits which come through. Sometimes just by suing for a big enough number people 'legally extort' a nice settlement. And look how much we pay big name lawyers... is that how much justice costs?
It would be nice in fact if the justice system could be entirely divorced from any personal transfer of money. Punitive damages should go to charity via some third party apparatus rather than being split between plaintiffs and lawyers. Positions such as warden in prisons and elsewhere should be constantly swapped to prevent the creation of any long term scams. And if governments 'make money' fining people for crimes, or locking them up, they should not be able to keep the excess, lest that create an incentive for them, but instead should have to return it to the taxpayers in general.
One cool thing with new tech is that it lifts the bar for the scammers. With RFID you need a lot more than a photocopier and laminator to make a fake drivers license.
I think in most places drivers license/government ID are now done on plastic cards (not laminated). Getting a color printer for those plastic ID cards will set you back quite a few grand, which is a lot more than this guy is paying to copy RFID. And this way gives minimum exposure vs. needing to have physical access to something to copy it.
But, you know, there is not much defense against someone who waits to mug you in a lonely alleyway either. Maybe instead of focusing on preventing these sort of things, the primary focus should be on making the exploitation of vulnerabilities more susceptible to post-facto detective work. (for example, if you make the RFID tags require a stronger signal, that will make this kind of setup easier to remotely detect)
I like volunteering. A while back I started a group (friend/friend's friends/etc.) that would go out on Saturdays and help out.
A major problem, though, was finding places to volunteer. Really the only place we found to reliably volunteer was at a couple of foodbanks (always happy to have people sort cans, etc.). Which is great, but quite dull to be doing every weekend.
Obviously, there are lots of other places/people who could use some help, but since they only need it sporadically there is no way to find out about it. We did manage to get a few other jobs by calling well-known charities, like, we did yard work for Ronald McDonald house. Or played baseball with some kids at an orphanage. However, generally speaking, it is hard for an unaffiliated group of people in my city to find somewhere to volunteer on a weekend.
So what I would propose is building a website with these features:
*Let organizations post volunteer opportunities.
*Allow creation of volunteer groups which allow a group of friends/associates/etc. to plan on working together.
*Filter opportunities based on personal preference. (religion/working with homeless/etc.)
I could just as well argue that there is nothing useful about developing quantum computers until we have programs we can run on them.
This is not tangential science. The is the real groundwork for the development of the new technology. Without this sort of work quantum computers will simply never exist.
So pointing out its lack of present utility is like pointing out that after laying the foundation for a house that you still have nothing to live in. That may be true, but in so far as the initial step is pre-requisite to your ultimate goal, it is erroneous to dismiss it as 'not useful.'
Mathematics is an abstract game of counting, built up into great complexity. 1 + 1 = 2 will be true in any universe, under any god(s), in any circumstances. And all of mathematics is built up from that. It's universal truth.
First of all, I can easily comprise a system in which 1+1=0, or some such, provided I am willing to deny one of the Peano postulates. It's not quite as fundamental as you think.
Second of all, saying mathematics is just counting is like saying literature is just arranging letters. Just because you can wildly reduce the expression of something doesn't mean you have dismissed it's higher level properties.
We use mathematics to quantify physics, but there is no "connection" between the two, except in the sense that we can count *anything* and say there's a connection. It's like saying, "How deep does the connection go between mathematics and bananas when I observe there are 10 bananas, and I add two more, and then I observe 12 bananas."
Fundamentally, you are correct. There is not and can never be any pure connection between empiricism and theoretical statements.
But you are not going far enough, because, simply put, it cannot for that matter be demonstrated that the universe even exists. And if that were a given, there would be no way to distinguish a universe which followed laws from one which just happened to randomly spontaneously reorganize itself in a very improbably fashion which happened to correspond to their being laws. And no reason to believe that there was the slightest probability that the observed patterns would continue.
We assume that they will, that they exist, that the universe is genuinely here and is somehow sensible to our intellectual efforts. But none of that is anything that may be deduced. Oh, it may seem quite intuitive, but sit down and try to prove any of it, and you'll see that you don't get anywhere. You're just a victim of your own prejudice about what ought to be true.
However, I *do* choose to accept all those assumptions, and frankly, I don't care that if when I get all analytic about it I have to admit that they are not deductively justifiably. And to me part of assuming that the universe is sensible to human reason is believing that it's rules can ultimately be formulated.
You certainly don't have to accept that, but without an underlying assumption of meaning, science never gets off the ground.
This is a method to determine whether or statements are part of a system, not whether they are true or false within the system.
So, it can tell you whether or not there is an answer, but not what the answer is.
Furthermore, it can only truly prove that something is not a member of the system, because then you get different answers when you query the system. But if you keep getting the same answers, well, that could just be coincidence. Hence, you can be fairly certain, but it is not the same thing as a proof.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing to remember is, the FBI is going to come out of this justifying themselves. Because somewhere in all of that data is going to be something illegal, practically as a given.
But let's forget temporarily about our rights (taking a cue from the judge who signed this)--it had better be a really important crime if the FBI is going to spend the resources to examine an entire datacenter's worth of data. There are more than enough understaffed and unsolved murder cases etc. that if they're doing this to track down the leek of the new X-Men movie (as alleged) I'll be pretty pissed.
There is no reason to worry about winding up friends. Women who are your friends have other women friends to whom they will introduce you or even set you up with. One might even say that making friends with women is exponentially more effective than hitting on them.
Not to mention that 10/10 times any woman who sets you up with one of her friends will in the process try to sell your good qualities first, which sure saves you introverts a lot of time and effort trying to bring those out into the open.
What happened to all the other 'bad cylons'? They won't know what happened at Cavil's base so they'll still be out there hunting down humanity.
Well, they only have the natural life expectancy of a cylon to do so, what with the loss of the resurrection hub. Also, presumably the 'naturally evolved' humans on the 'new earth' have been around for millions of years without being found. After sending all of the spaceships into the sun, the technological signatures the cyclons are accustomed to identifying with humanity no longer exist.
What about the other remnants of humanity on the 12 planets? Was sam's resistance the last group left?
Unless they had a secret store of spaceships, I assume they were trapped there when the cylons left. And they would have died off once they ran out of radiation meds.
# No one got left behind on New Caprica?
The cylon plan once they lost control was to nuke the planet. The Three ultimately did not do this because she found Hera, but it seems reasonable to assume that they would have later nuked it from space once Hera was safe.
I believe the most logical choice for the Linux birthday is to take whatever date is median to Linus Torvald's birthday and UNIX's birthday.
How is this a problem? Equations have names (important ones at least)
So how do you find out the name of the equation if you don't know it?
Not only that, but how do you find out the name or nature of some esoteric operator that appears an the equation, but which you've never seen before. Maybe you are looking at a sum of functions, but one of the functions you have no idea about. How can you look it up besides searching for its expression, and how can you do that with an existing search engine?
Most physicists seem to get along just fine.
The point is not necessarily to help people already immersed in the given field. They have a working knowledge generated from thousands of hours of study and collaborative research.
But what if I just want to read a single paper on a very advanced and esoteric topic? Perhaps I am interested in doing a computer simulation. I don't want to have to spend hundreds of hours investigating someone else's field, I just want to pull up the bare minimum of information necessary.
It is not such a wild idea. Lots of people take an amateur or specialized interest in, for example, history. The difference is that it is pretty easy to expand from a certain point of knowledge by searching for related names, places, and dates. It is not so easy to pick up a mathematics paper and pull up the context you need to understand it.
That is only an example, however. I feel that in physics and math I would have almost as much use for an engine capable of understanding expressions and their context as programmers do being able to perform that kind of meta-lookup on code.
Well, undoubtedly sshing into every machine is not the standard solution to such problems, but I would point out that it is both trivial and perfectly functional to write a small shellscript that would do exactly that.
Really what it sounds like you want to do is setup NIS or LDAP and then you can load configuration files from the network instead of the local machine.
For the initial install you can make a kickstart file and/or install from the network if you want an easy way to install the same customized stuff on every machine. (This is much better than ghosting copies.)
You can even roll your own version of the distro CD. Scripts like reconstructor make this insanely easy.
Trying to find mathematics/physics information is often pretty terrible. I mean, if you are just looking for a topic you can generally pull up related papers, but that is about the depth of complexity you are capable of searching for.
Unfortunately there is no convenient (or universal) plaintext notation. If you are doing anything serious you probably use latex markup (e.g., \Psi^{*}\Psi) or something similar to render images of your equations. That's well and good for people who just want to read your paper, but for people who want to do a complex search to find very specific bits of contextual information, it is just about useless.
So if I can hope that Wolfram's goal is to make his company's math and science knowledge base searchable by some sort of contextual framework, then that could be pretty awesome for those of us who would like to penetrate particular aspects of independent fields without having to become experts on the fields first.
Seeing as hulu lets you embed their content like youtube, it is strange if their objection is that in-site ads are being skipped. (And are we back to the AdBlock extension == theft argument?)
Otherwise, I assume the ads embedded in the video are still be played.
The only reasons I can imagine for Hulu to wat to block Boxee are (1) ignorance of their own profit model (2) planning to release their own hardware box, or else partner with someone else in order to get the same vertical monopoly going.
As far as I know public schools are freely accessible after hours, government buildings offer fairly unrestricted access (obvious exceptions), churches are open to everyone as one of their founding tenets, and I can't think of any of these places that you would not be able to get a better survey of from the street... so I really wonder what is being protected.
Will we also impose these limitations on city-scape photography taken from terrace apartments?
Who doesn't enjoy a program that, when you hover your mouse over an option, you get a description of what the option does and why you should use it?
"Contextual help" makes even the most alien programs a dream to use.
You can see this if you use Emacs. Nice though that software is in features, the interface is godawful, and actively prevents anyone new to computer usage or programing from using it.
What would you honestly change? 99% of the feature set is packed up in control sequences. If you're using the GUI at all one would have to wonder why you are using Emacs. Vi doesn't even bother.
I understand the point you are making but Emacs is really not the program to pick on because it has a *fantastic* User Interface for programmers--which is the entire point of the program. No your grandma will not be able to point-and-click her way through writing a new database application, but I think that is ok.
As far as "new programmers" go, I would say (i) if they can't easily get through the included Emacs tutorial, programming is probably not going to work out for them (ii) they should not start off in Emacs anyway. Emacs solves a lot of problems but until you've written your first big program you're unlikely to have much appreciation for its features.
Humans are virtually incapable of making realistic cost-benefit analyses of these type of situations. There is so much genetic material phasing into and out of existence, human beings could not begin to comprehend it all. However, a single species is easy enough to comprehend, and so by being considered at all it gets a fairly disproportionate representation in the grand scheme of earth's ecosystem. (and I guess the 'conservationists' are not so sentimental about fungus as frogs)
I think it is interesting that their long-term solution is either to attack the fungus (basically performing a total reversal of natural selection through human intervention) or to preserve the frogs and provide the frogs with some kind of immunity. Of course, nature *already has* an paradigm for immunity, the principle mechanism of which is to let all the organisms that lack intrinsic biological defenses to be killed off.
IANAL, but I imagine there is a distinction between 'self-incrimination' and 'providing evidence.'
Since he has already admitted that the laptop is his and he is responsible for storing pictures in the encrypted section, the barrier between convicting him and not convicting him is merely whether the photos are retrieved. This could just as well be done by technological means (hypothetically!) as having him give up the password.
The reason for his having a right to retain the password is because this essentially admits his possession and access to the encrypted data. Forcing him to provide it is forcing him to prove his guilt, which is obviously self-incriminating. But since he has already given that testimony, now the password is just a barrier to material evidence the court would like to collect.
I don't think anybody would argue that screening for and treating diseases is wrong.
The methodology of choosing an embryo from a set, however, brings in all the usual abortion-related questions as to whether we consider human life to be sacred once it is has the potential to be conscious, or only when it actually is conscious. In the former case, we are concerned about the welfare of those embryos.
There is also the GATACA issue in which you have screening which is more general than your efforts to intercept bad genes, and people are discriminated against by insurance providers and possibly by other people.
The law of unintended consequences may arise in regard to the genes themselves. Until you have a complete understanding of the relationship between genetics and phenotype (which is an awful long way off) it is not always a given that the genes you are selecting against would have been unhealthy, and it is certainly not a given that the genes you are selecting for are going to produce the best overall combination. What happens if through various unexpected subtleties this compounds to a life of pain for the poor creature you create, or you manufacture a serial killer? Do you have responsibility, or can you just write it off as an innocent mistake? Is it right to experiment when an unconsenting party must bear the consequences for the rest of their life?
I think some of the questions are obviously of critical significance to whether or not certain things should be done, but the answers are also going to frequently derive from personal convictions. Without presenting my own views, I think it is reasonable to at least exercise caution, and temper our zeal for progress with a little moral restraint.
Sorry, but I'm 100% in favor of non-cosmetic Eugenics.
Well, I'm sure they will take your opposition to cosmetic eugenics into account and only make money through non-cosmetic eugenics. (Right?)
My problem (well, one of my problems) is the general healthiness of a society that decides what class of person is allowed to exist. Families in China frequently choose to abort female babies. Even if we decided that was morally ok to do... doesn't it still abet a very unhealthy social view of women?
Maybe you'd feel the same if you knew someone with cancer, diabetes or countless other horrible conditions.
Let's try to avoid being dishonest with ourselves here. We are not talking about curing ailments, we are talking selecting the right future-persons to live. Depending on your views on abortion you may achieve the same goals either way, and it is certainly an argument to consider. But you are totally mixing-and-matching if you are going to make an emotional appeal along the lines of "wouldn't you like it if the people you knew were better?" Yes, I would, but your plan for non-cosmetic eugenics would not have made them better, it just would have assured that they never existed, someone healthier would exist in their stead.
In fact, these guys were so geeky they hacked their own brains to image what they saw directly.
But being basement nerds their eyesight is roughly on par with that of an Euglena.
Sure their programming sometimes goes bad and they start killing us, but don't EAT OUR BRAINS!
Entirely their loss, as far as I'm concerned.
*is treated to a thoughtful lunch*
Well, it is not just private prisons, state run prisons are subsidied based on their populations as well, and also charge inmates for their stay, as well as for stationary, envelopes, food, a few other things the inmates can have. I don't know how much that goes for, but if someone is greasing the fund it could be the same problem. And if traffic tickets are any indication even municipalities can be swayed by profit motives.
Then of course there are those big juicy lawsuits which come through. Sometimes just by suing for a big enough number people 'legally extort' a nice settlement. And look how much we pay big name lawyers... is that how much justice costs?
It would be nice in fact if the justice system could be entirely divorced from any personal transfer of money. Punitive damages should go to charity via some third party apparatus rather than being split between plaintiffs and lawyers. Positions such as warden in prisons and elsewhere should be constantly swapped to prevent the creation of any long term scams. And if governments 'make money' fining people for crimes, or locking them up, they should not be able to keep the excess, lest that create an incentive for them, but instead should have to return it to the taxpayers in general.
One cool thing with new tech is that it lifts the bar for the scammers. With RFID you need a lot more than a photocopier and laminator to make a fake drivers license.
I think in most places drivers license/government ID are now done on plastic cards (not laminated). Getting a color printer for those plastic ID cards will set you back quite a few grand, which is a lot more than this guy is paying to copy RFID. And this way gives minimum exposure vs. needing to have physical access to something to copy it.
But, you know, there is not much defense against someone who waits to mug you in a lonely alleyway either. Maybe instead of focusing on preventing these sort of things, the primary focus should be on making the exploitation of vulnerabilities more susceptible to post-facto detective work. (for example, if you make the RFID tags require a stronger signal, that will make this kind of setup easier to remotely detect)
I like volunteering. A while back I started a group (friend/friend's friends/etc.) that would go out on Saturdays and help out.
A major problem, though, was finding places to volunteer. Really the only place we found to reliably volunteer was at a couple of foodbanks (always happy to have people sort cans, etc.). Which is great, but quite dull to be doing every weekend.
Obviously, there are lots of other places/people who could use some help, but since they only need it sporadically there is no way to find out about it. We did manage to get a few other jobs by calling well-known charities, like, we did yard work for Ronald McDonald house. Or played baseball with some kids at an orphanage. However, generally speaking, it is hard for an unaffiliated group of people in my city to find somewhere to volunteer on a weekend.
So what I would propose is building a website with these features:
*Let organizations post volunteer opportunities.
*Allow creation of volunteer groups which allow a group of friends/associates/etc. to plan on working together.
*Filter opportunities based on personal preference. (religion/working with homeless/etc.)
So what you're saying is that the Slashdot editors have benefited financially from Mr. Connell's death?
The pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together!
PV=nRT
Yes, water at 1600ÂF is just vapor here on earth, but it could be liquid (or ice!) on a gas giant.
Or there could be large currents of cooler fluid at the poles, maybe.
It probably isn't anything life could be sustained in, but there is more potential than has been ruled out.
I could just as well argue that there is nothing useful about developing quantum computers until we have programs we can run on them.
This is not tangential science. The is the real groundwork for the development of the new technology. Without this sort of work quantum computers will simply never exist.
So pointing out its lack of present utility is like pointing out that after laying the foundation for a house that you still have nothing to live in. That may be true, but in so far as the initial step is pre-requisite to your ultimate goal, it is erroneous to dismiss it as 'not useful.'
Mathematics is an abstract game of counting, built up into great complexity. 1 + 1 = 2 will be true in any universe, under any god(s), in any circumstances. And all of mathematics is built up from that. It's universal truth.
First of all, I can easily comprise a system in which 1+1=0, or some such, provided I am willing to deny one of the Peano postulates. It's not quite as fundamental as you think.
Second of all, saying mathematics is just counting is like saying literature is just arranging letters. Just because you can wildly reduce the expression of something doesn't mean you have dismissed it's higher level properties.
We use mathematics to quantify physics, but there is no "connection" between the two, except in the sense that we can count *anything* and say there's a connection. It's like saying, "How deep does the connection go between mathematics and bananas when I observe there are 10 bananas, and I add two more, and then I observe 12 bananas."
Fundamentally, you are correct. There is not and can never be any pure connection between empiricism and theoretical statements.
But you are not going far enough, because, simply put, it cannot for that matter be demonstrated that the universe even exists. And if that were a given, there would be no way to distinguish a universe which followed laws from one which just happened to randomly spontaneously reorganize itself in a very improbably fashion which happened to correspond to their being laws. And no reason to believe that there was the slightest probability that the observed patterns would continue.
We assume that they will, that they exist, that the universe is genuinely here and is somehow sensible to our intellectual efforts. But none of that is anything that may be deduced. Oh, it may seem quite intuitive, but sit down and try to prove any of it, and you'll see that you don't get anywhere. You're just a victim of your own prejudice about what ought to be true.
However, I *do* choose to accept all those assumptions, and frankly, I don't care that if when I get all analytic about it I have to admit that they are not deductively justifiably. And to me part of assuming that the universe is sensible to human reason is believing that it's rules can ultimately be formulated.
You certainly don't have to accept that, but without an underlying assumption of meaning, science never gets off the ground.
No.
This is a method to determine whether or statements are part of a system, not whether they are true or false within the system.
So, it can tell you whether or not there is an answer, but not what the answer is.
Furthermore, it can only truly prove that something is not a member of the system, because then you get different answers when you query the system. But if you keep getting the same answers, well, that could just be coincidence. Hence, you can be fairly certain, but it is not the same thing as a proof.