No, you've missed the point. The article isn't about "logical beliefs that can't be proven". There is no such thing. A logical belief is proven by definition, otherwise it's not logical. (If you can, please explain what you think you mean by an unproven logical belief.) Perhaps the word you're looking for is "reasonable". There are many who find the idea of God to be perfectly reasonable, even if others don't. Several of those who responded for the article do, for example.
Whatever makes you think Jung is any more rational than Freud? Honestly! Maybe his theories tickle you in a more satisfying way, but it's not even remotely scientific. Both of them were cast from the same witch-doctor mold. But you're wrong anyway. The whole parent-cast-as-God thing is classically Freudian.
This is a rather silly Freudian idea you're spouting, for which you have no proof either. Neither did Freud. And not only for this, but for much else he wrote, which is why he's generally discredited these days. Why he's still referenced by people like the lit-crit crowd I have no idea.
You further argue against a strawman: theists generally do not claim God is complex.
wouldn't a "delete" attribute be redundant to allowing writes to the parent directory?
No. Why should it be?
This also allows you to create files in the directory, which you wouldn't have with just a delete attribute...But then again, when would you only want to delete files in a directory, but not be able to create them?
The security attributes available in VMS are read, write, execute, and delete and can be set at the level of the individual file even if you happen to not be using ACLs, which are available too. You can set permissions to create in a directory but not delete which actually is very useful at times. As you suggest, you can also set permissions to delete and not create. I don't know why anyone would want to do this either, but is that a good reason to stop them?
And whats wrong with writing a file to null? That seems reasonable thing to be able to do.
Not if you're trying to prevent data loss via restrictive file permissions.
VMS' built-in versioning is very simplisitc. Any fully qualified pathname includes a version number, and any time a new version of a file is written out, you're really getting a new file of the same name as the old but with an incremented version number. (The file system delivers the highest version by default.) It's not intended so much to track anything as it is to prevent the accidental loss of data discussed above.
The DCL DELETE command can delete arbitrary file versions, and PURGE deletes all versions but the highest.
If you want version tracking, with full history, then you use CMS which, if I'm not mistaken, is included in a default VMS install. It's intended as a code management tool, but it can handle any file type these days so it's often used for other purposes. But CMS doesn't really store versions.
just because I referenced the simpsons doesn't make my point less valid.
Yes it does. You wanted to suggest a moral course of action, and your only recourse is to a silly cartoon? That bespeaks a certain lack of depth. It certainly doesn't support your point in any meaningful way.
plus, it doesn't have anything to do with "metaphysics".
I think you ought to THINK about what the point is and not how the point is phrased.
I THINK you ought to read the rest of my response and address the substance of what I said instead of picking on the one or two parts of it you think you understand.
Sorry, but exitus non acta probat. Not fallacious at all, just moral. Or as moral as one can get after buying gray-market software in the first place. That's one method by which I don't mind harming MS's revenue stream, and incidentally benefiting those who have been harmed by their methods. I see no need to go further.
I really think you ought to study metaphysics in some context other than The Simpsons.
I honestly can't claim I've been ripped off by MS. I've never paid a MS tax since I build all my own boxes. I do run MS OSes (gotta have my games) but I think the last time I paid retail for it was when MS-DOS 6.22 came out. Most everything else has been gray market, which to an extent means I've benefitted from someone else having paid the MS tax. And that's even if the settlement was worthwhile, and I'm not certain it is.
Re:There must be something to this
on
Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Feynman wouldn't necessarily have known from personal experience. As a physicist, he was unique in many ways.
Reflecting on the array of instructors, it occurs to me that each department had its characteristic temprament by which we might be able make a guess or two about their personal lives.
The math department was uniformly good-tempered and mellow, while the EE profs all seemed a little... tense. As noted above.
The CS department formed while I was there -- this was the early '80s. When I started out on my CS major you could get it either through the EE or the Math department. Mine's from the Math department. Neener.
Physics was an interesting case and showed the most variation. The younger instructors seemed happy and reasonably contented, while the older ones mostly were trying too hard as if to say, "I could still get laid if I wanted to! Really!" Disco was dead by then, but you wouldn't know it from how some of them dressed.
Chemistry profs all acted like they didn't need it. Since this department included biology/biochemistry, maybe this indicates that too much knowledge is a very dangerous thing.
I never took any Mechanical, Civil, or Marine Engineering courses so I can't say anything about those profs from personal experience. There were some frightening things in the bathroom stalls in the buildings that housed those departments though.
The Phys Ed instructors were much like PE teachers everywhere else. IOW, I'm not going there.
We were made to take at least one "Liberal Arts" type of class each semester so we had a small chance of turning into well-rounded individuals and not inveterate geeks. These were all collected in the Humanities department. However, every prof I ever had in those courses appeared to be same-sex oriented, so I had no standard by which to calibrate their tension levels.
Finally, the Management Science department all acted like they were getting it from the departmental secretary, but I have it on good authority that this wasn't true.
There must be something to this
on
Mathematics and Sex
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
All I know is, out of all the classes I ever took in college, only the Math professors consistently acted as if they'd gotten laid recently.
This was in sharp contrast to the Electrical Engineering department...
This is true. They don't perform their tests under laboratory conditions, although they do everything possible to make quantitive measurements. They test under the same biases and prejudices used by most consumers. The theory is that they're far more interested in how a product performs as people will actually use it than how the manufacturer would like to see it used.
Until he retired, my uncle was head of their paint testing laboratory, and this is exactly what he did. He would, for example, test a paint's opacity by applying a coat directly to an unprimed test pattern. He used to drive the paint companies nuts -- but when he said a paint will cover in a single coat that's exactly what a consumer could expect.
How pleafant that they've done what waf neceffary to make this happen. How did they train the foftware to recognize the quirky 18th Century handwriting?
"Methuselah". He lived to be 969 years. But most of the people mentioned in Genesis between Adam and Noah lived to be over 900, so any of them will do. You might as well pick one that's easy to spell.
The chapter of Genesis where Methuselah is introduced actually has some good examples of what I'm talking about with respect to the meaning of "year" though. One synodal month is 29.53 days, so there are 12.37 of them in a year of 365.25 days.
Gen 5:25 records that Methuselah was 187 years old when he begat Lamech. (With no indication as to whether or not Lamech was his first child; the interest here is tracing the ancestry of Noah.) If "year" meant "month", that would make Methuselah 15 years old at the time. Not an unreasonable age of marriage in a pastoral society, admittedly. But 5:21 says his father Enoch was 65 years old when he begat Methuselah, which by this measure would make him only 5 years old! (And we plainly must apply the same scale to Enoch because he was supposed to have been 365 years when he went to God. Enoch is not said to have died, and the tradition is that he was taken directly to heaven in a way similar to Elijah.) Enoch's father Jared, who lived to 962 years, was 162 when he fathered him which would make him 13, close to the lower limit for making babies pre-rBGH (or whatever the cause is for the earlier onset of puberty in recent years). But his father Mahaleel was 65 when he begat Jared -- 5 years old again. It doesn't seem possible to make "year" into "lunar year" with any consistency. You have to be very selective to make it work at all.
Lets say in the bible a man lived for 900 years (which there are at least one I just cant spell his name).
You can't spell "Adam"?
Your theory about Biblical years really being lunar years has been bruited about before, but it's not consistent with everything we're told about these people -- for example, the ages at which they had their first children would, in general, be absurdly low. We're really left no choice but to think the text means solar years. Make of that what you will.
And by that system, we'd have had about 20 different ballot boxes in the room for this past election when you add up all the offices and referenda that needed to be decided. 40 actually, since due to new accessibility rules we lost a polling place and had to vote two seperate precincts out of the same facility. Two different sets of officials, two different ballots, two different ballot boxes. The only requirements here was that the voter stand in the correct line, and then after voting put his ballot into the correct box. Since, when we balanced all the numbers at the end of the day to ensure all the ballots we issued were accounted for, we ended up 6 over and the other precinct ended up 6 under, there were at least 6 people from the other precinct who put their ballots into the wrong box despite being instructed otherwise. That's net obviously; two-way crossovers would go undetected at this point. I suppose considering how busy we were to have only 6 such errors isn't so bad -- but suppose we had 20 boxes each! What a disaster that might have been.
This is what I mean when I say we'd have to completely restructure the way we run elections. (This is California, by the way. All elections in the US are conducted by the states, not the federal government. That's why there's no one uniform system from state to state.) To count votes by hand, there can't possibly be more than 2 or 3 candidates or issues to be decided at once. It's hard enough to get the electorate to turn out once or twice a year. 6 or 7 times a year would be just too much, IMO.
The main reason it takes so long to get a final count is because of provisional balloting, which we do so as to not inadvertently deny the vote to anyone who has the right to do so. For each one a decision has to be made as to whether that ballot will be counted or not. This takes time, and until it's complete the count isn't finished. Naturally, for all practical purposes the results are known long before the figures are official since provisional ballots comprise only a small proportion of the total. And the Presidential election isn't official until the Electors meet and Congress counts their votes anyway, which happens in December.
That's easy enough if the ballot is a simple one. You couldn't possibly do it in many parts of the US. I worked as an officer at an election precinct this year, in a county where we use optically scanned ballots. After the polls close, part of our job is to sort through the ballots looking for those that are mismarked, have write-in candidates, or would otherwise be unreadable by a machine, and set them aside for hand counting by the Elections Board. With four people working a single ballot box, that took the better part of an hour by itself.
Now, besides the presidential election there were whole slates of local and state candidates, a US Senator and Representative to choose, and close on a dozen referenda. There is simply no way to do an actual count that quickly with a ballot that large.
In principle, I agree with you. But for a state to change its system to manual counting, it would require it to completely change the way it conducts elections. It's not a change we can simply drop into place.
It's true. Natural gas can be deadly explosive stuff, but we live with it everyday and think nothing of the risk. But every so often there's a reminder.
But mention hydrogen and you get unreasoned panic. Go figure.
Not to mention that God himself could, someday, speak from the sky, cause plagues of locusts, and generally prove his existence in the scientific sense.
This would not prove God's existence scientifically. It'll be unanalyzable and non-repeatable. Miracles actually occur with some regularity...
Parenthetical note: I've seen the above statement denied here rather stridently, but for me to credit that means I have to discard the evidence of my own eyes, and the testmony of a large number of people I personally know and trust, in favor of that of some faceless militant atheist. (Not you. The post I have in mind was far less reasonable in tone.) I think I can be excused for not doing so.
...But the nature of a miracle is that once it happens, there's nothing of it to see other than its effect where, if there are no physical signs of the cause, there are usually no supernatural signs of it either. Even the fire from the annual Holy Light in Jerusalem starts to give off heat after a while. What's to say about a miraculous healing except that a medical condition corrected itself somehow? A voice? Did anyone record it? Witnesses? We all know how unreliable they can be. And so forth.
And if a miracle could be verified scientifically, then what? Why would that be scientific evidence of God's existence? Wouldn't a materially-oriented scientist conclude rather that there's some physical law he does not yet understand and work towards understanding it? That the law would not exist given our hypothetical premise doesn't matter for the purpose of making a guess about such a person's natural reaction.
What it boils down to is that a system and method such as science, which is of marvellous utility for analyzing, categorizing, and understanding the natural world, can't say much about the actions of a supremely free-willed being who acts unpredictably and outside the bounds of nature. This is just not a sphere it's designed to operate in. Personally, I have no more problem with science's limitations here than I do in the opposite direction. After all, electric lights are pretty useful. Even in church.
Modded funny, but although a parody this is clearly an absolutely serious post. This complete lock we've got on a 2-party system is killing us.
The amazing thing is that Bush has almost managed to sell himself as a genuine conservative -- he's not -- and Kerry is held up as a genuine liberal -- I can't see it myself. I'd dearly love Bush to lose tomorrow, but I really don't want to see Kerry win either. It's a 3rd party year for me. Too bad none of them, not even Nader, has a snowball's chance in hell of winning.
It's true they did not adopt teens. But in this context, we're talking about infant adoptions. They did adopt children of color, and are white themselves.
It was in the post you said you didn't want to read.
I note from the adoption site link that no national statistcs have been compiled since 1992. That's a damn shame, because this is really something we should know about as a society. All I know at this point is that the system is nowhere near saturated considering how long couples wanting to adopt have to wait. Three families I'm acquainted with ended up doing international adoptions, multiple times, because the domestic system was simply not serving them. Perhaps that points more to inefficiencies in the system more than anything else, but the effect is the same as if there was a shortage of available adoptees. That's something that has to change.
Whoa... You've been saying that graph showed 47% of women identified as pro-choice, yet's it's labelled Americans, not women. (The tables at the "More details" link says "adults".) I'll let it pass because of the other survey showing no gender gap so the numbers probably are close to that for women -- but you really should have mentioned that. Without that other chart, this graph is useless when it comes to identifying the opinions of women as such.
Given all the other data, especially those that indicate most people favor illegalizing elective abortions, the natural question to ask a respondant to that survey is, "What does pro-life mean? What does pro-choice mean?" If pro-life is interpreted as the position that all abortions should be illegal, then obviously the only sensible thing to call yourself is pro-choice. But even the Pope thinks abortion should be legal if there's a life on the line. And a large majority -- 84% -- favors illegalizing third trimester abortions such as the "partial birth abortion". Does that make all those people pro-life?
I don't know if that's what's going on, but the disparity here should be accounted for somehow if we're just going to throw these numbers around.
I'll remark on adoption just so we don't bifurcate further. Bear in mind that when adoption is held up as an alternative to abortion, it's infant adoptions people have in mind with arrangements settled before the actual birth. These kids don't generally need to go through the foster care system, which I agree can be a nightmare for all involved. I think we're talking about two different worlds here.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever makes you think Jung is any more rational than Freud? Honestly! Maybe his theories tickle you in a more satisfying way, but it's not even remotely scientific. Both of them were cast from the same witch-doctor mold. But you're wrong anyway. The whole parent-cast-as-God thing is classically Freudian.
You further argue against a strawman: theists generally do not claim God is complex.
No. Why should it be?
This also allows you to create files in the directory, which you wouldn't have with just a delete attribute...But then again, when would you only want to delete files in a directory, but not be able to create them?
The security attributes available in VMS are read, write, execute, and delete and can be set at the level of the individual file even if you happen to not be using ACLs, which are available too. You can set permissions to create in a directory but not delete which actually is very useful at times. As you suggest, you can also set permissions to delete and not create. I don't know why anyone would want to do this either, but is that a good reason to stop them?
And whats wrong with writing a file to null? That seems reasonable thing to be able to do.
Not if you're trying to prevent data loss via restrictive file permissions.
You mentioned wanting VMS features for Unix on a site full of Linux boosters and you didn't think it would spark so much debate? Are you insane, man?
The DCL DELETE command can delete arbitrary file versions, and PURGE deletes all versions but the highest.
If you want version tracking, with full history, then you use CMS which, if I'm not mistaken, is included in a default VMS install. It's intended as a code management tool, but it can handle any file type these days so it's often used for other purposes. But CMS doesn't really store versions.
Yes it does. You wanted to suggest a moral course of action, and your only recourse is to a silly cartoon? That bespeaks a certain lack of depth. It certainly doesn't support your point in any meaningful way.
plus, it doesn't have anything to do with "metaphysics".
Lisa Simpson would know better. Look it up
I think you ought to THINK about what the point is and not how the point is phrased.
I THINK you ought to read the rest of my response and address the substance of what I said instead of picking on the one or two parts of it you think you understand.
I really think you ought to study metaphysics in some context other than The Simpsons.
I honestly can't claim I've been ripped off by MS. I've never paid a MS tax since I build all my own boxes. I do run MS OSes (gotta have my games) but I think the last time I paid retail for it was when MS-DOS 6.22 came out. Most everything else has been gray market, which to an extent means I've benefitted from someone else having paid the MS tax. And that's even if the settlement was worthwhile, and I'm not certain it is.
Reflecting on the array of instructors, it occurs to me that each department had its characteristic temprament by which we might be able make a guess or two about their personal lives.
The math department was uniformly good-tempered and mellow, while the EE profs all seemed a little... tense. As noted above.
The CS department formed while I was there -- this was the early '80s. When I started out on my CS major you could get it either through the EE or the Math department. Mine's from the Math department. Neener.
Physics was an interesting case and showed the most variation. The younger instructors seemed happy and reasonably contented, while the older ones mostly were trying too hard as if to say, "I could still get laid if I wanted to! Really!" Disco was dead by then, but you wouldn't know it from how some of them dressed.
Chemistry profs all acted like they didn't need it. Since this department included biology/biochemistry, maybe this indicates that too much knowledge is a very dangerous thing.
I never took any Mechanical, Civil, or Marine Engineering courses so I can't say anything about those profs from personal experience. There were some frightening things in the bathroom stalls in the buildings that housed those departments though.
The Phys Ed instructors were much like PE teachers everywhere else. IOW, I'm not going there.
We were made to take at least one "Liberal Arts" type of class each semester so we had a small chance of turning into well-rounded individuals and not inveterate geeks. These were all collected in the Humanities department. However, every prof I ever had in those courses appeared to be same-sex oriented, so I had no standard by which to calibrate their tension levels.
Finally, the Management Science department all acted like they were getting it from the departmental secretary, but I have it on good authority that this wasn't true.
This was in sharp contrast to the Electrical Engineering department...
Until he retired, my uncle was head of their paint testing laboratory, and this is exactly what he did. He would, for example, test a paint's opacity by applying a coat directly to an unprimed test pattern. He used to drive the paint companies nuts -- but when he said a paint will cover in a single coat that's exactly what a consumer could expect.
How pleafant that they've done what waf neceffary to make this happen. How did they train the foftware to recognize the quirky 18th Century handwriting?
The chapter of Genesis where Methuselah is introduced actually has some good examples of what I'm talking about with respect to the meaning of "year" though. One synodal month is 29.53 days, so there are 12.37 of them in a year of 365.25 days.
Gen 5:25 records that Methuselah was 187 years old when he begat Lamech. (With no indication as to whether or not Lamech was his first child; the interest here is tracing the ancestry of Noah.) If "year" meant "month", that would make Methuselah 15 years old at the time. Not an unreasonable age of marriage in a pastoral society, admittedly. But 5:21 says his father Enoch was 65 years old when he begat Methuselah, which by this measure would make him only 5 years old! (And we plainly must apply the same scale to Enoch because he was supposed to have been 365 years when he went to God. Enoch is not said to have died, and the tradition is that he was taken directly to heaven in a way similar to Elijah.) Enoch's father Jared, who lived to 962 years, was 162 when he fathered him which would make him 13, close to the lower limit for making babies pre-rBGH (or whatever the cause is for the earlier onset of puberty in recent years). But his father Mahaleel was 65 when he begat Jared -- 5 years old again. It doesn't seem possible to make "year" into "lunar year" with any consistency. You have to be very selective to make it work at all.
Yeah. Never mind that it makes predictions that we can test and have repeatedly confirmed. What fools these physicists are!
You can't spell "Adam"?
Your theory about Biblical years really being lunar years has been bruited about before, but it's not consistent with everything we're told about these people -- for example, the ages at which they had their first children would, in general, be absurdly low. We're really left no choice but to think the text means solar years. Make of that what you will.
This is what I mean when I say we'd have to completely restructure the way we run elections. (This is California, by the way. All elections in the US are conducted by the states, not the federal government. That's why there's no one uniform system from state to state.) To count votes by hand, there can't possibly be more than 2 or 3 candidates or issues to be decided at once. It's hard enough to get the electorate to turn out once or twice a year. 6 or 7 times a year would be just too much, IMO.
The main reason it takes so long to get a final count is because of provisional balloting, which we do so as to not inadvertently deny the vote to anyone who has the right to do so. For each one a decision has to be made as to whether that ballot will be counted or not. This takes time, and until it's complete the count isn't finished. Naturally, for all practical purposes the results are known long before the figures are official since provisional ballots comprise only a small proportion of the total. And the Presidential election isn't official until the Electors meet and Congress counts their votes anyway, which happens in December.
Now, besides the presidential election there were whole slates of local and state candidates, a US Senator and Representative to choose, and close on a dozen referenda. There is simply no way to do an actual count that quickly with a ballot that large.
In principle, I agree with you. But for a state to change its system to manual counting, it would require it to completely change the way it conducts elections. It's not a change we can simply drop into place.
But mention hydrogen and you get unreasoned panic. Go figure.
This would not prove God's existence scientifically. It'll be unanalyzable and non-repeatable. Miracles actually occur with some regularity...
Parenthetical note: I've seen the above statement denied here rather stridently, but for me to credit that means I have to discard the evidence of my own eyes, and the testmony of a large number of people I personally know and trust, in favor of that of some faceless militant atheist. (Not you. The post I have in mind was far less reasonable in tone.) I think I can be excused for not doing so.
And if a miracle could be verified scientifically, then what? Why would that be scientific evidence of God's existence? Wouldn't a materially-oriented scientist conclude rather that there's some physical law he does not yet understand and work towards understanding it? That the law would not exist given our hypothetical premise doesn't matter for the purpose of making a guess about such a person's natural reaction.
What it boils down to is that a system and method such as science, which is of marvellous utility for analyzing, categorizing, and understanding the natural world, can't say much about the actions of a supremely free-willed being who acts unpredictably and outside the bounds of nature. This is just not a sphere it's designed to operate in. Personally, I have no more problem with science's limitations here than I do in the opposite direction. After all, electric lights are pretty useful. Even in church.
The amazing thing is that Bush has almost managed to sell himself as a genuine conservative -- he's not -- and Kerry is held up as a genuine liberal -- I can't see it myself. I'd dearly love Bush to lose tomorrow, but I really don't want to see Kerry win either. It's a 3rd party year for me. Too bad none of them, not even Nader, has a snowball's chance in hell of winning.
They called them holes when they couldn't find any naturally occurring ones in the area and had to dig them for themselves.
It's true they did not adopt teens. But in this context, we're talking about infant adoptions. They did adopt children of color, and are white themselves.
It was in the post you said you didn't want to read.
I note from the adoption site link that no national statistcs have been compiled since 1992. That's a damn shame, because this is really something we should know about as a society. All I know at this point is that the system is nowhere near saturated considering how long couples wanting to adopt have to wait. Three families I'm acquainted with ended up doing international adoptions, multiple times, because the domestic system was simply not serving them. Perhaps that points more to inefficiencies in the system more than anything else, but the effect is the same as if there was a shortage of available adoptees. That's something that has to change.
Given all the other data, especially those that indicate most people favor illegalizing elective abortions, the natural question to ask a respondant to that survey is, "What does pro-life mean? What does pro-choice mean?" If pro-life is interpreted as the position that all abortions should be illegal, then obviously the only sensible thing to call yourself is pro-choice. But even the Pope thinks abortion should be legal if there's a life on the line. And a large majority -- 84% -- favors illegalizing third trimester abortions such as the "partial birth abortion". Does that make all those people pro-life?
I don't know if that's what's going on, but the disparity here should be accounted for somehow if we're just going to throw these numbers around.
I'll remark on adoption just so we don't bifurcate further. Bear in mind that when adoption is held up as an alternative to abortion, it's infant adoptions people have in mind with arrangements settled before the actual birth. These kids don't generally need to go through the foster care system, which I agree can be a nightmare for all involved. I think we're talking about two different worlds here.
That last remark is deeply insulting to every adoptive parent I know, and I know several.