The cheap PS3 can play any PS3 game and the cheap Xbox360 won't be able to play any Xbox360 game just as it can't possibly play all Xbox games or purchases from the Live Marketplace. That's why he called it crippled and you even half pointed it out.
And you call the cheap PS3 crippled when it doesn't have HDMI when even the expensive Xbox360 doesn't have HDMI. If the cheap PS3 is crippled in that regards then a every Xbox360 with the HD-DVD addon is equally crippled. HD-DVD also has the image constraint token!
My favorite exploitation is the Ascetic Monk/Shiba Protector/Druid
Though I also liked the */Tempest/Dervish
It seems like once you make things interesting, balance becomes very hard. I think balance has to be worked in from the beginning and systems like D20 are hard to balance as you make them interesting because it doesn't have enough structure from the beginning.
I was personally astroturfed in a Toy's R Us after the XBox was released.
Some bald, middle aged guy in a buisness attire was standing in the isles and as I approached he proclaimed very loudly "Those games look okay" pointing to PS2 games "But these games look really good" poining to XBox games
One of the stranger things I've seen in person. But a Toy's R Us employee told me that there are these company people from Nintendo, Sony, MS that come over to make sure their displays are set up correctly and sometimes they act weird like that.
Somebody has the pin-outs of the 360's multi-out port, or else nobody would be making a/v cables for it, right? Are there or are there not leads putting out HDMI signals?
It's analog. You can't make a DVI/HDMI converter for the XBox360, PS2, XBox,...
Neverwinter Nights just had a patch recently. The community is still active and will remain so till NWN2 comes out in September, at which point the Mac and Linux NWN community will probably die.
I'm not. I am only willing to pay so much for the PS3 because it has a BluRay player. I prefer upfront costs and I don't like the Microsoft model. Perhaps I am an outlier.
The word "freethinker" is a word of profound arrogance. Its use implies those that agree with you are "freethinkers", and those that disagree are just slaves to their own stupidity and the control of evil puppet-masters.
Ok, you're sounding kind of crazy. The free in freethinking is about rejecting dogma and not accepting without reason.
Hmmm...I spent years in a science department and rarely remember having such discussions (we had a lot more during undergrad). To the extent that I do know people's opinions, there is not much of a correlation between education level, income, or IQ and political persuasion (either in my person experience or according to poll data). I know several pro-life PhDs.
There are obvious liberal leanings in academia. I know several pro-life PhD's too. I don't know what university you are at. Certainly if you are at Bob Young's it might be like that. But even when I was in the deep south, the professors tended to be very liberal, not that they all liked to discuss politics much. And the conservative professors tend to be libertarian and fairly antiRepublican.
It is their beliefs that would matter, not the number of times they go to church. Many people go out of a sense of participation and civics more than the religion itself. Also, large numbers of people (almost a third) vaguely define themselves as Christian yet rarely enter a church. These people are not irrelevant to the debate, as they are both numerous and the swing block.
As I suspected you have a very different definition of "not religious" than I do. This is merely a semantic argument.
I am not sure how one justifies such beliefs. How do you justify the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative? You do understand that EVERYTHING you believe to be true is ultimately based on things you cannot prove.
So you don't think there is a reason that the Golden Rule is good? Not a fan of Kant, so I can't say. Yes, but that shouldn't be used as a cop out
They can be just as illegimate as well. What I am saying is that it is irrelevant that it is religious. It doesn't matter if the justification came from Jesus, Kant, the guy's grandmother, or right out of his own musings.
If it doesn't matter, then it's not really a good justification.
I am not a Christian, though I do feel that the New Testament is one of the more profound religious fairy tales out there.
There you go, you have used your emotive intuition to judge that the NT is good. That's something.
Then let's make you set one. I am going to set one for you if you do not. How about your age, plus one. Good? Then you have no rights, and I am coming over with a shot-gun tonight. Hmmmm....wanna move the line back a bit?
Facetiousness aside, you DO have a line. There is some point (perhaps even after birth, and not necessarily defined by age) where you feel killing a human being is unacceptable, and I am sure you have some justification as to why.
I wouldn't kill anything more intelligent than a cow without good justification. There's a line for you.
And if you think that a embryo is just "a single cell", then I could say the same about you.
It's not an embryo until the zygote divides at least once. So that's not something I would say unless I were to mix up the terminology. But an embryo can't think or feel. I see no reason why it can't be used. I'd cry more for killing a cow to eat beef than I would for destroying a billion embryos.
If you were in a burning building and you only had time to either save an infant or a billion embryos, which would you save?
As you fail to realize that there are a substantial body of people who are both NOT religious and DO believe X.
As an atheist, who hangs out with atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers daily (physics department), and who visits in atheist and agnostic newsgroups on a regular basis, I have to say that you are very wrong. There are not a substantial number of such people. I personally only know of one such person in real life. Perhaps "not religious" to you means "doesn't go to church often". It means more than that to me, though not necessarily that one is strong atheist.
You are still falling for the "If they believe X, they must be religious. Therefore, the argument must be religious." fallacy I mentioned before.
If you had actually read what I wrote, you would know I never made such an argument. In fact I am friends with a pro-life atheist.
You are making a second mistake as well - assuming that a religious argument is inferior to a secular one in a moral debate.
First of all, I never made any such claim. I posed a question. Secondly a religious argument is not much better than an argument with no justification at all. Faith is a belief in something without justification.
When religion is used to address moral or philosophical questions, it is just as legitimate as a point of view as any other philosophical system.
So if I murder a homosexual, and then I make a religious argument at my trial that the Bible commanded me to stone the homosexual, then that is what you call a legitimate point of view as far as morals are concerned? The suicide bomber has a morally legitimate point of view?
If one person uses the philosophy of Kant, while the second uses the philosophy of Jesus to decide this moral debate, why is one person's opinion more valid than the next? Why would either's be considered worse than that of the common man, who just pulls the answer out of his butt without much thought at all?
If you cannot somehow judge the philosophy of Jesus to be good, then you shouldn't be following it. "Because it's a religion" doesn't cut the mustard.
You have a line beyond which you consider killing a fetus/baby murder. I don't know where it is, but you must have one. Why did you put it there? What reasoning did you use? Odds are that most Jesus freaks have thought about it as much or more than you, so you can't claim that as your high ground.
I don't have a set line. I don't plan on ever having to have an abortion, so it's not something I have to worry about intimately. But if somebody thought hard about it and concluded that it's murder to kill a single cell, then they aren't very good at thinking.
You are using the philosopher's definition of a fact. I think that you are going to find that most people don't care for philosophy, though it is important.
Gravity is as much of a fact as the fact of who my mother and father are. I don't pull out a cake recipie and say that this recipie is only a theory of how to make a cake and could, in fact, make ice cream.
Switching back and forth between the philosophical and layman definitions is one of the ways that creationists lie and manipulate debate. I think if you are going to start splitting hairs you should make explicit your definitions and labels, otherwise you lay fertil grounds for the creationists to flourish.
Don't say "lots of religious people believe the former" - that is irrelevant. Lots of religious people believe the sky is blue - that doesn't change the fact that it is.
That isn't a very good analogy. The situation is more correctly "Most people who believe X are religious. Most people who are not religious do not believe X." With a large constituant of people who are both religious and do not believe X.
The sky being blue is agreed upon by both groups, so it isn't an analagous situation.
But the Earth being made 6,000 years ago, Noah's Ark, martyrdom,... are all analagous situations.
Can you think of a good counterexample that is analagous but not so embarrassing?
There is absolutely nothing "religious" about the belief that personhood begins at conception (rather than any other point you want to put it). Indeed, the Bible says essentially nothing on the matter.
Please educate me as to where this idea originated? I thought it was a Catholic idea, but perhaps I am wrong.
Do your homework and quit assuming. This is a battle between people who belief personhood begins at conception vs people who believe it begins at first brain wave, birth, the cutting of the umbilical cord, etc. None of these positions is necessarily any more "religious" than the other, and more importantly, none is any more "scientific" as well. "Personhood" is a moral concept and outside of the scope of science.
I am aware that there are pro-life atheists, because I knew one. Though they are a tiny minority within a minority. But that isn't necessarily evidence that it isn't a religious idea. There are, in fact, many religions that are or can be atheistic in nature. Buddhism being the best example.
My idea of something being religious, in this sense at least, is that it dogmatic and/or based upon faith and feelings and that it also involves something more important than mere superstitions. I see no good reason to think a single cell is of comparable importance to a person. To me this strikes as a blatantly religious idea weather or not atheists partake in it. Perhaps this is just a semantic argument.
Science can tell us that a blastocyst is alive and a human (according to the accepted definitions), but it cannot tell us if this is sufficient for the granting of rights.
A fully grown human being that is infertile isn't "life" according to the accepted definition of biological life. The biological definition of life is a strict scientific definition. You shouldn't argue from it even you were right, as you seem to suggest.
This debate has nothing to do with science OR religion, let alone a conflict between them.
I think you have gone beyond reason here. To say that it is not only about science or religion is one thing. But to say it has nothing to do with science or religion is just ignorant or dumb.
It turns out that neither the clump or a 3-month-old child have interests.
I doubt things are so simple. It's more likely a continuum. The embryo has no interests because it has no brain. The 3-month old has a brain but it isn't fully grown and experienced. The 3-month old's interests probably include nipples and shiny things. <sarcasm>Not to different from most people I might add.</sarcasm>
Look at the numbers though. The number of embryos made are orders of magnitude more than the numbers of embryos adopted. Short of outlawing fertilization clinics, this will not change.
Those adoptions aren't even drops in the bucket. It's like saving 2 Jews from the holocaust and then turning around and saying "look, problem solved, I saved 2 Jews."
So, essentially, if we were to suppose every single argument I used is wrong, you just said I was right in my original assertion either way: the notion of density is completely without meaning for point masses, yet you state it is relevant to the problem!
No. A point mass has infinite density.
However, that's not the case. Consider 2 system, each composed of 4 particles (ie, point masses), and a test particle....
Irrelevant. That isn't a spherically symmetric system. Your code doesn't model Newtonian gravity either.
What's the problem with your assumptions? Well, it's twofold. On one end is that your invocation of Gauss's law is invalid. To quote your own reference, Gauss's law gives the relation between the electric or graviational flux flowing out a closed surface and, respectively, the electric charge or mass enclosed in the surface. Field intensity at a given point in space != flux. When you have a particle travelling through space, what you care about is the field intensity at all points in the trajectory. The second problem is that all your statements assume a constant mass density inside the sphere, which is assuming too much. Look at earth's magnetic field for an example of a non-homogeneous charge distribution that yields a distorted field, despite a more or less spherical distribution.
Sorry you don't know Gauss' Law, it's not something you are going to understand from reading some english. I figured if you had an intro course in physics covering it then you would been able to draw analogy to the same results with the Coulomb force. And I didn't assume anything about the mass distribution other than spherical symmetry again. I gave one example, being uniform density, where the result is simple. I'll say it again, the field beneath the surface is a functional of that distribution. Outside it is identical to the point mass.
Just to let you know, you are arguing with somebody who just finished teaching 3rd semester physics for engineers and scientists. You aren't going to win! But I will keep answering you if you want.
"stand" close enough to a massive spherical mass (like a human being standing on the surface of the earth), and it will essentially behave like parallel field lines perpendicular to the ("almost flat") surface, rather than radial field lines like a point mass.
Completely wrong. The denser the body, the less parallel the field lines are at the surface. The less dense the body, the more parallel the field lines are at the surface.
Gravitationally speaking the Earth's mass is extremely small compared to the Earth's radius. In fact the ratio is 7E-10 in gravitational units (G=c=1).
Spherical masses = point masses is a gross oversimplification. It's just one that is valid in some cases.
Absolutely wrong. Outside the surface, the fields are mathematically identical. Look up Gauss' Law. It is an absolute, mathematical statement. It is only beneath the surface that the the field is different and depends upon the mass distrobution of the body. For a uniform density, the field strength becomes linear in r.
I should add though in GR this is only true for the one-body problem, whereas in NG this is true in general thanks to Gauss' law and center of mass motion.
But for the case of light bending around our Sun, or any other system of one single, spherically symmetric massive body it will still be true.
Umm, what's next then? Why don't black holes consume most of space? Does the expansion of the universe happen at a much higher rate than the expansion of a blackhole?
Black holes don't suck up everything in sight. If the Sun were a black hole of the same mass, we would orbit around it just the same.
I was once taught that the more powerful a gravity field, the slower time progresses within that field - a consequence of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. If that is true, then during the collapse of a star towards becoming a singularity, we would expect the passage of time to be slowed more and more severely as the mass collapses and produces a denser and denser gravity well. Wouldn't this result in a real-universe equivalent of Zeno's paradox - i.e., wouldn't the collapsing mass always be moving closer to becoming a black hole but never arriving at that point due to the increasing time dilation?
That's only the case for a static blackhole. That means that the stuff falling in is of infinitesimal mass and the metric is simply that of the blackholes and is by definition unchanging. In reality, stuff falling does matter, the mass of the blackhole increases and the event horizon expands.
Another very important point is that you don't only see things taking forever to fall into the static blackhole. What you see also becomes infinitely red shifted. Eventually you don't see anything at all.
It all works out to be completely consistent, and only confusing until you have your head wrapped around it.
I have thought for a long time that singularities were impossible due to conservation of angular momentum. Velocity is all relative, so if you have a spinning basketball and squish it down to half it's original circumference, the relative velocity of two opposing points on it's equator will double. Divide the circumference again and the relative velocity will double again. There is a lot of dividing that can be done between any rational number and zero (the theoretical diameter of a singularity), and if you have any spin in the original matter that relative velocity is going to hit the speed of light long before you hit zero.
Your mistake is that you are using a Newtonian definition of angular momentum, L = m r × v. L = r × p, where p is the relativistic momentum. This p is not m v, but gamma m v and can become arbitrarily large.
Slashdot Mirror
The cheap PS3 can play any PS3 game and the cheap Xbox360 won't be able to play any Xbox360 game just as it can't possibly play all Xbox games or purchases from the Live Marketplace. That's why he called it crippled and you even half pointed it out.
And you call the cheap PS3 crippled when it doesn't have HDMI when even the expensive Xbox360 doesn't have HDMI. If the cheap PS3 is crippled in that regards then a every Xbox360 with the HD-DVD addon is equally crippled. HD-DVD also has the image constraint token!
PrC's and Templates kill all balance in D&D 3.X
My favorite exploitation is the Ascetic Monk/Shiba Protector/Druid
Though I also liked the */Tempest/Dervish
It seems like once you make things interesting, balance becomes very hard. I think balance has to be worked in from the beginning and systems like D20 are hard to balance as you make them interesting because it doesn't have enough structure from the beginning.
It takes a thinking person to believe in fairy tales and superstitions?
I guess you've never really done it.
I was personally astroturfed in a Toy's R Us after the XBox was released.
Some bald, middle aged guy in a buisness attire was standing in the isles and as I approached he proclaimed very loudly
"Those games look okay" pointing to PS2 games
"But these games look really good" poining to XBox games
One of the stranger things I've seen in person. But a Toy's R Us employee told me that there are these company people from Nintendo, Sony, MS that come over to make sure their displays are set up correctly and sometimes they act weird like that.
They didn't support it on the PS2 and that didn't stop anyone.
Alcohol makes some people happy.
It's analog. You can't make a DVI/HDMI converter for the XBox360, PS2, XBox,
The PS3 still has usb ports like the PS2, so that should't be an issue.
I pull my PS2 saves off with a usb memory stick.
The PS3 will have usb also.
The terrorist torture their prisoners, why can't we?
Neverwinter Nights just had a patch recently. The community is still active and will remain so till NWN2 comes out in September, at which point the Mac and Linux NWN community will probably die.
I'm not. I am only willing to pay so much for the PS3 because it has a BluRay player. I prefer upfront costs and I don't like the Microsoft model. Perhaps I am an outlier.
Ok, you're sounding kind of crazy. The free in freethinking is about rejecting dogma and not accepting without reason.
There are obvious liberal leanings in academia. I know several pro-life PhD's too. I don't know what university you are at. Certainly if you are at Bob Young's it might be like that. But even when I was in the deep south, the professors tended to be very liberal, not that they all liked to discuss politics much. And the conservative professors tend to be libertarian and fairly antiRepublican.
As I suspected you have a very different definition of "not religious" than I do. This is merely a semantic argument.
So you don't think there is a reason that the Golden Rule is good?
Not a fan of Kant, so I can't say.
Yes, but that shouldn't be used as a cop out
If it doesn't matter, then it's not really a good justification.
There you go, you have used your emotive intuition to judge that the NT is good. That's something.
I wouldn't kill anything more intelligent than a cow without good justification. There's a line for you.
It's not an embryo until the zygote divides at least once. So that's not something I would say unless I were to mix up the terminology.
But an embryo can't think or feel. I see no reason why it can't be used. I'd cry more for killing a cow to eat beef than I would for destroying a billion embryos.
If you were in a burning building and you only had time to either save an infant or a billion embryos, which would you save?
As an atheist, who hangs out with atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers daily (physics department), and who visits in atheist and agnostic newsgroups on a regular basis, I have to say that you are very wrong. There are not a substantial number of such people. I personally only know of one such person in real life. Perhaps "not religious" to you means "doesn't go to church often". It means more than that to me, though not necessarily that one is strong atheist.
If you had actually read what I wrote, you would know I never made such an argument. In fact I am friends with a pro-life atheist.
First of all, I never made any such claim. I posed a question.
Secondly a religious argument is not much better than an argument with no justification at all. Faith is a belief in something without justification.
So if I murder a homosexual, and then I make a religious argument at my trial that the Bible commanded me to stone the homosexual, then that is what you call a legitimate point of view as far as morals are concerned?
The suicide bomber has a morally legitimate point of view?
If you cannot somehow judge the philosophy of Jesus to be good, then you shouldn't be following it. "Because it's a religion" doesn't cut the mustard.
I don't have a set line. I don't plan on ever having to have an abortion, so it's not something I have to worry about intimately. But if somebody thought hard about it and concluded that it's murder to kill a single cell, then they aren't very good at thinking.
You are using the philosopher's definition of a fact. I think that you are going to find that most people don't care for philosophy, though it is important.
Gravity is as much of a fact as the fact of who my mother and father are. I don't pull out a cake recipie and say that this recipie is only a theory of how to make a cake and could, in fact, make ice cream.
Switching back and forth between the philosophical and layman definitions is one of the ways that creationists lie and manipulate debate. I think if you are going to start splitting hairs you should make explicit your definitions and labels, otherwise you lay fertil grounds for the creationists to flourish.
That isn't a very good analogy. The situation is more correctly "Most people who believe X are religious. Most people who are not religious do not believe X." With a large constituant of people who are both religious and do not believe X.
The sky being blue is agreed upon by both groups, so it isn't an analagous situation.
But the Earth being made 6,000 years ago, Noah's Ark, martyrdom,
Can you think of a good counterexample that is analagous but not so embarrassing?
Please educate me as to where this idea originated? I thought it was a Catholic idea, but perhaps I am wrong.
I am aware that there are pro-life atheists, because I knew one. Though they are a tiny minority within a minority. But that isn't necessarily evidence that it isn't a religious idea. There are, in fact, many religions that are or can be atheistic in nature. Buddhism being the best example.
My idea of something being religious, in this sense at least, is that it dogmatic and/or based upon faith and feelings and that it also involves something more important than mere superstitions. I see no good reason to think a single cell is of comparable importance to a person. To me this strikes as a blatantly religious idea weather or not atheists partake in it. Perhaps this is just a semantic argument.
A fully grown human being that is infertile isn't "life" according to the accepted definition of biological life. The biological definition of life is a strict scientific definition. You shouldn't argue from it even you were right, as you seem to suggest.
I think you have gone beyond reason here. To say that it is not only about science or religion is one thing. But to say it has nothing to do with science or religion is just ignorant or dumb.
I doubt things are so simple. It's more likely a continuum. The embryo has no interests because it has no brain. The 3-month old has a brain but it isn't fully grown and experienced. The 3-month old's interests probably include nipples and shiny things. <sarcasm>Not to different from most people I might add.</sarcasm>
Look at the numbers though. The number of embryos made are orders of magnitude more than the numbers of embryos adopted. Short of outlawing fertilization clinics, this will not change.
Those adoptions aren't even drops in the bucket. It's like saving 2 Jews from the holocaust and then turning around and saying "look, problem solved, I saved 2 Jews."
No. A point mass has infinite density.
Irrelevant. That isn't a spherically symmetric system. Your code doesn't model Newtonian gravity either.
Sorry you don't know Gauss' Law, it's not something you are going to understand from reading some english. I figured if you had an intro course in physics covering it then you would been able to draw analogy to the same results with the Coulomb force. And I didn't assume anything about the mass distribution other than spherical symmetry again. I gave one example, being uniform density, where the result is simple. I'll say it again, the field beneath the surface is a functional of that distribution. Outside it is identical to the point mass.
Just to let you know, you are arguing with somebody who just finished teaching 3rd semester physics for engineers and scientists. You aren't going to win! But I will keep answering you if you want.
Completely wrong. The denser the body, the less parallel the field lines are at the surface. The less dense the body, the more parallel the field lines are at the surface.
Gravitationally speaking the Earth's mass is extremely small compared to the Earth's radius. In fact the ratio is 7E-10 in gravitational units (G=c=1).
Absolutely wrong. Outside the surface, the fields are mathematically identical. Look up Gauss' Law. It is an absolute, mathematical statement. It is only beneath the surface that the the field is different and depends upon the mass distrobution of the body. For a uniform density, the field strength becomes linear in r.
I should add though in GR this is only true for the one-body problem, whereas in NG this is true in general thanks to Gauss' law and center of mass motion.
But for the case of light bending around our Sun, or any other system of one single, spherically symmetric massive body it will still be true.
Perhaps you were confusing those two facts.
Black holes don't suck up everything in sight. If the Sun were a black hole of the same mass, we would orbit around it just the same.
That's only the case for a static blackhole. That means that the stuff falling in is of infinitesimal mass and the metric is simply that of the blackholes and is by definition unchanging. In reality, stuff falling does matter, the mass of the blackhole increases and the event horizon expands.
Another very important point is that you don't only see things taking forever to fall into the static blackhole. What you see also becomes infinitely red shifted. Eventually you don't see anything at all.
It all works out to be completely consistent, and only confusing until you have your head wrapped around it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_metric
Your mistake is that you are using a Newtonian definition of angular momentum, L = m r × v.
L = r × p, where p is the relativistic momentum. This p is not m v, but gamma m v and can become arbitrarily large.