Parents should know their kids and what their kids are doing.
You realize the same argument can be made against child molestation laws, right? I'm not trying to compare the two, just saying that you should modify your argument a bit;)
Of course to be fair it also shouldn't be a felony to deliver a swift elbow to a Holocaust denier's jaw.:3
In the U.S. at least, a swift elbow to anyone's jaw is treated as a misdemeanor assault, isn't it (as long as you don't break the jaw and the assaultee isn't a cop)?
And then they start blackmailing you - "Hey, I've got your active resume here, wouldn't want it to show up in your supervisor's inbox now, would we?" Or better yet, what about all the people who use the same username/password combinations on all online sites?
How can I unfreeze the account if your link is broken? Ah well, could you please unfreeze it for me? My BOA username/password is kalirion/password123. Thanks a ton!
My understanding though is that the demo is essentially the first hour of the game and therefore playing the demo might well serve to take some of the initial lustre off of what is evidently a sublime experience.
IIRC remember the Baldur's Gate 2 demo was a large portion of the first chapter, but you had the option of continuing your saved games in the retail version. Isn't something like that possible with Bioshock?
Heh, remember Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall? That game had full frontal nudity all over the place (ok, mostly in temples). Of course it was all really pixelated....
Uh, yeah, that's kinda my point. Free will without the ability to act on that will is meaningless. The reason we have free will now is that we don't truly know what the consequences of our actions are in terms of eternal punishment. If God came down and announced that X is required but Y leads to eternal damnation, then our "free will" is illusory at best.
Free will (the ability to think anything) and freedom (the ability to do anything) are completely different. If free will exists, it exists, if it's illusory, it's illusory, but limiting actions does not change it a bit. Threat of eternal damnation would take away our freedom, and that's a perfectly fine disaster all on its own. There is absolutely no reason to bring free will into it. Whether lack of freedom makes free will meaningless is really for the individual to decide, don't you think?
What does an illusion of free will mean? That our actions are pre-decided and we only think we're making choices?
That's pretty much it.
Again, a meaningless question, because it cannot be proved one way or the other, and it doesn't really affect how I live my life either way.
And again, it shouldn't affect how you live your life. But there are tons of interesting things to ponder even if they have absolutely no practical value. This is one of them. If it doesn't interest you, feel free to ignore it, but there's no reason to expect everyone else to feel the way you do.
It wouldn't remove your free will anymore than a rapist holding a gun to your head removes your free will. Anything you could have willed for before, you still can. Acting on it might present a problem for.
On a related note, do you really believe in free will (as opposed to an illusion of free will)? How exactly do you choose what to "will" for? Where do your decisions really come from?
By now you have deluded the concepts of God so much that you've totally lost the essence of what atheists argue against. Which is Jesus, Mohammed, the FSM, the Intelligent Designer, the Pink Unicorn, Mother Gaia, the Universe, etc. You're talking about belief systems in general (of which atheism and agnosticism are two particular), but not about (organized) relgion anymore. By religion I mean something distinct from mere spirituality.
Atheists don't just argue against organized religion, they argue against even the possibility that any God-type being exists. At least the "hard" atheists do. Doesn't matter if the God is Jesus, or a green jelly named Bob whom we've never heard of. Personally I find the possibility that any organized religion got it exactly right to be very remote, but it is still there. In my previous post I talked about the possibility of a being creating our own Universe and an afterlife. Nothing to stop someone like that from sending down a couple stone tablets of rules and implanting a part of its being into a human looking dude named Jesus who could walk on water. Nothing to stop him from "sacrificing himself to himself in order to change a rule he made himself" (courtesy of weirdcrap) either.
Also, remember that "nature" and "supernatural" or "determinism", "universe", "physical laws", "omnipotent", "afterlife", etc. are all human concepts. And it's humans that write the physical laws (through science).
These are all human concepts that have definitions beyond their names. They describe an object or a process, and that's what I'm talking about. The term "supernatural" implies a duality of existence - the natural (us) and whatever is beyond it. I think there is only a single existence, with a set of true physical laws governing everything. And when I say "true physical law", I mean "a consistent property of existence that makes it work the way it does", not just a bunch of words on paper explaining our observations. Feel free to believe that gravity and evolution are just human concepts and would disappear if we ceased to exist, but I won't be joining you.
This type of discussion always bring this short story to mind (which, in fact, I found out about through another of these little slashdot stories):
37 hands. Zed shook his head. The 84 candidates running for President were asked if they believed in Sixism, and only 37 raised their hands.
He couldn't believe this debate was still going on. For years they had assumed that the Manhattan Inflation Trial in 4838 had put the lid on the silly notion that the universe contained billions of galaxies. Billions! Zed looked out the window at the smooth black plane of the night sky. One-two-three-four-five-six. Six galaxies. There they were. It was so basic, so obvious. Any kid with a neutron telescope could make the observation for themselves!
The moderator turned to Governor Tembke of South Africa. "Madam, are you a Big Banger?" There were dampened giggles at the pejorative. Everyone knew what a 'banger" was.
Rev. Tembke sniffed. "I'm running for the office of president, not planning on writing a 5th-grade textbook on astrophysics."
"Aargh!" Zed threw his shoe at the screen, but it flew through the image of the Senator from Zimbabwe instead. He stood up and began to pace. He tried to breathe deeply, as if that would lower his blood pressure.
He used to be patient with relativists. He really did. But at a debate at ultra-conservative Harvard University, he'd made the mistake of asking one to explain how this galactic disappearing act occurred. The answer the nut had given him had been so ridiculous, he'd written it down:
"As the universe expanded, the force pushed the galaxies outward faster and faster. As they surpassed the speed of light, their light shifted to infinitely long wavelengths and dimmed. A similar "cloak of invisibility" befell the afterglow of the Big Bang, a faint bath of cosmic microwaves, whose wavelengths shifted so that they are now buried by the radio noise in our own galaxy. There was also an element called deuterium, but it is in deep space now. To be seen it needs to be backlit from distant quasars, and quasars, of course, have also disappeared."
Totally unqualified. Unprovable! Billions of galaxies-similar in size and shape to the six observable galaxies - simply sped up and - poof! - became invisible. "Yeah, that happened," Zed chuckled to himself, turning back to the debate.
Zed was particularly frustrated that the relativists were able to prop up their beliefs with... ancient texts! The silly belief was dying out until an archaeological dig in New Atlantis produced evidence of near universal belief in relativism by ancient world civilizations. Einstein, Hubble, Hawking... proto-scientists believed in an inflationary universe, so why shouldn't we?
"Science is based on observation," he grumbled, "not faith in theories about a Big Bang, cosmic radiation, and an expanding universe in which galaxies go missing." Why couldn't they just embrace the facts? Why did they insist on clinging to mythical beliefs? Were they just stupid?
Zed collapsed back into his recliner. Fortunately, time was on the side of science. Eventually, the old beliefs would finally fade away. After all, everyone knew the modern system would collapse if the rules could ever change.
Also, if you deny the existance of the supernatural, as atheists do, then God, by definition does not exist.
It really becomes a matter of terminology. I'm an agnostic, but I believe in an orderly deterministic universe (or multiverse, or whatever) following consistent laws, probably ones far beyond what we have discovered so far. That would be the nature of existence. If God exists, then it is a part of that nature, or maybe the nature itself. But there wouldn't be anything supernatural about it. Even if my deterministic outlook is wrong and there is randomness/chaos involved, there would still be physical laws underneath it all.
Note that this means I do not believe that a truly omnipotent God could exist, since in my view it would be impossible to break the physical laws of existence, whatever those might be. But I do not discount the possibility that existence itself might be sentient, or that there could be a nigh-omnipotent being who could have created our known universe and an afterlife for us. Again, if that's true, it would all be within what's allowed by physical laws.
People sometimes ask me if I believe in God. I always reply that the question is meaningless to me, because God's existence or nonexistence cannot be proven, and it has no bearing on my life.
I agree with most of what you say, but don't expect me to believe that if you thought there was a good chance of someone meeting out eternal suffering for the flimsiest of offenses, it wouldn't impact your behavior. It might not change your personal morals, as well as it shouldn't, but it would definitely have a bearing on your life in one way or another.
Claiming that it "might be" fact or "could be" fact is a lie. Claiming that there's an open question here anywhere is a lie. Claiming that any of this is "opinion" is a lie. And it doesn't become any less of a lie because Mr. Picard is replaced by Mr. Anderson or Mr God.
My my, what an open mind you got there. Must be nice to be 100% certain that everything you think you know is true and anyone who doubts it is some kind of a lying heretic.
Last I heard, my service (Virgin Mobile) didn't support any phones aside form its own. Personally I don't care too much, since I only use the phone to, get this, talk to people. But there goes the idea of choosing phones.
Just did a search, and more "news" on the experiment is mentioned in a much more recent article (in fact the article's main subject is the very experiment this slashdot article is about.) Just search for "John Cramer". Apparently there have been some delays.
Anyway, think of the photons in the original stream. They go through the double slit, and if left alone will create an interference pattern on the screen. If we put a detector right after one of the slits to see which individual photons go through that slit instead of the other one (the position), the interference pattern will stop forming as soon as the photons being measured start making it to the screen. That's the classic double slit experiment. However, instead of a detector, we put a splitter to divide each photon into a pair of entangled photons. One of the pair continues on towards the screen, while the other continues in the direction of a detector. Now any time that detector sees a photon, it tells you that the original photon went through the slit by the splitter, and that's also where the detected photon's twin will be coming from towards the screen. So by detecting (or failing to detect) any photon, you are finding positioning information about it's entangled counterpart. This causes the interference pattern to stop forming at the screen. When the detector is switched back off, the interference pattern comes back.
The setup above, or one very similar, was described in Brian Greene's The Fabric of Cosmos. When reading that, I immediately wondered why they didn't take it to the next level and try to send information by switching the detector on and off. Then over a year later I saw the slashdot article I linked to. Perhaps I should have patented the process when I had a chance....
No, in such a setup, there originally a single stream of "disentangled" electrons. After the stream passes through a double-slit, there is a splitter at one of the slits splitting the stream into two streams, with each electron in one stream having an entangled buddy in the other stream. The actual process that creates the entanglement splits the stream. Then down the line you start measuring one of the streams while the other one goes along its merry way towards the screen.
This might be easier to do with photons than electrons.
But what happens when you have to entangled electron and you measure the position of the first? Then the position of the second is no longer uncertain. So if you have two streams of electrons, split off after passing through the ubiquitous double-slit, with each electron in one stream having an entangled body in another, then once you start measuring one of these, the second stream will no longer form an interference pattern. I think a few months ago there was a story about this kind of setup being made to test sending information FTL.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do we need legislation to protect children?
;)
Isn't that what parents are for?
Parents should know their kids and what their kids are doing.
You realize the same argument can be made against child molestation laws, right? I'm not trying to compare the two, just saying that you should modify your argument a bit
Of course to be fair it also shouldn't be a felony to deliver a swift elbow to a Holocaust denier's jaw. :3
In the U.S. at least, a swift elbow to anyone's jaw is treated as a misdemeanor assault, isn't it (as long as you don't break the jaw and the assaultee isn't a cop)?
And then they start blackmailing you - "Hey, I've got your active resume here, wouldn't want it to show up in your supervisor's inbox now, would we?" Or better yet, what about all the people who use the same username/password combinations on all online sites?
How can I unfreeze the account if your link is broken? Ah well, could you please unfreeze it for me? My BOA username/password is kalirion/password123. Thanks a ton!
My understanding though is that the demo is essentially the first hour of the game and therefore playing the demo might well serve to take some of the initial lustre off of what is evidently a sublime experience.
IIRC remember the Baldur's Gate 2 demo was a large portion of the first chapter, but you had the option of continuing your saved games in the retail version. Isn't something like that possible with Bioshock?
Heh, remember Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall? That game had full frontal nudity all over the place (ok, mostly in temples). Of course it was all really pixelated....
What, you never heard of Typhoid Mary?
Uh, yeah, that's kinda my point. Free will without the ability to act on that will is meaningless. The reason we have free will now is that we don't truly know what the consequences of our actions are in terms of eternal punishment. If God came down and announced that X is required but Y leads to eternal damnation, then our "free will" is illusory at best.
Free will (the ability to think anything) and freedom (the ability to do anything) are completely different. If free will exists, it exists, if it's illusory, it's illusory, but limiting actions does not change it a bit. Threat of eternal damnation would take away our freedom, and that's a perfectly fine disaster all on its own. There is absolutely no reason to bring free will into it. Whether lack of freedom makes free will meaningless is really for the individual to decide, don't you think?
What does an illusion of free will mean? That our actions are pre-decided and we only think we're making choices?
That's pretty much it.
Again, a meaningless question, because it cannot be proved one way or the other, and it doesn't really affect how I live my life either way.
And again, it shouldn't affect how you live your life. But there are tons of interesting things to ponder even if they have absolutely no practical value. This is one of them. If it doesn't interest you, feel free to ignore it, but there's no reason to expect everyone else to feel the way you do.
It wouldn't remove your free will anymore than a rapist holding a gun to your head removes your free will. Anything you could have willed for before, you still can. Acting on it might present a problem for.
On a related note, do you really believe in free will (as opposed to an illusion of free will)? How exactly do you choose what to "will" for? Where do your decisions really come from?
By now you have deluded the concepts of God so much that you've totally lost the essence of what atheists argue against. Which is Jesus, Mohammed, the FSM, the Intelligent Designer, the Pink Unicorn, Mother Gaia, the Universe, etc. You're talking about belief systems in general (of which atheism and agnosticism are two particular), but not about (organized) relgion anymore. By religion I mean something distinct from mere spirituality.
Atheists don't just argue against organized religion, they argue against even the possibility that any God-type being exists. At least the "hard" atheists do. Doesn't matter if the God is Jesus, or a green jelly named Bob whom we've never heard of. Personally I find the possibility that any organized religion got it exactly right to be very remote, but it is still there. In my previous post I talked about the possibility of a being creating our own Universe and an afterlife. Nothing to stop someone like that from sending down a couple stone tablets of rules and implanting a part of its being into a human looking dude named Jesus who could walk on water. Nothing to stop him from "sacrificing himself to himself in order to change a rule he made himself" (courtesy of weirdcrap) either.
Also, remember that "nature" and "supernatural" or "determinism", "universe", "physical laws", "omnipotent", "afterlife", etc. are all human concepts. And it's humans that write the physical laws (through science).
These are all human concepts that have definitions beyond their names. They describe an object or a process, and that's what I'm talking about. The term "supernatural" implies a duality of existence - the natural (us) and whatever is beyond it. I think there is only a single existence, with a set of true physical laws governing everything. And when I say "true physical law", I mean "a consistent property of existence that makes it work the way it does", not just a bunch of words on paper explaining our observations. Feel free to believe that gravity and evolution are just human concepts and would disappear if we ceased to exist, but I won't be joining you.
This type of discussion always bring this short story to mind (which, in fact, I found out about through another of these little slashdot stories):
37 hands. Zed shook his head. The 84 candidates running for President were asked if they believed in Sixism, and only 37 raised their hands.
He couldn't believe this debate was still going on. For years they had assumed that the Manhattan Inflation Trial in 4838 had put the lid on the silly notion that the universe contained billions of galaxies. Billions! Zed looked out the window at the smooth black plane of the night sky. One-two-three-four-five-six. Six galaxies. There they were. It was so basic, so obvious. Any kid with a neutron telescope could make the observation for themselves!
The moderator turned to Governor Tembke of South Africa. "Madam, are you a Big Banger?" There were dampened giggles at the pejorative. Everyone knew what a 'banger" was.
Rev. Tembke sniffed. "I'm running for the office of president, not planning on writing a 5th-grade textbook on astrophysics."
"Aargh!" Zed threw his shoe at the screen, but it flew through the image of the Senator from Zimbabwe instead. He stood up and began to pace. He tried to breathe deeply, as if that would lower his blood pressure.
He used to be patient with relativists. He really did. But at a debate at ultra-conservative Harvard University, he'd made the mistake of asking one to explain how this galactic disappearing act occurred. The answer the nut had given him had been so ridiculous, he'd written it down:
"As the universe expanded, the force pushed the galaxies outward faster and faster. As they surpassed the speed of light, their light shifted to infinitely long wavelengths and dimmed. A similar "cloak of invisibility" befell the afterglow of the Big Bang, a faint bath of cosmic microwaves, whose wavelengths shifted so that they are now buried by the radio noise in our own galaxy. There was also an element called deuterium, but it is in deep space now. To be seen it needs to be backlit from distant quasars, and quasars, of course, have also disappeared."
Totally unqualified. Unprovable! Billions of galaxies-similar in size and shape to the six observable galaxies - simply sped up and - poof! - became invisible. "Yeah, that happened," Zed chuckled to himself, turning back to the debate.
Zed was particularly frustrated that the relativists were able to prop up their beliefs with... ancient texts! The silly belief was dying out until an archaeological dig in New Atlantis produced evidence of near universal belief in relativism by ancient world civilizations. Einstein, Hubble, Hawking... proto-scientists believed in an inflationary universe, so why shouldn't we?
"Science is based on observation," he grumbled, "not faith in theories about a Big Bang, cosmic radiation, and an expanding universe in which galaxies go missing." Why couldn't they just embrace the facts? Why did they insist on clinging to mythical beliefs? Were they just stupid?
Zed collapsed back into his recliner. Fortunately, time was on the side of science. Eventually, the old beliefs would finally fade away. After all, everyone knew the modern system would collapse if the rules could ever change.
-by Joe Carter/Kyle French
Second, if they believe in creationism, they probably also believe in the Second Coming
So virtually all creationists are Christians now?
>> Without God, nothing matters.
It matters to you.
No, it doesn't matter to him, as he has specifically stated. But it does matter to those of us with the slightest bit of common sense.
Also, if you deny the existance of the supernatural, as atheists do, then God, by definition does not exist.
It really becomes a matter of terminology. I'm an agnostic, but I believe in an orderly deterministic universe (or multiverse, or whatever) following consistent laws, probably ones far beyond what we have discovered so far. That would be the nature of existence. If God exists, then it is a part of that nature, or maybe the nature itself. But there wouldn't be anything supernatural about it. Even if my deterministic outlook is wrong and there is randomness/chaos involved, there would still be physical laws underneath it all.
Note that this means I do not believe that a truly omnipotent God could exist, since in my view it would be impossible to break the physical laws of existence, whatever those might be. But I do not discount the possibility that existence itself might be sentient, or that there could be a nigh-omnipotent being who could have created our known universe and an afterlife for us. Again, if that's true, it would all be within what's allowed by physical laws.
People sometimes ask me if I believe in God. I always reply that the question is meaningless to me, because God's existence or nonexistence cannot be proven, and it has no bearing on my life.
I agree with most of what you say, but don't expect me to believe that if you thought there was a good chance of someone meeting out eternal suffering for the flimsiest of offenses, it wouldn't impact your behavior. It might not change your personal morals, as well as it shouldn't, but it would definitely have a bearing on your life in one way or another.
Claiming that it "might be" fact or "could be" fact is a lie. Claiming that there's an open question here anywhere is a lie. Claiming that any of this is "opinion" is a lie. And it doesn't become any less of a lie because Mr. Picard is replaced by Mr. Anderson or Mr God.
My my, what an open mind you got there. Must be nice to be 100% certain that everything you think you know is true and anyone who doubts it is some kind of a lying heretic.
FISA: We require you to respond to the ACLU request.
White House: Very well, our response is "Fuck off, traitors."
FISA: The requirement has been technically fulfilled, the best kind of fulfillment.
Last I heard, my service (Virgin Mobile) didn't support any phones aside form its own. Personally I don't care too much, since I only use the phone to, get this, talk to people. But there goes the idea of choosing phones.
Go ahead, throw your vote away. MWAHAHAHAHA!
This is an article about it, but not an actual paper. And the sladot discussion.
Just did a search, and more "news" on the experiment is mentioned in a much more recent article (in fact the article's main subject is the very experiment this slashdot article is about.) Just search for "John Cramer". Apparently there have been some delays.
Anyway, think of the photons in the original stream. They go through the double slit, and if left alone will create an interference pattern on the screen. If we put a detector right after one of the slits to see which individual photons go through that slit instead of the other one (the position), the interference pattern will stop forming as soon as the photons being measured start making it to the screen. That's the classic double slit experiment. However, instead of a detector, we put a splitter to divide each photon into a pair of entangled photons. One of the pair continues on towards the screen, while the other continues in the direction of a detector. Now any time that detector sees a photon, it tells you that the original photon went through the slit by the splitter, and that's also where the detected photon's twin will be coming from towards the screen. So by detecting (or failing to detect) any photon, you are finding positioning information about it's entangled counterpart. This causes the interference pattern to stop forming at the screen. When the detector is switched back off, the interference pattern comes back.
The setup above, or one very similar, was described in Brian Greene's The Fabric of Cosmos. When reading that, I immediately wondered why they didn't take it to the next level and try to send information by switching the detector on and off. Then over a year later I saw the slashdot article I linked to. Perhaps I should have patented the process when I had a chance....
I imagine it might also have some uses in military personel, but... yes, it's a very slippery slope.
The first rule of Operation Treadstone is you do not remember Operation Treadstone.
No, in such a setup, there originally a single stream of "disentangled" electrons. After the stream passes through a double-slit, there is a splitter at one of the slits splitting the stream into two streams, with each electron in one stream having an entangled buddy in the other stream. The actual process that creates the entanglement splits the stream. Then down the line you start measuring one of the streams while the other one goes along its merry way towards the screen.
This might be easier to do with photons than electrons.
But what happens when you have to entangled electron and you measure the position of the first? Then the position of the second is no longer uncertain. So if you have two streams of electrons, split off after passing through the ubiquitous double-slit, with each electron in one stream having an entangled body in another, then once you start measuring one of these, the second stream will no longer form an interference pattern. I think a few months ago there was a story about this kind of setup being made to test sending information FTL.
Without the body, which generates desires and emotions, the simulated brain would have no need to behave in a human way, and therefore would not.
"Desires" I give you, at least the ones based upon physical urges (hunger, lust, etc.) But emotions? I'm pretty sure those are generated by the brain.
Oh my God, I just realised that Paris Hilton would fail the Turing Test, therefore, she is a robot.
No, she's only simulating a robot.