Generally, with maybe the exception of Democritus, the ancient Greek philosophers were monotheists. They spoke of the Greek mythological gods in terms of allegorical types of God. That's why the early Christians embraced their thinking and their terminology, adopting the terms and concepts of THEOS and LOGOS. It is speculated that in the 7 or 8 hundred years preceding Christianity, that Hebrew doctrines helped shaped the Greek monotheism. While there's not a lot of direct evidence of that, there was definitely a Jewish presence in Greece, so it seems inevitable that an exchange of ideas was going on.
It seems a reasonable assumption that much of the Greek populous regarded the Greek mythology in a literal polytheistic way. But for centuries, the leading thinkers of the culture, and their schools, were teaching various forms of monotheism. Plato said something along the lines of "We believe in the gods from a respect for the traditions of our ancestors; but we believe in God from reason."
As for Chinese monotheism, the period of Lao-Tzu and Confucius marked a transition in writing from the more personal term for "God" to the less personal terms of "Heaven" and "Tao" (the latter of which many people associate with the Greek term LOGOS. In some Chinese Bibles, "Tao" is even used as the translation of LOGOS, e.g. "In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God.") Confucius said, "Heaven means to be one with God." I would definitely consider both Lao-Tzu and Confucius monotheists.
Note that some of ancient Greek technology has still not been equaled by all our industrial and scientific progress -- for example their bronzework. There is no machine and no person on the planet who could reproduce a Greek bronze helmet. We have no idea how they could have done it. Similarly, it is only in the last 100 years that our understanding of metallurgy has increased to the point where we can understand what's going on in the traditional process of Samurai sword making. But if that tradition hadn't been preserved, like the Greek bronzework tradition hasn't been, there's nothing in our knowledge base that would allow us to create a sword with the capabilities of those swords -- despite our knowledge of the metallurgical principles used.
It's not that the mechanism is amazing by modern standards that is interesting.
I think it's pretty amazing by modern standards. If you watch the video, there's a "clock hand" for every visible planet. That wouldn't be so impressive if it were heleocentric... just a bunch of simple gears. But it's geocentric, which means that depending on the relative position to the earth, sometimes they're going forward and sometimes backwards, and sometimes standing still. And the position of the moon is not based on a circular orbit, but implements Hipparchus's complex epicycle algorithm for the lunar cycle. If there are more impressive modern mechanical designs, I don't know what they are.
Computers are programmable, this only solves the problems it was designed to solve.
It is programmable... it's just not re-programmable. It solves the problems it was programmed to solve. The programming language comprises gears, pins, and slots. The computers that control and monitor modern appliances and cars are still called "computers" even though the program is burned into the chip, and they cannot be re-programmed.
Plus people like to take pride that we are much more advanced then we were 2000 years ago.
Or rather, they get defensive, worrying that we AREN'T more advanced than we were 2,000 years ago. We're definitely more advanced if we get to pick the definition of "advanced", but that's not saying much. My definition of "advanced" would rest more on public morality and virtue than on technology; as would, incidentally, all the Greek philosophers' from Pythagoras to Aristotle. I see the era of this device, around 500 BC -- an era that included not only Plato and Socrates and their followers in the West, but Confucius and Lao-Tzu and their followers in the East -- a pinnacle of civilization that we have yet to again match.
Point taken... diet sodas serve a legitimate purpose for diabetics. It's the superficiality of society that bugs me more than the products themselves (though the products themselves turn my stomach). The whole idea that it's generally a good thing to develop/consume good-tasting, non-nutritive foods, so that our limited needs for sustenance don't have to limit our consumption. Maybe Olestra would be a better example. Who needs chips so desperately that they would eat chips made out of a fat-like plastic that acts as a laxative?
Well, as a connoisseur of fine sodas, I have occasionally ordered cases of Dr. Pepper direct from Texas, which are made with real cane sugar instead of corn syrup. I also keep an eye out for locally produced sodas which often use sucrose. But I would far rather gorge myself with High-Fructose Corn Syrup than with chlorinated sucrose, aka sucralose, aka splenda, aka powdered death; or aspartame; or saccharine, which is still used by some people, God help them.
The idea of a state charging tax on honest-to-God corn syrup soda and exempting that disgusting waste water that fat people drink so that the feel like they're "dieting" while they eat two big macs for lunch, gives me feelings of longing for a life of domestic terrorism.
I'm not aware of any ancient cultures in which young people being smart-asses to the elders were well-tolerated. And I have an even harder time finding plausibility in youngsters offing elders that "didn't get" their smart-assness....or maybe there's some sarcasm at work here that I am failing to detect.
Einstein too extended the work of many others. He did a lot of thinking on his own, but everything he did was an extension of the work of others. I'm not saying he wasn't smart, he was, but how much faster would his work have arrived had he been working in a group the whole time?
His "extension of the work of others" required great insights and was very difficult for many physicists to even follow at first. It was difficult for Einstein to follow at first. In other words, if he had been "working in a group the whole time," it never would have happened. Our current understanding of the universe would be based on Lorentzian relativity or something else.
People just don't understand evolution, that's all.
Attractiveness isn't some magical universal quality. What people find attractive is determined by evolution. We find people attractive in ways that our ancestors found them attractive. People who were wired this way survived and prospered. People who found other things attractive died out.
Your theory fails when confronted with the fact that different people are attracted by vastly differing characteristics.
Even armies have figured this out -- modern armies may be huge and complex organizations, but the smallest tactical unit is a squad of about ten people, much like the Roman contubernium.
In modern armies, the smallest tactical unit is the fireteam. It comprises four soldiers.
Indeed Einstein did not work in complete isolation: Much of the mathematical framework for the theory of relativity was explored by Poincare and Lorentz. And he corresponded about his ideas with others. Nevertheless, theoretical physics at this level is a highly individual activity, because ultimately it is all about thinking and testing concepts in a mathematical framework.
This is confusing the issue. No thinker in history thought in a vacuum. That's not the point. Einstein, Poincare, Lorentz, etc, made their breakthroughs through their individual efforts. They benefited from one another's work, but they each had individual contributions and individual genius. They didn't do their work in a committee. Committees generally produce nothing. The one guy on the committee who really gets it, gets out-voted. Progress is made when that guy quits the committee and develops his idea on his own, and publishes it.
but a power station in geosync orbit that wirelessly transmits a couple GWatts of power to a receiver station in the Caribbean or a North American desert wouldn't be so bad.
Desert? As far as I'm concerned they could beam it directly at the dome of the Capital Building in Washington.
The big guys will find ways to sell for less (MAP only controls advertised, not selling price); squeezing the dealers.
Right, I don't know if they still do this. But a few years ago I bought something from Amazon, but they wouldn't display the price until it was in my shopping cart. I didn't quite get it at the time, but it makes more sense in light of reading about this.
No, if you mean government price floors or ceilings, those are always bad, with virtually no exceptions. Manufacturer price floors and ceilings can make sense in limited situations, if they aren't done for anti-competitive reasons. And that is what the Supreme Court said. Instead of a blanket rule, the "rule of reason" should apply, which means that a court should look at the actual facts to determine whether the action is anti-competitive or not. They made the same decision in regard to manufacturer price ceilings in 1997, and now it applies to price floors as well.
I don't know for sure, but it seems like their preventing us from selling iPhones is something that should be illegal? Apple is notorious for taking steps to eliminate competition within their market, specifically from their partners. "competes with an Apple product" is the #1 reason for iPhone apps to be rejected by Apple from being sold on the Apple Store.
I agree. It sounds to me like Apple's behavior is exactly the kind of behavior that the court's majority opinion should be considered anti-competitive and illegal under the law. Sounds like a viable class action case to me. It seems like it would be fairly easy to show material loses in court from your inability to sell iPhones. Even moreso if it includes a plaintiff who actually lost their AAR status for one of these reasons.
Shouldn't existing law prevent MAPs already? This sounds an awful lot like collusion and price-fixing to me. But since the Supreme Court has already said that manufacturers can enforce price floors, it sounds like new legislation is definitely needed.
According to SCOTUS, existing law DOES, it some cases, prevent MAPs. All they said is that courts should be able to look at individual cases to determine if the MAP is anticompetitive or not. In the case they were reviewing, it sounded to me like a reasonable measure to only put their shoes in specialty stores that had higher markups and provided higher customer service, projecting a certain image in association with their brand. Other brands are free to provide the same quality at lower costs, so I don't see the problem.
If I sell you an apple from my apple tree then what right should I have to say that you sell that apple at? Or what rights do I have to then your apple at all?
They don't per se, but they have the right to stop selling apples to you if you start selling them for too cheap. Their reasoning is that they want to maintain the image of a very high quality apple, and wants to sell only to specialty stores who want to charge prices to support high quality customer services in support of those high quality apples. Putting their brand of apples in "Joe's Dirt-Cheap Fruit and Tires" would tarnish their image.
Take a warhead and put it in a shipping container? Seriously? Do you have any idea how hard it would be to retask a warhead to trigger in a way other than how it was designed?
And what makes you think that thousands of "anonymous" shipping containers come into port every day? Do you think it's like dropping a letter in a public mailbox? You think there's no paperwork saying who each one is from and to?
Say whatever you want about suicide bombers and martyrs. The leaders of Iran, North Korea, Russia, and whatever other possible nuclear threat you want to name, are not suicidal, not idiots, and not about to sacrifice all the power they've acquired and their entire country in order to destroy a city or two before being completely wiped out.
Maybe you're right, and Kim Jong Il is not suicidal or an idiot. But what about insane? What about delusional? Would you be willing to bet the West Coast on it? I wouldn't be.
ICBMs exist, and lots of them. Shipping container nukes don't. Regardless, it's a lot easier to send an anonymous ICBM, say from a patch of ground in Somalia, than it is to send an anonymous shipping container on a container ship.
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Generally, with maybe the exception of Democritus, the ancient Greek philosophers were monotheists. They spoke of the Greek mythological gods in terms of allegorical types of God. That's why the early Christians embraced their thinking and their terminology, adopting the terms and concepts of THEOS and LOGOS. It is speculated that in the 7 or 8 hundred years preceding Christianity, that Hebrew doctrines helped shaped the Greek monotheism. While there's not a lot of direct evidence of that, there was definitely a Jewish presence in Greece, so it seems inevitable that an exchange of ideas was going on.
It seems a reasonable assumption that much of the Greek populous regarded the Greek mythology in a literal polytheistic way. But for centuries, the leading thinkers of the culture, and their schools, were teaching various forms of monotheism. Plato said something along the lines of "We believe in the gods from a respect for the traditions of our ancestors; but we believe in God from reason."
As for Chinese monotheism, the period of Lao-Tzu and Confucius marked a transition in writing from the more personal term for "God" to the less personal terms of "Heaven" and "Tao" (the latter of which many people associate with the Greek term LOGOS. In some Chinese Bibles, "Tao" is even used as the translation of LOGOS, e.g. "In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God.") Confucius said, "Heaven means to be one with God." I would definitely consider both Lao-Tzu and Confucius monotheists.
Note that some of ancient Greek technology has still not been equaled by all our industrial and scientific progress -- for example their bronzework. There is no machine and no person on the planet who could reproduce a Greek bronze helmet. We have no idea how they could have done it. Similarly, it is only in the last 100 years that our understanding of metallurgy has increased to the point where we can understand what's going on in the traditional process of Samurai sword making. But if that tradition hadn't been preserved, like the Greek bronzework tradition hasn't been, there's nothing in our knowledge base that would allow us to create a sword with the capabilities of those swords -- despite our knowledge of the metallurgical principles used.
I think it's pretty amazing by modern standards. If you watch the video, there's a "clock hand" for every visible planet. That wouldn't be so impressive if it were heleocentric... just a bunch of simple gears. But it's geocentric, which means that depending on the relative position to the earth, sometimes they're going forward and sometimes backwards, and sometimes standing still. And the position of the moon is not based on a circular orbit, but implements Hipparchus's complex epicycle algorithm for the lunar cycle. If there are more impressive modern mechanical designs, I don't know what they are.
It is programmable... it's just not re-programmable. It solves the problems it was programmed to solve. The programming language comprises gears, pins, and slots. The computers that control and monitor modern appliances and cars are still called "computers" even though the program is burned into the chip, and they cannot be re-programmed.
Or rather, they get defensive, worrying that we AREN'T more advanced than we were 2,000 years ago. We're definitely more advanced if we get to pick the definition of "advanced", but that's not saying much. My definition of "advanced" would rest more on public morality and virtue than on technology; as would, incidentally, all the Greek philosophers' from Pythagoras to Aristotle. I see the era of this device, around 500 BC -- an era that included not only Plato and Socrates and their followers in the West, but Confucius and Lao-Tzu and their followers in the East -- a pinnacle of civilization that we have yet to again match.
Point taken... diet sodas serve a legitimate purpose for diabetics. It's the superficiality of society that bugs me more than the products themselves (though the products themselves turn my stomach). The whole idea that it's generally a good thing to develop/consume good-tasting, non-nutritive foods, so that our limited needs for sustenance don't have to limit our consumption. Maybe Olestra would be a better example. Who needs chips so desperately that they would eat chips made out of a fat-like plastic that acts as a laxative?
Well, as a connoisseur of fine sodas, I have occasionally ordered cases of Dr. Pepper direct from Texas, which are made with real cane sugar instead of corn syrup. I also keep an eye out for locally produced sodas which often use sucrose. But I would far rather gorge myself with High-Fructose Corn Syrup than with chlorinated sucrose, aka sucralose, aka splenda, aka powdered death; or aspartame; or saccharine, which is still used by some people, God help them.
The idea of a state charging tax on honest-to-God corn syrup soda and exempting that disgusting waste water that fat people drink so that the feel like they're "dieting" while they eat two big macs for lunch, gives me feelings of longing for a life of domestic terrorism.
What if the inclusion of the sarcasm mark is itself sarcastic? ~
I'm not aware of any ancient cultures in which young people being smart-asses to the elders were well-tolerated. And I have an even harder time finding plausibility in youngsters offing elders that "didn't get" their smart-assness. ...or maybe there's some sarcasm at work here that I am failing to detect.
His "extension of the work of others" required great insights and was very difficult for many physicists to even follow at first. It was difficult for Einstein to follow at first. In other words, if he had been "working in a group the whole time," it never would have happened. Our current understanding of the universe would be based on Lorentzian relativity or something else.
Your theory fails when confronted with the fact that different people are attracted by vastly differing characteristics.
In modern armies, the smallest tactical unit is the fireteam. It comprises four soldiers.
This is confusing the issue. No thinker in history thought in a vacuum. That's not the point. Einstein, Poincare, Lorentz, etc, made their breakthroughs through their individual efforts. They benefited from one another's work, but they each had individual contributions and individual genius. They didn't do their work in a committee. Committees generally produce nothing. The one guy on the committee who really gets it, gets out-voted. Progress is made when that guy quits the committee and develops his idea on his own, and publishes it.
Someone needs to read The Mythical Man-Month.
Desert? As far as I'm concerned they could beam it directly at the dome of the Capital Building in Washington.
Right, I don't know if they still do this. But a few years ago I bought something from Amazon, but they wouldn't display the price until it was in my shopping cart. I didn't quite get it at the time, but it makes more sense in light of reading about this.
No, if you mean government price floors or ceilings, those are always bad, with virtually no exceptions. Manufacturer price floors and ceilings can make sense in limited situations, if they aren't done for anti-competitive reasons. And that is what the Supreme Court said. Instead of a blanket rule, the "rule of reason" should apply, which means that a court should look at the actual facts to determine whether the action is anti-competitive or not. They made the same decision in regard to manufacturer price ceilings in 1997, and now it applies to price floors as well.
Er, you're holding the graph upside-down.
I agree. It sounds to me like Apple's behavior is exactly the kind of behavior that the court's majority opinion should be considered anti-competitive and illegal under the law. Sounds like a viable class action case to me. It seems like it would be fairly easy to show material loses in court from your inability to sell iPhones. Even moreso if it includes a plaintiff who actually lost their AAR status for one of these reasons.
According to SCOTUS, existing law DOES, it some cases, prevent MAPs. All they said is that courts should be able to look at individual cases to determine if the MAP is anticompetitive or not. In the case they were reviewing, it sounded to me like a reasonable measure to only put their shoes in specialty stores that had higher markups and provided higher customer service, projecting a certain image in association with their brand. Other brands are free to provide the same quality at lower costs, so I don't see the problem.
They don't per se, but they have the right to stop selling apples to you if you start selling them for too cheap. Their reasoning is that they want to maintain the image of a very high quality apple, and wants to sell only to specialty stores who want to charge prices to support high quality customer services in support of those high quality apples. Putting their brand of apples in "Joe's Dirt-Cheap Fruit and Tires" would tarnish their image.
I think that people tend to "forget" that part of the theory because looking at the progress of animal life, it's rather difficult to fully believe.
Take a warhead and put it in a shipping container? Seriously? Do you have any idea how hard it would be to retask a warhead to trigger in a way other than how it was designed?
And what makes you think that thousands of "anonymous" shipping containers come into port every day? Do you think it's like dropping a letter in a public mailbox? You think there's no paperwork saying who each one is from and to?
Maybe you're right, and Kim Jong Il is not suicidal or an idiot. But what about insane? What about delusional? Would you be willing to bet the West Coast on it? I wouldn't be.
ICBMs exist, and lots of them. Shipping container nukes don't. Regardless, it's a lot easier to send an anonymous ICBM, say from a patch of ground in Somalia, than it is to send an anonymous shipping container on a container ship.