He does say that "some things" are absolutely morally wrong. Your argument takes off in another direction by rephrasing that as "all things" which is entirely different than what he said.
Proof of his point: murdering* your neighbor is absolutely morally wrong. There, at least one instance exists and therefore his point is valid.
or perhaps: stealing your neighbor's TV is absolutely morally wrong.
or maybe: shaking your baby to death is absolutely morally wrong.
The examples could go on an on, but the longer you go the more likely you are to hit ones that there are sharp oppositions to. The point does remain though that moral relativism is just as bad as completely defined moral absolutism (where everything falls under black or white categories and is inflexible). You have to have both to make a society work - there have to be hard and fast principles that we all agree on (i.e. my stuff is mine, murder is bad, families are a good thing). The most enduring philosophies sort of split the difference. Christianity (for example) lays out guidelines as a foundation for the faith, but a lot of it hinges on "don't hurt your neighbor cause you wouldn't want to get hurt by him". A lot of the issues that people take with the Christian faith are from things read into what was said (or that became tradition afterward) that became "absolute" when they were meant not to be taken so strictly.
And honestly, neither myself or the GP poster are trying to answer the question of what is morally absolute, that's really beyond either of us (and Slashdot is really not the proper place for that debate to be answered). The point he's arguing for (and that I support) is that some thing are moral absolutes. Certainly the founding fathers of the United States believed that (hence: "inalienable rights" in the Declaration of Independence), and those were some pretty smart guys.
*Barring exigent circumstances, but true in the general case.
EverQuest is still going. Albeit it seems to be running on broken ankles about now with all the bolting on they've had to do to keep it competitive. I understand there's another expansion coming out soonish which will make...number 15 I think? I left last year, but it was and is a fun game for the types of people who enjoy that sort of thing.
From an RPG perspective at least, several Final Fantasy bosses (FF6 at least specifically for sure) died when they ran out of mana. Sure, it wasn't your own party, but still it's not an entirely new concept.
I think the achievement system was meant to partially alleviate this, and in large part it does. Someone who just now hits level 80 will probably never get the Classic Raider or Classic Dungeonmaster achievements like someone who's been playing since release likely has. It's a clever way of both preserving past accomplishments (for those that care about such things) and allowing new players to progress and get into the top end content without years of investment.
If you want frickin' hard go play Everquest. WoW is nice for what it does (the casual man's MMO). I left EQ specifically because it cost too much time investment to get anywhere (their AA system is a living hell to try to catch up on - you'll seriously spend a year or more hardcore playing before you catch up to even close - then the new expansion hits!). I like WoW because I can play for an hour or so a few nights a week and make it to level 80 with passable gear. Plus I don't have to have a group to do most things. They do what they intend very well, and personally I think it's a vocal minority that's pissed about it. Somehow even though it's "going downhill" they maintain a 10 million+ subscriber base...
What really kills me is "premium" HDMI cables. Where Monster tries to get you to pay twice as much for their cable because it's "better picture quality". I mean...it's digital...it either transmits perfectly or you get a blank screen. This isn't rocket science.
It remains that he developed the system (where system can be defined as a set of rules and processes - not necessarily having a physical analogue).
Plus, he gets bonus points for using the word "dumbfuckery" in a humorous and novel way. That makes his point more valid.
I would also like to point out that CA emissions laws are stupid. Requiring ethanol additives (burns cleaner!) reduces the efficiency (burns more!) and the net offset is that you're polluting just as much and paying more for the damn fuel for a net gain of we just paid more to do nothing but make ourselves feel smuggishly better.
Well, and also WWII wasn't nearly as publicized. I mean, intellectually people knew what was happening, but you weren't getting "up to the minute reports from the frontlines" like you do in modern warfare. Vietnam was torpedoed as much by press coverage as by the actual bad reasons we were over there.
January 2007 to September 2009 is 2 years and 8 months. By all accounts (and my own experience with it) Windows 7 looks to be essentially "Vista SP2". In some sense, we're right on track with Microsoft's normal record.
In order for his statement to be false, 50%+1 of humans currently alive would have to travel to >= 1 location photographed by the Hubble.
In logical form it basically goes: At least 50%+1 of the population of earth will not travel to at least 1 location seen in these images.
Take a class in formal logic sometime and spend some time translating natural language into symbolic logic. It's eye opening.
I bet that knowing the top-10 actors of each person will uniquely identify each and every person in US.
That's an interesting statement. If ranking matters then you need a very small pool of actors/actresses to be sufficient to uniquely address 300 million people with a top 10 list (google calculator helpfully informs me that a pool of 13 celebrities will be sufficient to do so).
However if ranking is ignored (and admittedly I think you'll find collisions even with a ranked system) you'll need...hmm...
37 choose 10 = 348,330,136
So a minimum pool of 37 celebrities. I believe we can safely say that there are more than that in the world. However I think that you're going to find heavy collisions even when ranked though. Teenage girls are likely to list the same boys over and over in their lists (most especially when geographically concentrated and in the same peer group), and sports fans are likely to list local sports heroes on their own. Still interesting from a mathematical perspective, even if just in theory.
I was damned impressed when I first heard a presentation from NetApp about their technology, but the day that they called me up and told me that the replacement disk was in the mail and I answered, "I had a failure?"... that was the day that I understood what data reliability was all about.
Agreed. We've had similar experiences with HP EVA systems here at work with things like that, it's wonderful =)
Someday, you'll have a petabyte disk in a 3.5" form-factor. At that point, you can treat it as a commodity.
As much as I want to believe this, I know that just as in the past the business will find a way to fill an array of such drives. They'll decide to do something silly like 24/7 recording of 1000 different cameras, or hourly snapshots of critical systems going back 3 months "just in case", or something. If you have seemingly unlimited amounts of cheap storage, the business *will* find a way to fill it.
It strikes me that GMail's for-pay services are targeted more at medium businesses. That indefinite in-between area where you're big enough to *really* need good uptime on your e-mail system, but too small to have a first class datacenter with 24/7 IT support staff. Basically companies with around 500 to a few thousandish employees. Much smaller and yeah, one server, one day downtime is tolerable, yadda yadda. Much bigger and you have the resources to devote to getting that kind of uptime for yourself. In the middle though, outsourcing is more cost efficient.
There aren't very many (or any that I know of) terrorist organizations that could hit a LEO object, and if they're talking geo-sync then you're really safe. I mean, governments have a hard time with that. Your only potential threat maybe would be North Korea (for LEO, geo-sync would be out of their range too). Terrorist groups thrive on cheap, easily deployed destructive devices. There's no concealing something capable of going 300+ miles straight up.
But in addition to the 1.21 jiggawatts, they'd need to hit 88mph and feed it straight into a flux capacitor.
See, but Marty screwed up. The real money is to be had peeking 20 years into the future, patenting everything cool that you find there, and suing the hell out of everyone that invents any of it. Sports betting is for amateur time travelers!
Well, more to the point, the appeals court basically said that there's enough ambiguity to survive summary judgment (a pretty freaking low bar). The ruling makes a point of saying that they're not saying anything one way or the other about the issue of who actually owns the copyrights, just that summary judgment was premature because, in the best possible light you could possibly cast the facts in the case, there's a minute possibility that they might maybe not be talking out of their ass when they call the APA + amendment 2 an instrument of conveyance.
Heck, half of it hinged on whether to consider the original APA separately from amendment 2. Kimball said to keep them separate, the appeals court decided they should be read together and that amendment 2 clarified the parties' original intent. It seems to get into some real fine hair splitting when you get to the appellate courts.
Slashdot Mirror
Sensuality + respect + kindness = the kind of man no woman can resist. Gotta respect yourself and her, though.
Exactly, that's why my co-worker, the bastard who treats women like sh*t gets laid all the time and has women fawning all over him.
Because that's how their dads treated them and that's all they know to respond to.
He does say that "some things" are absolutely morally wrong. Your argument takes off in another direction by rephrasing that as "all things" which is entirely different than what he said.
Proof of his point: murdering* your neighbor is absolutely morally wrong. There, at least one instance exists and therefore his point is valid.
or perhaps: stealing your neighbor's TV is absolutely morally wrong.
or maybe: shaking your baby to death is absolutely morally wrong.
The examples could go on an on, but the longer you go the more likely you are to hit ones that there are sharp oppositions to. The point does remain though that moral relativism is just as bad as completely defined moral absolutism (where everything falls under black or white categories and is inflexible). You have to have both to make a society work - there have to be hard and fast principles that we all agree on (i.e. my stuff is mine, murder is bad, families are a good thing). The most enduring philosophies sort of split the difference. Christianity (for example) lays out guidelines as a foundation for the faith, but a lot of it hinges on "don't hurt your neighbor cause you wouldn't want to get hurt by him". A lot of the issues that people take with the Christian faith are from things read into what was said (or that became tradition afterward) that became "absolute" when they were meant not to be taken so strictly.
And honestly, neither myself or the GP poster are trying to answer the question of what is morally absolute, that's really beyond either of us (and Slashdot is really not the proper place for that debate to be answered). The point he's arguing for (and that I support) is that some thing are moral absolutes. Certainly the founding fathers of the United States believed that (hence: "inalienable rights" in the Declaration of Independence), and those were some pretty smart guys.
*Barring exigent circumstances, but true in the general case.
EverQuest is still going. Albeit it seems to be running on broken ankles about now with all the bolting on they've had to do to keep it competitive. I understand there's another expansion coming out soonish which will make...number 15 I think? I left last year, but it was and is a fun game for the types of people who enjoy that sort of thing.
From an RPG perspective at least, several Final Fantasy bosses (FF6 at least specifically for sure) died when they ran out of mana. Sure, it wasn't your own party, but still it's not an entirely new concept.
I think the achievement system was meant to partially alleviate this, and in large part it does. Someone who just now hits level 80 will probably never get the Classic Raider or Classic Dungeonmaster achievements like someone who's been playing since release likely has. It's a clever way of both preserving past accomplishments (for those that care about such things) and allowing new players to progress and get into the top end content without years of investment.
If you want frickin' hard go play Everquest. WoW is nice for what it does (the casual man's MMO). I left EQ specifically because it cost too much time investment to get anywhere (their AA system is a living hell to try to catch up on - you'll seriously spend a year or more hardcore playing before you catch up to even close - then the new expansion hits!).
I like WoW because I can play for an hour or so a few nights a week and make it to level 80 with passable gear. Plus I don't have to have a group to do most things. They do what they intend very well, and personally I think it's a vocal minority that's pissed about it. Somehow even though it's "going downhill" they maintain a 10 million+ subscriber base...
What really kills me is "premium" HDMI cables. Where Monster tries to get you to pay twice as much for their cable because it's "better picture quality". I mean...it's digital...it either transmits perfectly or you get a blank screen. This isn't rocket science.
It remains that he developed the system (where system can be defined as a set of rules and processes - not necessarily having a physical analogue). Plus, he gets bonus points for using the word "dumbfuckery" in a humorous and novel way. That makes his point more valid. I would also like to point out that CA emissions laws are stupid. Requiring ethanol additives (burns cleaner!) reduces the efficiency (burns more!) and the net offset is that you're polluting just as much and paying more for the damn fuel for a net gain of we just paid more to do nothing but make ourselves feel smuggishly better.
Why not just swap WPA keys with your neighbours?
Why not just poke holes in all your condoms?
Well, and also WWII wasn't nearly as publicized. I mean, intellectually people knew what was happening, but you weren't getting "up to the minute reports from the frontlines" like you do in modern warfare. Vietnam was torpedoed as much by press coverage as by the actual bad reasons we were over there.
If someone is memory impaired they'd forget to mention it!
January 2007 to September 2009 is 2 years and 8 months. By all accounts (and my own experience with it) Windows 7 looks to be essentially "Vista SP2". In some sense, we're right on track with Microsoft's normal record.
In order for his statement to be false, 50%+1 of humans currently alive would have to travel to >= 1 location photographed by the Hubble. In logical form it basically goes: At least 50%+1 of the population of earth will not travel to at least 1 location seen in these images. Take a class in formal logic sometime and spend some time translating natural language into symbolic logic. It's eye opening.
I bet that knowing the top-10 actors of each person will uniquely identify each and every person in US.
That's an interesting statement. If ranking matters then you need a very small pool of actors/actresses to be sufficient to uniquely address 300 million people with a top 10 list (google calculator helpfully informs me that a pool of 13 celebrities will be sufficient to do so). However if ranking is ignored (and admittedly I think you'll find collisions even with a ranked system) you'll need...hmm... 37 choose 10 = 348,330,136 So a minimum pool of 37 celebrities. I believe we can safely say that there are more than that in the world. However I think that you're going to find heavy collisions even when ranked though. Teenage girls are likely to list the same boys over and over in their lists (most especially when geographically concentrated and in the same peer group), and sports fans are likely to list local sports heroes on their own. Still interesting from a mathematical perspective, even if just in theory.
There are 8 distinct elements indexable by a three bit number. I fine you 5 nerd points for attempting to correct an already correct nerdy statement.
Only in water. You may wish to read up on Superbases
I can understand how resistance to malaria could be handy, but how are painfully inflamed fingers and toes a useful super power?
Just in case you're not joking, I offer this disambiguation:
resistance to (malaria and painfully inflamed fingers and toes).
I was damned impressed when I first heard a presentation from NetApp about their technology, but the day that they called me up and told me that the replacement disk was in the mail and I answered, "I had a failure?" ... that was the day that I understood what data reliability was all about.
Agreed. We've had similar experiences with HP EVA systems here at work with things like that, it's wonderful =)
Someday, you'll have a petabyte disk in a 3.5" form-factor. At that point, you can treat it as a commodity.
As much as I want to believe this, I know that just as in the past the business will find a way to fill an array of such drives. They'll decide to do something silly like 24/7 recording of 1000 different cameras, or hourly snapshots of critical systems going back 3 months "just in case", or something. If you have seemingly unlimited amounts of cheap storage, the business *will* find a way to fill it.
It strikes me that GMail's for-pay services are targeted more at medium businesses. That indefinite in-between area where you're big enough to *really* need good uptime on your e-mail system, but too small to have a first class datacenter with 24/7 IT support staff. Basically companies with around 500 to a few thousandish employees. Much smaller and yeah, one server, one day downtime is tolerable, yadda yadda. Much bigger and you have the resources to devote to getting that kind of uptime for yourself. In the middle though, outsourcing is more cost efficient.
Yes, because one accidental screw-up is exactly the same as systematic epic fails in security design and practice. You get a gold star!
There aren't very many (or any that I know of) terrorist organizations that could hit a LEO object, and if they're talking geo-sync then you're really safe. I mean, governments have a hard time with that. Your only potential threat maybe would be North Korea (for LEO, geo-sync would be out of their range too). Terrorist groups thrive on cheap, easily deployed destructive devices. There's no concealing something capable of going 300+ miles straight up.
But in addition to the 1.21 jiggawatts, they'd need to hit 88mph and feed it straight into a flux capacitor.
See, but Marty screwed up. The real money is to be had peeking 20 years into the future, patenting everything cool that you find there, and suing the hell out of everyone that invents any of it. Sports betting is for amateur time travelers!
Looks like an android failing a Turing test.
I wonder if it had these contact lenses for eyes...
Real men use about:blank as their homepage.
Well, more to the point, the appeals court basically said that there's enough ambiguity to survive summary judgment (a pretty freaking low bar). The ruling makes a point of saying that they're not saying anything one way or the other about the issue of who actually owns the copyrights, just that summary judgment was premature because, in the best possible light you could possibly cast the facts in the case, there's a minute possibility that they might maybe not be talking out of their ass when they call the APA + amendment 2 an instrument of conveyance.
Heck, half of it hinged on whether to consider the original APA separately from amendment 2. Kimball said to keep them separate, the appeals court decided they should be read together and that amendment 2 clarified the parties' original intent. It seems to get into some real fine hair splitting when you get to the appellate courts.