however, science and nonbelief have gone hand in hand for a long time. look at any statistics on the beliefs of scientists. if a person is a natural scientist, she is that much more likely not to be a believer. this is the contribution science can make to religion, people learn to discard unsupported ideas. the scientific approach is basically the antithesis of faith or the idea that it's somehow virtuous to believe without evidence. science and faith are fundamentally incompatible, because one teaches the other's authority is false. yes, there are people that are scientists and yet remain believers, and there are also a multitude of explanations that don't involve assuming that religious belief and a scientific attitude are fundamentally compatible
I'm sorry, but the Church has always, and I mean always has tasked itself with explaining empirical facts and declaring truths about the observable world, which falls within science's purview. in fact, even the existence of God could be taken as the ultimate scientific hypothesis. saying that science can answer other questions about the observable reality, but not this one, because God is invisible or hidden, is just special pleading
before the Church's hegemony ended in the West, it was banning books left and right, and the basis for banning was disagreeing with its (the Church's) teachings, which included, since the late Middle Ages, Aristotle's natural philosophy. after Ferdinand and Isabella introduced the Inquisition, it got worse, and you had a reason to fear for your life if you dared to do natural philosophy of your own. remember that the word "heretic" meant anyone who dissented from the Church? if Aristotle's views on reality were the official doctrine of the Church, then doing natural philosophy would almost certainly label you a heretic, unless you just repeated official dogma. think about what the ostensible reason was for Galileo's punishment, for instance. he was made to recant the heliocentric model of the solar system, after which he said "eppur si muove!" likewise, part of the ostensible reason Bruno was burned was that he thought the universe was infinite. now, there was politics involved, yes, but that's not the point; the point is that the Church had authority on scientific facts and used it. simply read the papal sentence of Galileo, it will say that geocentrism is true and heliocentrism is false, because it's "contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture". is this one of the "historical oddities" you talk about?
in any case, carry on, don't let the facts stop your whitewashing
is someone still using Pascal's Wager as a serious argument? I mean, there's even some suspicion that Pascal thought it as a joke, because it's so bad. it would work only if there was a single faith, which is not true
the rest of what you say is appealing to consequences. you are irrationally deciding on your beliefs about reality based on how they make you feel. you find "meaning and purpose" appealing, and dislike nihilism, and therefore choose to believe in the supernatural. ignoring that it doesn't follow that not believing in a higher power would necessarily lead to nihilism, because humans make their own meaning, it's just an intellectually sloppy approach. it just means that you do not value knowing the truth as much as feeling good. if you did, the question of emotions or morality wouldn't even come up when deciding on what to believe about the nature of reality. you would choose what is the best supported by evidence, or remain agnostic if the evidence is insufficient, and live with it. not the other way around, not choose what's easiest to live with
that would work out for the J.K.Rowlings types, but what about the great majority of authors and translators that aren't producing global hits, how would they get compensated? e.g., people who write important academic texts and translate things from ancient languages and so on. they get very little now anyway, but without copyrights they'd be completely dependent on charity. I guess that sounds just fine if you're a libertarian, but to me it seems like it would take away too much of the already little incentive to publish scientific works. unless, of course, you're sure that it's going to be one of the few works of the century that will get famous outside the academic community
oh, come off it. scientific racism wasn't disproved by critically thinking laymen, but by science correcting itself. this is what science does, and it's the beauty of it. regarding eugenics, it wasn't falsified when people started agreeing that the government shouldn't do artificial selection on its people, and what you say has actually very little to do with science. Nazi eugenics, for instance, were markedly pseudo-scientific, because they thought that you could achieve a superior race by basically inbreeding. eugenics in general is a philosophical stance. all science does is explain how exactly artificial selection works, not advocate that it should be applied to human societies. so do you have any actual examples of where established science got it dead wrong, but was corrected by the gut feeling of a general populace? I somehow doubt it
first off, evolution is not a hypothesis at this point, it's a full fledged scientific theory. second, it's also an observed reality, and scientists seem to generally agree that there is no point in trying to disprove facts. third, there exists disagreement about the mechanism of evolution, but not about the basic fact, because there is so much evidence for common descent, speciation etc. and lastly, the authors of the bill should be trying very hard to explain why single out biology and evolution in particular, despite basically all the experts saying that it's not problematic. my personal opinion is that it's obvious that evolution just sits especially poorly with their religious dogmas, and that this is the main motivation for the bill
yeah, if by "runs just fine" you mean "can boot". the fun starts with integrated video chipsets, NICs and wlan cards, webcams, sound cards etc. often you end up having to manually configure ndiswrapper or whatnot. please don't go over linux hw support in a baloon, it's not that good. the gp is right that checking hw support is important, even if his tone is stupid
what exactly is so hard about it? could it by any chance be that you're talking about installing windows on very old hardware? I've done it more than few times, and the only problems I had were with a 2k era pentium 3. this is with xp and lately vista. are you sure you're talking about windows and not some other os?
even if Disney was a pioneer, the fields are still very different. it just doesn't make sense to proclaim someone who doesn't make films a successor to a famous filmmaker. Miyazaki, on the other hand, fits the bill perfectly. I've even heard on some commentary tracks and elsewhere that Disney is very much influenced by Miyazaki's works. I don't watch too many Disney movies myself, so I can't verify it, but I think it's a one way street. at least from seeing Miyazaki's films, I can't imagine what he could have taken from Disney. it also helps that he doesn't have much competition in the animation world today. the other more or less famous names aren't as mainstream as he is
the credit for being creative doesn't go to the Death Note anime, it goes to the manga. the anime is just an adaptation and adds basically nothing in terms of storyline or character design
also, some of the titles you included in your list make me think that you're either new to anime or just aren't very critical. one shouldn't recommend stinkers like Code-E or Hayate no Gotoku to people you're trying to convince that anime isn't bad, especially since there are much better options, e.g., some of the progressive series like Ergo Proxy or GitS
indeed, this was exactly my first though. Disney was a filmmaker, and Miyazaki is a filmmaker, and a legend. Miyamoto, on the other hand, makes video games. very different areas of occupation those
I didn't argue for an objective ethical standard, I argued against universal ethical relativism, by showing that there are clear exceptions to that. once again, you're not clever for arguing relativism, just confused. there certainly are ethical values that depend entirely on their surrounding culture, but there are also values that are shared across all cultures, like the aforementioned example of killing children for sport being universally unethical.
kudos for being consistent about your convictions, but I think that this is a monstrous answer, and if the situation were real, I'd do everything to stop people from preventing the kid being saved. in my eyes, a grown human with memories and thoughts clearly has much more value than an embryo lacking those things. I'm also sure that you value human experiences too, and just haven't connected it to this case.
if your goal was to have chickens, of course that you would value the eggs, but you would value the chickens more than the non-chickens. also, I did not say that grown humans come before the embryos, so most of your response is irrelevant
that's not "true atheists", but dogmatic atheists. most atheists don't hold that they can prove that gods doesn't exist, just that they can refute the conceptual arguments offered in favor of their existence, that there is no empirical proof for them, and that there exist good conceptual arguments against their existence.
nice gratuitous attack, and I'm sorry to hear that your life's value hit the roof so early. some of us think that when we improve ourselves and gain experience, we become more valuable as human beings, but apparently an impregnated egg is as valuable as we can be. in fact, the logical conclusion is that the eggs are more valuable than us, because grown humans have already spent a portion of their limited lifespan, so they have less potential. your answer should have been "no, I was more valuable then."
let's try a thought experiment and see how your evaluation of life works out. suppose there was a poisoned embryo and a poisoned 15 year old kid, and you had only one dose of antidote, so you couldn't save them both. according to the above answer, their lives are of equal value, so it'd be just as ethical to save the embryo as the kid. (or even more ethical to save the embryo, since it has more potential.) so do we need to run public opinion polls to say that not choosing to save the kid would be an outrageous choice? I think not, and hopefully you'll think about this
thing is, you can't argue universal ethical relativism. you aren't sophisticated if you try to, you just lack imagination. want an example of a moral truth that holds across all cultures? find me one that thinks killing children for sport is ethical, please.
it's not like the only thing skype has is voip, and it's not like it all depends solely on what you choose to use. I have some 60-odd contacts in there and communicate with them via IM, and only occasionally via voip, and it tends to involve video too. there's probably no way I could get the other people in my contacts to start using something else, because they too have dozens of contacts in skype that are valuable to them. so sip phones are a non-alternative to skype, unless all you use it for is voip, and even then it's unclear to me if you could call the same people for free as you can now with skype.
Slashdot Mirror
it's not that simple. property can also be a part of what makes you 'you' or part of your identity
however, science and nonbelief have gone hand in hand for a long time. look at any statistics on the beliefs of scientists. if a person is a natural scientist, she is that much more likely not to be a believer. this is the contribution science can make to religion, people learn to discard unsupported ideas. the scientific approach is basically the antithesis of faith or the idea that it's somehow virtuous to believe without evidence. science and faith are fundamentally incompatible, because one teaches the other's authority is false. yes, there are people that are scientists and yet remain believers, and there are also a multitude of explanations that don't involve assuming that religious belief and a scientific attitude are fundamentally compatible
I'm sorry, but the Church has always, and I mean always has tasked itself with explaining empirical facts and declaring truths about the observable world, which falls within science's purview. in fact, even the existence of God could be taken as the ultimate scientific hypothesis. saying that science can answer other questions about the observable reality, but not this one, because God is invisible or hidden, is just special pleading
before the Church's hegemony ended in the West, it was banning books left and right, and the basis for banning was disagreeing with its (the Church's) teachings, which included, since the late Middle Ages, Aristotle's natural philosophy. after Ferdinand and Isabella introduced the Inquisition, it got worse, and you had a reason to fear for your life if you dared to do natural philosophy of your own. remember that the word "heretic" meant anyone who dissented from the Church? if Aristotle's views on reality were the official doctrine of the Church, then doing natural philosophy would almost certainly label you a heretic, unless you just repeated official dogma. think about what the ostensible reason was for Galileo's punishment, for instance. he was made to recant the heliocentric model of the solar system, after which he said "eppur si muove!" likewise, part of the ostensible reason Bruno was burned was that he thought the universe was infinite. now, there was politics involved, yes, but that's not the point; the point is that the Church had authority on scientific facts and used it. simply read the papal sentence of Galileo, it will say that geocentrism is true and heliocentrism is false, because it's "contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture". is this one of the "historical oddities" you talk about?
in any case, carry on, don't let the facts stop your whitewashing
is someone still using Pascal's Wager as a serious argument? I mean, there's even some suspicion that Pascal thought it as a joke, because it's so bad. it would work only if there was a single faith, which is not true
the rest of what you say is appealing to consequences. you are irrationally deciding on your beliefs about reality based on how they make you feel. you find "meaning and purpose" appealing, and dislike nihilism, and therefore choose to believe in the supernatural. ignoring that it doesn't follow that not believing in a higher power would necessarily lead to nihilism, because humans make their own meaning, it's just an intellectually sloppy approach. it just means that you do not value knowing the truth as much as feeling good. if you did, the question of emotions or morality wouldn't even come up when deciding on what to believe about the nature of reality. you would choose what is the best supported by evidence, or remain agnostic if the evidence is insufficient, and live with it. not the other way around, not choose what's easiest to live with
no, it's a myth that SSDs are less power hungry: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html
that would work out for the J.K.Rowlings types, but what about the great majority of authors and translators that aren't producing global hits, how would they get compensated? e.g., people who write important academic texts and translate things from ancient languages and so on. they get very little now anyway, but without copyrights they'd be completely dependent on charity. I guess that sounds just fine if you're a libertarian, but to me it seems like it would take away too much of the already little incentive to publish scientific works. unless, of course, you're sure that it's going to be one of the few works of the century that will get famous outside the academic community
except it's not a command, but an application. commands are a part of your shell.
oh, come off it. scientific racism wasn't disproved by critically thinking laymen, but by science correcting itself. this is what science does, and it's the beauty of it. regarding eugenics, it wasn't falsified when people started agreeing that the government shouldn't do artificial selection on its people, and what you say has actually very little to do with science. Nazi eugenics, for instance, were markedly pseudo-scientific, because they thought that you could achieve a superior race by basically inbreeding. eugenics in general is a philosophical stance. all science does is explain how exactly artificial selection works, not advocate that it should be applied to human societies. so do you have any actual examples of where established science got it dead wrong, but was corrected by the gut feeling of a general populace? I somehow doubt it
first off, evolution is not a hypothesis at this point, it's a full fledged scientific theory. second, it's also an observed reality, and scientists seem to generally agree that there is no point in trying to disprove facts. third, there exists disagreement about the mechanism of evolution, but not about the basic fact, because there is so much evidence for common descent, speciation etc. and lastly, the authors of the bill should be trying very hard to explain why single out biology and evolution in particular, despite basically all the experts saying that it's not problematic. my personal opinion is that it's obvious that evolution just sits especially poorly with their religious dogmas, and that this is the main motivation for the bill
yeah, if by "runs just fine" you mean "can boot". the fun starts with integrated video chipsets, NICs and wlan cards, webcams, sound cards etc. often you end up having to manually configure ndiswrapper or whatnot. please don't go over linux hw support in a baloon, it's not that good. the gp is right that checking hw support is important, even if his tone is stupid
what exactly is so hard about it? could it by any chance be that you're talking about installing windows on very old hardware? I've done it more than few times, and the only problems I had were with a 2k era pentium 3. this is with xp and lately vista. are you sure you're talking about windows and not some other os?
even if Disney was a pioneer, the fields are still very different. it just doesn't make sense to proclaim someone who doesn't make films a successor to a famous filmmaker. Miyazaki, on the other hand, fits the bill perfectly. I've even heard on some commentary tracks and elsewhere that Disney is very much influenced by Miyazaki's works. I don't watch too many Disney movies myself, so I can't verify it, but I think it's a one way street. at least from seeing Miyazaki's films, I can't imagine what he could have taken from Disney. it also helps that he doesn't have much competition in the animation world today. the other more or less famous names aren't as mainstream as he is
the credit for being creative doesn't go to the Death Note anime, it goes to the manga. the anime is just an adaptation and adds basically nothing in terms of storyline or character design
also, some of the titles you included in your list make me think that you're either new to anime or just aren't very critical. one shouldn't recommend stinkers like Code-E or Hayate no Gotoku to people you're trying to convince that anime isn't bad, especially since there are much better options, e.g., some of the progressive series like Ergo Proxy or GitS
indeed, this was exactly my first though. Disney was a filmmaker, and Miyazaki is a filmmaker, and a legend. Miyamoto, on the other hand, makes video games. very different areas of occupation those
I didn't argue for an objective ethical standard, I argued against universal ethical relativism, by showing that there are clear exceptions to that. once again, you're not clever for arguing relativism, just confused. there certainly are ethical values that depend entirely on their surrounding culture, but there are also values that are shared across all cultures, like the aforementioned example of killing children for sport being universally unethical.
kudos for being consistent about your convictions, but I think that this is a monstrous answer, and if the situation were real, I'd do everything to stop people from preventing the kid being saved. in my eyes, a grown human with memories and thoughts clearly has much more value than an embryo lacking those things. I'm also sure that you value human experiences too, and just haven't connected it to this case.
since this is a thought experiment, we could make the chance of survival exactly the same, because we control the conditions. who would you save then?
if your goal was to have chickens, of course that you would value the eggs, but you would value the chickens more than the non-chickens. also, I did not say that grown humans come before the embryos, so most of your response is irrelevant
that's not "true atheists", but dogmatic atheists. most atheists don't hold that they can prove that gods doesn't exist, just that they can refute the conceptual arguments offered in favor of their existence, that there is no empirical proof for them, and that there exist good conceptual arguments against their existence.
nice gratuitous attack, and I'm sorry to hear that your life's value hit the roof so early. some of us think that when we improve ourselves and gain experience, we become more valuable as human beings, but apparently an impregnated egg is as valuable as we can be. in fact, the logical conclusion is that the eggs are more valuable than us, because grown humans have already spent a portion of their limited lifespan, so they have less potential. your answer should have been "no, I was more valuable then."
let's try a thought experiment and see how your evaluation of life works out. suppose there was a poisoned embryo and a poisoned 15 year old kid, and you had only one dose of antidote, so you couldn't save them both. according to the above answer, their lives are of equal value, so it'd be just as ethical to save the embryo as the kid. (or even more ethical to save the embryo, since it has more potential.) so do we need to run public opinion polls to say that not choosing to save the kid would be an outrageous choice? I think not, and hopefully you'll think about this
thing is, you can't argue universal ethical relativism. you aren't sophisticated if you try to, you just lack imagination. want an example of a moral truth that holds across all cultures? find me one that thinks killing children for sport is ethical, please.
tell me, do you feel your life as a zygote was as valuable back then as it is now?
I think there's a quaking aspen that's at least 80 000 years old, if not more. Wikipedia has an article about very old living things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long-living_organisms
it's useful for everything that a js framework can be useful for.
it's not like the only thing skype has is voip, and it's not like it all depends solely on what you choose to use. I have some 60-odd contacts in there and communicate with them via IM, and only occasionally via voip, and it tends to involve video too. there's probably no way I could get the other people in my contacts to start using something else, because they too have dozens of contacts in skype that are valuable to them. so sip phones are a non-alternative to skype, unless all you use it for is voip, and even then it's unclear to me if you could call the same people for free as you can now with skype.