What you said here about theists is more true than anything I have ever read on Slashdot. We could spend all day discussing what religious entities have committed what atrocities in their name all day, but eventually, only one real conclusion can be reached. Whenever people become ingrained with a concept that there is something supreme to their own lives and the lives of their loved ones, it does nothing but breed more misguided fools who are willing to expend their lives and the lives of others for their holy goal. What's worse is that religions that force individuals to constantly be confronted with their religions are the best at building these sorts of climates. For example, Christian churches that are really community compounds where children must all learn together in a nonpublic atmosphere so that the church can maintain power by embedding their ideals into the children at a young age, where adults are required to spend so many hours a week at church engaged in various activities and studies to promote their religious awareness (really just to maintain their brainwashed state). Muslims who are forced to recognize their beliefs and be bound to them 7 times a day, every day of their life are another example. L. Ron-ists who are socially manipulated to buy more books and invest and devote more into their "church" as a means of social and religious acceptance are beginning to fall into the same path. Yes, religion is the opiate of the small minded masses and all such institutions should be destroyed for the good and enlightenment of all.
The EDGE/GPRS issue (where the signal type is showing up lower case), may have been resolved. RIM is claiming that there was a backlog of registrations and messages hitting their database. This was causing the wireless provider's inability to get a better signal from the relays. RIM states that they may have resolved this issue by removing burden from their DB. If users are still seeing a lowercase edge or gprs, the device may need to have the radio recycled or the power recycled. This is assuming that the BES are trafficing information to RIM. If not, power cycle the BES first.
NOC = Network Operations Center
RIM = Research In Motion
BES = Blackberry Enterprise Server
SRP = Server Routing Protocol
GPRS = General Packet Radio Service
EDGE = Enhanced Data GSM Environment
IHBT, HAND
Not true. RIM lost their primary North American NOC last night. Even if you have a BES, you are constantly transmitting data and messages to RIM (SRP for instance). Because SRP ping and because even when it was back up, RIM's DB wasn't online, even if you have your own BES (we have 3), you'd still have experienced the issue.
Hmmmm. I wonder if RIM is rejecting your SRP due to lack of connectivity (even though it was caused by their fault). Log into the BES and see if your users are showing pending messages. If they are then you may not be communicating with RIM yet. You may want to call the T-Support number and check in with them. If there are no pendings, then RIM is just severely backlogged with mail to deliver and your messages are sitting in RIM's queue. They gave us an "official" all clear for CDMA devices, so I don't see why you would be experiencing any problems.
Actually, if you're willing to shell out the money for T5 support, their service isn't too bad. When we were on T2, the hold times and quality of support was absolutely horrible. Recently we jumped to T5, have a dedicated technician, experience no more than 5 minute wait times, and get some extremely qualified support personnel. However, I think we're paying well over 100K/year for it.
RIM lost their primary NOC last night. Your BES transmits data to their NOC including mailflow routing and SRP information. This issue affects the Americas entirely and is currently fixed for Sprint and Nextel. GPRS/EEDGE providers are still unable to contact back to RIM at the present time. So, if you are a Sprint or Nextel shop, this would explain why you are not experiencing the issue at this time. However, everyone was experiencing it from 6:30PM CDT to about 3:00AM CDT.
I was on RIM's rolling conference call last night and received some additional information. It seems that somehow they lost connectivity in their NOC. When they failed over to a co-lo they couldn't get the SRP communication up and running, causing all BES to fail in their connection to RIM. Fast forward a few hours and SRP is back up, but they cannot get critical components for email delivery to connect to their DB. Fast forward a few more hours and they get this up and running also. Currently, Sprint and Nextel are up and running, but the GPRS/EDGE service providers are still not receiving consistent mail flow.
Definitely agreed. I just enjoy pedantic counterexamples. However, one good point to bring up is that if two people can agree on one necessary quality for an object and a contradiction can be raised from it, then that is sufficient evidence to reject the existence of that entity. For instance:
(x)Sx -> Nx (All things that are souls also have a necessary quality N)
(x) - Nx (Nothing has the quality N)
thus (x) -Sx (Souls do not exist)
Although very few things in this world can be so easily qualified.
Not necessarily. If there is an a priori contradiction, you don't have to worry about the phenomenology of the entity or idea at hand. For instance, if I ask you to give me a description of the marital status of a married bachelor, so that we can debate his existence, I would imagine you would want to appeal to the contradiction rather to show that there is no such thing as a married bachelor.
Sorry. I was really unclear on the last part of that post. For some reason, the boss actually wanted me to do work. Here is what I was getting at. When you attempt to argue nihilism, there are usually two arguments that come about. The first is the mass agreement argument. "There are certain things that everyone believes is evil, like raping babies while cutting out their eyes and eating them." Nihilism coupled with the phenomena of ethics due to biological makeup can explain that argument away. It also provides the answer to the relativist argument, "Sure, universally binding ethical principles may not exist, but that's because you're not looking at where these principles come from (insert culture, individualism, etc)." Yes I am: biology.
Nope. It has to be universally binding. That doesn't mean that you have to go along with it, but if the principles are not universally binding, you fall into relativism. The main problem with relativism is that you never know how to cut the pie. Are ethics culturally relativistic? If so, then what defines a culture? Maybe they are family relativistic. Ultimately, some will see enough difference in individuals to reduce it to individualism. You may not think that sounds like a bad idea, but individualism leads to nihilism. This is because, in individualism, there is no way to confirm or validate the good or evil in an action. If the individual who acted says it was just, you have to take it at face value. By doing this, we are essentially stuck between ethical skepticism or nihilism. Either you can never know if someone acted justly, or there is just no such thing as just actions. So that's pretty much what forces it to be universally binding. In Mill's "Utilitarianism" you can see some of more detailed rationality behind it.
Understood that individualism and nihilsm have different definitions. However, looking at the three different answer sets to ethics (one universal set of principles, multiple possible sets of principles, no such thing as good and evil) it is easy to see that individualism pretty much reduces to nihilism. If morality can be determined by whim or by individual, then there is no accountability for ethics. If everyone can run around saying "based on my own personal ethical code, this action is justified," if becomes unfalsifiable but more so meaningless. Thus, it essentially reduces to no ethics.
I believe Dawkins explains this by showing a reproductive advantage to carrying the recessive trait. Whether that is because there is some inherent disadvantage to being homozygous or if there is another phenotypic trait that is "piggybacked" onto that gene, if the trait is recessive, it can explain why the phenotype is expressed still in subsequent generations.
Yes, but here's the beauty of that defense. Your client cannot be rehabilitated and thus is a menace to society. To whom should we charge the cost of the bullet to?
What about the Euthyphro dilemma? Plato made a pretty damn good argument that regardless of anything else, theological ethics is going to necessarily compromise the entire idea of an all powerful god.
Dawkins also explains this in his "Selfish Gene" theory, where genes (rather than organisms) are the active replicators. The theory is interesting and explains certain animal behaviors, like when certain squirrels let out an alarm to alert the rest of the group when danger is around, often sacrificing it's own life. Because the genes are the replicators, this trait ends up saving a large number of genes with each organism that gets out of harm's way.
So, if you're going for an evolutionary explanation, you'll probably answer 2.) by saying that at least the desire to be moral comes from a biological mechanism. (You may say that the principles themselves are also hardwired.) And you'll probably answer 1.) by saying that the content of the moral principles simply reflects that which is evolutionary advantageous. Things that tend to damage the community "fitness" tend to be regarded as "immoral". Good call, except that there is a requirement that the community is necessary for survival. Currently, I believe we live in such a society. However, if it becomes necessary to harm the community to ensure the individual's survival, only those with a weaker moral phenotype will survive. Not that it refutes anything you said, but it is an interesting addition.
And if you're going to accept this explanation of morality, you have to give serious consideration to whether the phrase "That was wrong" really belongs in your vocabulary. In this view, it's hard to see how you can claim that "evil" actually exists. This actually assist my world view, which is a nice change from most moral theory. Without proof of evolutionary morality, I would have to be in the nihilist camp, as I doubt any serious conversations can be had about good or evil actions.
Yes and no. From a purely philosophical view, morality (more accurately Morality) is a universal set of binding principles. Relativism and subjectivism both cannot be allowed because they can ultimately reduce to individual ethics and thus nihilism.
There was actually an article that stated that some evolutionary biologists believe that the initial religious beliefs were actually hard wired into the brain. If (and i do stress the if) both account are true, then it would make a sense to some degree. If I can find the article I will link it.
Sounds like one hell of a setup. We've outgrown out LTO2 library for about a year now and just arrived at a deduplicating VTL solution (FalconStor) that will allow our LTO2 library to give us another year's worth of using by going D2D2T, also. So how did you score such a nice DR system for your office? Did you guys suffer a data disaster before they saw the need for it? Also, are you guys using Veritas, Commvault or something else for your backups?
Slashdot Mirror
That is an important distinction. Belief != religion. Points well taken.
What you said here about theists is more true than anything I have ever read on Slashdot. We could spend all day discussing what religious entities have committed what atrocities in their name all day, but eventually, only one real conclusion can be reached. Whenever people become ingrained with a concept that there is something supreme to their own lives and the lives of their loved ones, it does nothing but breed more misguided fools who are willing to expend their lives and the lives of others for their holy goal. What's worse is that religions that force individuals to constantly be confronted with their religions are the best at building these sorts of climates. For example, Christian churches that are really community compounds where children must all learn together in a nonpublic atmosphere so that the church can maintain power by embedding their ideals into the children at a young age, where adults are required to spend so many hours a week at church engaged in various activities and studies to promote their religious awareness (really just to maintain their brainwashed state). Muslims who are forced to recognize their beliefs and be bound to them 7 times a day, every day of their life are another example. L. Ron-ists who are socially manipulated to buy more books and invest and devote more into their "church" as a means of social and religious acceptance are beginning to fall into the same path. Yes, religion is the opiate of the small minded masses and all such institutions should be destroyed for the good and enlightenment of all.
The EDGE/GPRS issue (where the signal type is showing up lower case), may have been resolved. RIM is claiming that there was a backlog of registrations and messages hitting their database. This was causing the wireless provider's inability to get a better signal from the relays. RIM states that they may have resolved this issue by removing burden from their DB. If users are still seeing a lowercase edge or gprs, the device may need to have the radio recycled or the power recycled. This is assuming that the BES are trafficing information to RIM. If not, power cycle the BES first.
NOC = Network Operations Center
RIM = Research In Motion
BES = Blackberry Enterprise Server
SRP = Server Routing Protocol
GPRS = General Packet Radio Service
EDGE = Enhanced Data GSM Environment
IHBT, HAND
Not true. RIM lost their primary North American NOC last night. Even if you have a BES, you are constantly transmitting data and messages to RIM (SRP for instance). Because SRP ping and because even when it was back up, RIM's DB wasn't online, even if you have your own BES (we have 3), you'd still have experienced the issue.
Hmmmm. I wonder if RIM is rejecting your SRP due to lack of connectivity (even though it was caused by their fault). Log into the BES and see if your users are showing pending messages. If they are then you may not be communicating with RIM yet. You may want to call the T-Support number and check in with them. If there are no pendings, then RIM is just severely backlogged with mail to deliver and your messages are sitting in RIM's queue. They gave us an "official" all clear for CDMA devices, so I don't see why you would be experiencing any problems.
Actually, if you're willing to shell out the money for T5 support, their service isn't too bad. When we were on T2, the hold times and quality of support was absolutely horrible. Recently we jumped to T5, have a dedicated technician, experience no more than 5 minute wait times, and get some extremely qualified support personnel. However, I think we're paying well over 100K/year for it.
RIM lost their primary NOC last night. Your BES transmits data to their NOC including mailflow routing and SRP information. This issue affects the Americas entirely and is currently fixed for Sprint and Nextel. GPRS/EEDGE providers are still unable to contact back to RIM at the present time. So, if you are a Sprint or Nextel shop, this would explain why you are not experiencing the issue at this time. However, everyone was experiencing it from 6:30PM CDT to about 3:00AM CDT.
I was on RIM's rolling conference call last night and received some additional information. It seems that somehow they lost connectivity in their NOC. When they failed over to a co-lo they couldn't get the SRP communication up and running, causing all BES to fail in their connection to RIM. Fast forward a few hours and SRP is back up, but they cannot get critical components for email delivery to connect to their DB. Fast forward a few more hours and they get this up and running also. Currently, Sprint and Nextel are up and running, but the GPRS/EDGE service providers are still not receiving consistent mail flow.
Definitely agreed. I just enjoy pedantic counterexamples. However, one good point to bring up is that if two people can agree on one necessary quality for an object and a contradiction can be raised from it, then that is sufficient evidence to reject the existence of that entity. For instance:
(x)Sx -> Nx (All things that are souls also have a necessary quality N)
(x) - Nx (Nothing has the quality N)
thus (x) -Sx (Souls do not exist)
Although very few things in this world can be so easily qualified.
You've obviously never had to support users running Windows ME.
Not necessarily. If there is an a priori contradiction, you don't have to worry about the phenomenology of the entity or idea at hand. For instance, if I ask you to give me a description of the marital status of a married bachelor, so that we can debate his existence, I would imagine you would want to appeal to the contradiction rather to show that there is no such thing as a married bachelor.
Sorry. I was really unclear on the last part of that post. For some reason, the boss actually wanted me to do work. Here is what I was getting at. When you attempt to argue nihilism, there are usually two arguments that come about. The first is the mass agreement argument. "There are certain things that everyone believes is evil, like raping babies while cutting out their eyes and eating them." Nihilism coupled with the phenomena of ethics due to biological makeup can explain that argument away. It also provides the answer to the relativist argument, "Sure, universally binding ethical principles may not exist, but that's because you're not looking at where these principles come from (insert culture, individualism, etc)." Yes I am: biology.
Nope. It has to be universally binding. That doesn't mean that you have to go along with it, but if the principles are not universally binding, you fall into relativism. The main problem with relativism is that you never know how to cut the pie. Are ethics culturally relativistic? If so, then what defines a culture? Maybe they are family relativistic. Ultimately, some will see enough difference in individuals to reduce it to individualism. You may not think that sounds like a bad idea, but individualism leads to nihilism. This is because, in individualism, there is no way to confirm or validate the good or evil in an action. If the individual who acted says it was just, you have to take it at face value. By doing this, we are essentially stuck between ethical skepticism or nihilism. Either you can never know if someone acted justly, or there is just no such thing as just actions. So that's pretty much what forces it to be universally binding. In Mill's "Utilitarianism" you can see some of more detailed rationality behind it.
Understood that individualism and nihilsm have different definitions. However, looking at the three different answer sets to ethics (one universal set of principles, multiple possible sets of principles, no such thing as good and evil) it is easy to see that individualism pretty much reduces to nihilism. If morality can be determined by whim or by individual, then there is no accountability for ethics. If everyone can run around saying "based on my own personal ethical code, this action is justified," if becomes unfalsifiable but more so meaningless. Thus, it essentially reduces to no ethics.
I believe Dawkins explains this by showing a reproductive advantage to carrying the recessive trait. Whether that is because there is some inherent disadvantage to being homozygous or if there is another phenotypic trait that is "piggybacked" onto that gene, if the trait is recessive, it can explain why the phenotype is expressed still in subsequent generations.
Isn't it possible that the high level of human cognition merely masks the same instinctual trait?
Yes, but here's the beauty of that defense. Your client cannot be rehabilitated and thus is a menace to society. To whom should we charge the cost of the bullet to?
What about the Euthyphro dilemma? Plato made a pretty damn good argument that regardless of anything else, theological ethics is going to necessarily compromise the entire idea of an all powerful god.
Dawkins also explains this in his "Selfish Gene" theory, where genes (rather than organisms) are the active replicators. The theory is interesting and explains certain animal behaviors, like when certain squirrels let out an alarm to alert the rest of the group when danger is around, often sacrificing it's own life. Because the genes are the replicators, this trait ends up saving a large number of genes with each organism that gets out of harm's way.
Yes and no. From a purely philosophical view, morality (more accurately Morality) is a universal set of binding principles. Relativism and subjectivism both cannot be allowed because they can ultimately reduce to individual ethics and thus nihilism.
There was actually an article that stated that some evolutionary biologists believe that the initial religious beliefs were actually hard wired into the brain. If (and i do stress the if) both account are true, then it would make a sense to some degree. If I can find the article I will link it.
Sounds like one hell of a setup. We've outgrown out LTO2 library for about a year now and just arrived at a deduplicating VTL solution (FalconStor) that will allow our LTO2 library to give us another year's worth of using by going D2D2T, also. So how did you score such a nice DR system for your office? Did you guys suffer a data disaster before they saw the need for it? Also, are you guys using Veritas, Commvault or something else for your backups?