Meh, your point may or may not be a good one, but i'm going to nitpick at you on technical grounds because your examples are annoyingly bad.
1)The truth (soundness) of a logical conclusion is always dependent on the truth (soundness) of the assumptions, i.e. the starting points of the logical chain. What you are citing here (lack of internal contradictions) is not soundness but validity. As any student of philosophy is conditioned to say within 5 seconds of bringing the subject up, perfectly valud arguments are sometimes (often, actually) entirely false or of undefinable truth.
2) Jesus christ is or isn't god regardless of what you think on the subject, unless you have achueved some sort of transcendance which allows you to form the universe to your will. If you have, please tell me how: I tried for a long time, but then i ran out of red bull.
Repeatability, however, is kind of the big assumption of science. If I throw a ball in the air a billion times, and it falls back to the earth at the same accelleration each time, I'll naturally assume that, so long as conditions remain constant, the pattern will continue, and i will formulate my analyses accordingly. I cannot, however, pretend that this is in any way logical: no number of repetitions actually proves a pattern.
What I'm saying here is don't get too cocky about our sciences. The method has its weak points, just like everything else we've come up with.
So your argument is that if there were no hackers, then hackers would easily take down the system? Yeah, I'm going to leave this one alone. It's just... too... easy...
Nonsense. Hacker = someone who gains access to a computer application or set of data by bypassing the normal authorizations. The criminal or non-criminal bit is taken care of by that 'black hat' 'white hat' stuff. The fact that I can write a program in notepad to reformat a set of sample data to spreadsheet form and compile it in Dev-c doean't make me a hacker any more than climbing the north face of Everest would make me a cat burglar.
I know there was an attempt to reforge the lingo to give people the ability to brag in irc chatrooms, but you guys lost, I'm sorry. Actually, no, I'm not. Your alternate vocabulary is lame.
And a 'cracker' is a guy who works for NSA decoding encrypted messages. Wither that or a white guy. Also, i'm pretty sure that a script kiddie has to, you know, have something to do with computers, not jsut be a criminal who doesn't hack.
Ok, i'm done pouring the gasoline now, let me light the match real quick... uh, i mean press 'submit'.
To be entirely fair, the conflict is usually over how to make the world better. People rarely fight for things that they think will screw EVERYONE over, though they may attempt to sacrifice one good for another. Now, I imagine that you would hold that most of their reasoning about what would make the world a better place is wrong, but we think your ideas are stupid too, so it all works out.;)
For instance, I like nuclear weapons. They made a lot of annoying politicians shut the hell up for a good couple of decades. I also go with the old saw coined by Clemens, something to the effect of "the only thing worse than war is the degraded moral state in which nothing is worth going to war for". Besides, conflict and competition is pretty much what created life. If there was no statistical conflict between random assemblies of atoms and self-reproducing molecules, earth would still be a wet pile of rocks.
Or, rather, he died peniless because he spent it all, rather than because he was one of those bearded guys with rags on their feet that live behind the 7-11.
Hard to revolt when the other guy has all the guns. Social contract stems form Hobbes' assumption that all men are about equally capable of killing each other. I would link the actual text of Leviathan, but I'm lazy and I'm an engineering major, so look it up yourself.
I can. It's because Sudan is in Africa. Have you paid any attention to the last century of history at all? Attempts to intervene in African affairs inevitably fail, and just end up killing the interveners along with the rest of the people in the area.
You have a valid point, I guess, but I feel a strange desire to reply: Once the decision is made to initiate a war with a country, it is preferable to bomb rather than focus on ground invasion. The focus is in (a) winning and (b) keeping our own guys alive. We try not to take out bystanders (and we're pretty good at it, considering the nature of concussive and ignition weaponry) but in all honesty preserving the lives of our own citizens is a slightly higher priority, and wins in the occasion when a conflict between the two arises.
1) The war wasn't illegal. 2) It's over. 3) It's not being ignored. 4) Off topic is not a very good troll, you should say something in support of DRM instead.
"When will society become outraged at the corporate mindset?"
When it stops working so well. The corporate mindset produces what my classmates would term a "fuckton of money", which makes "a Utopian world where even the poorest can live comfortably" an actual possibility instead of the unattainable, wild goose chase that most slashdotters would use the ideal as in order to trick people into conforming to their stupid ideas regarding economics.
There. Was that outraged enough for ya? I can add more smouldering rhetoric, if you want.
Bah, crazy slashdot, make up your mind. Is the government corrupt (moralless and for sale) or an evil basition of 'morality legistaltion' (i.e. not corrupt enough)? Am I the only one that's annoyed by the contradictory double?
Individual societies are actually peaceful a good portion of the time, and the proportion gets higher with the standard of living. Aliens bored enough with enough spare resources to come visit us probably have a damned high standard of living, I imagine they're fairly likely to be peaceful, given your assumption of humanlike social development.
Your "less than 200 years of peace" argument misleads by having too wide a scope. I could argue that I'm likely to be hit by a meteor, because there has been, what, one hour in the statistically predicted history of the world where some large object has not struck the surface of the earth, but that would be silly, as this statistic does not scale to the two foot square of ground which I am occupying.
Nah, humans steal tech right back. Ever read that story about the guys building the pressurized steel ball and lowering it on a winch to the bottom of the sea? We always find a way, once something touches our interest, to get a good look at it. It's part of what makes us so damned annoying.
Dude, a lot of cool stuff was invented because people looked at science fiction and figured out how it would work. It's practically the muse of the scientific community. Note how a lot of old fiction predicts modern tech with uncanny accuracy.
Or, for that matter, causing them to develop intelligent life? If intelligence becomes a factor in survival, the normal weeding process would bring it out in local wildlife pretty fast.
Plus, the origin of all the humanoid types in the movies could easily be common: no one remembers a point before interstellar travel was possible, and in a population that big and technologically varied, purposeful and accidental genetic modificaiton will no doubt occur. So there's not actually a need for parallel evolution at all.
Your point is a good one, but intelligence is only one of the many things that can cause a species to survive or prosper, and it is so ill defined that assuming it to be roughly equal in spacefaring species really isn't all that much of a stretch.
The cable is probably light enough that the air will slow it down pretty quickly, and its crash-landing will just be a problem of a bunch of cord falling on your head rather than a giant whip. This assumes that the cables don't end up being made out of black hole phase material or anything crazy like that.
I fail to see relevance. Racism is a convenient lable to stick on things (in this case, for no apparrent reason), but it in no way affects the validity of Mr. Darwin's point.
Assuming anyone in government has any idea what's going on is probably not the best thing to lay your bets on. That said, global warming theory is pretty much bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
I salute the first person in the thread that appears to actually know what logic is. /SALUTE!
The problem with logic is that you have to start with something that's not logical. The only alternative is circular logic.
Meh, your point may or may not be a good one, but i'm going to nitpick at you on technical grounds because your examples are annoyingly bad.
1)The truth (soundness) of a logical conclusion is always dependent on the truth (soundness) of the assumptions, i.e. the starting points of the logical chain. What you are citing here (lack of internal contradictions) is not soundness but validity. As any student of philosophy is conditioned to say within 5 seconds of bringing the subject up, perfectly valud arguments are sometimes (often, actually) entirely false or of undefinable truth.
2) Jesus christ is or isn't god regardless of what you think on the subject, unless you have achueved some sort of transcendance which allows you to form the universe to your will. If you have, please tell me how: I tried for a long time, but then i ran out of red bull.
Repeatability, however, is kind of the big assumption of science. If I throw a ball in the air a billion times, and it falls back to the earth at the same accelleration each time, I'll naturally assume that, so long as conditions remain constant, the pattern will continue, and i will formulate my analyses accordingly. I cannot, however, pretend that this is in any way logical: no number of repetitions actually proves a pattern.
What I'm saying here is don't get too cocky about our sciences. The method has its weak points, just like everything else we've come up with.
So your argument is that if there were no hackers, then hackers would easily take down the system? Yeah, I'm going to leave this one alone. It's just... too... easy...
Well, he's obviously not a trained coder, what with misusing symbolic logic like that. Maybe he's using the chemistry yield sign?
Nonsense. Hacker = someone who gains access to a computer application or set of data by bypassing the normal authorizations. The criminal or non-criminal bit is taken care of by that 'black hat' 'white hat' stuff. The fact that I can write a program in notepad to reformat a set of sample data to spreadsheet form and compile it in Dev-c doean't make me a hacker any more than climbing the north face of Everest would make me a cat burglar.
I know there was an attempt to reforge the lingo to give people the ability to brag in irc chatrooms, but you guys lost, I'm sorry. Actually, no, I'm not. Your alternate vocabulary is lame.
And a 'cracker' is a guy who works for NSA decoding encrypted messages. Wither that or a white guy. Also, i'm pretty sure that a script kiddie has to, you know, have something to do with computers, not jsut be a criminal who doesn't hack.
Ok, i'm done pouring the gasoline now, let me light the match real quick... uh, i mean press 'submit'.
To be entirely fair, the conflict is usually over how to make the world better. People rarely fight for things that they think will screw EVERYONE over, though they may attempt to sacrifice one good for another. Now, I imagine that you would hold that most of their reasoning about what would make the world a better place is wrong, but we think your ideas are stupid too, so it all works out. ;)
For instance, I like nuclear weapons. They made a lot of annoying politicians shut the hell up for a good couple of decades. I also go with the old saw coined by Clemens, something to the effect of "the only thing worse than war is the degraded moral state in which nothing is worth going to war for". Besides, conflict and competition is pretty much what created life. If there was no statistical conflict between random assemblies of atoms and self-reproducing molecules, earth would still be a wet pile of rocks.
Nah, wait for the dupe, it might have more bad punctuation.
Or, rather, he died peniless because he spent it all, rather than because he was one of those bearded guys with rags on their feet that live behind the 7-11.
Hard to revolt when the other guy has all the guns. Social contract stems form Hobbes' assumption that all men are about equally capable of killing each other. I would link the actual text of Leviathan, but I'm lazy and I'm an engineering major, so look it up yourself.
I can. It's because Sudan is in Africa. Have you paid any attention to the last century of history at all? Attempts to intervene in African affairs inevitably fail, and just end up killing the interveners along with the rest of the people in the area.
You have a valid point, I guess, but I feel a strange desire to reply: Once the decision is made to initiate a war with a country, it is preferable to bomb rather than focus on ground invasion. The focus is in (a) winning and (b) keeping our own guys alive. We try not to take out bystanders (and we're pretty good at it, considering the nature of concussive and ignition weaponry) but in all honesty preserving the lives of our own citizens is a slightly higher priority, and wins in the occasion when a conflict between the two arises.
1) The war wasn't illegal.
2) It's over.
3) It's not being ignored.
4) Off topic is not a very good troll, you should say something in support of DRM instead.
"When will society become outraged at the corporate mindset?"
When it stops working so well. The corporate mindset produces what my classmates would term a "fuckton of money", which makes "a Utopian world where even the poorest can live comfortably" an actual possibility instead of the unattainable, wild goose chase that most slashdotters would use the ideal as in order to trick people into conforming to their stupid ideas regarding economics.
There. Was that outraged enough for ya? I can add more smouldering rhetoric, if you want.
Bah, crazy slashdot, make up your mind. Is the government corrupt (moralless and for sale) or an evil basition of 'morality legistaltion' (i.e. not corrupt enough)? Am I the only one that's annoyed by the contradictory double?
Individual societies are actually peaceful a good portion of the time, and the proportion gets higher with the standard of living. Aliens bored enough with enough spare resources to come visit us probably have a damned high standard of living, I imagine they're fairly likely to be peaceful, given your assumption of humanlike social development.
Your "less than 200 years of peace" argument misleads by having too wide a scope. I could argue that I'm likely to be hit by a meteor, because there has been, what, one hour in the statistically predicted history of the world where some large object has not struck the surface of the earth, but that would be silly, as this statistic does not scale to the two foot square of ground which I am occupying.
Nah, humans steal tech right back. Ever read that story about the guys building the pressurized steel ball and lowering it on a winch to the bottom of the sea? We always find a way, once something touches our interest, to get a good look at it. It's part of what makes us so damned annoying.
Dude, a lot of cool stuff was invented because people looked at science fiction and figured out how it would work. It's practically the muse of the scientific community. Note how a lot of old fiction predicts modern tech with uncanny accuracy.
Or, for that matter, causing them to develop intelligent life? If intelligence becomes a factor in survival, the normal weeding process would bring it out in local wildlife pretty fast.
Plus, the origin of all the humanoid types in the movies could easily be common: no one remembers a point before interstellar travel was possible, and in a population that big and technologically varied, purposeful and accidental genetic modificaiton will no doubt occur. So there's not actually a need for parallel evolution at all.
Your point is a good one, but intelligence is only one of the many things that can cause a species to survive or prosper, and it is so ill defined that assuming it to be roughly equal in spacefaring species really isn't all that much of a stretch.
I don't think the laser was set at full power to destroy the cruisers. would make sense that it would fire faster, anyhow.
The cable is probably light enough that the air will slow it down pretty quickly, and its crash-landing will just be a problem of a bunch of cord falling on your head rather than a giant whip. This assumes that the cables don't end up being made out of black hole phase material or anything crazy like that.
I fail to see relevance. Racism is a convenient lable to stick on things (in this case, for no apparrent reason), but it in no way affects the validity of Mr. Darwin's point.
Assuming anyone in government has any idea what's going on is probably not the best thing to lay your bets on. That said, global warming theory is pretty much bullshit.