No, you didn't. You're stuck in a circular reasoning, but apparently unaware of it.
Care to explain how, Socrates? You know, your saying so doesn't make it so.
No, they aren't. Ask anybody who works with animals if they have or not temperaments, personalities, moods, likes, dislikes, friends, enemies, the works.
Or just spend some time looking at your neighbourhood's dogs relationships and see how simple they are.
"The works," eh? What an incredibly scientific point you make. You go from pointing out a few simple characteristics about animal psyche to saying, nebulously, that they have "the works," which I suppose we're supposed to read as "everything we humans have." They do not have "the works." The ability for an animal to have temperaments, personalities, moods, dislikes, friends, and enemies is a far cry from having the ability to launch a program. Embarking on the systematic extermination of another species requires a program. If you can point me to ONE case of this in the animal kingdom except for our species, rather than simply declaring that my logic is circular without demonstrating how, I'll gladly concede and go home with my tail between my legs.
As for watching dogs, I've had pet dogs my entire life and I understand them very well. It's easy to anthropomorphize them, but when you get down to it, they are very simple beasts. I agree that they can experience probably a wider gamut of emotions than we give them credit for; actually, I think a sense of belonging, a fairly advanced emotion, is one of the strongest emotional traits they have, descended from pack instincts. I've read tons of dog trainer and pet psychologist literature, and there is for the most part a consensus on the idea that dogs, at least, while intelligent, are limited. To what degrees they are limited is still a matter of debate and research. Generally, trainers believe that dogs do what is in their best interests, and what is in their best interests revolves around food, or perhaps having his ears rubbed. When we see a dog that has done something bad acting "guilty," it's probably not guilt. It's fear of punishment, and sometimes it's the knowledge that contrition might lead to lighter punishment. The dog does not have the capacity to regret what he did. That requires the ability to think "I wish I hadn't done that," and that requires language. He does have the ability to associate cause and effect, and to know that he has hell to pay.
But it looks like guilt to us, because it is what we would feel in the same situation. Similarly, you are reading much deeper complexity into the neighborhood dogs you watch than is really there. Either that, or you watch too many cartoons. I don't see how chasing, fighting, marking territory, and humping one another constitutes interrelational complexity of an order to compare to human relations.
What animals lack is language, not emotions or personalities, so they're not telling us. You have to go and see for yourself.
First off, this is a straw man. I never said that animals lack "emotions or personalities," or even intelligence of a kind. They simply lack the intelligence and the ability to have programs.
By your leap-ahead logic, the mewling of cats and growls and barks of dogs constitutes language.
You inadvertently bring up a very good point that contrasts the way dogs and other animals think versus the way we think. The fact that we have language means that we think in words. It's called "verbal thought." Dogs, and likely every other animal, think in a sensory fashion. This is another reason they could never organize and launch programs. Example: Assuming for the moment all dogs hate cats, dogs would never envision a world without cats and then try to make that vision reality, but it would be easy for us to decide to get rid of cats, to form a plan of action, and to accomplish the gruesome task--even if we never had the vision of the world devoid of cats, and were driven by verbal ideas alone.
so in other words(just clarifying), humans not having reached an equilibrium means no equilibrium exists?
You are not clarifying anything, you are obfuscating and misinterpreting a very simple, unassailable premise. We passed equilibrium long ago.
and we have over farmed areas before. ever heard of crop rotation? it was invented because we were over farming areas and farmers realized there was a better way about it. sounds like a negative feedback loop to improving how we use land.
No, it doesn't. You don't know what negative feedback is. If you were right about crop rotation being a feedback loop, it would be a positive feedback loop, not a negative feedback loop. Go do some research on systems so you can learn the difference.
If overfarming land were a successful negative feedback control, our population would go down after we overfarm land. We have overfarmed land many times throughout history, but our population has grown for every year in our history. Therefore, we are able to thwart this particular negative feedback control. No other animal has that option. Sure, tigers might have to change what they eat, but when they lose access to their main food source, their numbers diminish. Ours do not. Why is this so difficult for you to grasp?
maybe as a global species we have never done that(overhunted or over-farmed to the detriment of the world population), but if you have ever been to areas that aren't getting the help you speak of, populations are dropping because of starvation. it does happen,but not globally
So the arbitrary, imaginary boundaries that we draw around parts of the world somehow invalidate my premise? Do you care to explain what difference it makes WHERE the population expansion occurs? I'm not seeing the logic here. I mean, where do you think the massive food surpluses we produce in America go? Do you think they just disappear or something? Do you think we burn them? They go facilitate growth somewhere in the Third World. We ARE a "global species," and we ARE an animal population, so that's how I'm looking at things.
we have also overhunted species, but this has just caused humans to shift what they eat(american indians filled the lack of buffalo in their diet with other food sources). Animals do the same thing. Tigers, when they are unable to hunt wild animals, can become maneaters because humans such easy prey, though not as nutricious as other animals.
First of all, the plains Indians started subsisting mainly on buffalo only after Europeans brought horses to the plains. Prior to that, it was unfeasable and they mainly practiced primitive agriculture. Second of all, native Americans adapted their diets as any species will, but they did not seek to annex neighboring territories in order to turn them into fields of grain. They tried to keep their populations in check because their survival depended upon it. The native Americans remained subject to the negative feedback controls of food availability and neighboring tribal boundaries. They would kill only how many buffalo they needed to survive, because they realized that it's stupid to wipe out your own food supply. Also, they would not waste any part of the prey they did kill. What does adapting your diet have to do with altering your environment to suit your diet? Tigers might start eating people, but they don't go out and try to wipe out the hyena population, even though hyenas are direct nuisances and competitors. Humans will deliberately wipe out, for instance, foxes, because they interfere with our agriculture, preying on chickens. Or, as in Europe, we hunted wolves to extinction, because we considered them a menace. This is intentional extermination, which is clearly different that hunting to extinction.
and again, just to point out the same thing I have been saying, when you define genoci
so in other words, just as I said, as long as you define things like genocide and torture using things like emotions, we can't apply them to animals, right? If you define these things in such a way that only humans could fit your definition, then guess what, only humans will fit your definition.
That's nonsense. Genocide is defined in Webster's as the deliberate killing of a large group of people (though I am extending the latter part of the definition to include a species as well). The important word is "deliberate." In one of your examples, you pointed out the elk nearly eliminating a species of lily as being "genocide." This proves you don't understand the word. Genocide is a deliberate attempt, a program, to wipe a group off the earth. Animals do not have the mental capacity to launch a program. Period.
but I must disagree on a few point, humans, as you have said, do the same thing as wolves. we try to convert as much raw food as possible into edible food.
No, we try to convert as much everything as we can into human food ("edible" food is redundant) and living space. A plot of desert is not food that we are converting into "edible food" when we irrigate it. Again, wolves have not overrun the world because they remain subject to the negatie feedback controls of nature: we do not. That's why there are over 6 billion of us. Surely you see a difference here? Obviously we are unique. There is no other animal that consumes the calories of a large mammal but lives in the numbers of an insect.
as our food supplies are no where near infinite as you suggest, we do suffer from the same population limitations the wolf would. It just happens to be that we haven't reached that limit yet.
We reach and exceed that limit every year. That's why we continue to have millions of starving people in the world, and yet still have a population boom. We suffer from the same population limiations and we are subject to the same laws of nature that all other creatures are. We simply have the unique ability to convert the entire world into food for us, so we can keep growing. The only real biological limit to our growth will be whatever number of calories the earth can produce in human food once the entire planet is converted, assuming the conversion doesn't cause us to destroy ourselves in the process.
Just like over-hunting the elk would cause food shortages that would modulate the wolf population, when humans in areas push the natural reasources too far with too many people, usually severe famine persists until some type of balance is restored.
This simply doesn't happen anymore. We have international petroleum-based agribusiness ship food surpluses to areas of the world hit by famine. Sure, millions continue to starve, but each and every year, our population grows. Doesn't this prove that, unlike the wolves, we have exempted ourselves from those negative feedback controls?
We can also over-farm land to make it unusable and over-hunt our own animal food sources to extinction. what you really mean is that unlike anyone else in the animal kingdom, we can eat anything and can effectively produce our own food if we want.
You keep listing things that haven't happened yet. We have never over-farmed or -hunted to the point where it slowed our population growth. And I'll thank you to maintain your own points without telling me what I meant, but the very fact that we can produce our own food and that we are relentless in doing so is the whole point. That's what the wolves don't do, and that's what has allowed us to defeat for the time being the negative feedback control of nature.
I'll concede that point, and I'm certainly not saying humans are not animals. I still maintain that we are the only species capable and willing to implement a program of deliberate elimination of other species.
What you say is true, but connecting your life to something greater than yourself does not in and of itself mandate that you adopt religion or spiritualism of any kind. It's all in how we define something that is greater than ourselves. You can attach yourself to your family, your friends, your community, or mankind itself. You can attach yourself to your life's work or to a cause, or, yes, even to science. I think that people can have full and integral and relevant lives with and without religion. What I have a problem with is when faith, be it blind faith in religious dogma, or be it blind faith in scientific or cultural dogma, becomes a barrier to investigation. It's clear that this happens quite frequently in fundamentalist religions, and is the driving force behind such fallacious theories as ID.
I explained predators playing with their prey in a cousin post, so I won't go over it again here. This is just opinion, and we clearly differ, but my opinion is that to attach cruelty to these actions is to anthropomorphize creatures that are too simple to feel malice, but also too simple to feel compassion (as in, a quick and easy death for their prey). Animals play with one another (puppies or kittens), so why wouldn't they play with their prey? I believe it is training and exercise in both cases.
You're missing the point. To turn your analogy back on you, Nihilism didn't arise out of an agenda, it arose out of a response to the human condition in the context of the zeitgeist of the era and a search for meaning. ID arose out of a backdoor attempt to undermine science and to sneak mythology of origin into science classrooms instead of sunday school or theology classrooms, where it belongs. It lacks legitimacy as a philosophy and as a theological or scientific theory of origin.
No, that is not genocide. The elk eat because they are hungry. They do not attempt to eliminate another species. If such an elimination occurs (as it often does in nature, that's what natural selection is all about), then it happens by accident, not intent. The elk don't have the capacity to reason and thus they could never say to themselves, for instance, "You know, these weeds are constricting the growth of these grasses we like to eat. Shall we embark on a program to eliminate the weeds by chewing all of them up and spitting them out, so that more of our grasses may grow? Then our numbers will grow." They were eating those willow presumably because they liked to eat them. Animals have limited intelligence, but they certainly have the capacity to have a preference for a certain food.
The difference in predation or competition and genocide is very clear. While animals engage in territorial squabbles as you mention, ants do not go out LOOKING for other ants to exterminate. Conflicts arise only out of expansion into neighboring territories--they only engage in warfare when their populations but up against one another. This sort of competition occurs throughout nature and is different than what humans practice, which often constitutes a concerted hunting and elimination of humans or other animals that has nothing to do with sustenance, and often nothing to do with competition, and everything to do with imposing our brand of order on the world. I do agree that a lot of human conflict arises out of contention for limited resources, but you have to also acknowledge that much of it does not. When we invaded Vietnam, for instance, there we no resources in contention that lead to that conflict: rather, it arose out of our will to test out some military toys and impose our order somewhere.
When the wolves hunt the elk, it is a negative feedback system that regulates itself. If the wolves eliminate too many elk, the wolves do not have enough food to survive, and thus the wolf population diminishes. Similarly, if the elk destroy their food supply, they die and rot in the ground, becoming feritlizer for more grasses to grow.
When humans deliberately eliminate species or groups of other humans, it is arbitrary and has nothing to do with this balance: it has only to do with a positive feedback system in which one group of people seeks unlimited growth. This is hugely different from anything else that happens in nature, and our ability to reason (and therefore, to be murderous and insane) is what facilitates this. Our ability to produce arbitrary amounts of food and to store this food facilitates unlimited growth, and it also has the side effect of making us exterminate other people and species in other to convert as much of the world as possible into food for us. This is unprecedented in the animal kingdom.
I don't need to go into torture, because while animals might occasionally play with their prey, they also play with one another. I see no reason to look upon these actions differently: I see both of the as being training and exercise of a sort. To put malice on those activities is to anthropomorphize animals with minds that are IMO too simple to derive pleasure from the pain of another being.
This is an interesting post that I agree with, except for the final sentence:
But in the end, science belongs in science classes, and areas that are beyond science (including intelligent design) could be tought I guess in philosophy or theology classes.
The former I agree with, though of course science has application outside of classrooms. However, I don't think that ID belongs anywhere, especially not in a philosophy classroom, because the entire body of work is fraught with fallacies and bad reasoning. Philosophy should be based upon reason, not comfortable assumptions that are appealing simply because they are warm and fuzzy and fit with assumptions that are already in place.
Theology classes? I still don't think so. ID is not written in the scriptures of any religion I know of. Theology classes should teach the creation myths of whatever religion those courses are attached to. ID is a fabrication that is designed to take the creationist challenge out of the sanctuary and into the classroom. As such, it has no validity anywhere.
I don't want to put words in his mouth, but perhaps he looks upon religion as the end of rational thought and the start of comfortable, though fallacious, assumptions. To some people, the adoption of religion looks like either inherited faith with no rational thought or questioning, or a case of simply throwing up one's hands and saying "I give up!" and embracing the most conventient explanation. I don't know what problems with evolution you could be referring to, but for any religion to cast stones at evolutionary biology, the stones must first make it out of a glass house. There are all kinds of problems with particularly Western religion, mainly (in my view) the idea of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God allowing so much suffering to take place.
That's a fallacy. What you consider to be cruelty on the part of animals is predation. There is a difference. Animals hunt and kill other animals, but they don't engage in torture or genocide.
Gary Gygax: "It's a..." (rolls dice) "...pleasure to meet you!"
(later in the program, Gary rolls dice to make a decision, and Al Gore grabs his arm.
Al Gore: "Put the dice away, or I'm taking them away!"
BAJAJAJA!!!
The only real connection between programmers and roleplaying games is when Operation Sundevil (http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/SJG/)raided Steve Jackson Games' offices over the Cyberpunk RPG. I think the correlation you mention would also be found among polymer scientists, physicists, chemists, or any other field filled with moderately intelligent, nerdy people. I'm kind of surprised not to see SJG/GURPS mentioned alongside TSR in the followups, it was a much more flexible and open system. Or Shadowrun? It was pretty interesting too.
I put the title in all caps because I am responding to dozens of people claiming Solaris is monolithic. It is not. The Solaris microkernel is a stripped-down SVr4 kernel. Drivers are loaded from it and run in the same context for performance reasons, everything else outside of scheduling, interrupts, and a few other services runs strictly in user space and is dynamically loadable. I've heard the model referred to as an "object-oriented" architecture, since modules can call functions in other modules, though Mach, the famous microkernel, is also pretty thoroughly object-oriented, as is Windows XP's kernel, so this is somewhat confusing when used as a term to differentiate the architecture from a microkernel.
The problem is that the pathogen does not result in the negative consequence 100% of the time.
That's a poor analogy. Smoking impairs the health of your lungs 100% of the time. This might not manifest itself as emphysema or cancer every time, but from a health perspective, you are always better off not smoking. That's been proven under rigorous conditions. Shortness of breath, wasted money, yellowed teeth and nails, etc. are negative consequences, if of lesser degree than lung cancer.
Applying this to your argument, violence in video games always has negative psychological effects, but they do not always manifest themselves in the form of violence. I do not know whether or not this is true, but for such a statement to be made, I would expect it to be qualified with research, which, as you note, has not been done. Even if this were done, I would expect justification for extending the laws that are already in place, including the ratings system. Therefore, there is no scientifically valid reason for such a law, and moral majority does not qualify as a valid reason to pass any law. In other words, laws should not be enacted unless their is a reason for them. Authority is subject to reason.
Maybe they aren't "anti-family." Maybe they are pro-First Amendment. Do you really think there is some Faustian character in government seeking to destroy families? If so, would you care to provide evidence rather than placing invective monikers on those who disagree with you?
These games are not made for children and there is already a ratings system in place. Even using a term like "anti-family" evinces the sort of reactionary paranoia typical of that exhibited by sanctimonious right-wing moralists. No one is "anti-family," and it's a ridiculous term. Parental control is the responsibility of... anyone? anyone? the PARENTS. If the parents choose to let a video game console raise their children, then the responsibility for what their children are exposed to falls on.. anyone? That would be the parents' shoulders. The hypocrisy of a figure who made his career on graphic depictions of violence (well, that and political buy-offs) signing such a bill into law is just...anyone?...anyone? staggering.
Symantec's products, in my experience, create a lot of instability in Mac OS X and are very difficult to thoroughly remove. They also create a lot of unnecessary conflicts that can disable services you were using if you don't know how to go into all the kernel extension and other system folders to eliminate the software. I know OS X isn't the most secure OS in the world, but I would prefer to go without third party security than use Symantec's products, until and unless they learn how to make their products more effective and less disruptive.
You're both wrong, or at least overstating your cases. FreeBSD provides, for the most part, Unix user space functionality. Almost all of the essential functionality that must exist in an operating system is provided by Mach. This includes memory management, IPC, real-time support, VM, and other crucial functionality. Saying that either part "doesn't do a lot" is untrue. Mach is largely the guts of the system, right above the hardware, and FreeBSD is Unix space, sitting on top of Mach, providing an interface to it, managing processes, etc. If by "background technology" you mean that the user is largely unaware of Mach, I'll agree. But Mach handles the most essential primitives of the OS--almost everything you do in OS X has to go through Mach at some point.
No, they did not use 2.5. 2.5 is a huge kernel because it contains 4.3BSD as well as CMU Mach code--Mach was originally developed inside of BSD. As Mach became more of a microkernel, they threw more and more kernel functionality outside of the kernel. The idea is that the same services may be provided, but they use the Mach primitives to accomplish those tasks: it's somewhat reminiscent in this way as the RISC concept: fewer, simpler, low level, primitive calls can be pieced together to form more complexity. Version 3 fully deposited all Unix functionality outside of the kernel. I'd say OS X either uses version 3.x or 4.x (which I think was actually developed at Utah), and then a modified version at that. There would simply be no point in using 2.5. Yes, the performance is better, but only because it isn't a microkernel at all--you only use Mach if you want a microkernel. If you were going to use 2.5, you would be better off using FreeBSD all the way.
You can almost look at Mach as a virtual machine layer that alllows you to deploy operating systems on top of it. FreeBSD is on top of Mach, though for some things, the FreeBSD layer reaches the hardware directly.
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As for watching dogs, I've had pet dogs my entire life and I understand them very well. It's easy to anthropomorphize them, but when you get down to it, they are very simple beasts. I agree that they can experience probably a wider gamut of emotions than we give them credit for; actually, I think a sense of belonging, a fairly advanced emotion, is one of the strongest emotional traits they have, descended from pack instincts. I've read tons of dog trainer and pet psychologist literature, and there is for the most part a consensus on the idea that dogs, at least, while intelligent, are limited. To what degrees they are limited is still a matter of debate and research. Generally, trainers believe that dogs do what is in their best interests, and what is in their best interests revolves around food, or perhaps having his ears rubbed. When we see a dog that has done something bad acting "guilty," it's probably not guilt. It's fear of punishment, and sometimes it's the knowledge that contrition might lead to lighter punishment. The dog does not have the capacity to regret what he did. That requires the ability to think "I wish I hadn't done that," and that requires language. He does have the ability to associate cause and effect, and to know that he has hell to pay.
But it looks like guilt to us, because it is what we would feel in the same situation. Similarly, you are reading much deeper complexity into the neighborhood dogs you watch than is really there. Either that, or you watch too many cartoons. I don't see how chasing, fighting, marking territory, and humping one another constitutes interrelational complexity of an order to compare to human relations.
First off, this is a straw man. I never said that animals lack "emotions or personalities," or even intelligence of a kind. They simply lack the intelligence and the ability to have programs.By your leap-ahead logic, the mewling of cats and growls and barks of dogs constitutes language.
You inadvertently bring up a very good point that contrasts the way dogs and other animals think versus the way we think. The fact that we have language means that we think in words. It's called "verbal thought." Dogs, and likely every other animal, think in a sensory fashion. This is another reason they could never organize and launch programs. Example: Assuming for the moment all dogs hate cats, dogs would never envision a world without cats and then try to make that vision reality, but it would be easy for us to decide to get rid of cats, to form a plan of action, and to accomplish the gruesome task--even if we never had the vision of the world devoid of cats, and were driven by verbal ideas alone.
You are not clarifying anything, you are obfuscating and misinterpreting a very simple, unassailable premise. We passed equilibrium long ago.
No, it doesn't. You don't know what negative feedback is. If you were right about crop rotation being a feedback loop, it would be a positive feedback loop, not a negative feedback loop. Go do some research on systems so you can learn the difference.
If overfarming land were a successful negative feedback control, our population would go down after we overfarm land. We have overfarmed land many times throughout history, but our population has grown for every year in our history. Therefore, we are able to thwart this particular negative feedback control. No other animal has that option. Sure, tigers might have to change what they eat, but when they lose access to their main food source, their numbers diminish. Ours do not. Why is this so difficult for you to grasp?
So the arbitrary, imaginary boundaries that we draw around parts of the world somehow invalidate my premise? Do you care to explain what difference it makes WHERE the population expansion occurs? I'm not seeing the logic here. I mean, where do you think the massive food surpluses we produce in America go? Do you think they just disappear or something? Do you think we burn them? They go facilitate growth somewhere in the Third World. We ARE a "global species," and we ARE an animal population, so that's how I'm looking at things.
First of all, the plains Indians started subsisting mainly on buffalo only after Europeans brought horses to the plains. Prior to that, it was unfeasable and they mainly practiced primitive agriculture. Second of all, native Americans adapted their diets as any species will, but they did not seek to annex neighboring territories in order to turn them into fields of grain. They tried to keep their populations in check because their survival depended upon it. The native Americans remained subject to the negative feedback controls of food availability and neighboring tribal boundaries. They would kill only how many buffalo they needed to survive, because they realized that it's stupid to wipe out your own food supply. Also, they would not waste any part of the prey they did kill. What does adapting your diet have to do with altering your environment to suit your diet? Tigers might start eating people, but they don't go out and try to wipe out the hyena population, even though hyenas are direct nuisances and competitors. Humans will deliberately wipe out, for instance, foxes, because they interfere with our agriculture, preying on chickens. Or, as in Europe, we hunted wolves to extinction, because we considered them a menace. This is intentional extermination, which is clearly different that hunting to extinction.
I'll concede that point, and I'm certainly not saying humans are not animals. I still maintain that we are the only species capable and willing to implement a program of deliberate elimination of other species.
What you say is true, but connecting your life to something greater than yourself does not in and of itself mandate that you adopt religion or spiritualism of any kind. It's all in how we define something that is greater than ourselves. You can attach yourself to your family, your friends, your community, or mankind itself. You can attach yourself to your life's work or to a cause, or, yes, even to science. I think that people can have full and integral and relevant lives with and without religion. What I have a problem with is when faith, be it blind faith in religious dogma, or be it blind faith in scientific or cultural dogma, becomes a barrier to investigation. It's clear that this happens quite frequently in fundamentalist religions, and is the driving force behind such fallacious theories as ID.
I explained predators playing with their prey in a cousin post, so I won't go over it again here. This is just opinion, and we clearly differ, but my opinion is that to attach cruelty to these actions is to anthropomorphize creatures that are too simple to feel malice, but also too simple to feel compassion (as in, a quick and easy death for their prey). Animals play with one another (puppies or kittens), so why wouldn't they play with their prey? I believe it is training and exercise in both cases.
You're missing the point. To turn your analogy back on you, Nihilism didn't arise out of an agenda, it arose out of a response to the human condition in the context of the zeitgeist of the era and a search for meaning. ID arose out of a backdoor attempt to undermine science and to sneak mythology of origin into science classrooms instead of sunday school or theology classrooms, where it belongs. It lacks legitimacy as a philosophy and as a theological or scientific theory of origin.
The difference in predation or competition and genocide is very clear. While animals engage in territorial squabbles as you mention, ants do not go out LOOKING for other ants to exterminate. Conflicts arise only out of expansion into neighboring territories--they only engage in warfare when their populations but up against one another. This sort of competition occurs throughout nature and is different than what humans practice, which often constitutes a concerted hunting and elimination of humans or other animals that has nothing to do with sustenance, and often nothing to do with competition, and everything to do with imposing our brand of order on the world. I do agree that a lot of human conflict arises out of contention for limited resources, but you have to also acknowledge that much of it does not. When we invaded Vietnam, for instance, there we no resources in contention that lead to that conflict: rather, it arose out of our will to test out some military toys and impose our order somewhere.
When the wolves hunt the elk, it is a negative feedback system that regulates itself. If the wolves eliminate too many elk, the wolves do not have enough food to survive, and thus the wolf population diminishes. Similarly, if the elk destroy their food supply, they die and rot in the ground, becoming feritlizer for more grasses to grow.
When humans deliberately eliminate species or groups of other humans, it is arbitrary and has nothing to do with this balance: it has only to do with a positive feedback system in which one group of people seeks unlimited growth. This is hugely different from anything else that happens in nature, and our ability to reason (and therefore, to be murderous and insane) is what facilitates this. Our ability to produce arbitrary amounts of food and to store this food facilitates unlimited growth, and it also has the side effect of making us exterminate other people and species in other to convert as much of the world as possible into food for us. This is unprecedented in the animal kingdom.
I don't need to go into torture, because while animals might occasionally play with their prey, they also play with one another. I see no reason to look upon these actions differently: I see both of the as being training and exercise of a sort. To put malice on those activities is to anthropomorphize animals with minds that are IMO too simple to derive pleasure from the pain of another being.
The former I agree with, though of course science has application outside of classrooms. However, I don't think that ID belongs anywhere, especially not in a philosophy classroom, because the entire body of work is fraught with fallacies and bad reasoning. Philosophy should be based upon reason, not comfortable assumptions that are appealing simply because they are warm and fuzzy and fit with assumptions that are already in place.
Theology classes? I still don't think so. ID is not written in the scriptures of any religion I know of. Theology classes should teach the creation myths of whatever religion those courses are attached to. ID is a fabrication that is designed to take the creationist challenge out of the sanctuary and into the classroom. As such, it has no validity anywhere.
I don't want to put words in his mouth, but perhaps he looks upon religion as the end of rational thought and the start of comfortable, though fallacious, assumptions. To some people, the adoption of religion looks like either inherited faith with no rational thought or questioning, or a case of simply throwing up one's hands and saying "I give up!" and embracing the most conventient explanation. I don't know what problems with evolution you could be referring to, but for any religion to cast stones at evolutionary biology, the stones must first make it out of a glass house. There are all kinds of problems with particularly Western religion, mainly (in my view) the idea of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God allowing so much suffering to take place.
That's a fallacy. What you consider to be cruelty on the part of animals is predation. There is a difference. Animals hunt and kill other animals, but they don't engage in torture or genocide.
Gary Gygax: "It's a..." (rolls dice) "...pleasure to meet you!"
(later in the program, Gary rolls dice to make a decision, and Al Gore grabs his arm. Al Gore: "Put the dice away, or I'm taking them away!"
BAJAJAJA!!!
The only real connection between programmers and roleplaying games is when Operation Sundevil (http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/SJG/)raided Steve Jackson Games' offices over the Cyberpunk RPG. I think the correlation you mention would also be found among polymer scientists, physicists, chemists, or any other field filled with moderately intelligent, nerdy people.
I'm kind of surprised not to see SJG/GURPS mentioned alongside TSR in the followups, it was a much more flexible and open system. Or Shadowrun? It was pretty interesting too.
So, what are Ivan and Andres, drag queens?
I put the title in all caps because I am responding to dozens of people claiming Solaris is monolithic. It is not. The Solaris microkernel is a stripped-down SVr4 kernel. Drivers are loaded from it and run in the same context for performance reasons, everything else outside of scheduling, interrupts, and a few other services runs strictly in user space and is dynamically loadable. I've heard the model referred to as an "object-oriented" architecture, since modules can call functions in other modules, though Mach, the famous microkernel, is also pretty thoroughly object-oriented, as is Windows XP's kernel, so this is somewhat confusing when used as a term to differentiate the architecture from a microkernel.
It is superior, also because it runs driers in the same context as the microkernel. That's why it's faster than Mach or QNX
Applying this to your argument, violence in video games always has negative psychological effects, but they do not always manifest themselves in the form of violence. I do not know whether or not this is true, but for such a statement to be made, I would expect it to be qualified with research, which, as you note, has not been done. Even if this were done, I would expect justification for extending the laws that are already in place, including the ratings system. Therefore, there is no scientifically valid reason for such a law, and moral majority does not qualify as a valid reason to pass any law. In other words, laws should not be enacted unless their is a reason for them. Authority is subject to reason.
Maybe they aren't "anti-family." Maybe they are pro-First Amendment. Do you really think there is some Faustian character in government seeking to destroy families? If so, would you care to provide evidence rather than placing invective monikers on those who disagree with you?
These games are not made for children and there is already a ratings system in place. Even using a term like "anti-family" evinces the sort of reactionary paranoia typical of that exhibited by sanctimonious right-wing moralists. No one is "anti-family," and it's a ridiculous term. ...anyone? ...anyone? staggering.
Parental control is the responsibility of... anyone? anyone? the PARENTS. If the parents choose to let a video game console raise their children, then the responsibility for what their children are exposed to falls on.. anyone? That would be the parents' shoulders. The hypocrisy of a figure who made his career on graphic depictions of violence (well, that and political buy-offs) signing such a bill into law is just
Symantec's products, in my experience, create a lot of instability in Mac OS X and are very difficult to thoroughly remove. They also create a lot of unnecessary conflicts that can disable services you were using if you don't know how to go into all the kernel extension and other system folders to eliminate the software. I know OS X isn't the most secure OS in the world, but I would prefer to go without third party security than use Symantec's products, until and unless they learn how to make their products more effective and less disruptive.
...I made a replica of what it could look like for giggles:
iPod Video
They will almost certainly port Linux to the nano, as they have to all generations of its big brother.
I could tell you, but then I'd have to klil you...
You're both wrong, or at least overstating your cases. FreeBSD provides, for the most part, Unix user space functionality. Almost all of the essential functionality that must exist in an operating system is provided by Mach. This includes memory management, IPC, real-time support, VM, and other crucial functionality. Saying that either part "doesn't do a lot" is untrue. Mach is largely the guts of the system, right above the hardware, and FreeBSD is Unix space, sitting on top of Mach, providing an interface to it, managing processes, etc. If by "background technology" you mean that the user is largely unaware of Mach, I'll agree. But Mach handles the most essential primitives of the OS--almost everything you do in OS X has to go through Mach at some point.
You can almost look at Mach as a virtual machine layer that alllows you to deploy operating systems on top of it. FreeBSD is on top of Mach, though for some things, the FreeBSD layer reaches the hardware directly.
True, but more precisely, IOKit drivers are written in Embedded C++
I believe OS X drivers are normally written in Embedded C++, assuming they are IOKit...