Your logic is flawed where you jump from "minds" to "a Mind."
No, not flawed logic. Just a different philosophy from yours. You claim that the laws that govern everything are merely inventions of our humans minds. I don't think so, because things have been following rules billions of years before humans ever described the rules. No, I'm not talking about our mathematical equations. I'm not talking about E=mc^2. I'm talking about the actual, objectively correct and complete rules, those that our human minds could only approximate via the scientific method and mathematics. But no matter how wrong our approximations are, we cannot deny that the rules exist. Why do they exist?
That's where the chasm between us lies. You cannot see the necessity of the laws having a Law-Maker. I cannot imagine how laws could exist otherwise. A computer program could be self-programming, but to say that the algorithm for self-programming wasn't itself created by a programmer (or, in this case, The Programmer), just sounds totally bonkers to me.
It's probably just my Catholic upbringing, but I just can't imagine how the Laws of Nature, being laws, can be anything other than abstract ideas. And ideas come from minds...or in this case, a Mind. To say that the Laws did not come from a Mind but are just...there, seems quite bewilderingly illogical to me.
If you can let go of dualism and realize that there is no subjective observer separate from the objects observed, but that observation still exists, then you will be free and it won't matter one bit whether we are living in a simulation, or even whether there is a God, a soul, or an afterlife.
Oh, that's real insightful, that is. So you're saying that we need to be "free"...I suppose free from the need to think about things like God and the afterlife, about whether they exist or not. Okay, so imagine this, here we are freeing ourselves from the "cage" of religion...but guess where we end up? We just found ourselves caged in another prison: yours!
What you don't realize is that some of us don't consider your condition as "freedom". I guess you could say we'd like to be free from having to be "free", because "free" is a false free.
You claim that believers fear death, but not all of us do. Some of us simply fear the crushing despair of your "freedom", such an awful despair that people like you have to hide it from yourselves under the pretense of being stoical, objective, unfeeling Buddhas. Truth sets us free, it does not bury us to oblivion, just as this "No one is listening" philosophy of yours buries you. This "freedom" of yours...I don't want any part in it; I'll just stick to my "medieval and antiquated dogmas" (as you'd probably call them), thank you very much.
Dogma gives man too much freedom when it permits him to fall. Dogma gives even God too much freedom when it permits him to die. It is like believing in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with wills. It is like accepting a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to believe in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer...But I decline to show any respect for those who first of all clip the wings and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains and refuse the freedom, close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer thought.. - G.K Chesterton
I'd like to think that God, being omniscient, would not need to throw dice even in matters involving quantum physics. He'd be able to determine which path he really wants, then choose that path.
This sort of reminds me of Pullman's dæmons, which are kind of like life-long furry avatars of people in the Dark Materials universe. I think it'd be cool if we could have some sort of physical "avatar", albeit a robotic one not a living one as in the books.
Suppose a person has a sufficiently advanced and intelligent robotic avatar, maintaining a database of all sorts of stuff about him. It could serve as the person's representative not just online but in real life as well, doing all sorts of tasks that would normally require the person's presence. On the software side, this kind avatar would do a whole lot more than merely be a cute graphical element for people to see. It would be able to connect to all of the person's online accounts and manage/use them according to instructions.
Finally, physical avatars would be excellent companions (like in the books), depending on what sort of personality is programmed into them
(Off-topic side-note: Probably no one cares, but just in case someone gets me wrong, I'd like to clarify that I don't actually like the Dark Materials trilogy. Though I've read Pullman-related articles in Wikipedia and found some fascinating concepts like the aforementioned dæmons, I find the anti-Catholicism in the books extremely off-putting.)
It's either Filipino or Philippine. And yes, our actors do suck. I suddenly feel so sad about my country...
Chinese photo of the moon showing a moving crater: evidence that the Copernicus Center has been built, and Kai-Fu Lee is the Earth-bound Chief Lunar Operations Manager.
If you please, I'd like to direct you to the fact that the pope was quite willing to let Galileo give reasons for his claims, until Galileo published a book that insulted the pope. Go on blaming people for only being as reasonable as their culture and sense of personal dignity allows them to. Go on blaming them for being raised in a world where, irrespective of their religion, a great majority of intelligent people viewed the physical world in a different way from us. But please, please don't go so low as to blame it on their religion (e.g. Catholicism) because, frankly, it just makes you look stupid.
Aristotelian geocentrism was never an official doctrine of the Church, and the only reason Galileo's heliocentrism was persecuted was because of his arrogant, smart-assed way of defending it. In fact, I'd bet that without Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (which was quite unnecessary, anyway), the bias against heliocentrism would have died down a lot earlier than it did, and Copernicus' work never would have been included in the List of Prohibited Books. Sometimes you need to do more that just be right in order to convince people.
On Topic: The weird thing about some Creationists is that they insist that God must've done some cheating to create life as we know it. On the contrary, I believe that what they call "Intelligent Design" happened before Creation. Personally, I believe that God is so uber that, if he was a programmer, he wouldn't need Agile methods; he'd just design the project first, develop it, and it would be perfect the first time around. I mean, if I had unlimited intelligence and was the Programmer of the Universe, I would have created a set of elegant algorithms that would cleanly and logically lead to Life, and eventually to Intelligent Life, without having to do some awkward recoding and hacking. It almost seems as if these Creationists think God isn't 1337 enough...
I realise why so many people need to believe in the biblical creation myth. Believe that and everything becomes easy, simple enough that you don't have to worry about it. Reject it and boy have you got a lot of work to do. For one thing you actually have to understand things, not pass it of as 'the work of god'.
Yet you're just describing how certain kinds of people, when given a certain set of principles to believe in, would react to a situation in a certain kind of way. I've seen many atheists who would go "Why do we have to bother learning so much about nature? I mean, we'll all just rot six-feet under the ground in the end, anyway." That's definitely not how I would stereotype atheists, because I respect the fact most of the top scientists of today don't believe in God, but what you're doing is just that: stereotyping a group of people based on the flaws of a few members.
Personally, I feel that there is a strong philosophical basis for believing in Science if you believe in God, maybe even more than if you're an atheist. You say that Christians don't believe Evolution because they want everything to be as easy as "God made it that way". But "God made it that way" is definitely NOT easy, certainly not for us mere humans. To say that a Higher Mind created everything is almost synonymous to saying that there is more to everything than meets the eye. Far from making the world simple, it makes it far more mysterious and interesting. Now, one could be a jittery kind of Christian who sees God as some sort of fearsome trigger-happy Zeus who zaps those who ask too many questions. Thankfully that's not the kind of Christian I'm used to reading about.
Anti-Catholics talk so much about the Church being "anti-Science", yet a lot of times they only look at anti-scientists who just so happened to be Catholics. At times they point at instances of persecution that, in reality, are due to doctrinal error rather than purely scientific ideas. Even worse, some would show examples of persecution of scientists who were actually scientifically incorrect, and they call that anti-Science! (I mean, how the hell do you expect the powers that be would react, no matter how reasonable they are, to extremely radical ideas that aren't even backed up by sufficient evidence?)
They call us anti-Science, but they never look at official Catholic doctrines for anything anti-Science (they won't find any), nor do they look at the countless devout non-heretical Catholic scientists who have shown great intellectual curiosity about the world and how it works. No wonder many Christians today get turned-off by Science, when there are so many rude, bigoted, strawmen-attacking anti-Christians who insist that Christians are too stupid to understand Science.
Of course this implies that there is no god, since a system that does not require a god to run doesn't need one to exist at all.
I sure hope none of your descendants invent an Enlightened Intellectual Self-Sufficient Robot, or else humanity is doomed.;-)
Alternatively, it is a tool used by some in society to control others. Use some peoples fear, uncertainties and doubts and offer them an easy, quick fix and watch the wealth and power flow in.
Random Roman Emperor: "Henceforth, everyone accused of Christianity shall be executed, unless they reject Christ and bow down before me."
Random Christian leader (to himself): Oh, I'd really like to live longer, but my greed outweighs my survival instinct. I'd rather die than lose all the wealth being poured down my pocket from all those gullible chumps I've been conning for the past few years.
RCL (to RRE): "I'm a Christian, and I'll never abandon my faith!!!"
Oh those silly Christians. Imagine that, all those martyred Christians in the past, none of them intelligent enough to simply reject their current money-making scheme and just invent another one when the coast is clear. So idiotic. Almost like they were conjured up by some atheist as a straw man argument...
What do you mean? The guy was saying "Jesus had siblings, so Mary was not a virgin". I merely showed how these "siblings" might not have been Mary's children. Is there some serious logical hole I'm missing, or do you actually want me to prove that Mary never had children? Don't you think that might be a bit unfair?
No, there's nothing explicitin the Bible about any of the Marian dogmas (Immaculate Conception, Perpetual Virginity, Assumption into Heaven, Mother of God). You seem to assume, though, that all Christians believe in Sola Scriptura, Luther's own non-scriptural and therefore contradictory doctrine stating that, somehow, Christians today should only be limited to personal interpretations of a set of books compiled by other Christians hundreds of years after the first Christians were baptized. I assure you that your assumption is wrong.
Since Jesus apparently had other siblings, why do people still refer to his mother as virgin?
Tradition has it that Joseph was an old widower with children before he and Mary got engaged. There's also the fact that Jews called their cousins "brothers". Nope, I can't prove that any of these things accurately explain what really happened (as that would be impossible), but it ought to wipe that "I've just stumped `em Bible-thumpin' Xtians with a scriptural contradiction"-smile off your face.
On topic:
Fact A: Religious practices sometimes produce certain psychological effects.
Fact B: For a number of people, the only time they've encountered these certain psychological effects (if ever) was during religious rituals.
Fact C: Scientists have successfully reproduced these certain psychological effects in the laboratory.
Only the modern, enlightened, rationalist intellectuals of today could possibly connect all those facts and conclude that they have "delivered God". It would never occur to them that how we experience a God (if any exist) would necessarily be limited to what the moist computer in our skull can "experience" (i.e. a bunch of neurological signals), and that the explanation of this experience does NOT explain God/gods/fairies.
Believing in God has made me feel good at times; it's also made me feel bad at times. Is it logical to believe in God just because it makes you warm and fuzzy inside? Is it logical to disbelieve in God just because you're life is "shit"? These questions are meaningless because they are merely sentimental. God exists or does not exist however we feel about Him.
So now that we know that this scientific study has no religious or "spiritual" value whatsoever (unless your religion is that shallow), I'd like to express my utmost excitement for the future applications of these findings in the area of Virtual Reality entertainment: Realistic Uber-Creepy Horror Video Games FTW!!!
wildness. Fuji drew up the photocopying machine which automatically translates the document from English from Japanese. That is the clean nut. With respect to appearance, as for the copier the text, as for OCR what kind of section text, to send that to the translation engine, and in the place English". You reset, or can grasp.
After figuring out that that came from Google Language Tools (it's the English translation of the Japanese translation), I decided to play with it by going through the same process of English->Japanese->English. Here's the result:
"Wildness. Fuji drew up the photocopy machine which automatically translates the document from English from Japanese. That is the clean nut. In regard to the copier in order the text and some kind of section text, that" in the translation engine, and to send in England of the place, in regard to appearance, in regard to OCR. You re-adjust, or can grasp
Let's see how mangled it will be after a few more iterations.:-D
Rarely happens.
When it does, I think they should find out WHY the verdict was wrong. Did a cop not do his job right? Withhold evidence? Did a lab tech screw up an analysis? Did the Prosecutor ignore an alibi? Then they hold THAT person for trial- charge: Murder.
So, Mr. Robinson, we're about to end your precious life for allegedly committing a heinous crime. But not to worry. If you didn't do it, after all, we'll make sure to execute the people responsible for your conviction. So it's all good.
What did you say? What if you were merely a victim of a rare limitation of current methods and that no one would be criminally responsible for your wrongful execution, other than maybe the legislators who passed the Death Penalty into law? Well I don't know, Mr. Robinson, I guess shit just happens. Now would you please hold out your hand to the officer with the syringe? Okily dokily...
Anyway, I still have my slightly worn-out but faithful Nokia 1100. If I wanted some of that Multi-Touch goodness, I'll buy iPod touch when it's available here in the Philippines (that's probably sooner than the iPhone, anyway).
Ah, the advantage of living in Southeast Asia, where we get to first watch Americans and Japanese fumble with tons of new gadgets, so we can see which ones truly are worth buying (either the original or the Chinese-made clone:-P) when they finally arrive.
I'm sadly unaware of my religion's take on the matter (if it even has one), but the most consistent answer as far as my theological knowledge is concerned would be that your soul would go to heaven when you originally die, and "your" bionic self would obtain its own soul. So basically, your bionic self might think like you and act like you, but it won't spiritually be you. It would have its own spiritual journey, whereas yours would have ended.
But that's just theological speculation until I hear the Vatican's statement.
I can think of no greater tragedy than to waste the limited time we have here together on earth by worshiping god.
If there is no existence after death to be hoped for, then there IS a greater tragedy than living your life in a futile faith. It is that whatever one does in life has an utterly infinitesimal bearing upon the awful abyss that is our dead and absurd universe. That is not whining, that is simply the plain fact if there is no life after death. It is tragic because we can't even waste our lives if we want to, because there is nothing to waste. And because there is nothing to waste, there is nothing to not waste.
Life is precious.
I completely agree. I believe that Life is more than a grain of sand. I believe that Life is worth protecting. My reason is religious and is therefore rational. Your reason is purely sentimentalist, so I wonder where that "I'm rational and you pie-in-the-sky-believing-freaks ought to wake up to reality" tone of yours comes from.
Isn't it worth noting that Kasparov modifies his brain constantly as well--before, during, and after every match?
No, because Kasparov did his own "software modification" for himself, while multiple humans had to do it for the computer. It would have been impressive if Deep Blue could discover its own mistakes, find the proper solution, and evolve accordingly. As it was, the Deep Blue vs Kasparov games were actually a few puppeteers vs Kasparov, with their puppet being Deep Blue. Imagine the Chinese room, except with a dozen actual Chinese-speakers and linguists helping the man inside the room. Now that's cheating by humans, not a sign of computer superiority.
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No, not flawed logic. Just a different philosophy from yours. You claim that the laws that govern everything are merely inventions of our humans minds. I don't think so, because things have been following rules billions of years before humans ever described the rules. No, I'm not talking about our mathematical equations. I'm not talking about E=mc^2. I'm talking about the actual, objectively correct and complete rules, those that our human minds could only approximate via the scientific method and mathematics. But no matter how wrong our approximations are, we cannot deny that the rules exist. Why do they exist?
That's where the chasm between us lies. You cannot see the necessity of the laws having a Law-Maker. I cannot imagine how laws could exist otherwise. A computer program could be self-programming, but to say that the algorithm for self-programming wasn't itself created by a programmer (or, in this case, The Programmer), just sounds totally bonkers to me.
It's probably just my Catholic upbringing, but I just can't imagine how the Laws of Nature, being laws, can be anything other than abstract ideas. And ideas come from minds...or in this case, a Mind. To say that the Laws did not come from a Mind but are just...there, seems quite bewilderingly illogical to me.
Oh, that's real insightful, that is. So you're saying that we need to be "free"...I suppose free from the need to think about things like God and the afterlife, about whether they exist or not. Okay, so imagine this, here we are freeing ourselves from the "cage" of religion...but guess where we end up? We just found ourselves caged in another prison: yours!
What you don't realize is that some of us don't consider your condition as "freedom". I guess you could say we'd like to be free from having to be "free", because "free" is a false free.
You claim that believers fear death, but not all of us do. Some of us simply fear the crushing despair of your "freedom", such an awful despair that people like you have to hide it from yourselves under the pretense of being stoical, objective, unfeeling Buddhas. Truth sets us free, it does not bury us to oblivion, just as this "No one is listening" philosophy of yours buries you. This "freedom" of yours...I don't want any part in it; I'll just stick to my "medieval and antiquated dogmas" (as you'd probably call them), thank you very much.
Dogma gives man too much freedom when it permits him to fall. Dogma gives even God too much freedom when it permits him to die. It is like believing in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with wills. It is like accepting a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to believe in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer...But I decline to show any respect for those who first of all clip the wings and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains and refuse the freedom, close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer thought.. - G.K Chesterton
I'd like to think that God, being omniscient, would not need to throw dice even in matters involving quantum physics. He'd be able to determine which path he really wants, then choose that path.
This sort of reminds me of Pullman's dæmons, which are kind of like life-long furry avatars of people in the Dark Materials universe. I think it'd be cool if we could have some sort of physical "avatar", albeit a robotic one not a living one as in the books.
Suppose a person has a sufficiently advanced and intelligent robotic avatar, maintaining a database of all sorts of stuff about him. It could serve as the person's representative not just online but in real life as well, doing all sorts of tasks that would normally require the person's presence. On the software side, this kind avatar would do a whole lot more than merely be a cute graphical element for people to see. It would be able to connect to all of the person's online accounts and manage/use them according to instructions.
Finally, physical avatars would be excellent companions (like in the books), depending on what sort of personality is programmed into them
(Off-topic side-note: Probably no one cares, but just in case someone gets me wrong, I'd like to clarify that I don't actually like the Dark Materials trilogy. Though I've read Pullman-related articles in Wikipedia and found some fascinating concepts like the aforementioned dæmons, I find the anti-Catholicism in the books extremely off-putting.)
It's either Filipino or Philippine. And yes, our actors do suck. I suddenly feel so sad about my country... Chinese photo of the moon showing a moving crater: evidence that the Copernicus Center has been built, and Kai-Fu Lee is the Earth-bound Chief Lunar Operations Manager.
What if they discovered a vastly superior evolutionary potential here on Earth in the form of a hyper-active Japanese school girl?
Oops, wrong site...
So...it's a kind of lie?
*duck*
If you please, I'd like to direct you to the fact that the pope was quite willing to let Galileo give reasons for his claims, until Galileo published a book that insulted the pope. Go on blaming people for only being as reasonable as their culture and sense of personal dignity allows them to. Go on blaming them for being raised in a world where, irrespective of their religion, a great majority of intelligent people viewed the physical world in a different way from us. But please, please don't go so low as to blame it on their religion (e.g. Catholicism) because, frankly, it just makes you look stupid.
Aristotelian geocentrism was never an official doctrine of the Church, and the only reason Galileo's heliocentrism was persecuted was because of his arrogant, smart-assed way of defending it. In fact, I'd bet that without Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (which was quite unnecessary, anyway), the bias against heliocentrism would have died down a lot earlier than it did, and Copernicus' work never would have been included in the List of Prohibited Books. Sometimes you need to do more that just be right in order to convince people.
On Topic: The weird thing about some Creationists is that they insist that God must've done some cheating to create life as we know it. On the contrary, I believe that what they call "Intelligent Design" happened before Creation. Personally, I believe that God is so uber that, if he was a programmer, he wouldn't need Agile methods; he'd just design the project first, develop it, and it would be perfect the first time around. I mean, if I had unlimited intelligence and was the Programmer of the Universe, I would have created a set of elegant algorithms that would cleanly and logically lead to Life, and eventually to Intelligent Life, without having to do some awkward recoding and hacking. It almost seems as if these Creationists think God isn't 1337 enough...
Yet you're just describing how certain kinds of people, when given a certain set of principles to believe in, would react to a situation in a certain kind of way. I've seen many atheists who would go "Why do we have to bother learning so much about nature? I mean, we'll all just rot six-feet under the ground in the end, anyway." That's definitely not how I would stereotype atheists, because I respect the fact most of the top scientists of today don't believe in God, but what you're doing is just that: stereotyping a group of people based on the flaws of a few members.
Personally, I feel that there is a strong philosophical basis for believing in Science if you believe in God, maybe even more than if you're an atheist. You say that Christians don't believe Evolution because they want everything to be as easy as "God made it that way". But "God made it that way" is definitely NOT easy, certainly not for us mere humans. To say that a Higher Mind created everything is almost synonymous to saying that there is more to everything than meets the eye. Far from making the world simple, it makes it far more mysterious and interesting. Now, one could be a jittery kind of Christian who sees God as some sort of fearsome trigger-happy Zeus who zaps those who ask too many questions. Thankfully that's not the kind of Christian I'm used to reading about.
Anti-Catholics talk so much about the Church being "anti-Science", yet a lot of times they only look at anti-scientists who just so happened to be Catholics. At times they point at instances of persecution that, in reality, are due to doctrinal error rather than purely scientific ideas. Even worse, some would show examples of persecution of scientists who were actually scientifically incorrect, and they call that anti-Science! (I mean, how the hell do you expect the powers that be would react, no matter how reasonable they are, to extremely radical ideas that aren't even backed up by sufficient evidence?)
They call us anti-Science, but they never look at official Catholic doctrines for anything anti-Science (they won't find any), nor do they look at the countless devout non-heretical Catholic scientists who have shown great intellectual curiosity about the world and how it works. No wonder many Christians today get turned-off by Science, when there are so many rude, bigoted, strawmen-attacking anti-Christians who insist that Christians are too stupid to understand Science.
I sure hope none of your descendants invent an Enlightened Intellectual Self-Sufficient Robot, or else humanity is doomed. ;-)
Random Roman Emperor: "Henceforth, everyone accused of Christianity shall be executed, unless they reject Christ and bow down before me."
Random Christian leader (to himself): Oh, I'd really like to live longer, but my greed outweighs my survival instinct. I'd rather die than lose all the wealth being poured down my pocket from all those gullible chumps I've been conning for the past few years.
RCL (to RRE): "I'm a Christian, and I'll never abandon my faith!!!"
Oh those silly Christians. Imagine that, all those martyred Christians in the past, none of them intelligent enough to simply reject their current money-making scheme and just invent another one when the coast is clear. So idiotic. Almost like they were conjured up by some atheist as a straw man argument...
Google MentalPlex was an April Fool's joke...
What do you mean? The guy was saying "Jesus had siblings, so Mary was not a virgin". I merely showed how these "siblings" might not have been Mary's children. Is there some serious logical hole I'm missing, or do you actually want me to prove that Mary never had children? Don't you think that might be a bit unfair?
No, there's nothing explicitin the Bible about any of the Marian dogmas (Immaculate Conception, Perpetual Virginity, Assumption into Heaven, Mother of God). You seem to assume, though, that all Christians believe in Sola Scriptura, Luther's own non-scriptural and therefore contradictory doctrine stating that, somehow, Christians today should only be limited to personal interpretations of a set of books compiled by other Christians hundreds of years after the first Christians were baptized. I assure you that your assumption is wrong.
Tradition has it that Joseph was an old widower with children before he and Mary got engaged. There's also the fact that Jews called their cousins "brothers". Nope, I can't prove that any of these things accurately explain what really happened (as that would be impossible), but it ought to wipe that "I've just stumped `em Bible-thumpin' Xtians with a scriptural contradiction"-smile off your face.
On topic:
Fact A: Religious practices sometimes produce certain psychological effects.
Fact B: For a number of people, the only time they've encountered these certain psychological effects (if ever) was during religious rituals.
Fact C: Scientists have successfully reproduced these certain psychological effects in the laboratory.
Only the modern, enlightened, rationalist intellectuals of today could possibly connect all those facts and conclude that they have "delivered God". It would never occur to them that how we experience a God (if any exist) would necessarily be limited to what the moist computer in our skull can "experience" (i.e. a bunch of neurological signals), and that the explanation of this experience does NOT explain God/gods/fairies.
Believing in God has made me feel good at times; it's also made me feel bad at times. Is it logical to believe in God just because it makes you warm and fuzzy inside? Is it logical to disbelieve in God just because you're life is "shit"? These questions are meaningless because they are merely sentimental. God exists or does not exist however we feel about Him.
So now that we know that this scientific study has no religious or "spiritual" value whatsoever (unless your religion is that shallow), I'd like to express my utmost excitement for the future applications of these findings in the area of Virtual Reality entertainment: Realistic Uber-Creepy Horror Video Games FTW!!!
It's a trap!
Fine by me. For starters, fuck you.
After figuring out that that came from Google Language Tools (it's the English translation of the Japanese translation), I decided to play with it by going through the same process of English->Japanese->English. Here's the result:
Let's see how mangled it will be after a few more iterations.Correct. A few people with a Y chromosome might be almost straight-friendly, if don't mind certain symptoms like infertility.
Oh, wait, you were making a joke? *catches joke before it whooshes past*
Many locations in Google Maps are still of low quality (e.g. no high-resolution, very blurry when zoomed in, etc.).
You bastard!
Anyway, I still have my slightly worn-out but faithful Nokia 1100. If I wanted some of that Multi-Touch goodness, I'll buy iPod touch when it's available here in the Philippines (that's probably sooner than the iPhone, anyway).
Ah, the advantage of living in Southeast Asia, where we get to first watch Americans and Japanese fumble with tons of new gadgets, so we can see which ones truly are worth buying (either the original or the Chinese-made clone :-P) when they finally arrive.
I'm sadly unaware of my religion's take on the matter (if it even has one), but the most consistent answer as far as my theological knowledge is concerned would be that your soul would go to heaven when you originally die, and "your" bionic self would obtain its own soul. So basically, your bionic self might think like you and act like you, but it won't spiritually be you. It would have its own spiritual journey, whereas yours would have ended. But that's just theological speculation until I hear the Vatican's statement.
traffic jams on the Information Super Highway Interesting thread here, but everyone knows the Internet isn't a highway. It's a series of tubes...