Although I imagine these have been in the FF3 branch all along, I only just noticed today because I've been playing with some drop shadows for my company's logo. Not only do the filter effects look really nice, FF3 does svg draws/redraws much more smoothly than IE+Adobe SVG Viewer, which had (up until now perhaps) been the best in-browser SVG experience for windows. Gotta say I'm really impressed and really happy.
I've been wondering about this particular aspect of magnetism for a while - ie demagnetisation, magnets as energy stores etc - are you able to supply any further information/links etc with regards to this?
Cheers, percy.
Few points, none terribly important.
First off thanks Jeff - i've played and enjoyed a few of your games over the years, mostly when i was student and had time on my hands - I even payed:-)
Second, lately i don't have much spare time to play games so I agree with your point about "10-15 hours of kick ass A-list material" - these days if I was going to play an RPG i would want it to feel like everything was quite purposeful, almost like a novel.
Third, while i'm at it, i reckon Wasteland was an awesome a-list material game, but I'm showing my age...
FWIW I've played a few of Jeff's games over the years and enjoyed them very much - they're very oldschool rpg's (think ultima/wasteland). Yeah RPGs can be long-winded at times but somewhere along the line that long-windedness became an endearing feature and the genre flourished. When i was younger i lapped it up but these days I mostly can't be bothered or simply don't have the time (apart from a furious spurt a year ago to finish Morrowind). Perhaps Jeff has just changed a bit as he's gotten older - he is allowed to y'know.
Uh hi, thanks for the reply, just quickly dude if you feel like having a chat then cool, but if all you want to do is reiterate the Christian position at me (i'm quite familiar and don't need reminding), then troll elsewhere.
A quick test - do you understand what i mean by 'assertion'? I said in my previous post that you 'asserted' some things. Here i'll help you out - here's a dictionary definition: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/assertion. For example you've done a lot of it in this post as well, eg
Faith in an of itself gives answers
or
There is no way science or any other human effort can discover these [answers]
Do you realise why i might consider these statements to be assertions?
Oops I seem to have missed your closing paragraph, sorry:
At the very minimum, acknowledging God is an acknowledgement of a morality that is beyond subjective human choice. If there is no God, then moral relativism is a valid option, leading to the logical conclusion that there is no real (intrinsic) reason to act for the societal good.
I'm not sure but it kind of sounds like you're implying that there would be 'no real (intrinsic) reasons' for anything under moral relativism. By real/intrinsic do you mean infallible or self-evident or eternal or something along those lines?
Even if those types of properties did exist in our reality what access would we have to them as humans? We couldn't ever know for sure that a reason or a truth or a moral had one of those properties except by faith. There just isn't any way to establish any of those properties about anything.
Or at least as I understand things.
I cannot argue that such (an absence of God negates reasons to act for the societal good) is true in and of itself, for some may choose to act in a moral manner apart from acceptance of God.
Mmmm okay, bit of a retreat from your previous post, but i reckon you could still have a go at it, even if you were just asserting it last time.
Geez i don't even adhere to the statement and i reckon i could have a crack at it. But anyways...
If there is no God... then how can one define right and wrong?
Your question about defining right and wrong is an interesting one.
See I wonder now whether there really is anything useful we can do with these concepts as humans.
Similar to you (i guess) i suppose that absolute measures of anything are predicated on the existence of a privileged observer (ie God).
But further to that it seems to me that absolute measures could only really be knowable by the privileged observer as well.
So as a concept yeah cool, but I wouldn't dare to say that i knew definitively whether something was right or wrong or not.
It's just beyond my operational parameters as a human being.
See i think 'right' and 'wrong' are born out of a bit of induction and imagination.
We make types of judgements like "x sucks more than y" all the time, and if x ends up on the losing side often enough we tend to call it "wrong", with the converse being true for "right".
That's human. The definitions aren't absolute, they're created and dynamic.
But anyways I digress.
A good friend once tried to convince me that moral relativism is true (that each individual can decide what is right or wrong for himself/herself).
Well I'm not sure if you meant to state it that way but anyone will quickly run aground trying to prove things true.
It's not worth the effort most of the time. What tends to yield better results is showing statements to be
accurate descriptions. I'd say (don't feeling like doing a sociological study right now) that moral
relativism is an accurate description of the real world - most people do decide for themselves, hence the
list of interesting life choices you presented.
But the clincher is that not all choices have the same outcomes - some choices really do suck more than others.
Maybe wrong, maybe not, but many are counter-productive and some downright stupid.
I choose to avoid some things because I know they'll screw me up big time - a personal example for myself is drugs.
Smoking dope in high school had some bad effects on me so i havn't touched it (or any illicit drug) since, goodness knows i've wanted to sometimes though.
I don't know the origin of the quote but you sometimes hear people around here say "your right to swing your arm ends at my nose".
It's pithy but gets the point across.
btw I'm sorry about your niece, that bites in a way that I doubt I'll ever understand.
If there is no God, then there is no real reason to act for the societal good. Just go out and rape, steal, seek pleasure for yourself, and do whatever it is you want to do... I find it funny that most atheists, however, still have a pretty firm moral code. Why? If there is no God, then there is no one to hold you accountable. Go for the gusto! Kill off your neighbors and set yourself up as king of your block (or of the world).
I seem to recall that I used to think like that but I don't anymore and I can't remember why I used to think like that. I (then, like you now) might have had good reasons, i just can't remember. And if they were good reasons and I've somehow lost them along the way i should quite like to re-adopt them. But I won't lie to you, if it turns out the reasons aren't that good after all I might like to argue about some of them.
So specifically, remind me why this should be true:
If there is no God, then there is no real reason to act for the societal good.
And while i'm typing, what is the more that you are alluding to?
Oh just for fun while I'm eating lunch....(please forgive the rough edges of my rant, I'm a programmer not a philosopher:)...
There are many things that don't make sense....(1)
That's why there isn't, and never has been a single human that was/isn't religious....(2)
For starters can you clear up the logical connection between these two sentences - i really don't see how (2) follows from (1). Secondly (2) which you want to be an analytic statement dependent on (1) is really a descriptive statement that can (concievably) be tested as long as you provide a good enough definition of 'religious'. Please provide one if you have one handy.
There is not now, and there has never been, a culture that did not have some form of religion....(3)
The human creature is incurably religious....(4)
(3) is probably true at the present as a descriptive statement, but is not necessarily true. But none of that logically leads to (4), nor does it stand up on its own, its just an assertion.
Science is the modern world view and therefore religion...(5)
Does that mean that worldview = religion then? I hate these types of statements becuase they conflate concepts that are distinct. They also do violence to language by obviating words.
Don't do it it's bad. Look up the words and use them properly. As for science being a religion... that topic has been done to death by many more able persons than i. I'll simply suggest that what you probably mean is that there are aspects of science that might resemble religion in some ways, but you might as well say that a cat has paws and is therefore a dog.
It attempts to answer four questions every thinking human asks at some time in their life. 1) Who am I really? 2) Where did I come from, 3) Why am I here, 4) Where am I going after I die.
Well you just sort of personified science; please be careful with your attributions - it would be more accurate to say that some humans tend to ask these questions, and some humans are engaged in scientific pursuits.
In the process some scientists have had a bash at some of these questions (particularly 1, 2 and 4), but 'why' questions are usually not easy to nail down because they tend to make certain presuppositions about reason and meaning that aren't at all obvious.
Science cannot answer these, only faith can.
Well how do you come to this statement other than by bald assertion? Of course science can answer them. A child could answer them. Or do you mean answer them correctly? What constitutes a correct answer to one these questions? And who gets to judge the correctness of the answer? Why does faith give correct answers? In the end it will always be a human making the judgment, so our usual rules of utility and consistency of knowledge will have to apply.
Of all life forms on this planet, we have evidence that only people seek answers to
these.
My guess is this is probably true, but i really doubt you could quote any evidence to back this up...:)
God is the only one who gives satisfying answers to these.
Well that depends on who you ask. A few years ago I would have agreed with you but not anymore. These days I find a lot of the answers provided in church really unsatisfying.
(And it's another bald assertion.)
Right - so God can EITHER make a poptart so hot that he really can't pick it up - OR he can pick up infinitely hot poptarts - but not both.
Who decides which is the limitation on his power?
Now that's just silly! (ref. Graham Chapman).
Look granted this is just mental fun and games and not necessarily related to anything tangible, but
I think it would be better to say 'all things that are possible' rather than 'anything except [foo]'.
Although obviously they mean pretty much the same thing if [foo] is the set of impossible things.
However, this limitation doesn't help us much.
My 'Eric the Purple Dinosaur' example contains no contradictions (that I can imagine).
His special 'magic' power is pretty limited - indeed one could perhaps imagine such a power existing within the laws of physics as we know them.
However, even with such a relatively limited ability to mess with your mind - you have no way to falsify the theory of his existance.
That's all fine.
That means that 'Eric the Purple Dinosaur' is possible non-contradictory entity.
Not of much use to science of course, but more acceptable that an intrinsically contradictory concept.
The limitation is merely an attempt to move beyond the naive concept of omnipotence, which contains contradictions (and is therefore to be rejected), to a more internally consistent one.
I'm not a maths guru, but I understand that mathematicians have done similar things with set theory - naive set theory was found to have contradictions about a century ago so it was axiomatised.
You'll have to forgive my use of analogy.
I realise that analogy doesn't make anything right - I'm merely trying to say that it's valid to try and move thought systems beyond naive readings.
This more limited definition of omnipotence is interesting though - it suggests that (for example) God could not choose a different value for PI or make it possible to trisect an angle using only ruler and compasses because to do so would cause all sorts of messy contradictions.
I've heard more or less this exact thing preached from a pulpit.
Before you explode, although I've spent most of my life going to church these days I'm sort of a meta-christian.
I've got a sceptical/scientific streak thats making ordinary Christian belief a bit hard.
So at the moment I'm kind of arguing for fun, not out of fear for my soul.
It was a baptist church in Australia if you're interested.
I'm not an expert, but I think that omnipotence has never enjoyed a single definition or universal support from theists.
The wikipedia article is helpful (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnipotence).
It references a nice quote from Paul (considered by some to be the true founder of Christianity) saying that God cannot lie (Titus 1:2), ie he probably was not a supporter of the naive concept of omnipotence.
However, did the church find out that this was a limitation on omnipotence by some reference in the ancient sources - or did the poptart argument force them into this definition?
I suspect the latter - which is just a way of saying "You scientists can't even attempt to prove the existance of God by looking for any contradictions that he may have left lying around" - and "You can't use the 'poptart' argument to disprove his omnipotence and thereby demonstrate his non-existance".
This line of discussion is pretty much purely philosophical, not scientific, so it's only about disproof inasmuch as the set of assertions could be shown to imply contradictions.
So the argument only eliminates the possibility of existence of the particular thing described by the particular contradictory system.
I'm pretty sure for the theist this is a descriptive exercise.
They're already pretty convinced God exists, they're just busy trying to formulate the best description of God.
If one description doesn't work, try another one, lather, rinse, repeat.
Granted if *no* descriptions work, then there's a real problem, but I don't know whether or not that is the current state of affairs in theology.
Omnipotence could perhaps be better rendered as 'the greatest power that implies no contradictions', otherwise it becomes a joke concept, as your example shows.
But once you have done that you are well on your way down the interpretive slippery slope that leads to secular humanism. You'll find lots of friendly people ready to greet you with open arms when you reach the bottom!
All interpretive positions are maintained by arbitrary choices about whether to read this or that bit of scripture in a plain or metaphorical way - there really isn't a stable position anywhere on the interpretive slope that doesn't rely on extra-scriptural axioms.
I'm not certain about this, but I think the secular position is simply the one that relies on the fewest axioms.
Just tried out a quick comparison of SVG rendering between FFb1 and Adobe SVG Viewer 3.02 (in IE 6) using the sample svg suite that comes with batik (1.6)
All worked okay (no crashes), but there were quite a few small differences when placed side-by-side
- Alot of font faces and sizes were different
- Some line thickness were different (fatter)
- filters and patterns don't seem to be working at all yet
Some things that are good:
- gradients look nearly identical
- Most basic line art looks really good
- the dynamically drawn 3D.svg sample file works really well and is very smooth
All up I'm bloody impressed and can't wait to see this mature further.
Congratulations to the FF team!
The parent post raises an issue that's been bugging me for a while about this whole ID debate.
I'm not an ID advocate but I think that it's reasonable to ask "was this done intentionally?" when faced with some interesting set of circumstances. Various fields of research already do this - for instance archaeology, forensics, paleontology, history, etc.
Biology is another such field as the parent poster suggests - I can imagine a geneticist in the future asking whether a sample is representative of natural diversity or mankinds ingenuity - whether or not it is (sorry about this) a product of 'intelligent design'.
I would hate to see the general rejection of fundamentalism based ID result in the rejection of similar non-fundamentalist questions about design that are scientifically valid.
Yeah it does suck.
I took some cues from the part of the discussion about the tag header framing bit (not that I really know what that is), and used Foobar2000's masstagger to strip out a whole lot of non-essential tags from the files on my player - had far fewer lockups since.
The firmware on my bought player is version 1.521 and the updater program reports that the latest one available to me is 1.321 - seems Samsung/Yepp are a little out of synch with themselves;)
All up though, I really am enjoying the player - just hope they get the tag bug sorted soon.
Proper playlists would nice too:-)
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.satirewire.com/news/aug02/jupiter.shtml
Sounds like a job for Zeppelin
Ooh YEAH:
So I've decided what I'm gonna do now
So I'm packing my bags for the Misty Mountains
Where the spirits go now
Over the hills where the spirits fly
SVG Filter Effects are working in FF3 - hooray!
See for example:
http://www.svgbasics.com/filters1.html
Although I imagine these have been in the FF3 branch all along, I only just noticed today because I've been playing with some drop shadows for my company's logo. Not only do the filter effects look really nice, FF3 does svg draws/redraws much more smoothly than IE+Adobe SVG Viewer, which had (up until now perhaps) been the best in-browser SVG experience for windows. Gotta say I'm really impressed and really happy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
I've been wondering about this particular aspect of magnetism for a while - ie demagnetisation, magnets as energy stores etc - are you able to supply any further information/links etc with regards to this? Cheers, percy.
Replaygain is exactly what GP wants
Few points, none terribly important. :-)
First off thanks Jeff - i've played and enjoyed a few of your games over the years, mostly when i was student and had time on my hands - I even payed
Second, lately i don't have much spare time to play games so I agree with your point about "10-15 hours of kick ass A-list material" - these days if I was going to play an RPG i would want it to feel like everything was quite purposeful, almost like a novel.
Third, while i'm at it, i reckon Wasteland was an awesome a-list material game, but I'm showing my age...
FWIW I've played a few of Jeff's games over the years and enjoyed them very much - they're very oldschool rpg's (think ultima/wasteland). Yeah RPGs can be long-winded at times but somewhere along the line that long-windedness became an endearing feature and the genre flourished. When i was younger i lapped it up but these days I mostly can't be bothered or simply don't have the time (apart from a furious spurt a year ago to finish Morrowind). Perhaps Jeff has just changed a bit as he's gotten older - he is allowed to y'know.
A quick test - do you understand what i mean by 'assertion'? I said in my previous post that you 'asserted' some things. Here i'll help you out - here's a dictionary definition: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/assertion. For example you've done a lot of it in this post as well, eg or Do you realise why i might consider these statements to be assertions?
Even if those types of properties did exist in our reality what access would we have to them as humans? We couldn't ever know for sure that a reason or a truth or a moral had one of those properties except by faith. There just isn't any way to establish any of those properties about anything.
Or at least as I understand things.
I don't know the origin of the quote but you sometimes hear people around here say "your right to swing your arm ends at my nose". It's pithy but gets the point across.
btw I'm sorry about your niece, that bites in a way that I doubt I'll ever understand.
For starters can you clear up the logical connection between these two sentences - i really don't see how (2) follows from (1). Secondly (2) which you want to be an analytic statement dependent on (1) is really a descriptive statement that can (concievably) be tested as long as you provide a good enough definition of 'religious'. Please provide one if you have one handy. (3) is probably true at the present as a descriptive statement, but is not necessarily true. But none of that logically leads to (4), nor does it stand up on its own, its just an assertion. Does that mean that worldview = religion then? I hate these types of statements becuase they conflate concepts that are distinct. They also do violence to language by obviating words. Don't do it it's bad. Look up the words and use them properly. As for science being a religion... that topic has been done to death by many more able persons than i. I'll simply suggest that what you probably mean is that there are aspects of science that might resemble religion in some ways, but you might as well say that a cat has paws and is therefore a dog. Well you just sort of personified science; please be careful with your attributions - it would be more accurate to say that some humans tend to ask these questions, and some humans are engaged in scientific pursuits. In the process some scientists have had a bash at some of these questions (particularly 1, 2 and 4), but 'why' questions are usually not easy to nail down because they tend to make certain presuppositions about reason and meaning that aren't at all obvious. Well how do you come to this statement other than by bald assertion? Of course science can answer them. A child could answer them. Or do you mean answer them correctly? What constitutes a correct answer to one these questions? And who gets to judge the correctness of the answer? Why does faith give correct answers? In the end it will always be a human making the judgment, so our usual rules of utility and consistency of knowledge will have to apply.
My guess is this is probably true, but i really doubt you could quote any evidence to back this up...
Well that depends on who you ask. A few years ago I would have agreed with you but not anymore. These days I find a lot of the answers provided in church really unsatisfying. (And it's another bald assertion.)
Aha! Finally after all these I think I've found my calling - Spamhenge.
You sound Australian - NSW?
Now that's just silly! (ref. Graham Chapman). Look granted this is just mental fun and games and not necessarily related to anything tangible, but I think it would be better to say 'all things that are possible' rather than 'anything except [foo]'. Although obviously they mean pretty much the same thing if [foo] is the set of impossible things.
That's all fine. That means that 'Eric the Purple Dinosaur' is possible non-contradictory entity. Not of much use to science of course, but more acceptable that an intrinsically contradictory concept.
The limitation is merely an attempt to move beyond the naive concept of omnipotence, which contains contradictions (and is therefore to be rejected), to a more internally consistent one. I'm not a maths guru, but I understand that mathematicians have done similar things with set theory - naive set theory was found to have contradictions about a century ago so it was axiomatised. You'll have to forgive my use of analogy. I realise that analogy doesn't make anything right - I'm merely trying to say that it's valid to try and move thought systems beyond naive readings.
I've heard more or less this exact thing preached from a pulpit. Before you explode, although I've spent most of my life going to church these days I'm sort of a meta-christian. I've got a sceptical/scientific streak thats making ordinary Christian belief a bit hard. So at the moment I'm kind of arguing for fun, not out of fear for my soul. It was a baptist church in Australia if you're interested.
I'm not an expert, but I think that omnipotence has never enjoyed a single definition or universal support from theists. The wikipedia article is helpful (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnipotence). It references a nice quote from Paul (considered by some to be the true founder of Christianity) saying that God cannot lie (Titus 1:2), ie he probably was not a supporter of the naive concept of omnipotence.
This line of discussion is pretty much purely philosophical, not scientific, so it's only about disproof inasmuch as the set of assertions could be shown to imply contradictions. So the argument only eliminates the possibility of existence of the particular thing described by the particular contradictory system.
I'm pretty sure for the theist this is a descriptive exercise. They're already pretty convinced God exists, they're just busy trying to formulate the best description of God. If one description doesn't work, try another one, lather, rinse, repeat. Granted if *no* descriptions work, then there's a real problem, but I don't know whether or not that is the current state of affairs in theology.
Sorry about the typo, should have previewed.
Omnipotence could perhaps be better rendered as 'the greatest power that implies no contradictions', otherwise it becomes a joke concept, as your example shows.
My understanding is that most Christians do not think omnipotence to be logically equivalent 'make real any statement'.
I'm not certain about this, but I think the secular position is simply the one that relies on the fewest axioms.
Ack in a few months I won't be able to claim to be a teenager anymore.
It's been great being 1F.
Just tried out a quick comparison of SVG rendering between FFb1 and Adobe SVG Viewer 3.02 (in IE 6) using the sample svg suite that comes with batik (1.6)
All worked okay (no crashes), but there were quite a few small differences when placed side-by-side
- Alot of font faces and sizes were different
- Some line thickness were different (fatter)
- filters and patterns don't seem to be working at all yet
Some things that are good:
- gradients look nearly identical
- Most basic line art looks really good
- the dynamically drawn 3D.svg sample file works really well and is very smooth
All up I'm bloody impressed and can't wait to see this mature further.
Congratulations to the FF team!
Hey it was me, it was kind of an accident that I posted AC. Glad you enjoyed it.
Cheers, Percy.
The parent post raises an issue that's been bugging me for a while about this whole ID debate.
I'm not an ID advocate but I think that it's reasonable to ask "was this done intentionally?" when faced with some interesting set of circumstances. Various fields of research already do this - for instance archaeology, forensics, paleontology, history, etc.
Biology is another such field as the parent poster suggests - I can imagine a geneticist in the future asking whether a sample is representative of natural diversity or mankinds ingenuity - whether or not it is (sorry about this) a product of 'intelligent design'.
I would hate to see the general rejection of fundamentalism based ID result in the rejection of similar non-fundamentalist questions about design that are scientifically valid.
Yeah it does suck. ;) :-)
I took some cues from the part of the discussion about the tag header framing bit (not that I really know what that is), and used Foobar2000's masstagger to strip out a whole lot of non-essential tags from the files on my player - had far fewer lockups since.
The firmware on my bought player is version 1.521 and the updater program reports that the latest one available to me is 1.321 - seems Samsung/Yepp are a little out of synch with themselves
All up though, I really am enjoying the player - just hope they get the tag bug sorted soon.
Proper playlists would nice too
I bought the same player a few days ago and while i'm enjoying it, some of my ogg files can cause the player to freeze.r s#Samsung.27s_Yepp_Ogg_Vorbis_support
Have you had any of same problems?
There's a bit of a discussion of the problem over at the Xiph wiki: http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Talk:PortablePlaye