He falls back on the old trick of comparing the opposition to something that is general hated, no matter how absurd the comparison. Democrats as communists? Sorry buddy, but there's no way any political parties in this country are any where near that liberal, and on the other side, aren't that authoritarian/centralists. Joe McCarthy isn't in the Senate anymore; I think it's time to move on from the red scare.
Since when has accusation of moral corruption furthered any sort of intellectual debate? It has nothing to do with the issues at hand, and is simply an easy way to demonize the opposition.
The idea of certain slashdot readers given the ability to moderate posts works most of the time, but I submit that this particular case was subject to some personal bias.
Does anyone out there realistically think that there is any way to make social taboos dissappear off the face of the earth in favor of a society of pure intellectualism?
What precisely is wrong with polygamy? I would never want to be in a marriage with multiple people, but why is it illegal for others to do so? If it's consensual (i.e., all parties have full knowledge of the entire situation), I don't see why it can be illegal. It is the most benign "crime" I can think of; victimless.
It's the Judeo-Christian version of what is right and wrong clouding our laws.
Since when are pro-choice people against prostitution? I'm pro-choice, and I don't see how the government can say people can't put a penny on the table for sex. Is that not what the porn insdustry does? Is a factory worker getting minimum wage for a job that is detrimental to his health somehow better than a person being paid to perform an act that our bodies were designed for?
I've always thought that Rowe v. Wade could be used as precedent as to why prostitution is legal. If women have control over their uterus, certainly they should have control over their vagina.
Freedom is the ability to walk into a deli and piss on the cheese. --The Vandals
Freedom in the purest sense of the term cannot co-exist with laws. Laws limit freedom. The question is how much are we willing to be restrained, how much freedom are we willing to give up. But don't be disillusioned that you are free.
And just because there are people who are less free than you, that doesn't make you free.
If you want to live in a completely free society (anarchy, if you're catching on), you must be responsible. Obviously, the system wouldn't work if people harmed others constantly. Notice I didn't say "if everyone did what they wanted," because since when is it a person's first impulse is to harm others? If murder wasn't against the law, would there be more of them? Or does something other than laws, like our own sense of responsibility, community, and ethics that prevents this?
The government can't hold me if I don't believe it exists. --The Vandals
Here's one to throw you for a loop. Straight from Cecil Adams' mouth:
Possibility number three (you may want to sit down for this) is as follows. For reasons that I confess are not entirely clear to me, when a black hole grows to enormous mass, it becomes less dense.
If our entire galaxy collapsed into an ebony aperture (I am getting tired of typing black hole), said BH would be about ten billion light years across, with the average density of a thin gas. If we take this to its logical conclusion, it is possible that the known universe is itself a black hole, with us living in it.
Wherefore, it seems to me, the obvious question is: how the hell do we get out of here? The casual attitude of our public officials toward this baleful possibility is nothing short of scandalous.
I'm Just to expound upon the point that we wouldn't get pulled in if our sun was a black hole.
Imagine the Earth and the sun as they are now. Then replace the sun with a blackhole (minus the whole supernova thing, though that wouldn't happen with our sun, which is why it won't become a blackhole). The gravitational pull would the the exact same on the Earth when it's orbiting the sun as a star, then it would be when it's orbiting a blackhole (life as we know it would die off without sunlight, but that's a different story). It's still the same amount of mass, it just has infinite density.
Gold nuclei--what they're using, and what some people have said may be dangerous for the same reason you're saying#151;collisions happen on the moon all the time. They're pretty much recreating something that occurrs often, but in a way that they can observe it.
Are you going to bother to say why cosmic radation is irrelevant?
This is from a New Scientist article on the exact same topic (which was much more informative, by the way):
In 1995, Paul Dixon, a psychologist at the University of Hawaii, picketed Fermilab in Illinois because he feared that its Tevatron collider might trigger a quantum vacuum collapse. Then again in 1998, on a late night talk radio show, he warned that the collider could "blow the Universe to smithereens".
But particle physicists have this covered. In 1983, Martin Rees of Cambridge University and Piet Hut of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, pointed out that cosmic rays (high-energy charged particles such as protons) have been smashing into things in our cosmos for aeons. Many of these collisions release energies hundreds of millions of times higher than anything RHIC can muster--and yet no disastrous vacuum collapse has occurred. The Universe is still here.
This argument also squashes any fears about black holes or strange matter. If it were possible for an accelerator to create such a doomsday object, a cosmic ray would have done so long ago. "We are very grateful for cosmic rays," says Jaffe.
[emphasis mine]
For those who want to read the article, you can find it at http://www.newscientist.com/n s/19990828/ablackhole.html. Its a month or two old, but I think it's much more informative than the one linked here. It rebukes the Sky Is Falling cries with more examples than the one at the Boston Globe.
Before you call someone many different kinds of wrong, you may want to read up on it first. Our friend summed it up very well by saying it is "very old hat indeed."
Documentary? You're kidding, right? That movie was based on a work of fiction, which was written by the late Carl Sagan, a scientist himself. He got a Nobel Prize for coming up with the nuclear winter theory.
Re:Why Must We Test On Animals?/Talk to My Cat
on
The Cat Cam
·
· Score: 1
I'm rather against testing on animals, but testing on prisoners is no better, if not worse.
Likewise, can you actually take the time to point out what you think I misinterpeted, and state what you meant to say, or is it just more fun to call people names?
Adults and teenagers often look back to the life of a small child, and envy the simpleness that their life is. They see the child as a care-free existence, with no significant worries about the future.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been worrying about things my entire life. Any memory I have, I've had things at the same time that worried me. Did the report I did on tigers in the second grade have any substantial effect on my life, and therefore justify the worry I gave it? Probably not.
Does that change anything? Of course not. I thought it was extremely important at the time, and it caused quite a bit of stress (rarely will you hear the term "stress" with "second grade," but there ya go). Now my worries seem much bigger--the major essay I have due on the 15th, the pain I feel sometimes in my left hand that I think is mild carpal tunnel syndrome, what the fuck I'm going to do with my CS degree when I get out of college, will I even get that CS degree--but you can't make someone understand that what they think is important really isn't when they can't grasp what it is you worry about. The same goes for 40 year olds who look at high school kids and think they have a care free life--they don't, high school is very stressful.
Even if the president has to worry about "more important" matters than I do, we can still have the same stress levels about what we worry about.
This is the exact same thing. During the "information age," we're looking back ten years, a generation, 100 years, however long, and saying to our selves "Life was so much simpler then." In many respects, yeah, but on the other hand, did it make any difference in how much and what a person had to think about? No, I really don't think it does. A farmer 100 years ago probably had just the same level of stress (think about all of the things a farmer has to worry about: will his crops fail, can he feed his family, will he have any surplus to sell, if he doesn't have any surplus where will the money come from, etc.) that we do now. We adapt.
In ten years, a generation, or 100 years, people will look back at 1999 and say "Gee, they had it so easy, they didn't have any important issues to worry about." Every generation does it. These theories are just a more articulate way of saying "Life is complicated now, it was much simpler in the past."
Thing is, there is no such thing as a simple life.
Natural selection is not a law we need to submit to, it is an observation of what tends to happen. To do something simpley because "it's part of natural selection" is... stupid. Any action we take is part of natural selection, evolution, there really isn't any way we can go against it. If we fuck up so bad that our species gets wiped out, well, then that's natural selection, isn't it?
Flip a coin continuously, and it will gravitate towards the mean of 50% heads, 50% tails. Your assertation that we would be going against natural selection is like saying that we should tailor the flipping of a coin to make sure it obeys the law of averages. Like I said, stupid.
And about kicking the dog... that is the difference that we can see between animals and plants. Kick a dog, it is pained. We can see that, as you so astutely pointed out. Plants don't do this. While it is up in the air as to what level of sentiency animals have, I am comfortable committing to the notion that plants have none (no brain, no place for thought of any kind).
Not only do I understand the rationale of a vegertarian/vegan (vegetarian's don't eat meat, but eat dairy; vegans eat no animal products), I agree with it. Yet I eat meat. Therefore I am a hypocrite, and will readily admit it. But to dismiss other people taking compassion for life as trivial is arrogant.
I actually agree with Singer that month old babies are not sentient. While on the overall issue I'm so firmly placed on the fence that I have a post up my ass, I can agree with some of his rationale. As someone else said, Singer does take to its logical conclusion what many pro-choice people use to argue for abortions.
I'm pro-choice, but the rationale I most often use is that the zygote/fetus/baby-to-be is in the women. It is a part of her body. Her body, her life, her business, her choice.
Once the baby is born, however, matters change, and that's where I climb up on the fence and start contemplating. For one, how would we measure when the baby is sentient? Not an easy task, just ask Turing. Especialy with a baby that while it may be sentient, ain't all that bright. So at what point do you decide no more youthanasia (thank you Megadeath)? It's not easy.
The problem with the Turing Test (and the test used to see if something is alive--not sentient, just alive) is the way that they were developed.
People didn't say "Alright, here is what it takes to be sentient [or alive], let's go find out what fits our paradigm," they said "Alright, this is sentient [or alive], let's develop a standard to fit it."
Which brings up another point: Can something be sentient, but not alive? One of the current definitions of something being alive is that it can reproduce. If we were able to create a computer that was sentient, but we created it in such a way that it could not produce others like itself, it would be (by current defintions) sentient but not alive.
So our defintions of alive/sentient are biased towards what we know is alive/sentient. We haven't taken into other life forms, because we simply haven't had exposure to them.
Flesh is very special, when you consider that despite all of our intellectual achievements, we haven't come anywhere close to developing something on the same level as the human body (including the brain).
Poetry isn't hampered by our inability to express ourselves perfectly, it exists because of it. It is due to the flaws in languagens, the double meanings, the vastness of a language that enables us to twist words as poets do.
If you enable instant and perfect communicaiton, you eliminate art, since art is essentialy a means to overcome our inability to express certain thoughts, ideas or emotions.
It's mainly about the "plasticity" of the human brain; its ability to actually change the way that it is arranged. Imagine a computer being able to rewire its circuitry at will, daily, or when some error occured (like loss of a piece of hardware).
Actually, it would depend on the speed of the oven. It doesn't matter what temperature you set it to, ovens always heat up at the same rate. And if you've ever cooked something when you're hungry, you know that this rate is not fast enough.
Imagine communications without all of the ambiguity and vagueness of body language and speech. Sure it won't be perfect, but it's an incredible vision.
Incredible? Incredibley depressing. It's the ambiguity of our language that makes poetry beutiful--hell, the ambiguity of language makes poetry possible. It's the ambiguity of language that lets prose stimulate our imagination; if we know exactly what the writing is saying, no less, no more, there is room for creative thought on our end.
Body language, and the inadequacies of spoken languages are what make human interactions so interesting. You can "read" a person you've known for years better than someone you've just met.
There are certain aspects of our lives that I don't think should be optimized for the greatest effeciency possible.
I mailed the site about this (said it was disgusting), and this was mailed back to me:
I do not have a clue what you are talking about. We never made claims the article was ours...Mr. Cumming is aware that it is on our site and he is referenced as author with link to his site. Mr. Cumming has also listed several plugins with us. Someone out there is a very sick person but starting this stuff and obviously trying to start trouble. So go ahead and post this where ever this sick post is coming from. Please let us know where this thread is! The copyright on our site is a footer which is located on all of our pages.
Donna Ellis FileMakerToday
I don't buy that, since it was Mr. Cummings himself who alerted slashdot, but if you try that page now, FileMaker Today took it down.
Slashdot Mirror
He falls back on the old trick of comparing the opposition to something that is general hated, no matter how absurd the comparison. Democrats as communists? Sorry buddy, but there's no way any political parties in this country are any where near that liberal, and on the other side, aren't that authoritarian/centralists. Joe McCarthy isn't in the Senate anymore; I think it's time to move on from the red scare.
Since when has accusation of moral corruption furthered any sort of intellectual debate? It has nothing to do with the issues at hand, and is simply an easy way to demonize the opposition.
The idea of certain slashdot readers given the ability to moderate posts works most of the time, but I submit that this particular case was subject to some personal bias.
Does it hurt to try?
It's the Judeo-Christian version of what is right and wrong clouding our laws.
I've always thought that Rowe v. Wade could be used as precedent as to why prostitution is legal. If women have control over their uterus, certainly they should have control over their vagina.
And just because there are people who are less free than you, that doesn't make you free.
If you want to live in a completely free society (anarchy, if you're catching on), you must be responsible. Obviously, the system wouldn't work if people harmed others constantly. Notice I didn't say "if everyone did what they wanted," because since when is it a person's first impulse is to harm others? If murder wasn't against the law, would there be more of them? Or does something other than laws, like our own sense of responsibility, community, and ethics that prevents this?
Imagine the Earth and the sun as they are now. Then replace the sun with a blackhole (minus the whole supernova thing, though that wouldn't happen with our sun, which is why it won't become a blackhole). The gravitational pull would the the exact same on the Earth when it's orbiting the sun as a star, then it would be when it's orbiting a blackhole (life as we know it would die off without sunlight, but that's a different story). It's still the same amount of mass, it just has infinite density.
Gold nuclei--what they're using, and what some people have said may be dangerous for the same reason you're saying#151;collisions happen on the moon all the time. They're pretty much recreating something that occurrs often, but in a way that they can observe it.
This is from a New Scientist article on the exact same topic (which was much more informative, by the way):
For those who want to read the article, you can find it at http://www.newscientist.com/n s/19990828/ablackhole.html. Its a month or two old, but I think it's much more informative than the one linked here. It rebukes the Sky Is Falling cries with more examples than the one at the Boston Globe.Before you call someone many different kinds of wrong, you may want to read up on it first. Our friend summed it up very well by saying it is "very old hat indeed."
Documentary? You're kidding, right? That movie was based on a work of fiction, which was written by the late Carl Sagan, a scientist himself. He got a Nobel Prize for coming up with the nuclear winter theory.
I'm rather against testing on animals, but testing on prisoners is no better, if not worse.
Likewise, can you actually take the time to point out what you think I misinterpeted, and state what you meant to say, or is it just more fun to call people names?
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been worrying about things my entire life. Any memory I have, I've had things at the same time that worried me. Did the report I did on tigers in the second grade have any substantial effect on my life, and therefore justify the worry I gave it? Probably not.
Does that change anything? Of course not. I thought it was extremely important at the time, and it caused quite a bit of stress (rarely will you hear the term "stress" with "second grade," but there ya go). Now my worries seem much bigger--the major essay I have due on the 15th, the pain I feel sometimes in my left hand that I think is mild carpal tunnel syndrome, what the fuck I'm going to do with my CS degree when I get out of college, will I even get that CS degree--but you can't make someone understand that what they think is important really isn't when they can't grasp what it is you worry about. The same goes for 40 year olds who look at high school kids and think they have a care free life--they don't, high school is very stressful.
Even if the president has to worry about "more important" matters than I do, we can still have the same stress levels about what we worry about.
This is the exact same thing. During the "information age," we're looking back ten years, a generation, 100 years, however long, and saying to our selves "Life was so much simpler then." In many respects, yeah, but on the other hand, did it make any difference in how much and what a person had to think about? No, I really don't think it does. A farmer 100 years ago probably had just the same level of stress (think about all of the things a farmer has to worry about: will his crops fail, can he feed his family, will he have any surplus to sell, if he doesn't have any surplus where will the money come from, etc.) that we do now. We adapt.
In ten years, a generation, or 100 years, people will look back at 1999 and say "Gee, they had it so easy, they didn't have any important issues to worry about." Every generation does it. These theories are just a more articulate way of saying "Life is complicated now, it was much simpler in the past."
Thing is, there is no such thing as a simple life.
Natural selection is not a law we need to submit to, it is an observation of what tends to happen. To do something simpley because "it's part of natural selection" is... stupid. Any action we take is part of natural selection, evolution, there really isn't any way we can go against it. If we fuck up so bad that our species gets wiped out, well, then that's natural selection, isn't it?
Flip a coin continuously, and it will gravitate towards the mean of 50% heads, 50% tails. Your assertation that we would be going against natural selection is like saying that we should tailor the flipping of a coin to make sure it obeys the law of averages. Like I said, stupid.
And about kicking the dog... that is the difference that we can see between animals and plants. Kick a dog, it is pained. We can see that, as you so astutely pointed out. Plants don't do this. While it is up in the air as to what level of sentiency animals have, I am comfortable committing to the notion that plants have none (no brain, no place for thought of any kind).
Not only do I understand the rationale of a vegertarian/vegan (vegetarian's don't eat meat, but eat dairy; vegans eat no animal products), I agree with it. Yet I eat meat. Therefore I am a hypocrite, and will readily admit it. But to dismiss other people taking compassion for life as trivial is arrogant.
I actually agree with Singer that month old babies are not sentient. While on the overall issue I'm so firmly placed on the fence that I have a post up my ass, I can agree with some of his rationale. As someone else said, Singer does take to its logical conclusion what many pro-choice people use to argue for abortions.
I'm pro-choice, but the rationale I most often use is that the zygote/fetus/baby-to-be is in the women. It is a part of her body. Her body, her life, her business, her choice.
Once the baby is born, however, matters change, and that's where I climb up on the fence and start contemplating. For one, how would we measure when the baby is sentient? Not an easy task, just ask Turing. Especialy with a baby that while it may be sentient, ain't all that bright. So at what point do you decide no more youthanasia (thank you Megadeath)? It's not easy.
You're using Decleration of Independence to prove the existence of god and moral absolutes?!
People didn't say "Alright, here is what it takes to be sentient [or alive], let's go find out what fits our paradigm," they said "Alright, this is sentient [or alive], let's develop a standard to fit it."
Which brings up another point: Can something be sentient, but not alive? One of the current definitions of something being alive is that it can reproduce. If we were able to create a computer that was sentient, but we created it in such a way that it could not produce others like itself, it would be (by current defintions) sentient but not alive.
So our defintions of alive/sentient are biased towards what we know is alive/sentient. We haven't taken into other life forms, because we simply haven't had exposure to them.
Flesh is very special, when you consider that despite all of our intellectual achievements, we haven't come anywhere close to developing something on the same level as the human body (including the brain).
If you enable instant and perfect communicaiton, you eliminate art, since art is essentialy a means to overcome our inability to express certain thoughts, ideas or emotions.
The Infinite Brain
It's mainly about the "plasticity" of the human brain; its ability to actually change the way that it is arranged. Imagine a computer being able to rewire its circuitry at will, daily, or when some error occured (like loss of a piece of hardware).
Actually, it would depend on the speed of the oven. It doesn't matter what temperature you set it to, ovens always heat up at the same rate. And if you've ever cooked something when you're hungry, you know that this rate is not fast enough.
faster != better
Incredible? Incredibley depressing. It's the ambiguity of our language that makes poetry beutiful--hell, the ambiguity of language makes poetry possible. It's the ambiguity of language that lets prose stimulate our imagination; if we know exactly what the writing is saying, no less, no more, there is room for creative thought on our end.
Body language, and the inadequacies of spoken languages are what make human interactions so interesting. You can "read" a person you've known for years better than someone you've just met.
There are certain aspects of our lives that I don't think should be optimized for the greatest effeciency possible.
Just because they SAY the can't/won't be held responsible doesn't mean it's true. It would get decided by a court.
I don't buy that, since it was Mr. Cummings himself who alerted slashdot, but if you try that page now, FileMaker Today took it down.
Seems he may have won.