What is your evidence for a soul? By soul, I'm assuming something non-physical that contributes to the personality and mental processing of any given person.
On the other hand, there is evidence that the chemicals and physical structure of our brain determine our personality. People who receive brain trauma can have personality changes as a result.
Lets say the radiation was non-destructive to the hard drive a certain percentage of the time, and re-arranged the bits. Lets also say that the hard drive is capable of holding Skynet. That is, we've established that its theoretically possible to go from the starting result to the end result using the method you've outlined. Now, add in a selection function that will make copies of the hard drive that have data that is closer to Skynet, and put them in their own microwave. Let that bake for hundreds of thousands of years.
Yes, I think you'd eventually get to Skynet. Your withering criticism of evolution (and lets face it, that's what it is) leaves out several critical factors contributing the "success" of the process.
Its a fairly interesting study, I'll admit. However, after a brief reading of it, I noticed: 1) The methodology doesn't say whether the generator is in view of the subject, and the phrasing suggests that it is. The generator could have had tells. 2) Doesn't mention how the administrator was isolated from the subjects in the double-blind experiments. 3) It states that a single-blind was first conducted, then goes on to say that the double-blind was conducted with "the same parameters."
It would be nice to see these clarified and the results reproduced. If there were issues with the "double-blind" (either the administrator or the generator being observable), then the first run of the single blind, and subsequent weeding out of the test subjects, would select for those who would be able to recognize the tells.
This particular paragraph gave me a bit of pause too: "In our experience, the patients' clinical responses could not always be reproduced completely, but the objective Iriscorder, EKG, and respirometer could be. However, the responses were definitely different from controls or placebo challenges. In our experience over the years, we have found partial reproduction of symptoms on repeat challenge to be as significant as total reproduction. Therefore, significant differences from controls in objective ineasurementa were deemed valid."
There are some other questionable assumptions in the discussion section as well.
Still, it would nice to see the experiment reproduced, since they did manage to obtain some interesting results that would be worthwhile investigating.
The point I was pointing out, and that you missed (as you apparently aren't intellectually equipped to appreciate this) is that just because Microsoft pays shills doesn't mean that a given person with a positive opinion of a Microsoft product is necessarily a Microsoft shill.
And the reality is that it doesn't matter. In one case, the person is conveying their opinion, which can be simply countered with yours, and really doesn't matter in any debate (an opinion isn't proof of anything). In the other case, they're conveying facts, which can be verified or discounted. Claiming that a person is a shill is an anti-intellectual appeal to emotion. Its intellectual dishonesty, unless you have any proof to back up the claim (which they never do). In case you missed it with your staggering intellect, proof here means proof that the person in question is a shill, not proof that Microsoft in general pays for shills.
But then again, you're linking to boycottnovel and twitter's journal, so you know all about intellectual dishonesty (Hell I'm giving it a 50/50 that you are twitter. Hi twitter!) But go ahead, have fun labeling me a troll. Easier to dodge the point that way, isn't it?
Because anything positive said about Windows usually prompts responses shrilly claiming that the parent poster must be a paid shill. Without any proof, of course.
No, we're biased because, to date, double-blind studies done with people who are "WiFi sensitive" have turned up nothing. It is up to the people making the claims to prove their claims. If they are sensitive to WiFi signals, this can be trivially proven by a double-blind experiment. Yet, no-one has produced one.
Well, excluding C#, which doesn't count (because its Microsoft-only, bar Mono), most code I've written have been cross-platform GUI programs, which I haven't had a problem with. I've only done a little CLI, and I haven't run into any implementation issues with the standard libraries. But I haven't written a CLI app in a while, and I'm mostly used to post-VC6 Visual Studio (VC6 was pretty terrible standards-wise, they even got the for-loop scoping wrong).
Its nice to have small, simple utilities that you can chain together. But at certain times its nice to have a larger tool that ties them all together for certain tasks. Ideally, you'd have a choice between both where appropriate (and in most cases, this isn't that difficult to accomplish). NMap strikes me as the kind of tool that can benefit from this sort of thing.
Really? Everyone I know who uses Visual Studio.Net loves it, and I frequently hear comments, even on Slashdot, how its the "One thing that Microsoft got right." I certainly enjoy using it, and scratch my head when I come across the occasional (rare) comment that its "bloated and buggy."
Of course, using the words "bloated and buggy" has become the new "I don't like it, but don't want to give any specifics." So, yeah.
In a lot of parents' eyes, you'd probably end up with 0 > P-violence, so you end up with P-violence * M-violence P-sex * M-sex, simply because sex is far more likely.
Slashdot ate my formatting
That is, In a lot of parents' eyes, you'd probably end up with 0 < P-violence << P-sex, so while M-sex << M-violence, you still end up with P-violence * M-violence << P-sex * M-sex, simply because sex is far more likely.
I wouldn't say that. Its an application of expected value.
M = Lets call this immorality, with higher, positive numbers being more immoral. P = Probability
M-total = P-sex * M-sex + P-violence * M-violence
In a lot of parents' eyes, you'd probably end up with 0 > P-violence, so you end up with P-violence * M-violence P-sex * M-sex, simply because sex is far more likely.
Along other lines, you have issues like teen pregnancy, which is far more likely to negatively impact a kids' life than violence.
Now, I don't agree that sex is immoral. Provided you give your kids education about safe sex, its safe too, so for me M-sex is pretty much non-existent. But a lot of the driving force behind these kinds of "People worry about sex but not violence," is to portray people you don't agree with as stupid, incompetent, and immoral, which is not necessarily the case. I'm sure that if you asked many parents, having a kid who murders someone is a far worse outcome than having your kid sleep with his girlfriend. However, they simply don't see the former as very likely, and thus not worth a lot of concern. To simply state that this is proof that they see sex and violence as morally equivalent is bullshit.
I tried using banlist. My impressions were that it was flakey technically (sometimes pinging and banning just didn't work for me), and also flakey from a social perspective. I got "banned" for some of the stupidest stuff, including picking the hero that the host wanted.
It depends. If I'm fighting a guy, and I'm whomping him completely, with none of his allies around, and some guy comes along and purposely takes the last hit, I'd probably send him a message saying its rude. If our life bars are roughly even, or there's lots of enemy players around, then its understandable that the other guy might assume that I needed help, and I'd just brush it off. Its also worth noting that your character auto attacks stuff, so in several cases I've been in a situation where my character kills off a trash unit, then turns and hits the enemy hero, killing him, before I notice and re-assign targets.
At any rate, the level of verbal abuse is often-times completely unwarranted. In many cases, the hostility shown due to a simple mistake is on-par of what you'd expect if other players were following heros with the explicit goal of taking the kill-shot.
Its understandable why they're hostile, but its still not acceptable. And it still kills the fun in the game. I tried to get a couple of friends into playing DotA so we could have a competent team, but they never got past the newbie stage. They didn't feel that dealing with all the harassment was worth it.
Ask for help, and in my experience, you'll get it.
In my experience, if I was in a lane with an opposing hero that was particularly bad against mine (as some heroes have a lot of trouble fighting other heroes), then my request would be all but ignored until I died several times, at which point I would be verbally berated. It was a tossup whether questions about optimal weapon builds would be met with a helpful answer, scorn, or just ignored. Suffice to say, I did not find that the community was willing to help you get through challenges in the game.
Its partly a flaw of having to deal with Battle.net as a matchmaking system. That is, you couldn't kick players, swap players for new ones, mark players to avoid, or re-balance teams.
Yes, the community certain rates as one of the top-3 most hostile I've come across, if not the number one. Once I noticed the hostility starting to rub off on me, I decided to quit playing the game altogether. That kind of thing is poisonous. If one of these spin-offs develops a significantly better community, then I'd consider picking it up.
DOTA, however, doesn't really have stats to track. At least not without using some sort of external program (I don't know if they exist or not). Custom games aren't tracked in WC3/Battle.net. Within a DOTA match, however, it was quite common for players to try to get the biggest kill/death ratio and brag about that. This got to the point where you would get screamed at if you killed an enemy player that your team-mate was fighting (called kill-stealing).
It is, is it? You don't really offer any proof to that effect. Companies are perfectly able to grow very large without government assistance, and once they have disproportionate resources (economy, manpower, social influence), its a simple matter to utilize those resources to coerce people. Government is certainly part of the problem, and is certainly corruptible. But government is, in theory, the people working together to certain ends, and is, paradoxically, the best way for us to deal with entities that are trying to infringe upon our rights.
I won't simply accept, "Government is bad, mmkay. Government is the source of all our problems, mmkay," as a valid argument. Government causes many problems, but it is also a tool that we use to fight many others. Balance is important.
I don't know why you're modded flame-bait. Greenspan was completely wrong on the banking industry and the economy, even admitting so himself. Is there any evidence that his opinion is worthwhile, or that following his suggestions would be prudent? Because it sure as hell isn't working out so well for us right now.
Investigation isn't the same as taking them to court. Maybe the investigations will turn up nothing, coincidentally at the same time as Google gives a nice campaign donation some prominent Democrats.
Slashdot Mirror
What is your evidence for a soul? By soul, I'm assuming something non-physical that contributes to the personality and mental processing of any given person.
On the other hand, there is evidence that the chemicals and physical structure of our brain determine our personality. People who receive brain trauma can have personality changes as a result.
Lets say the radiation was non-destructive to the hard drive a certain percentage of the time, and re-arranged the bits. Lets also say that the hard drive is capable of holding Skynet. That is, we've established that its theoretically possible to go from the starting result to the end result using the method you've outlined. Now, add in a selection function that will make copies of the hard drive that have data that is closer to Skynet, and put them in their own microwave. Let that bake for hundreds of thousands of years.
Yes, I think you'd eventually get to Skynet. Your withering criticism of evolution (and lets face it, that's what it is) leaves out several critical factors contributing the "success" of the process.
Its a fairly interesting study, I'll admit. However, after a brief reading of it, I noticed:
1) The methodology doesn't say whether the generator is in view of the subject, and the phrasing suggests that it is. The generator could have had tells.
2) Doesn't mention how the administrator was isolated from the subjects in the double-blind experiments.
3) It states that a single-blind was first conducted, then goes on to say that the double-blind was conducted with "the same parameters."
It would be nice to see these clarified and the results reproduced. If there were issues with the "double-blind" (either the administrator or the generator being observable), then the first run of the single blind, and subsequent weeding out of the test subjects, would select for those who would be able to recognize the tells.
This particular paragraph gave me a bit of pause too:
"In our experience, the patients' clinical responses could not always be reproduced completely, but the objective Iriscorder, EKG, and respirometer could be. However, the responses were definitely different from controls or placebo challenges. In our experience over the years, we have found partial reproduction of symptoms on repeat challenge to be as significant as total reproduction. Therefore, significant differences from controls in objective ineasurementa were deemed valid."
There are some other questionable assumptions in the discussion section as well.
Still, it would nice to see the experiment reproduced, since they did manage to obtain some interesting results that would be worthwhile investigating.
The point I was pointing out, and that you missed (as you apparently aren't intellectually equipped to appreciate this) is that just because Microsoft pays shills doesn't mean that a given person with a positive opinion of a Microsoft product is necessarily a Microsoft shill.
And the reality is that it doesn't matter. In one case, the person is conveying their opinion, which can be simply countered with yours, and really doesn't matter in any debate (an opinion isn't proof of anything). In the other case, they're conveying facts, which can be verified or discounted. Claiming that a person is a shill is an anti-intellectual appeal to emotion. Its intellectual dishonesty, unless you have any proof to back up the claim (which they never do). In case you missed it with your staggering intellect, proof here means proof that the person in question is a shill, not proof that Microsoft in general pays for shills.
But then again, you're linking to boycottnovel and twitter's journal, so you know all about intellectual dishonesty (Hell I'm giving it a 50/50 that you are twitter. Hi twitter!) But go ahead, have fun labeling me a troll. Easier to dodge the point that way, isn't it?
Because anything positive said about Windows usually prompts responses shrilly claiming that the parent poster must be a paid shill. Without any proof, of course.
No, we're biased because, to date, double-blind studies done with people who are "WiFi sensitive" have turned up nothing. It is up to the people making the claims to prove their claims. If they are sensitive to WiFi signals, this can be trivially proven by a double-blind experiment. Yet, no-one has produced one.
Uhg, VC5? My condolences.
Well, excluding C#, which doesn't count (because its Microsoft-only, bar Mono), most code I've written have been cross-platform GUI programs, which I haven't had a problem with. I've only done a little CLI, and I haven't run into any implementation issues with the standard libraries. But I haven't written a CLI app in a while, and I'm mostly used to post-VC6 Visual Studio (VC6 was pretty terrible standards-wise, they even got the for-loop scoping wrong).
Its nice to have small, simple utilities that you can chain together. But at certain times its nice to have a larger tool that ties them all together for certain tasks. Ideally, you'd have a choice between both where appropriate (and in most cases, this isn't that difficult to accomplish). NMap strikes me as the kind of tool that can benefit from this sort of thing.
Really? Everyone I know who uses Visual Studio .Net loves it, and I frequently hear comments, even on Slashdot, how its the "One thing that Microsoft got right." I certainly enjoy using it, and scratch my head when I come across the occasional (rare) comment that its "bloated and buggy."
Of course, using the words "bloated and buggy" has become the new "I don't like it, but don't want to give any specifics." So, yeah.
Er what? How is DirectX a security atrocity?
In a lot of parents' eyes, you'd probably end up with 0 > P-violence, so you end up with P-violence * M-violence P-sex * M-sex, simply because sex is far more likely.
Slashdot ate my formatting
That is, In a lot of parents' eyes, you'd probably end up with 0 < P-violence << P-sex, so while M-sex << M-violence, you still end up with P-violence * M-violence << P-sex * M-sex, simply because sex is far more likely.
I wouldn't say that. Its an application of expected value.
M = Lets call this immorality, with higher, positive numbers being more immoral.
P = Probability
M-total = P-sex * M-sex + P-violence * M-violence
In a lot of parents' eyes, you'd probably end up with 0 > P-violence, so you end up with P-violence * M-violence P-sex * M-sex, simply because sex is far more likely.
Along other lines, you have issues like teen pregnancy, which is far more likely to negatively impact a kids' life than violence.
Now, I don't agree that sex is immoral. Provided you give your kids education about safe sex, its safe too, so for me M-sex is pretty much non-existent. But a lot of the driving force behind these kinds of "People worry about sex but not violence," is to portray people you don't agree with as stupid, incompetent, and immoral, which is not necessarily the case. I'm sure that if you asked many parents, having a kid who murders someone is a far worse outcome than having your kid sleep with his girlfriend. However, they simply don't see the former as very likely, and thus not worth a lot of concern. To simply state that this is proof that they see sex and violence as morally equivalent is bullshit.
I think this is mostly because most parents feel that their kids having sex is more likely than them becomming violent killers.
I tried using banlist. My impressions were that it was flakey technically (sometimes pinging and banning just didn't work for me), and also flakey from a social perspective. I got "banned" for some of the stupidest stuff, including picking the hero that the host wanted.
It depends. If I'm fighting a guy, and I'm whomping him completely, with none of his allies around, and some guy comes along and purposely takes the last hit, I'd probably send him a message saying its rude. If our life bars are roughly even, or there's lots of enemy players around, then its understandable that the other guy might assume that I needed help, and I'd just brush it off. Its also worth noting that your character auto attacks stuff, so in several cases I've been in a situation where my character kills off a trash unit, then turns and hits the enemy hero, killing him, before I notice and re-assign targets.
At any rate, the level of verbal abuse is often-times completely unwarranted. In many cases, the hostility shown due to a simple mistake is on-par of what you'd expect if other players were following heros with the explicit goal of taking the kill-shot.
Its understandable why they're hostile, but its still not acceptable. And it still kills the fun in the game. I tried to get a couple of friends into playing DotA so we could have a competent team, but they never got past the newbie stage. They didn't feel that dealing with all the harassment was worth it.
Between terrible rap music and black-ops busting my door down, I'd have to say its a toss-up.
Ask for help, and in my experience, you'll get it.
In my experience, if I was in a lane with an opposing hero that was particularly bad against mine (as some heroes have a lot of trouble fighting other heroes), then my request would be all but ignored until I died several times, at which point I would be verbally berated. It was a tossup whether questions about optimal weapon builds would be met with a helpful answer, scorn, or just ignored. Suffice to say, I did not find that the community was willing to help you get through challenges in the game.
Its partly a flaw of having to deal with Battle.net as a matchmaking system. That is, you couldn't kick players, swap players for new ones, mark players to avoid, or re-balance teams.
Yes, the community certain rates as one of the top-3 most hostile I've come across, if not the number one. Once I noticed the hostility starting to rub off on me, I decided to quit playing the game altogether. That kind of thing is poisonous. If one of these spin-offs develops a significantly better community, then I'd consider picking it up.
DOTA, however, doesn't really have stats to track. At least not without using some sort of external program (I don't know if they exist or not). Custom games aren't tracked in WC3/Battle.net. Within a DOTA match, however, it was quite common for players to try to get the biggest kill/death ratio and brag about that. This got to the point where you would get screamed at if you killed an enemy player that your team-mate was fighting (called kill-stealing).
It is, is it? You don't really offer any proof to that effect. Companies are perfectly able to grow very large without government assistance, and once they have disproportionate resources (economy, manpower, social influence), its a simple matter to utilize those resources to coerce people. Government is certainly part of the problem, and is certainly corruptible. But government is, in theory, the people working together to certain ends, and is, paradoxically, the best way for us to deal with entities that are trying to infringe upon our rights.
I won't simply accept, "Government is bad, mmkay. Government is the source of all our problems, mmkay," as a valid argument. Government causes many problems, but it is also a tool that we use to fight many others. Balance is important.
I don't know why you're modded flame-bait. Greenspan was completely wrong on the banking industry and the economy, even admitting so himself. Is there any evidence that his opinion is worthwhile, or that following his suggestions would be prudent? Because it sure as hell isn't working out so well for us right now.
Investigation isn't the same as taking them to court. Maybe the investigations will turn up nothing, coincidentally at the same time as Google gives a nice campaign donation some prominent Democrats.