I wonder if the author ever tried gaim a few years ago. I first tried it ~2001 for AOL instant messaging and man, it stunk. The preferences were half-baked and it would crash on the Solaris machine I ran it on. Plus, the developers were still figuring out AIM's protocol which meant that basic text was about all you could expect.
I tried the latest version again this week and I was appreciative of the progress they've made. The prefs are easy to understand, it doesn't crash (so far), and it is more similar to windows AIM (which is what I usually use).
If you're wondering what the DARPA Challenge is, you have to scroll to the bottom the their flash website:
"The DARPA Grand Challenge is an unprecedented government effort to accelerate research and development in autonomous ground vehicles to help save American lives on the battlefield. DARPA will award $2 million to the autonomous (robotic) ground vehicle that can successfully navigate a challenging desert course of approximately 150 miles the fastest (in less than 10 hours). The vehicles must find and follow a prescribed course route, avoid obstacles, and negotiate turns, all while travelling at militarily-relevant rates of speed. The ground vehicles are fully autonomous - not remote-controlled."
My big question is whether it will work in Firefox? (or Konqueror, Safari, Opera, etc.)
Even the current Yahoo mail interface doesn't work correctly on Firefox for XP. The buttons don't click right. And now they're going to move to a newer technology and add more features. That sounds like more compatibility problems to me...
You're on to something with power-assisted rotation.
My idea/fantasy is to wear special shoes that communicate with a pad that measures about 20 feet in diameter. The pad is made up of millions of tiny spheres. Each sphere is powered independently so that it can rotate in any direction.
The direction and speed of the spheres are controlled by the movement of your shoes. Lets say you start walking in one direction. The spheres will spin in the opposite direction, but at maybe 90% the speed of your push-off foot, to let you feel a bit of inertial resistance. You will actually push yourself forward a bit depending on how fast you started walking.
If you accelerate, you will get a little farther from the center of the pad. When you eventually want to stop, you have to brace for it almost as much as you would in real life because you are going to be pushed back to the center of the pad to simulate your change in momentum.
Your current level of momentum would be seen to an outside spectator as your distance from the center of the pad. This would work because humans have a pretty low top speed as far as running goes. The pad would be calibrated so that your maximum momentum (your top speed multiplied by your mass) would only let you get within a foot or two of the edge. Yes, exaggerating your top speed or weight would be painful.
Cool, huh? And version 2.0's spheres would be individually elevated to simulate terrain! Again, height would be dampened exactly like horizontal movement. All sphere's would start at a certain "sea level" height (say, 1 foot off the ground). Your current height would represent your current vertical momentum. In other words, climbing an incline at a constant speed wouldn't actually raise your body except at the very beginning. Stopping the climb would bring you back to sea level, simulating a reverse in vertical momentum. You could even stumble and fall down a whole flight of stairs if you were wearing a complete sensor-suit. Can you imagine what that would look like to a spectator? Mythical bonus points if you get it right.
Disclaimer: The latency between the shoes/pad would have to be virtually zero and the X,Y/Z acceleration/max speed of the pad would have to be very high.
That's very generous of you, but consider that situation objectively. Neither Google nor your neightborhood could depend on your service because even with a contract you might choose to take down the tower at any time, disallow regular maintenance, move to a new home, or you could die suddenly. Although I completely agree with you that broadband is expensive and has too few options right now, it would be better from the standpoint of the company and the community if the towers were built on corporate land.
You've got a good point. Cutting up anything because you hate it is probably unhealthy. Morally wrong to hate a brownie? Eh, I would tend to say no. But definitely unhealthy and promotive of further unhealthy behaviors.
I think it's a great idea to avoid that sort of action. It's a wonderful gesture to fight your instinct to murder puppies. Another bad example? Quid pro quo.
Killing puppies for pleasure is morally wrong, but I say so only because it harms beings that possess a mind. Who would that be in this lovely example? The owner/creator of the puppies, but most importantly, yourself. You're falling prey to the desires of your Id. I believe we have free will so that we can deny ourselves of these sinful pleasures.
While we're on the subject, we could step into the camp where destroying anything is a slap in the face to its creator. If you believe in God, as I do, then you tend to respect all of His creation. But it still boils down to a respect for beings with the capacity for free thought. So that's why it doesn't bother me when a wolf eats a puppy. Just never let me catch you doing the same and we're all good.
I may believe that animals have no free will, but I only make such an assertion as a matter of opinion. In fact, I greatly prefer your disagreement to that of one who denies free will exists at all.
I'm curious, for what reasons do you believe that an animal has free will? If they do have the capacity for free thought, does that not mean we must hold them accountable for their raping, murdering, stealing, and general mistreatment of their fellow gifted peers? As I see it, free will implies a great moral responsibility. Hence, I cite such capacity as the measurement of moral wrong in TFA.
Perhaps I should have addressed that too. When I said it's only a moral dilemma if the being has free will, I meant that only then is the issue of how to treat the being a dilemma.
Naturally, there are moral uncertainties brought to light if the creation of life starts to hurt other beings. Again, my opinion here is that the hurting is only wrong if it hurts some being that has free will. Please keep in mind, I'm referring to "wrong" in a moral context. That is, after all, what TFA is about.
So if the act of hurting is wrong, who should take resposibility for the action? Well, just like everything else I've proposed here, you follow the cause of the action back to its ultimate First Cause. If you don't believe in free will, this First Cause happens to be the beginning of existence (whatever that would mean to you). However, First Cause is much more immediate if you believe that some animals have a mind. Due to free thought, their decision defines the ultimate cause of their actions. Only with a mind can we make decisions that are truly "ours".
Great question. It doesn't lend itself to explanation very well, does it? How a non-random event could possibly take place without preceding causes.
Then again, believing in randomness itself takes a bit of faith. I think you would agree with that. How can anything happen without an antecedent cause? A great deal of that has to do with the nature of time.
I believe in the universe (I think most everybody does:-). Yet, I can't explain the existence of existence. Even if the ultimate cause of existence is random, what caused the randomness? Nothing? I guess so. Or at best existence is circular and it caused itself. But the very idea sounds impossible, doesn't it? It means that existence has no cause at all.
Take this opportunity to imagine a plane of existence without time. Or rather, try to imagine it. In a universe such as this, events could possibly be caused by events that have yet to take place. But even beyond that, I think in order for time to be completely removed you would have to accept that things could happen without any cause at all.
A place like this could provide the "super-existence" necessary to create ours. Is this my explanation for the universe? Hardly. It's just a feeble attempt at resolving the dilemma you've proposed. It's important to keep in mind: free will isn't the only thing that defies logic. The universe itself eludes explanation. And that should not be taken lightly. Existence is the one undeniable truth we have.
All we can say for certain is that nothing is certain; nothing is provable. Even the most basic beliefs are built on the tenet of faith. I, for one, believe in absolute truth. If that exists, then that means we can be closer to it or farther from it. Things like free will, God, a soul, and the afterlife all desire thorough and skeptical contemplation. I believe in them because I feel that without these things, our lives couldn't possibly have meaning.
Meaning is a pretty safe measuring stick if you think about it. Without meaning, your answers are meaningless anway. But with it, there is the promise of truth. In my opinion, we were designed to use meaning as a heuristic for determining our closeness to absolute truth. And no, I don't think that design was random.
Of course you're right about that one. It's impossible to write a proof for such concepts as the mind, the soul, the origin of the universe, etc. But I do believe that we can arrive at meaningful beliefs by discussing these issues and exploring the consequences of our beliefs.
As I mentioned in another post, I was quite young when I first considered the possibility that all our decisions were really just illusions. If that were true, then I could safely relax my morals and do whatever the hell my body felt like. There would be no need to worry myself with decisions, because I could comfort myself in the fact that I had no control over those decisions anyway. But even as a child, considering the motto "it's not my fault" sounded so horribly wrong. It is wrong. The worst examples of human beings are those that act without feeling any shred of personal responsibility. It's ironic -- I'm not an optimist by any stretch, but I believe in free will. Whether that belief is truly mine or not, I'm certainly glad I believe it.
You're right, that's probably where we're losing each other.
You've summarized it pretty well. Without free will our behavior is wholly dependent on our body's architecture and external stimuli. Of course we could change either of those things to change our behavior. However, we certainly wouldn't be "changing ourselves" because it wasn't we who made the decision to change those factors. The environment simply changed itself in an indirect way.
In other words, it would be like saying your computer decided to change you by running the applications that you tell it to. Interacting with your computer programs definitely affects you. And you are an important part of the computer's environment. But does that mean the computer changed itself? I suppose it depends on your perspective, but from a human's elevated point of view, we see that a computer doesn't change itself. We do all of the changing.
Does that perhaps alter your perspective at all, or would you still say that a being with no free will can change itself?
Thanks for asking. In a scientific model of the brain, every "decision" is merely a set of reactions to a set of inputs. The mind cannot change the way that it reacts to those inputs. It must always react in a scientifically defined manner. If you believe there is such a thing as randomness, then the individual reactions that are random are completely without meaning or direction. On the other hand, any reaction that is deterministic can be predicted and completely controlled by exterior inputs. In either case, "you" are not controlling the decisions at all. Unless you define "you" as science itself (in which case you have a pretty big ego;-).
To me, a choice is something that can be made without complete exterior control. A scientific model of the mind cannot allow for such a case. It would be as if the mind, your essence, could alter the probabilities of certain reactions in your brain, thereby granting you the ability to resist what our environment would otherwise scientifically mandate.
So what makes choices different from other thought? The ability to change one's self from within.
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?
First off, I don't recommend assuming anything. I'm a skeptical person who places a lot of importance on philosophical issues. Consider the alternative to free will. You can't take any credit for any accomplishments you've had. You can't take responsibility for any sins you've committed. Your actions aren't a reflection of yourself, only of your environment. So really, there is no you.
I definitely see how choices could be an illusion. That idea occurred to me long before I ever read it in a book or heard it from a professor. But I decided long ago that I couldn't believe in a complete lack of control. I knew that if I believed that, I could safely relax my morals and do whatever the hell my body felt like. But then I thought about how those people tend to make poor choices and eventually become detestable people. And then I realized, they become that way because of a decision. The decision to not believe in choice. So whether I can really choose or not, I'm happy I've chosen to believe in free will.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I would say that 100% of the energy consumed by a processor is converted to heat.
The company's first so-called PWRficient chip...
"PWR" is thPWR nPWRw "e".
I wonder if the author ever tried gaim a few years ago. I first tried it ~2001 for AOL instant messaging and man, it stunk. The preferences were half-baked and it would crash on the Solaris machine I ran it on. Plus, the developers were still figuring out AIM's protocol which meant that basic text was about all you could expect.
I tried the latest version again this week and I was appreciative of the progress they've made. The prefs are easy to understand, it doesn't crash (so far), and it is more similar to windows AIM (which is what I usually use).
Device manufacturers could then target those standardized voltages and spend less money on adapters
You misspelled earn.
If you're wondering what the DARPA Challenge is, you have to scroll to the bottom the their flash website:
"The DARPA Grand Challenge is an unprecedented government effort to accelerate research and development in autonomous ground vehicles to help save American lives on the battlefield. DARPA will award $2 million to the autonomous (robotic) ground vehicle that can successfully navigate a challenging desert course of approximately 150 miles the fastest (in less than 10 hours). The vehicles must find and follow a prescribed course route, avoid obstacles, and negotiate turns, all while travelling at militarily-relevant rates of speed. The ground vehicles are fully autonomous - not remote-controlled."
"Currently, on our OfficeOnline site, we are seeing over 30,000 searches per week for PDF support. That makes a pretty easy decision"
Quick, everybody search OfficeOnline using the word "Free".
"I don't really care, and anyone who has had the chance to play the original isn't likely to care either."
What a great way to grip your audience.
And when the parents are unaware of their child, it is bad parenting. Sometimes a warning isn't enough.
In those cases where a warning isn't enough, then sue them. I think the idea of warning them first is a very good solution, actually.
My big question is whether it will work in Firefox? (or Konqueror, Safari, Opera, etc.)
Even the current Yahoo mail interface doesn't work correctly on Firefox for XP. The buttons don't click right. And now they're going to move to a newer technology and add more features. That sounds like more compatibility problems to me...
But to be fair, they do sound like nice features.
You're on to something with power-assisted rotation.
My idea/fantasy is to wear special shoes that communicate with a pad that measures about 20 feet in diameter. The pad is made up of millions of tiny spheres. Each sphere is powered independently so that it can rotate in any direction.
The direction and speed of the spheres are controlled by the movement of your shoes. Lets say you start walking in one direction. The spheres will spin in the opposite direction, but at maybe 90% the speed of your push-off foot, to let you feel a bit of inertial resistance. You will actually push yourself forward a bit depending on how fast you started walking.
If you accelerate, you will get a little farther from the center of the pad. When you eventually want to stop, you have to brace for it almost as much as you would in real life because you are going to be pushed back to the center of the pad to simulate your change in momentum.
Your current level of momentum would be seen to an outside spectator as your distance from the center of the pad. This would work because humans have a pretty low top speed as far as running goes. The pad would be calibrated so that your maximum momentum (your top speed multiplied by your mass) would only let you get within a foot or two of the edge. Yes, exaggerating your top speed or weight would be painful.
Cool, huh? And version 2.0's spheres would be individually elevated to simulate terrain! Again, height would be dampened exactly like horizontal movement. All sphere's would start at a certain "sea level" height (say, 1 foot off the ground). Your current height would represent your current vertical momentum. In other words, climbing an incline at a constant speed wouldn't actually raise your body except at the very beginning. Stopping the climb would bring you back to sea level, simulating a reverse in vertical momentum. You could even stumble and fall down a whole flight of stairs if you were wearing a complete sensor-suit. Can you imagine what that would look like to a spectator? Mythical bonus points if you get it right.
Disclaimer: The latency between the shoes/pad would have to be virtually zero and the X,Y/Z acceleration/max speed of the pad would have to be very high.
That's very generous of you, but consider that situation objectively. Neither Google nor your neightborhood could depend on your service because even with a contract you might choose to take down the tower at any time, disallow regular maintenance, move to a new home, or you could die suddenly. Although I completely agree with you that broadband is expensive and has too few options right now, it would be better from the standpoint of the company and the community if the towers were built on corporate land.
why do they have to be dead?
Read on for my impressions of what it's like to step into Hulk's very big shoes.
Um, the Hulk doesn't wear shoes.
Oh yeah? I'd like to see you write a better rant.
oh wait...
If you want it to look, feel, and act like firefox, why not get firefox.
Because we don't want it to act like Firefox. We want our browsers to act like IE in terms of speed and compatibility.
or they could just use firefox.
IE is faster. So assuming this had all the same features and security (it doesn't, but hypothetically) why would you want Firefox again?
100000000 Pascals
Sorry, I believe you're missing a zero. Giga is 10^9.
You've got a good point. Cutting up anything because you hate it is probably unhealthy. Morally wrong to hate a brownie? Eh, I would tend to say no. But definitely unhealthy and promotive of further unhealthy behaviors.
I think it's a great idea to avoid that sort of action. It's a wonderful gesture to fight your instinct to murder puppies. Another bad example? Quid pro quo.
Killing puppies for pleasure is morally wrong, but I say so only because it harms beings that possess a mind. Who would that be in this lovely example? The owner/creator of the puppies, but most importantly, yourself. You're falling prey to the desires of your Id. I believe we have free will so that we can deny ourselves of these sinful pleasures.
While we're on the subject, we could step into the camp where destroying anything is a slap in the face to its creator. If you believe in God, as I do, then you tend to respect all of His creation. But it still boils down to a respect for beings with the capacity for free thought. So that's why it doesn't bother me when a wolf eats a puppy. Just never let me catch you doing the same and we're all good.
The very fact that it's not a certainty, but a belief, bolsters my belief in free will.
I could elaborate here, but it might be more pragmatic to encourage you to take a peek at some of your sibling threads.
I may believe that animals have no free will, but I only make such an assertion as a matter of opinion. In fact, I greatly prefer your disagreement to that of one who denies free will exists at all.
I'm curious, for what reasons do you believe that an animal has free will? If they do have the capacity for free thought, does that not mean we must hold them accountable for their raping, murdering, stealing, and general mistreatment of their fellow gifted peers? As I see it, free will implies a great moral responsibility. Hence, I cite such capacity as the measurement of moral wrong in TFA.
Perhaps I should have addressed that too. When I said it's only a moral dilemma if the being has free will, I meant that only then is the issue of how to treat the being a dilemma.
Naturally, there are moral uncertainties brought to light if the creation of life starts to hurt other beings. Again, my opinion here is that the hurting is only wrong if it hurts some being that has free will. Please keep in mind, I'm referring to "wrong" in a moral context. That is, after all, what TFA is about.
So if the act of hurting is wrong, who should take resposibility for the action? Well, just like everything else I've proposed here, you follow the cause of the action back to its ultimate First Cause. If you don't believe in free will, this First Cause happens to be the beginning of existence (whatever that would mean to you). However, First Cause is much more immediate if you believe that some animals have a mind. Due to free thought, their decision defines the ultimate cause of their actions. Only with a mind can we make decisions that are truly "ours".
Great question. It doesn't lend itself to explanation very well, does it? How a non-random event could possibly take place without preceding causes.
:-). Yet, I can't explain the existence of existence. Even if the ultimate cause of existence is random, what caused the randomness? Nothing? I guess so. Or at best existence is circular and it caused itself. But the very idea sounds impossible, doesn't it? It means that existence has no cause at all.
Then again, believing in randomness itself takes a bit of faith. I think you would agree with that. How can anything happen without an antecedent cause? A great deal of that has to do with the nature of time.
I believe in the universe (I think most everybody does
Take this opportunity to imagine a plane of existence without time. Or rather, try to imagine it. In a universe such as this, events could possibly be caused by events that have yet to take place. But even beyond that, I think in order for time to be completely removed you would have to accept that things could happen without any cause at all.
A place like this could provide the "super-existence" necessary to create ours. Is this my explanation for the universe? Hardly. It's just a feeble attempt at resolving the dilemma you've proposed. It's important to keep in mind: free will isn't the only thing that defies logic. The universe itself eludes explanation. And that should not be taken lightly. Existence is the one undeniable truth we have.
All we can say for certain is that nothing is certain; nothing is provable. Even the most basic beliefs are built on the tenet of faith. I, for one, believe in absolute truth. If that exists, then that means we can be closer to it or farther from it. Things like free will, God, a soul, and the afterlife all desire thorough and skeptical contemplation. I believe in them because I feel that without these things, our lives couldn't possibly have meaning.
Meaning is a pretty safe measuring stick if you think about it. Without meaning, your answers are meaningless anway. But with it, there is the promise of truth. In my opinion, we were designed to use meaning as a heuristic for determining our closeness to absolute truth. And no, I don't think that design was random.
Of course you're right about that one. It's impossible to write a proof for such concepts as the mind, the soul, the origin of the universe, etc. But I do believe that we can arrive at meaningful beliefs by discussing these issues and exploring the consequences of our beliefs.
As I mentioned in another post, I was quite young when I first considered the possibility that all our decisions were really just illusions. If that were true, then I could safely relax my morals and do whatever the hell my body felt like. There would be no need to worry myself with decisions, because I could comfort myself in the fact that I had no control over those decisions anyway. But even as a child, considering the motto "it's not my fault" sounded so horribly wrong. It is wrong. The worst examples of human beings are those that act without feeling any shred of personal responsibility. It's ironic -- I'm not an optimist by any stretch, but I believe in free will. Whether that belief is truly mine or not, I'm certainly glad I believe it.
You're right, that's probably where we're losing each other.
You've summarized it pretty well. Without free will our behavior is wholly dependent on our body's architecture and external stimuli. Of course we could change either of those things to change our behavior. However, we certainly wouldn't be "changing ourselves" because it wasn't we who made the decision to change those factors. The environment simply changed itself in an indirect way.
In other words, it would be like saying your computer decided to change you by running the applications that you tell it to. Interacting with your computer programs definitely affects you. And you are an important part of the computer's environment. But does that mean the computer changed itself? I suppose it depends on your perspective, but from a human's elevated point of view, we see that a computer doesn't change itself. We do all of the changing.
Does that perhaps alter your perspective at all, or would you still say that a being with no free will can change itself?
What does it mean---to you---to make a choice?
;-).
Thanks for asking. In a scientific model of the brain, every "decision" is merely a set of reactions to a set of inputs. The mind cannot change the way that it reacts to those inputs. It must always react in a scientifically defined manner. If you believe there is such a thing as randomness, then the individual reactions that are random are completely without meaning or direction. On the other hand, any reaction that is deterministic can be predicted and completely controlled by exterior inputs. In either case, "you" are not controlling the decisions at all. Unless you define "you" as science itself (in which case you have a pretty big ego
To me, a choice is something that can be made without complete exterior control. A scientific model of the mind cannot allow for such a case. It would be as if the mind, your essence, could alter the probabilities of certain reactions in your brain, thereby granting you the ability to resist what our environment would otherwise scientifically mandate.
So what makes choices different from other thought? The ability to change one's self from within.
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?
First off, I don't recommend assuming anything. I'm a skeptical person who places a lot of importance on philosophical issues. Consider the alternative to free will. You can't take any credit for any accomplishments you've had. You can't take responsibility for any sins you've committed. Your actions aren't a reflection of yourself, only of your environment. So really, there is no you.
I definitely see how choices could be an illusion. That idea occurred to me long before I ever read it in a book or heard it from a professor. But I decided long ago that I couldn't believe in a complete lack of control. I knew that if I believed that, I could safely relax my morals and do whatever the hell my body felt like. But then I thought about how those people tend to make poor choices and eventually become detestable people. And then I realized, they become that way because of a decision. The decision to not believe in choice. So whether I can really choose or not, I'm happy I've chosen to believe in free will.