Do any of these "Do Not Track" buttons in browsers actually do anything useful, like disable third-party cookies
If I understand correctly, the only one that does the feature right is IE (see also here). IE allows blacklisting of tracker sites; the lists can be built and distributed by external groups, like consumer organizations. To access the sites in the list, you have to type its address in the address box explicitly, otherwise IE9 will just not go to any of the tracking sites at all. All other browsers still follow links to tracking sites, but ask them nicely to please please not track them. With IE9 the trackers don't even get the opportunity to dump cookies on your machine or log your IP address.
The idea of "object-oriented shell" is idiotic to begin with. Text can be parsed by anything,
Parsing text was ok in the seventies. The world has moved on since those times. Modern applications use and exchange really complex data structures; passing them between applications via text requires designing complex formats, writing hairy and difficult to maintain serialization and deserialization code, and wasting lots of time. Passing objects between apps is much, much more powerful, no matter how much you may like your yacc and awk.
"objects" can only be handled by "objects" derived from them, turning software development into incest.
That statement makes no sense; seriously, do you know anything about OO? Objects can expose interfaces; anybody who needs to do something can query the object, and, if it supports the required interface, they can just use it. The user doesn't need to know more about the object (indeed, he can use a wide variety of different objects, as long as they implement the proper interface). Whether an inheritance relationship exists between the two is absolutely orthogonal to this process
The whole idea of shell (and IPC, and network protocols, and even things like dbus) is to allow communications between completely unrelated pieces of software. Powershell design completely misses this (and underlying OS does not help, either).
That's emphatically not true; in all your examples the two sides need to agree on a protocol (or IPC, or text format, etc). The exactly same rule applies to Powershell objects, for example via the above mentioned interfaces. The mechanisms used by Powershell are more powerful; objects can implement multiple interfaces, allowing applications to use as much or as little as they need from the object's contents, you can use reflection to examine the capabilities of objects, and so on. Since Powershell is built on.NET, Powershell scripts and any.NET application can interoperate extremely easily (or PS scripts can just instantiate COM and WMI objects directly, as needed).
Oh japan.org?... fake rads map... fear mongering anti-nuke crap... Good call.
Instead of a brain-dead attack on the messenger, why not try finding out the truth for yourself? It takes all of 10 seconds to go to the IAEA site here and see the numbers quoted by the OP are correct:
The average total deposition determined at these locations for iodine-131 range from 0.2 to 25 Megabecquerel per square metre and for cesium-137 from 0.02-3.7 Megabecquerel per square metre. The highest values were found in a relatively small area in the Northwest from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. First assessment indicates that one of the IAEA operational criteria for evacuation is exceeded in Iitate village. We advised the counterpart to carefully assess the situation.
Apple consumers are no more conditioned to buy shiny things than anybody else
ObOnion. I particularly like the ending "As of press time, 3.2 million loyal customers were lining up overnight outside of Apple stores across the country for the chance to buy the slick new abomination."
How does kinect make a revolutionary change in robotics.
Let me point you to this book. It describes what's known as disruptive technologies. Here's a significant quote:
Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream
The Kinect seems to be a perfect example of a disruptive technology. It offers a simple and very cheap solution to issues that already had established solutions. Even if it weren't as powerful as existing sensors, the low price, simplicity of use and easy availability opens a wide variety of areas where previous solutions couldn't be used.Check out some of the other examples of disruptive technologies, and the way they redefined the market, and often ended up replacing the existing established solutions. I think the Kinect will get better and end up becoming the reigning technology except for very specialized niches. And as such, it is indeed revolutionary.
I don't know if a four chambered heart is advantageous for a reptile
May not be, which would explain (at least to me) why reptiles still have three chambered hearts. However, the discovery I mentioned in my post shows that the switch from a three to a four chambered heart can be caused by a relatively simple mutation. This mutation probably happened to an early mammalian ancestor, and in this case it was advantageous enough to be selected for - so much that 4 chambered hearts are now the norm for mammals. The point (to pop the initial discussion off the stack) is that I don't think there is an ID issue in the particular case of the four chambered heart.
How does evolution explain a four chambered heart? Take away one chamber and the whole thing doesn't work. Add a chamber to a three chamber heart and it fails. Nowhere is there any type of record, fossil or otherwise that explains how a four chambered mammalian heard evolved from a three chambered reptilian heart.
See here. Reptiles have a 3 chambered heart, but some (turtles) show the beginning of the formation of a septum separating the ventricle in two chambers. An article in Nature back in 2009 described the discovery of the genetic mutation that led to complete separation - I couldn't find the link to the Nature article itself, but here's a digest and here are a few quotes. The most important conclusion there is IMHO that there exists a relatively minor genetic change which leads to the formation of the extra heart chambers, advantageous for natural selection
term limits should be ONE. period - no renewals. that removes the 'profit incentive' or rather, the come-back-to-get-more-power incentive. you get one term to make a difference and then you're back to your old job; but with oversight to ensure you didn't make some sweetheart deals for post-office kickbacks.
Except it won't work. If the official in question knows he won't be in power again, he has no good reason to fix anything; it's not like *he*'ll have to deal with the consequences. On the contrary, he'll have a strong incentive to fill his pockets as much and as quickly as he can, since it's a once in a lifetime opportunity. Something similar happened in Eastern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Ottoman sultans named merchants of Greek origin as delegate rulers of some of the vassal countries. Those Phanariots got the nomination via massive bribes, and, once the rulership was obtained, their main objective was to recoup the expenses and get rich quick, before somebody else replaced them, That led to massive mismanagement, excessive taxes and general misrule.
Man is not God. The meglomaniac you propose is trying to kill people. God is not.
How would you know? Do you affirm to know the mind of God?
Even if the earthquake was caused by a man( and this has actually happened on a small scale due to oil and natural gas drilling), the most important thing in evaluating his actions would not be the result but the intent of the man. In our criminal justice system there are many different categories we can convict some one for killing another ( 1st degree murder, 2nd degree, manslaughter, reckless homicide, ect). The main difference in those is level of intent. If there is not intent at all to kill and it was truly an accident beyond their control we wouldn't convict them at all.
You can argue this way for a human, who doesn't know all the results of his actions. When God does the deed, he knows all that's going to happen (omniscient, remember?). So you can very well argue the human just wanted to destroy a bomb so it wouldn't fall in the hands of terrorists, and didn't expect it to explode and to cause an earthquake. You can't do the same for God; God knew very well all those people would die, and still decided to act.
You're trying to convince me that any God that does exist is evil.
Not as such; just trying to show you your ideas are self-contradictory and don't support even mild examination. There are many good answers to the problem of evil: the most logical is that there is no God (which has support from other directions as well). But an indifferent or absent God would also be a possible answer. An omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, as you postulate, doesn't work, sorry.
A notion that I reject out of hand.
Even with all the evidence available all around you? I guess you must be one of those guys Jeremiah warns us about, who have eyes but do not see, have ears but do not hear.
Now, does that mean there isn't any evil in disasters? No. There is this kind of evil:
The Haiti Earthquake was not a terrible earthquake in terms of the Richter scale. A few weeks later a larger earthquake struck Oregon state ( on our our 50 United ones for those not acquainted with US geography). Instead of 300,00 dead, there were 0. The poverty of the country, caused by many human factors starting back from the institution of slavery up to and including the dictators,drugs and corruption in the country created the shoddy buildings that collapsed causing the death and misery. The terrible hospitals, lack of medical care, clean water, jobs, food: those were caused by humans. The world didn't care enough about them. There leaders didn't care enough about them. That's the evil that was there, the lack of the world's love.
Let me suggest a thought experiment: suppose it's discovered tomorrow that the Haiti earthquake was actually caused by a human (say, a dictator, or something similar) who stealthily dropped a nuke in a neighboring oceanic deep and destabilized the local geology. Would you say this human is not evil? That he's not truly responsible for the dead in Haiti? That the real responsibility lies not with the bomber, but with the Haitian leaders, and the world who didn't love enough? If not, look for a moment at yourself, and think whether you're really honest when you absolve God of an act you'd recognize as evil were it caused by a mere human.
So what you're saying is that everyone who is capable of doing something is obligated to do so?
In the case of God, yes, he is. Or else he's not omnibenevolent. If on one hand I'm told he's a creature of infinite love, and on the other hand he doesn't bother lifting a finger to save his loved ones from pain and misery, I have to call nonsense.
As someone or other has said, defending the purity of the English language would be like defending the purity of a cribhouse whore
That would be James Nicoll, back in 1990 on rec.arts.sf-lovers; the complete quote is
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary
Free will is the ability to to reason, to make decisions
Stop making things up. Since when is free will the ability to reason? Quoting wikipedia: "Free will is the putative ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints". That's the normal meaning of "free will", and that's the one I've been using, so I haven't changed anything. The freedom from (supernatural) constraints is the essential factor here, and the one you're completely ignoring.
Heck, using your new made up definition, even your initial argument becomes senseless. Murders are allowed by God because murderers have the ability to reason? Geeze! Better give up and admit you're wrong than make those sad attempts to muddy the waters.
Free will man, Free will. Personal responsibility is a bitch. Free will my ass. Believers trot out this phrase whenever questioned about the issue of the existence of evil as if it explains anything. Believers say "free will can't be limited, or there'd be no personal responsibility", and therefore killers, rapists and others must have the possibility to do their thing. That's stupid.
First, there is no such thing as unlimited free will. Say I want to fly like a bird, and I choose to do so and I take responsibility for the consequences. Guess what, I can't. God has put limits on my free will, in this case via the laws of nature. So he does put limits on everybody's free will all the time. Why then not on the free will of murderers?
Second, your argument is self-contradictory. If free will matters, surely the free will of the victims ought to be taken into account. I can tell you with certitude that the majority of the victims have NOT chosen to be killed. Yet, their choice doesn't seem to matter. Worse, when the victims happen to be very young children, they don't even get a chance to exercise this so important "personal responsibility". You gotta wonder about the moral compass of a God who favors the free will of murderers over the free will of the victims. Or at least about the people who would believe in such a God.
Thirdly, there are lots of cases where free will doesn't even apply. What about "acts of God"? Do you think all the people who died in the Haiti earthquake exercised their free will to be buried under ruins? Well, guess again. There is no (human) free will involved. Of course, you could postulate the existence of sorcerers with supernatural powers who used their free will to cause the earthquake (FWIW, I wouldn't even be surprised, I heard even more cockeyed "explanations" from believers). Heck, forget the earthquake, who in this world freely chooses to get cancer? And don't argue it's the result of bad lifestyle choices: enough people do all the right things and still become sick, and enough people don't have the knowledge, or the possibilities to avoid all cancer-causing factors. Who in this world chooses to get old and die? But God blithely ignores the choice so many would want to make, to stay young and live.
BTW, in the standard Christian representation, God seems to be remarkably lacking in the "free will" he theoretically puts such a great price on. Being omnibenevolent, all of his actions are necessarily the ones that maximize good. He doesn't seem to have any choice there, all omnipotent as he's supposed to be.
A good point, except that incidence of cancer or birth deformities did not sky-rocket. On any time scale. Your information has come from environmentalists who exaggerate the figures by a factor of ten
You're full of it. Here are some quotes from the World Health Organization (not an environmentalist organization in any way). You can read the original document here.
A large increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer has occurred among people who were young children and adolescents at the time of the accident and lived in the most contaminated areas of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. This was due to the high levels of radioactive iodine released from the Chernobyl reactor in the early days after the accident.
In Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine nearly 5 000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children who were aged up to 18 years at the time of the accident.
It is expected that the increased incidence of thyroid cancer from Chernobyl will continue for many years, although the long-term magnitude of the risk is difficult to quantify.
The Expert Group concluded that there may be up to 4 000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime (240 000 liquidators; 116 000 evacuees and the 270 000 residents of the SCZs).
Predictions, generally based on the LNT model, suggest that up to 5000 additional cancer deaths may occur in this population [ Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine] from radiation exposure
The numbers in this report are contested by a Greenpeace study (available here). Greenpeace estimates the number of cancers attributable to the Chernobyl accident to 270000, out of which 93000 fatal.
Even discarding the Greenpeace numbers, your assertion that more than 9000 people die every year on the road outside your window proves you're too ignorant or too deranged to qualify for any normal discussion.
If one dollar buys one candy bar, why should that change if there are more dollars? Nothing has really changed in terms of the candy bar's production costs.
The price of an item is a function of its scarcity and of the effort required to create it. If everybody had lots of money, nobody would be willing to work to create more candy (why bother making candy for a buck a piece, when you can just shake the money tree in the backyard, and get more bucks with less effort?). So candy becomes a scarce resource, and everybody competes for the same limited amount of candy. The only way to get the sweet luxury is to pay more. The price of candy goes up, and will continue growing until either people give up on candy, or the price becomes high enough that making candy becomes profitable again.
Take for instance, these two infinite sets: All even numbers. All numbers divisible by 4. the first one is provably larger than the second
You are provably wrong, and your error is a good example of the fact that common sense can trick you when thinking about infinite quantities. The sets have the same cardinality, that is Aleph-naught. In this sense, they are equal, that is they have the same number of elements (both infinite, but the two infinites are equal)
Proof:
For each element n of set A (even numbers) there exists a unique correspondent in set B ( that is, 2n). Since all element in set A have a pair in set B, the two sets have the same number of elements. More information here: Aleph naught.
This is why "Infinity" is not a "Value".
I don't know what you mean by value, but "infinite" numbers are, well, numbers, clearly defined and understood, and used in a variety of areas.
"Portland residents will vote Nov. 2 on a proposal to give legal residents who are not U.S. citizens the right to vote in local elections, joining places like San Francisco and Chicago that have already loosened the rules or are considering it."
So it's about green card holders, or similar legal residents, I see.
Those people pay taxes, the same as citizens, but they don't actually have the right to vote, right? Well, too bad for them they don't live in one of those countries where the locals revolted against their government because of this silly concept of "No taxation without representation".
And what happens when they get out of high school?
They already have passed their genes on (or, if not, they will soon), so, as far as evolution is concerned, they won. A billionaire bachelor geek loses the evolution game to a former jock living in a trailer who has three kids with his first wife and two more with his mistress.
When I was 15 I figured out my first law of nature. Said law is, "People are generally stupid."
In the 27 years since I first figured that out, I have seen no evidence to the contrary.
Looks like Mark Twain was a bit faster than you. Quoting him: "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
Actually, my first pet's name is a fairly good choice, as security questions go. Its name isn't online anywhere (it died long before I was online), it wasn't really MY pet, and the few people who would figure out who's pet it was, and which of the many pets that person had was, are the people I'd trust with my online info anyway
Well, a dictionary attack should work well against this. Start with Spot, Lassie, Butch or Max, and you got at least a few percent of the users; failing that, work your way through a few of the many lists of popular pet names available on the net. It's even easier because hardly any pet names use digits or special characters.
Slashdot Mirror
Do any of these "Do Not Track" buttons in browsers actually do anything useful, like disable third-party cookies
If I understand correctly, the only one that does the feature right is IE (see also here). IE allows blacklisting of tracker sites; the lists can be built and distributed by external groups, like consumer organizations. To access the sites in the list, you have to type its address in the address box explicitly, otherwise IE9 will just not go to any of the tracking sites at all. All other browsers still follow links to tracking sites, but ask them nicely to please please not track them. With IE9 the trackers don't even get the opportunity to dump cookies on your machine or log your IP address.
The idea of "object-oriented shell" is idiotic to begin with. Text can be parsed by anything,
Parsing text was ok in the seventies. The world has moved on since those times. Modern applications use and exchange really complex data structures; passing them between applications via text requires designing complex formats, writing hairy and difficult to maintain serialization and deserialization code, and wasting lots of time. Passing objects between apps is much, much more powerful, no matter how much you may like your yacc and awk.
"objects" can only be handled by "objects" derived from them, turning software development into incest.
That statement makes no sense; seriously, do you know anything about OO? Objects can expose interfaces; anybody who needs to do something can query the object, and, if it supports the required interface, they can just use it. The user doesn't need to know more about the object (indeed, he can use a wide variety of different objects, as long as they implement the proper interface). Whether an inheritance relationship exists between the two is absolutely orthogonal to this process
The whole idea of shell (and IPC, and network protocols, and even things like dbus) is to allow communications between completely unrelated pieces of software. Powershell design completely misses this (and underlying OS does not help, either).
That's emphatically not true; in all your examples the two sides need to agree on a protocol (or IPC, or text format, etc). The exactly same rule applies to Powershell objects, for example via the above mentioned interfaces. The mechanisms used by Powershell are more powerful; objects can implement multiple interfaces, allowing applications to use as much or as little as they need from the object's contents, you can use reflection to examine the capabilities of objects, and so on. Since Powershell is built on .NET, Powershell scripts and any .NET application can interoperate extremely easily (or PS scripts can just instantiate COM and WMI objects directly, as needed).
Oh japan.org? ... fake rads map ... fear mongering anti-nuke crap ... Good call.
Instead of a brain-dead attack on the messenger, why not try finding out the truth for yourself? It takes all of 10 seconds to go to the IAEA site here and see the numbers quoted by the OP are correct:
The average total deposition determined at these locations for iodine-131 range from 0.2 to 25 Megabecquerel per square metre and for cesium-137 from 0.02-3.7 Megabecquerel per square metre. The highest values were found in a relatively small area in the Northwest from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. First assessment indicates that one of the IAEA operational criteria for evacuation is exceeded in Iitate village. We advised the counterpart to carefully assess the situation.
Apple consumers are no more conditioned to buy shiny things than anybody else
ObOnion. I particularly like the ending "As of press time, 3.2 million loyal customers were lining up overnight outside of Apple stores across the country for the chance to buy the slick new abomination."
Are you saying that the International House of Pancakes is a sham?
Of course not! It's clearly international, says so right in the name. Just like the World Series!
How does kinect make a revolutionary change in robotics.
Let me point you to this book. It describes what's known as disruptive technologies. Here's a significant quote:
Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream
The Kinect seems to be a perfect example of a disruptive technology. It offers a simple and very cheap solution to issues that already had established solutions. Even if it weren't as powerful as existing sensors, the low price, simplicity of use and easy availability opens a wide variety of areas where previous solutions couldn't be used.Check out some of the other examples of disruptive technologies, and the way they redefined the market, and often ended up replacing the existing established solutions. I think the Kinect will get better and end up becoming the reigning technology except for very specialized niches. And as such, it is indeed revolutionary.
I don't know if a four chambered heart is advantageous for a reptile
May not be, which would explain (at least to me) why reptiles still have three chambered hearts. However, the discovery I mentioned in my post shows that the switch from a three to a four chambered heart can be caused by a relatively simple mutation. This mutation probably happened to an early mammalian ancestor, and in this case it was advantageous enough to be selected for - so much that 4 chambered hearts are now the norm for mammals. The point (to pop the initial discussion off the stack) is that I don't think there is an ID issue in the particular case of the four chambered heart.
How does evolution explain a four chambered heart? Take away one chamber and the whole thing doesn't work. Add a chamber to a three chamber heart and it fails. Nowhere is there any type of record, fossil or otherwise that explains how a four chambered mammalian heard evolved from a three chambered reptilian heart.
See here. Reptiles have a 3 chambered heart, but some (turtles) show the beginning of the formation of a septum separating the ventricle in two chambers. An article in Nature back in 2009 described the discovery of the genetic mutation that led to complete separation - I couldn't find the link to the Nature article itself, but here's a digest and here are a few quotes. The most important conclusion there is IMHO that there exists a relatively minor genetic change which leads to the formation of the extra heart chambers, advantageous for natural selection
Can we extend it to the whole year of 2011?
Or at least to the month of November 2012?
term limits should be ONE. period - no renewals. that removes the 'profit incentive' or rather, the come-back-to-get-more-power incentive. you get one term to make a difference and then you're back to your old job; but with oversight to ensure you didn't make some sweetheart deals for post-office kickbacks.
Except it won't work. If the official in question knows he won't be in power again, he has no good reason to fix anything; it's not like *he*'ll have to deal with the consequences. On the contrary, he'll have a strong incentive to fill his pockets as much and as quickly as he can, since it's a once in a lifetime opportunity. Something similar happened in Eastern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Ottoman sultans named merchants of Greek origin as delegate rulers of some of the vassal countries. Those Phanariots got the nomination via massive bribes, and, once the rulership was obtained, their main objective was to recoup the expenses and get rich quick, before somebody else replaced them, That led to massive mismanagement, excessive taxes and general misrule.
The only smart watches run a windows OS
If you mean the SPOT watches, they don't run an OS per se. They run applications on top of the .NET microframework, which runs directly on the HAL.
Man is not God. The meglomaniac you propose is trying to kill people. God is not.
How would you know? Do you affirm to know the mind of God?
Even if the earthquake was caused by a man( and this has actually happened on a small scale due to oil and natural gas drilling), the most important thing in evaluating his actions would not be the result but the intent of the man. In our criminal justice system there are many different categories we can convict some one for killing another ( 1st degree murder, 2nd degree, manslaughter, reckless homicide, ect). The main difference in those is level of intent. If there is not intent at all to kill and it was truly an accident beyond their control we wouldn't convict them at all.
You can argue this way for a human, who doesn't know all the results of his actions. When God does the deed, he knows all that's going to happen (omniscient, remember?). So you can very well argue the human just wanted to destroy a bomb so it wouldn't fall in the hands of terrorists, and didn't expect it to explode and to cause an earthquake. You can't do the same for God; God knew very well all those people would die, and still decided to act.
You're trying to convince me that any God that does exist is evil.
Not as such; just trying to show you your ideas are self-contradictory and don't support even mild examination. There are many good answers to the problem of evil: the most logical is that there is no God (which has support from other directions as well). But an indifferent or absent God would also be a possible answer. An omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, as you postulate, doesn't work, sorry.
A notion that I reject out of hand.
Even with all the evidence available all around you? I guess you must be one of those guys Jeremiah warns us about, who have eyes but do not see, have ears but do not hear.
Now, does that mean there isn't any evil in disasters? No. There is this kind of evil:
The Haiti Earthquake was not a terrible earthquake in terms of the Richter scale. A few weeks later a larger earthquake struck Oregon state ( on our our 50 United ones for those not acquainted with US geography). Instead of 300,00 dead, there were 0. The poverty of the country, caused by many human factors starting back from the institution of slavery up to and including the dictators,drugs and corruption in the country created the shoddy buildings that collapsed causing the death and misery. The terrible hospitals, lack of medical care, clean water, jobs, food: those were caused by humans. The world didn't care enough about them. There leaders didn't care enough about them. That's the evil that was there, the lack of the world's love.
Let me suggest a thought experiment: suppose it's discovered tomorrow that the Haiti earthquake was actually caused by a human (say, a dictator, or something similar) who stealthily dropped a nuke in a neighboring oceanic deep and destabilized the local geology. Would you say this human is not evil? That he's not truly responsible for the dead in Haiti? That the real responsibility lies not with the bomber, but with the Haitian leaders, and the world who didn't love enough? If not, look for a moment at yourself, and think whether you're really honest when you absolve God of an act you'd recognize as evil were it caused by a mere human.
So what you're saying is that everyone who is capable of doing something is obligated to do so?
In the case of God, yes, he is. Or else he's not omnibenevolent. If on one hand I'm told he's a creature of infinite love, and on the other hand he doesn't bother lifting a finger to save his loved ones from pain and misery, I have to call nonsense.
As someone or other has said, defending the purity of the English language would be like defending the purity of a cribhouse whore
That would be James Nicoll, back in 1990 on rec.arts.sf-lovers; the complete quote is
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary
Free will is the ability to to reason, to make decisions
Stop making things up. Since when is free will the ability to reason? Quoting wikipedia: "Free will is the putative ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints". That's the normal meaning of "free will", and that's the one I've been using, so I haven't changed anything. The freedom from (supernatural) constraints is the essential factor here, and the one you're completely ignoring.
Heck, using your new made up definition, even your initial argument becomes senseless. Murders are allowed by God because murderers have the ability to reason? Geeze! Better give up and admit you're wrong than make those sad attempts to muddy the waters.
Free will man, Free will. Personal responsibility is a bitch.
Free will my ass. Believers trot out this phrase whenever questioned about the issue of the existence of evil as if it explains anything. Believers say "free will can't be limited, or there'd be no personal responsibility", and therefore killers, rapists and others must have the possibility to do their thing. That's stupid.
First, there is no such thing as unlimited free will. Say I want to fly like a bird, and I choose to do so and I take responsibility for the consequences. Guess what, I can't. God has put limits on my free will, in this case via the laws of nature. So he does put limits on everybody's free will all the time. Why then not on the free will of murderers?
Second, your argument is self-contradictory. If free will matters, surely the free will of the victims ought to be taken into account. I can tell you with certitude that the majority of the victims have NOT chosen to be killed. Yet, their choice doesn't seem to matter. Worse, when the victims happen to be very young children, they don't even get a chance to exercise this so important "personal responsibility". You gotta wonder about the moral compass of a God who favors the free will of murderers over the free will of the victims. Or at least about the people who would believe in such a God.
Thirdly, there are lots of cases where free will doesn't even apply. What about "acts of God"? Do you think all the people who died in the Haiti earthquake exercised their free will to be buried under ruins? Well, guess again. There is no (human) free will involved. Of course, you could postulate the existence of sorcerers with supernatural powers who used their free will to cause the earthquake (FWIW, I wouldn't even be surprised, I heard even more cockeyed "explanations" from believers). Heck, forget the earthquake, who in this world freely chooses to get cancer? And don't argue it's the result of bad lifestyle choices: enough people do all the right things and still become sick, and enough people don't have the knowledge, or the possibilities to avoid all cancer-causing factors. Who in this world chooses to get old and die? But God blithely ignores the choice so many would want to make, to stay young and live.
BTW, in the standard Christian representation, God seems to be remarkably lacking in the "free will" he theoretically puts such a great price on. Being omnibenevolent, all of his actions are necessarily the ones that maximize good. He doesn't seem to have any choice there, all omnipotent as he's supposed to be.
A good point, except that incidence of cancer or birth deformities did not sky-rocket. On any time scale. Your information has come from environmentalists who exaggerate the figures by a factor of ten
You're full of it. Here are some quotes from the World Health Organization (not an environmentalist organization in any way). You can read the original document here.
A large increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer has occurred among people who were young children and adolescents at the time of the accident and lived in the most contaminated areas of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. This was due to the high levels of radioactive iodine released from the Chernobyl reactor in the early days after the accident.
In Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine nearly 5 000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children who were aged up to 18 years at the time of the accident.
It is expected that the increased incidence of thyroid cancer from Chernobyl will continue for many years, although the long-term magnitude of the risk is difficult to quantify.
The Expert Group concluded that there may be up to 4 000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime (240 000 liquidators; 116 000 evacuees and the 270 000 residents of the SCZs).
Predictions, generally based on the LNT model, suggest that up to 5000 additional cancer deaths may occur in this population [ Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine] from radiation exposure
The numbers in this report are contested by a Greenpeace study (available here). Greenpeace estimates the number of cancers attributable to the Chernobyl accident to 270000, out of which 93000 fatal.
Even discarding the Greenpeace numbers, your assertion that more than 9000 people die every year on the road outside your window proves you're too ignorant or too deranged to qualify for any normal discussion.
Give a man a fish, and he's fed for a day.
Teach a man how to fish, and he's fed for life.
Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day.
Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
(with thanks to Sir Terry Pratchett, who's responsible for a lot of the hilarity in the Chathuant household.)
In fact the value of currency is psychological.
In fact it's not. Or more precisely, not only.
If one dollar buys one candy bar, why should that change if there are more dollars? Nothing has really changed in terms of the candy bar's production costs.
The price of an item is a function of its scarcity and of the effort required to create it. If everybody had lots of money, nobody would be willing to work to create more candy (why bother making candy for a buck a piece, when you can just shake the money tree in the backyard, and get more bucks with less effort?). So candy becomes a scarce resource, and everybody competes for the same limited amount of candy. The only way to get the sweet luxury is to pay more. The price of candy goes up, and will continue growing until either people give up on candy, or the price becomes high enough that making candy becomes profitable again.
Take for instance, these two infinite sets:
All even numbers.
All numbers divisible by 4.
the first one is provably larger than the second
You are provably wrong, and your error is a good example of the fact that common sense can trick you when thinking about infinite quantities. The sets have the same cardinality, that is Aleph-naught. In this sense, they are equal, that is they have the same number of elements (both infinite, but the two infinites are equal)
Proof:
For each element n of set A (even numbers) there exists a unique correspondent in set B ( that is, 2n). Since all element in set A have a pair in set B, the two sets have the same number of elements. More information here: Aleph naught.
This is why "Infinity" is not a "Value".
I don't know what you mean by value, but "infinite" numbers are, well, numbers, clearly defined and understood, and used in a variety of areas.
More information here: Transfinite numbers
"Portland residents will vote Nov. 2 on a proposal to give legal residents who are not U.S. citizens the right to vote in local elections, joining places like San Francisco and Chicago that have already loosened the rules or are considering it."
So it's about green card holders, or similar legal residents, I see.
Those people pay taxes, the same as citizens, but they don't actually have the right to vote, right? Well, too bad for them they don't live in one of those countries where the locals revolted against their government because of this silly concept of "No taxation without representation".
And what happens when they get out of high school?
They already have passed their genes on (or, if not, they will soon), so, as far as evolution is concerned, they won. A billionaire bachelor geek loses the evolution game to a former jock living in a trailer who has three kids with his first wife and two more with his mistress.
When I was 15 I figured out my first law of nature. Said law is, "People are generally stupid."
In the 27 years since I first figured that out, I have seen no evidence to the contrary.
Looks like Mark Twain was a bit faster than you.
Quoting him:
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
Actually, my first pet's name is a fairly good choice, as security questions go. Its name isn't online anywhere (it died long before I was online), it wasn't really MY pet, and the few people who would figure out who's pet it was, and which of the many pets that person had was, are the people I'd trust with my online info anyway
Well, a dictionary attack should work well against this. Start with Spot, Lassie, Butch or Max, and you got at least a few percent of the users; failing that, work your way through a few of the many lists of popular pet names available on the net. It's even easier because hardly any pet names use digits or special characters.