One might even say (as Max Tegmark more or less does) that concrete existence, the kind of existence that applies to rocks and trees and such, is just a special case of abstract existence, the kind that applies to mathematical structures like numbers and triangles. All mathematical structures "exist" in that abstract sense, and the things that "exist" in a more concrete sense are just the things that are part of the same mathematical structure of which we are a part, i.e. of our physical reality.
Or, as Aristotle says, the substance of a thing like a rock or a tree has a prior existence to the concrete instances of it: "The essence, i.e. the substantial reality, no one has expressed distinctly. It is hinted at chiefly by those who believe in the Forms; (...) they furnish the Forms as the essence of every other thing, and the One as the essence of the Forms." (Metaphysics, Book I, part 7)
Similar to how, as David Lewis puts it, "'actual' is indexical", i.e. in a multiverse of possible worlds (which, NB, would all be part of the concrete world we're talking about above), the "actual world" is just the one that we happen to be part of, and not ontologically different from any of the other possible worlds. We might likewise say that "'concrete' is indexical"; concrete reality is just the abstract structure of which we are a part, and not ontologically different from any other abstract structures.
Aristotle again? "Actuality, then, is the existence of a thing not in the way which we express by 'potentially'; we say that potentially, for instance, a statue of Hermes is in the block of wood and the half-line is in the whole, because it might be separated out, and we call even the man who is not studying a man of science, if he is capable of studying; the thing that stands in contrast to each of these exists actually."
You'd be surprised: your employer typically can fire you for any reason or for no reason at all, so long as they pay you severance and follow all the procedures. Remember, the First Amendment guarantees that "Congress shall make no law (...) abridging the freedom of speech..."
Brendan Eich was sacked from Mozilla for donating $1,000.00 for Proposition 8 in California, and the same media circus over Jessica Price happened over him. Were they wrong in firing him?
Okami is advertisement for Amaterasu, who is a dirty Pagan demoness, so obviously the Wahhabists are going to look at it as a step worse than Saints' Row or GTA, which merely glorify sociopathy and violence. At least the latter two games allow the clerics to point their fingers at the "decadence" of the infidel Westerners (while carefully pretending not to see the staunch alliance of their king with them).
Ink and paper? That's a great way to make sure you will need to either go corporate or be very, very limited in scope. You might as well hire a monk to copy your pamphlets...
I'm not really an EVE Online player, so maybe the point is moot, but I did play the WW series back when I was younger. Technically, I still play Vampire: The Masquerade, although we haven't had a session in something like three years. I am concerned that the Vampire franchise specially was originally somewhat cool (even if the complex mechanics somewhat clobbered that idea), but after the sourcebooks and expansions of the Second Edition, I was thoroughly disgusted with them (I still remember playing "The Chaos Factor" adventure, and it was a nadir in all my years of roleplaying; I can't believe they published that).
I'm hoping they will have learned this time around, but I doubt it.
Of course you wouldn't mind. It isn't directed at you, after all, since you do think like them;)
Americans are actually very religious, but depending on which social group you look at, there are going to be a greater or smaller number of orthodox Christians, Wicca, atheists, or what-have-you. Most Christians are usually located on the suburbs, the home of Middle Class.
As for something being absurdly foreign, not everyone thinks like you:) I used to have difficulty imagining a History teacher (or worse, a History professor) who isn't a Communist, but they are the overwhelming majority in the same USA. Hell, perhaps they're the majority in Australia, too -- sometimes, you all seem suspiciously alike. Maybe it has to do with being English colonies.
Aww, come on, at that point you might as well mention Al Gore...
There were browsers before Mosaic; only they were text-only. The transition between text-based applications and GUI-based ones is trivial and well-documented; it happened at NCSA, but it might as well have happened in New Zealand, or Germany. At the point Mosaic was created, there were already quite a few sites on the Web, or it would have been useless for Kunz et alii to build a graphical client for it -- there was a rival protocol, Gopher, developed in the US, but it was more complex and seems to have all but died out.
Finally, know that the W3C, which regulates the Web, has its copyright held jointly by three bodies: One is MIT in the US, another is the European ERCIM, and the other is Keio U in Japan. Pretty international, if you ask me.
We had the opportunity at total global domination 50 years ago, lets see how that played out.
Ahh, the powers of self-delusion. If the US tried to do the whole "global domination" thing, back in '45, what we'd have is an Iron Curtain significantly more to the West. The Red Army, marching forward ever since Hitler's botch in taking Moscow, was all but unstoppable -- if the US had shown any kind of imperialistic ambitions, Stalin would have just plowed on until he reached Normandy... Unlike the Nazis, the Reds were fully stocked, and they numbered in the millions.
Could have steamrolled Russia (Who made the Nazies look the kind of people you'd let baby sit your kids) we should have but didn't
Stalin himself was an evil man. No one disputes this. However, his successors as chairmen were significantly more reasonable than him -- Gorbachev was, at any rate, a much more reasonable character than his actor counterpart, who sold weapons to the Iraqi, to the counterrevolutionaries in Iran and Nicaragua, etc. Comparing the "Final Solution" Nazis favorably to them is insulting the troops who fought and died to storm the concentration camps (most of which were Russian!)
We were the only country not destroyed economically by WWII so what did we do? We poured money to rebuild everyone else, who with a few exceptions never paid us back.
The Russians still had most of their operating capacity. If the US hadn't poured money to rebuild Western Europe, the Soviets would have... and then Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Norway would be the last bastions of Capitalism in Europe. Same thing with China. The US simply wasn't quick enough with the dough to save Chiang Kai-shek's government from the Communists, but was able to avoid that fate for Japan. Don't believe for a moment the Marshall Plan was carried out due to charity on Truman's part...
The UN is a political organization and has no business dealing with what was and still isa primarily a US business venture
Please share some of that weed you're having. Wake up and smell the coffee -- the Internet is an INTERNATIONAL venture; even if you don't venture beyond the English-language part of it, there's still plenty of it outside of the US (.uk and.au, for example, are linked frequently here in Slashdot). It makes sense that the IANA an the ICANN, which provide a service to THE WHOLE WORLD, not be under the aegis of US law. It's undue (yes, undue) privilege to the US.
According to the author(s) of BZIP2, the "best available techniques" are a family of statistical compressors called
PPM. Unfortunately, they're real resource hogs, so caveat emptor...
Sorry, he does merit sympathy. Let him who has never used P2P to download something of questionable legal status cast the first stone. He's got as much right to sympathy as those shmucks who were bitch-slapped with lawsuits by the RIAA/MPAA... They also downloaded (and shared!) copyrighted material which, while not covered by an explicit NDA, are still not allowed to be given out for free.
Which is a pity, since.rar files are so much more compressible than.zip files. The difference is roughly the same between.gz and.bz2... What would be really easy is for anti-virus writers to include a RAR decompression library and look inside the damned files, rather than reject useful technology for no good reason
You can use the google calculator for that. But saving you the trouble, here goes: a sea 800km by 900km by 45m amounts to about 32.4 trillion cubic meters or 8.56 quatrillion US Gallons of ice.
HIDROPOWER. It generates a lot of ecologic impact when it's first build, then runs cleanly for all of its active life. Many 3rd world countries do have lots of rivers they can dam (and already do, for irrigation). Set up some hydroelectric plants and you're set. No CO2 at all.;)
I don't dispute that; however, the fact still stands that there was a knee-jerk reaction from otherwise very reputable scientists to his paper (and later book). The eventual failings of Lomborg's approach should have been discussed in purely scientific merits, rather than questioning his motivations. And this is the sort of thing that Crichton (in my view) is railing against, not necessarily the fact that environmental change is caused by man or isn't.
That's not the point he wants to make. His point is that sometimes, for policy reasons, "consensus" is invoked to dismiss out-of-hand honest research that doesn't fit with the other trends. I remember reading about Lomborg's work, and I was disappointed that his opinions weren't taken seriously on account that he is a statistician rather than a climatologist. Well, the fact remains that most of the processing on the climate data is honest statistical work, and a statistician should be allowed to criticize others on handling of statistics.
You've got a skewed perception on things. People in third-world countries do own cars, have refrigerators, heated or cooled houses, and yes, computers. After all, not every third world country is an enormous expanse of jungle with stone-age villages interspersed. There are *cities*, you know.
The problem is, many of those people have an energy matrix based on hydroelectric power, which is kind of problematic environmentally, but the plants are already there, and aren't going to cause any *more* damage. Also, they import most of the steel, refined oil, industrial chemicals, heavy machinery and other heavy duty goods they use and are responsible for most of the US's CO2 emissions.
At any rate, the problem with CO2 generation is mostly an industrial issue. It has little to do with cars, or house heating, or anything of the sort except in the largest cities (those with 5,000,000 inhabitants and up -- rare in actual third world countries).
No, actually, per capita is correct. It is likely a contraction of divisum per capita, "divided along/throughout the heads/persons". In this case, "caput" is in accusative plural, which agrees with the regency of "per".
For "pro", I think we'd have to use an expression such as pro capitibus quantum, roughly "in proportion to the heads/persons", but don't quote me on that. My Latin's been a bit rusty...
One of the respondents to that message also received the same message on his genuine copy of Win2K, so I wouldn't discount a failure in the standalone app itself just yet.
Except that these need not be glasses; anything which probably is structurally sound, transparent and electrically insulating will do, like lots of plastics. You're probably right about flexibility, though.
The purpose of HURD is to have a GPL'd *microkernel*-based OS. Andy Tanembaum would agree it's a good idea, because driver panics don't bring the kernel down, etc. That's probably the only reason the HURD is still in development. At any rate, even if we allow (merely for the sake of argument) that RMS is a selfish bastard who only wants to shut Linus off the spotlight, there are other people working on the HURD development, and surely not all of them are primarily concerned about making RMS look good. So there must, obviously, be another reason why they work on that kernel.
And about the "if it's worse, then why do it", there are a couple of mantras of F/OSS and the "Unix Way" that state: "Release early, release often" and "It's better to cover 80% of the cases now than 100% later". This means that if people are given something that can do even a little useful work, like run gcc, then other contributors can start making contributions, porting applications, and generally making the system more suited for use. If you get stuck at the mmap() bug and no one can mount a file system, then how are contributors supposed to improve the system? Everything's at a standstill.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, as Aristotle says, the substance of a thing like a rock or a tree has a prior existence to the concrete instances of it: "The essence, i.e. the substantial reality, no one has expressed distinctly. It is hinted at chiefly by those who believe in the Forms; (...) they furnish the Forms as the essence of every other thing, and the One as the essence of the Forms." (Metaphysics, Book I, part 7)
Aristotle again? "Actuality, then, is the existence of a thing not in the way which we express by 'potentially'; we say that potentially, for instance, a statue of Hermes is in the block of wood and the half-line is in the whole, because it might be separated out, and we call even the man who is not studying a man of science, if he is capable of studying; the thing that stands in contrast to each of these exists actually."
You'd be surprised: your employer typically can fire you for any reason or for no reason at all, so long as they pay you severance and follow all the procedures. Remember, the First Amendment guarantees that "Congress shall make no law (...) abridging the freedom of speech..." Brendan Eich was sacked from Mozilla for donating $1,000.00 for Proposition 8 in California, and the same media circus over Jessica Price happened over him. Were they wrong in firing him?
It beats the hell out of getting depressed by the news...
Okami is advertisement for Amaterasu, who is a dirty Pagan demoness, so obviously the Wahhabists are going to look at it as a step worse than Saints' Row or GTA, which merely glorify sociopathy and violence. At least the latter two games allow the clerics to point their fingers at the "decadence" of the infidel Westerners (while carefully pretending not to see the staunch alliance of their king with them).
Ink and paper? That's a great way to make sure you will need to either go corporate or be very, very limited in scope. You might as well hire a monk to copy your pamphlets...
I'm not really an EVE Online player, so maybe the point is moot, but I did play the WW series back when I was younger. Technically, I still play Vampire: The Masquerade, although we haven't had a session in something like three years. I am concerned that the Vampire franchise specially was originally somewhat cool (even if the complex mechanics somewhat clobbered that idea), but after the sourcebooks and expansions of the Second Edition, I was thoroughly disgusted with them (I still remember playing "The Chaos Factor" adventure, and it was a nadir in all my years of roleplaying; I can't believe they published that). I'm hoping they will have learned this time around, but I doubt it.
Oh, come on, I can't believe nobody made the joke!
(DrWho)ChrisEccleston;
I know, it isn't a very good joke, but on Slashdot, it's mandatory.
Of course you wouldn't mind. It isn't directed at you, after all, since you do think like them ;)
:) I used to have difficulty imagining a History teacher (or worse, a History professor) who isn't a Communist, but they are the overwhelming majority in the same USA. Hell, perhaps they're the majority in Australia, too -- sometimes, you all seem suspiciously alike. Maybe it has to do with being English colonies.
Americans are actually very religious, but depending on which social group you look at, there are going to be a greater or smaller number of orthodox Christians, Wicca, atheists, or what-have-you. Most Christians are usually located on the suburbs, the home of Middle Class.
As for something being absurdly foreign, not everyone thinks like you
Damn, that's sad.
So you say that people are ostracized if they don't think like the norm of the group... Where have I seen that before?
And you actually want to be associated with that kind of people?
Try again :)
c = (a + 1)(b + 1) - (ab + 1)
Expanding:
c = ab + a + b + 1 - ab - 1
c = a + b
Aww, come on, at that point you might as well mention Al Gore...
There were browsers before Mosaic; only they were text-only. The transition between text-based applications and GUI-based ones is trivial and well-documented; it happened at NCSA, but it might as well have happened in New Zealand, or Germany. At the point Mosaic was created, there were already quite a few sites on the Web, or it would have been useless for Kunz et alii to build a graphical client for it -- there was a rival protocol, Gopher, developed in the US, but it was more complex and seems to have all but died out.
Finally, know that the W3C, which regulates the Web, has its copyright held jointly by three bodies: One is MIT in the US, another is the European ERCIM, and the other is Keio U in Japan. Pretty international, if you ask me.
Ahh, the powers of self-delusion. If the US tried to do the whole "global domination" thing, back in '45, what we'd have is an Iron Curtain significantly more to the West. The Red Army, marching forward ever since Hitler's botch in taking Moscow, was all but unstoppable -- if the US had shown any kind of imperialistic ambitions, Stalin would have just plowed on until he reached Normandy... Unlike the Nazis, the Reds were fully stocked, and they numbered in the millions.
Stalin himself was an evil man. No one disputes this. However, his successors as chairmen were significantly more reasonable than him -- Gorbachev was, at any rate, a much more reasonable character than his actor counterpart, who sold weapons to the Iraqi, to the counterrevolutionaries in Iran and Nicaragua, etc. Comparing the "Final Solution" Nazis favorably to them is insulting the troops who fought and died to storm the concentration camps (most of which were Russian!)
The Russians still had most of their operating capacity. If the US hadn't poured money to rebuild Western Europe, the Soviets would have... and then Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Norway would be the last bastions of Capitalism in Europe. Same thing with China. The US simply wasn't quick enough with the dough to save Chiang Kai-shek's government from the Communists, but was able to avoid that fate for Japan. Don't believe for a moment the Marshall Plan was carried out due to charity on Truman's part...
Please share some of that weed you're having. Wake up and smell the coffee -- the Internet is an INTERNATIONAL venture; even if you don't venture beyond the English-language part of it, there's still plenty of it outside of the US (.uk and .au, for example, are linked frequently here in Slashdot). It makes sense that the IANA an the ICANN, which provide a service to THE WHOLE WORLD, not be under the aegis of US law. It's undue (yes, undue) privilege to the US.
According to the author(s) of BZIP2, the "best available techniques" are a family of statistical compressors called PPM. Unfortunately, they're real resource hogs, so caveat emptor...
Sorry, he does merit sympathy. Let him who has never used P2P to download something of questionable legal status cast the first stone. He's got as much right to sympathy as those shmucks who were bitch-slapped with lawsuits by the RIAA/MPAA... They also downloaded (and shared!) copyrighted material which, while not covered by an explicit NDA, are still not allowed to be given out for free.
Which is a pity, since .rar files are so much more compressible than .zip files. The difference is roughly the same between .gz and .bz2... What would be really easy is for anti-virus writers to include a RAR decompression library and look inside the damned files, rather than reject useful technology for no good reason
You can use the google calculator for that. But saving you the trouble, here goes: a sea 800km by 900km by 45m amounts to about 32.4 trillion cubic meters or 8.56 quatrillion US Gallons of ice.
HIDROPOWER. It generates a lot of ecologic impact when it's first build, then runs cleanly for all of its active life. Many 3rd world countries do have lots of rivers they can dam (and already do, for irrigation). Set up some hydroelectric plants and you're set. No CO2 at all. ;)
I don't dispute that; however, the fact still stands that there was a knee-jerk reaction from otherwise very reputable scientists to his paper (and later book). The eventual failings of Lomborg's approach should have been discussed in purely scientific merits, rather than questioning his motivations. And this is the sort of thing that Crichton (in my view) is railing against, not necessarily the fact that environmental change is caused by man or isn't.
That's not the point he wants to make. His point is that sometimes, for policy reasons, "consensus" is invoked to dismiss out-of-hand honest research that doesn't fit with the other trends. I remember reading about Lomborg's work, and I was disappointed that his opinions weren't taken seriously on account that he is a statistician rather than a climatologist. Well, the fact remains that most of the processing on the climate data is honest statistical work, and a statistician should be allowed to criticize others on handling of statistics.
You've got a skewed perception on things. People in third-world countries do own cars, have refrigerators, heated or cooled houses, and yes, computers. After all, not every third world country is an enormous expanse of jungle with stone-age villages interspersed. There are *cities*, you know.
The problem is, many of those people have an energy matrix based on hydroelectric power, which is kind of problematic environmentally, but the plants are already there, and aren't going to cause any *more* damage. Also, they import most of the steel, refined oil, industrial chemicals, heavy machinery and other heavy duty goods they use and are responsible for most of the US's CO2 emissions.
At any rate, the problem with CO2 generation is mostly an industrial issue. It has little to do with cars, or house heating, or anything of the sort except in the largest cities (those with 5,000,000 inhabitants and up -- rare in actual third world countries).
No, actually, per capita is correct. It is likely a contraction of divisum per capita, "divided along/throughout the heads/persons". In this case, "caput" is in accusative plural, which agrees with the regency of "per".
For "pro", I think we'd have to use an expression such as pro capitibus quantum, roughly "in proportion to the heads/persons", but don't quote me on that. My Latin's been a bit rusty...
One of the respondents to that message also received the same message on his genuine copy of Win2K, so I wouldn't discount a failure in the standalone app itself just yet.
Except that these need not be glasses; anything which probably is structurally sound, transparent and electrically insulating will do, like lots of plastics. You're probably right about flexibility, though.
You mean arguing with each other, perhaps? To be arguing with themselves, each fanatic would have to be arguing with himself...
SCNR
The purpose of HURD is to have a GPL'd *microkernel*-based OS. Andy Tanembaum would agree it's a good idea, because driver panics don't bring the kernel down, etc. That's probably the only reason the HURD is still in development. At any rate, even if we allow (merely for the sake of argument) that RMS is a selfish bastard who only wants to shut Linus off the spotlight, there are other people working on the HURD development, and surely not all of them are primarily concerned about making RMS look good. So there must, obviously, be another reason why they work on that kernel.
And about the "if it's worse, then why do it", there are a couple of mantras of F/OSS and the "Unix Way" that state: "Release early, release often" and "It's better to cover 80% of the cases now than 100% later". This means that if people are given something that can do even a little useful work, like run gcc, then other contributors can start making contributions, porting applications, and generally making the system more suited for use. If you get stuck at the mmap() bug and no one can mount a file system, then how are contributors supposed to improve the system? Everything's at a standstill.