Because this is a hidden, experimental option that almost no one would ever realistically change.
KDE is highly customizable, but one has to draw the line somewhere. In fact, the fact that KDE is so customizable is a frequent point of attack against it. Putting a GUI option for this, which would probably be used by way less than 1% of people (or, people who use KDE, rather than mostly Gnome with a couple KDE apps), would just be inflaming the situation.
Eternal Darkness does that as well. One of the hallucinations is that after walking through a door, you're surrounded by zombies, and then the message indicating that your controller is unplugged pops up on the screen. You can only watch helplessly as the zombies beat you to death.
You have to have a pretty low sanity meter to see this stuff, though. I guess you were too good at killing things to get that low. Perhaps you should have slacked off a little.:)
Fine, then substitute 'single-celled organism from 3 billion years ago' for amoeba.
Are you arguing that there aren't organisms that haven't had to adapt/change significantly in a long time? Sharks, for instance, haven't changed in a while, because they're well suited to their environment.
Humans are at the end of a 3 billion year chain of adaptations. Amoebas, or at least amoeba-like creatures can be found toward the start. So, yes, they are less evolved in a sense.
No, you're missing the point. These embryos aren't going to go on to become babies at all. It's a choice between:
Using them for research
Throwing them away
There is no, "let them go on to become babies" option. There's nowhere to put them so that they'll grow. There is no life support for these particular embryos anymore. They've already been taken off life support.
The original point was that, once you decide to take the baby off life support, do you donate the organs, or bury it? He argues that most parents would choose to donate the organs and save other lives.
He's not arguing that we should pull people off life support to harvest their organs when they have a chance of survival. That's a straw man.
That's not to mention that any distribution's automatic program downloader looks for important updates of all your software, not just the core stuff that Windows Update does. On Windows, every application is forced to keep track of its own updates (so you get fun popups every time you fire up Acrobat asking if you want to check for updates), rather than letting a common daemon do that job, and inform you in an unobtrusive manner.
It already has a fast searchable index of all the files and the content thereof on your computer?
It already has stores all kinds of contextual data about your files, so it can automatically tell you where you got them from, and what they're related to?
Yeah, Windows works for everything people do in Windows today, by definition. If you think it's the end-all of computing, and there will never be any significant developments, other than refining existing features, then I think you're rather naive.
nForce refers to motherboard chipsets. Regular is regular, SLI means it supports SLI, and Ultra means it's the highest performing model (which also happens to include SLI).
The only confusing aspect is the suffixes like GT (Ultra, GTX, LE) on the graphics cards, which can make cards with the same number have different specs. Of course, ATI does that was well (which is better: A Pro, an SE an XT or a regular?). In fact, the major difference between the naming schemes the two companies use is that the first number for a nVidia card is the generation the chip is from (4, 5, 6), while the first number in an ATI card is (supposed to be) the version of DirectX it's built to support (or, it was until the X series; they ran out of 9-based numbers, I guess). So for a time, ATI was actually inserting new 9x00 chips between existing 9x00 chips from an earlier generation. Are you sure that a 9600 is significantly worse than a 9700 in that situation?
nVidia's naming scheme is no more or less complex than ATI's. You're just familiar with ATI's product line, and rather ignorant (it seems) of nVidia's.
What evidence do you have that, given a sufficiently detailed and understood model of the brain, we could not find mechanisms that allow people to make choices, or provide the illusion thereof?
What does it mean---to you---to make a choice? If chemicals can produce thought (as the linked post says), what makes choices different from other thought such that they cannot be produced by chemicals? What evidence do you have that choices revolve around a supernatural influence on the chemicals in our brain? Is it even possible to provide evidence to support that?
If you define a mind as something the existence of which cannot be proven, then why should I assume that it does exist, and place great importance on it?
'Dude man, I have to tell you the funniest story, man. I was really fucked up the other day and I was hanging out with Jeremy and we were both super fucked up. And we went back to Jeremy's apartment; we split this bar of Xanax, okay? And then he put on that viking hat, you know, that he won at Vegas, you know, then he started dancing around and dude... it's was so fuckin' funny... dude I literally shit my pants!'
Because Christians don't think logically like that when it comes to their faith. Let's disregard the other reply to this post, because as I understand it, most Protestant forms of Christianity allow you to be saved by faith alone, irrespective of your good works. And even Catholics, who believe in faith and good works allow you options like repenting when you're near death, I think.
The paradox is similar to that of the old puritan belief of the elect and predestination. They believed that, from birth, everyone was either going to heaven or going to hell, and nothing you did could change that. From a logical perspective (assuming your actions are ultimately dictated by how your afterlife will turn out, as is the case from the Christian perspective), then, you might as well do whatever the fuck you want, because it's not going to change anything that really matters.
Of course, this didn't happen, because the puritans spent their lives trying to prove to each other that they were part of the elect, even though it doesn't really make any sense to do so, from their perspective. Of course, that was a reasonable thing to do, because people want to go through life with a certain amount of comfort, and being part of the elect got you power in Puritan society.
So, if you believe that Jesus dying for your sins is all that it takes to get into heaven, then, yes, you might as well go sin as much as you want; you're covered. However, that won't get you very good standing in the Christian community, and may get you out-and-out killed, depending on what you do. It seems that most people understand, unconsciously at least, that having a good time in 'this life' is important (no matter how much they profess otherwise), so they block out such a paradox, or try to rationalize around it, or do whatever so that they don't feel silly doing the opposite of what is the logical conclusion of what they believe.
Of course, if you're inclined to think about things in this way, odds are you aren't Christian, so you're screwed from the get-go. Then again, your morality would also probably be based around something other than fear of hell, or bribery of heaven, so none of this would really apply to you anyway.
That list is missing the definition that is most likely to have inspired the name of the command shell. A monad is a type of object in category theory which was adopted by functional programming languages like Haskell to represent units of computation. Essentially, it is an abstraction of imperative programming with side effects that doesn't break the purely functional nature of the language.
Some people at MS have actually been pretty active in the Haskell community, so the word probably came from there in some roundabout way.
Javac is written in java, so compiling anything requires firing up a jvm first, which can take a while.
However, since Eclipse is written in java, the jvm is already running, so it can just call up the appropriate javac classes and run the compiler in-process, removing the latency of starting up a new jvm. That's most likely why Eclipse is much more snappy at compiles (off the top of my head; I haven't written any Java in a while).
Alternatively they could be using IBM's jikes compiler, which is written in C or C++, so it also doesn't have the startup requirement of loading a jvm.
I have one. It's a good mouse, but I never find myself using the adjustable sensitivity. I get used twitching at 800 dpi, and changing that just throws me off. Maybe someone more coordinated/hardcore than I could make use of this feature.
The slick feet are nice, though (although you can get that with teflon tape, I think).
In other words, don't pay a premium to get the adjustable sensitivity. It's a good mouse overall, though.
Catholic schools here in Ohio (where I went) seem to be the same way. In fact, as I understand it, Catholicism is pretty much behind evolution, as long as you accept some sort of 'God created the soul when humans evolved' thing, which doesn't really deal with science at all anyway.
Interestingly enough, I heard a Catholic radio program that discussed the topic a bit (my mom's very Catholic, so it's hard to avoid that kind of thing around her). Someone called in and asked how it was possible that the church could support evolution and so on. The host explained something like the above, but also added something like the following, which I thought was interesting: 'The Pope doesn't say that evolution is "the truth." Evolution is a scientific theory, which can always be false and changes over time, so codifying any one version of it as "the truth" would lead to problems.'
In other words, it seems like at least some of the people high up in the Catholic church actually have some idea of how science works, and how it's different from religion and philosophy and so on. That doesn't surprise me, because from what I've seen (growing up Catholic), Catholics tend to be fairly moderate. They aren't the bible bangers you're looking for.
Most creationists/ID proponents I've seen tend to be fundamentalists of the protestant variety. For a fun time, ask them for their opinions on Catholicism. Of course, I won't argue that there aren't Catholics who support ID. It isn't, however, the official view of their church.
Yes, we can have an excellent discussion about how little most people actually know about science.
Do you think there's a lot of debate among people who actually look at facts and develop theories in order to explain them, and make predictions (that is, scientists), rather than people who cherry pick evidence to fit with their preconceived notions?
Representing this as some sort of significant debate within the scientific community is ridiculous. This is a debate between scientists and people with an agenda totally unrelated to scientific progress.
Mind you, I myself am an agnostic. I think the arguments against the existence of god are equally trite and meaningless, though I don't ascribe to any organized idea of what it would be to be god, so...
Thanks. I myself am (mostly) atheist (more atheist towards Christian-type gods than, for instance, deistic gods), but I, too, find the "proofs" against various gods' existence that many amateur atheist philosophers flaunt these days to be rather embarrassing, as they seem to be based, often times, around straw men and assumptions just as unprovable as the theistic claims they are trying to debunk.
It's nice to find a philosopher who feels the same way; I had almost given up on your kind.:)
I was referring to the repositories people put out with new KDE versions. I don't know who makes them, but from what I've seen there are usually i386 repositories on the day of release. They don't exist for x86-64, though, as far as I can tell.
I could have sworn that I had to compile something myself for mp3 support or something of that nature. Perhaps it was k3b or something, I can't recall. Most stuff is enabled via non-free repositories, though, you're right.
Out of curiosity, how prompt is SuSE on getting new KDE packages?
I tried out Kubuntu, since they usually claim to have new KDE packages on the day they're released (3.4 released? Kubuntu has it!). However, I discovered that that only applied to i386. Since I have an Athlon 64, I'd have to compile anything newer than 3.4.0 (including 3.4.x bugfix releases) myself, unless I want to use the breezy testing repository.
Combine that with the fact that I'd have to compile several other things myself to get support for mp3 and so on, and I decided there was little advantage for me to go Kubuntu over Gentoo on my particular setup.
I didn't say juries don't do stupid things. I fully expect that a ruling like that could happen, and it'd be ridiculous.
However, can you explain exactly how they're marketing to kids? I thought the quintessential gaming demographic these days was males of age 18 - 30, so presumably they're marketing to those people.
I've seen the commercial; it's full of explosions, gunfire, rock music and gratuitous-badass-walking-scenes. It looks like a typical R-rated, summer blockbuster action movie. Are all of those marketed at little kids, too? Let's fine all the movie studios.
Much of the American public may not have caught on to the fact that video games are not strictly for children anymore, just like they still think that "animation is for kids," and would never consider watching anime. However, that doesn't mean that Rockstar or other game companies are marketing towards kids, simply because they produce video games.
And regardless of all that, in this case the grandmother is saying that a game about hookers, drugs, stealing cars and shooting cops is fine for her 14-year-old kid, otherwise she wouldn't have bought it, right? Because that would make her negligent, considering it's rated as unacceptable for people under 17. Is the tobacco company responsible if you buy your own children cigarettes?
Actually, I think it'd be worse if he found some of the Disney porn out there. At least hentai has realistic-ish girls being fucked by nondescript males, demons, tentacles, dick-girl angels and so on. I think it's a little weirder to see Iago fuck princess Jasmine, or the white rabbit fuck Alice, considering those are beloved characters from his not-far-removed early childhood.
Slashdot Mirror
Because this is a hidden, experimental option that almost no one would ever realistically change.
KDE is highly customizable, but one has to draw the line somewhere. In fact, the fact that KDE is so customizable is a frequent point of attack against it. Putting a GUI option for this, which would probably be used by way less than 1% of people (or, people who use KDE, rather than mostly Gnome with a couple KDE apps), would just be inflaming the situation.
Do the original creators of the game still have/enforce the trademark for Burgertime?
Eternal Darkness does that as well. One of the hallucinations is that after walking through a door, you're surrounded by zombies, and then the message indicating that your controller is unplugged pops up on the screen. You can only watch helplessly as the zombies beat you to death.
:)
You have to have a pretty low sanity meter to see this stuff, though. I guess you were too good at killing things to get that low. Perhaps you should have slacked off a little.
Fine, then substitute 'single-celled organism from 3 billion years ago' for amoeba.
Are you arguing that there aren't organisms that haven't had to adapt/change significantly in a long time? Sharks, for instance, haven't changed in a while, because they're well suited to their environment.
Humans are at the end of a 3 billion year chain of adaptations. Amoebas, or at least amoeba-like creatures can be found toward the start. So, yes, they are less evolved in a sense.
I'm at the corner of 1st and... 1st. How can the same street intersect with itself? I must be at the nexus of the universe!
The fact is, there is no relevant difference between even a single celled embryo and an adult human except time
Oh, and a brain, and the ability to experience pain, and so on.
There's no difference between an adult human and an amoeba, except three billion years of evolution.
There is no, "let them go on to become babies" option. There's nowhere to put them so that they'll grow. There is no life support for these particular embryos anymore. They've already been taken off life support.
The original point was that, once you decide to take the baby off life support, do you donate the organs, or bury it? He argues that most parents would choose to donate the organs and save other lives.
He's not arguing that we should pull people off life support to harvest their organs when they have a chance of survival. That's a straw man.
That's not to mention that any distribution's automatic program downloader looks for important updates of all your software, not just the core stuff that Windows Update does. On Windows, every application is forced to keep track of its own updates (so you get fun popups every time you fire up Acrobat asking if you want to check for updates), rather than letting a common daemon do that job, and inform you in an unobtrusive manner.
It does everything?
It already has a fast searchable index of all the files and the content thereof on your computer?
It already has stores all kinds of contextual data about your files, so it can automatically tell you where you got them from, and what they're related to?
Yeah, Windows works for everything people do in Windows today, by definition. If you think it's the end-all of computing, and there will never be any significant developments, other than refining existing features, then I think you're rather naive.
GeForce 4200, 4400, 4600
GeForce FX5200, FX5300, FX5700, FX5750, FX5900
GeForce 6200, 6600, 6800
GeForce 7800
nForce refers to motherboard chipsets. Regular is regular, SLI means it supports SLI, and Ultra means it's the highest performing model (which also happens to include SLI).
The only confusing aspect is the suffixes like GT (Ultra, GTX, LE) on the graphics cards, which can make cards with the same number have different specs. Of course, ATI does that was well (which is better: A Pro, an SE an XT or a regular?). In fact, the major difference between the naming schemes the two companies use is that the first number for a nVidia card is the generation the chip is from (4, 5, 6), while the first number in an ATI card is (supposed to be) the version of DirectX it's built to support (or, it was until the X series; they ran out of 9-based numbers, I guess). So for a time, ATI was actually inserting new 9x00 chips between existing 9x00 chips from an earlier generation. Are you sure that a 9600 is significantly worse than a 9700 in that situation?
nVidia's naming scheme is no more or less complex than ATI's. You're just familiar with ATI's product line, and rather ignorant (it seems) of nVidia's.
So to you a mind is like a soul, so to speak?
What evidence do you have that, given a sufficiently detailed and understood model of the brain, we could not find mechanisms that allow people to make choices, or provide the illusion thereof?
What does it mean---to you---to make a choice? If chemicals can produce thought (as the linked post says), what makes choices different from other thought such that they cannot be produced by chemicals? What evidence do you have that choices revolve around a supernatural influence on the chemicals in our brain? Is it even possible to provide evidence to support that?
If you define a mind as something the existence of which cannot be proven, then why should I assume that it does exist, and place great importance on it?
Sweet Jesus, man! That's the worst story I've heard in months! I'd recommend keeping that to yourself.
Don't anyone dare modding this man up. Think of the children!
What is your definition of mind?
'Dude man, I have to tell you the funniest story, man. I was really fucked up the other day and I was hanging out with Jeremy and we were both super fucked up. And we went back to Jeremy's apartment; we split this bar of Xanax, okay? And then he put on that viking hat, you know, that he won at Vegas, you know, then he started dancing around and dude... it's was so fuckin' funny... dude I literally shit my pants!'
Hmm, that's a good question. Why isn't it OK?
Because Christians don't think logically like that when it comes to their faith. Let's disregard the other reply to this post, because as I understand it, most Protestant forms of Christianity allow you to be saved by faith alone, irrespective of your good works. And even Catholics, who believe in faith and good works allow you options like repenting when you're near death, I think.
The paradox is similar to that of the old puritan belief of the elect and predestination. They believed that, from birth, everyone was either going to heaven or going to hell, and nothing you did could change that. From a logical perspective (assuming your actions are ultimately dictated by how your afterlife will turn out, as is the case from the Christian perspective), then, you might as well do whatever the fuck you want, because it's not going to change anything that really matters.
Of course, this didn't happen, because the puritans spent their lives trying to prove to each other that they were part of the elect, even though it doesn't really make any sense to do so, from their perspective. Of course, that was a reasonable thing to do, because people want to go through life with a certain amount of comfort, and being part of the elect got you power in Puritan society.
So, if you believe that Jesus dying for your sins is all that it takes to get into heaven, then, yes, you might as well go sin as much as you want; you're covered. However, that won't get you very good standing in the Christian community, and may get you out-and-out killed, depending on what you do. It seems that most people understand, unconsciously at least, that having a good time in 'this life' is important (no matter how much they profess otherwise), so they block out such a paradox, or try to rationalize around it, or do whatever so that they don't feel silly doing the opposite of what is the logical conclusion of what they believe.
Of course, if you're inclined to think about things in this way, odds are you aren't Christian, so you're screwed from the get-go. Then again, your morality would also probably be based around something other than fear of hell, or bribery of heaven, so none of this would really apply to you anyway.
That list is missing the definition that is most likely to have inspired the name of the command shell. A monad is a type of object in category theory which was adopted by functional programming languages like Haskell to represent units of computation. Essentially, it is an abstraction of imperative programming with side effects that doesn't break the purely functional nature of the language.
Some people at MS have actually been pretty active in the Haskell community, so the word probably came from there in some roundabout way.
Javac is written in java, so compiling anything requires firing up a jvm first, which can take a while.
However, since Eclipse is written in java, the jvm is already running, so it can just call up the appropriate javac classes and run the compiler in-process, removing the latency of starting up a new jvm. That's most likely why Eclipse is much more snappy at compiles (off the top of my head; I haven't written any Java in a while).
Alternatively they could be using IBM's jikes compiler, which is written in C or C++, so it also doesn't have the startup requirement of loading a jvm.
I have one. It's a good mouse, but I never find myself using the adjustable sensitivity. I get used twitching at 800 dpi, and changing that just throws me off. Maybe someone more coordinated/hardcore than I could make use of this feature.
The slick feet are nice, though (although you can get that with teflon tape, I think).
In other words, don't pay a premium to get the adjustable sensitivity. It's a good mouse overall, though.
Catholic schools here in Ohio (where I went) seem to be the same way. In fact, as I understand it, Catholicism is pretty much behind evolution, as long as you accept some sort of 'God created the soul when humans evolved' thing, which doesn't really deal with science at all anyway.
Interestingly enough, I heard a Catholic radio program that discussed the topic a bit (my mom's very Catholic, so it's hard to avoid that kind of thing around her). Someone called in and asked how it was possible that the church could support evolution and so on. The host explained something like the above, but also added something like the following, which I thought was interesting: 'The Pope doesn't say that evolution is "the truth." Evolution is a scientific theory, which can always be false and changes over time, so codifying any one version of it as "the truth" would lead to problems.'
In other words, it seems like at least some of the people high up in the Catholic church actually have some idea of how science works, and how it's different from religion and philosophy and so on. That doesn't surprise me, because from what I've seen (growing up Catholic), Catholics tend to be fairly moderate. They aren't the bible bangers you're looking for.
Most creationists/ID proponents I've seen tend to be fundamentalists of the protestant variety. For a fun time, ask them for their opinions on Catholicism. Of course, I won't argue that there aren't Catholics who support ID. It isn't, however, the official view of their church.
Yes, we can have an excellent discussion about how little most people actually know about science.
Do you think there's a lot of debate among people who actually look at facts and develop theories in order to explain them, and make predictions (that is, scientists), rather than people who cherry pick evidence to fit with their preconceived notions?
Representing this as some sort of significant debate within the scientific community is ridiculous. This is a debate between scientists and people with an agenda totally unrelated to scientific progress.
Mind you, I myself am an agnostic. I think the arguments against the existence of god are equally trite and meaningless, though I don't ascribe to any organized idea of what it would be to be god, so...
:)
Thanks. I myself am (mostly) atheist (more atheist towards Christian-type gods than, for instance, deistic gods), but I, too, find the "proofs" against various gods' existence that many amateur atheist philosophers flaunt these days to be rather embarrassing, as they seem to be based, often times, around straw men and assumptions just as unprovable as the theistic claims they are trying to debunk.
It's nice to find a philosopher who feels the same way; I had almost given up on your kind.
I was referring to the repositories people put out with new KDE versions. I don't know who makes them, but from what I've seen there are usually i386 repositories on the day of release. They don't exist for x86-64, though, as far as I can tell.
I could have sworn that I had to compile something myself for mp3 support or something of that nature. Perhaps it was k3b or something, I can't recall. Most stuff is enabled via non-free repositories, though, you're right.
Out of curiosity, how prompt is SuSE on getting new KDE packages?
I tried out Kubuntu, since they usually claim to have new KDE packages on the day they're released (3.4 released? Kubuntu has it!). However, I discovered that that only applied to i386. Since I have an Athlon 64, I'd have to compile anything newer than 3.4.0 (including 3.4.x bugfix releases) myself, unless I want to use the breezy testing repository.
Combine that with the fact that I'd have to compile several other things myself to get support for mp3 and so on, and I decided there was little advantage for me to go Kubuntu over Gentoo on my particular setup.
Is SuSE better in this regard?
I didn't say juries don't do stupid things. I fully expect that a ruling like that could happen, and it'd be ridiculous.
However, can you explain exactly how they're marketing to kids? I thought the quintessential gaming demographic these days was males of age 18 - 30, so presumably they're marketing to those people.
I've seen the commercial; it's full of explosions, gunfire, rock music and gratuitous-badass-walking-scenes. It looks like a typical R-rated, summer blockbuster action movie. Are all of those marketed at little kids, too? Let's fine all the movie studios.
Much of the American public may not have caught on to the fact that video games are not strictly for children anymore, just like they still think that "animation is for kids," and would never consider watching anime. However, that doesn't mean that Rockstar or other game companies are marketing towards kids, simply because they produce video games.
And regardless of all that, in this case the grandmother is saying that a game about hookers, drugs, stealing cars and shooting cops is fine for her 14-year-old kid, otherwise she wouldn't have bought it, right? Because that would make her negligent, considering it's rated as unacceptable for people under 17. Is the tobacco company responsible if you buy your own children cigarettes?
Actually, I think it'd be worse if he found some of the Disney porn out there. At least hentai has realistic-ish girls being fucked by nondescript males, demons, tentacles, dick-girl angels and so on. I think it's a little weirder to see Iago fuck princess Jasmine, or the white rabbit fuck Alice, considering those are beloved characters from his not-far-removed early childhood.
I guess this is pretty off topic, though.