I have heard this explanation before, but I never have believed it. The "game" doesn't know who is playing -- all it has is a constant feed of bets. The bets can be from one bet per player, a 1,000 bets per players, or from 10,000 players. The game doesn't care who or what is betting. The statistical rules will always dictate a certain percentage return to the Casino that will be quite consistent over time. This return does not vary based on when a gambler quits betting. The Casino is not conferred any advantage or additional return because a typical gambler quits when they are broke. The "game" doesn't care at all. There is no such thing as a lucky streak to get ahead, that chance would dictate they would run into if they could play infinite hands. The depth of the gambler's pockets makes no difference at all to the return that the Casino gets on each game.
Scientists never know anything to be "absolutely true". Absolute truth is the domain of charlatans, liars and cheats.
Are you absolutely sure that you are right? (i.e. you know an absolute truth.) And if you are when you say this, does that mean you are a charlatan, liar or cheat?
My... printer.- never -- prints..- such . silly.-.. codes; -- In --- fact.-. I... have . never.-.. seen.. such...- a . thing!...
Cute.
The embedded morse Code says:
SAMUEL MORSE LIVES
Berman may be promoted off the subcommittee...
on
Lessig For Congress?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
... on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property on account of this unfortunate event. See
this article. Getting him off and getting Lessing on this committee, even as a junior Congressman could have a huge effect in getting good legislation to the floor of Congress that is currently blocked.
If the only factor in the case was the theft of the laptop, you would be correct. However, there is more involved in this case. IANAL, but it apppears that Best Buy broke a number of laws -- sometype of Fraud for repeatedly lying about the theft of the laptop, more fraud by crediting her credit card and sending her a gift card on the pretense that she had agreed to that as a settlement, plus violating Washington, DC's security breach notification laws by not telling her about the potential data loss. It seems to me to make Best Buy criminally negligent and liable for more that simple damages for the loss of the laptop.
It seems to me that she has very legitimate concerns. She admits that the $54 million dollar claim is a publicity stunt of sorts. It appears to be working. I think that this
ars technica article does a better job of describing the case.
I also worked on OpenServer for a while. It is and was crap -- old and outdated. Did you know that Taco Bell used to use OpenServer systems in their restaurants, but that they recently completed a conversion to Linux?
These are all bad comparisons. The Pope was not asked to teach a class on science that the university. If you wanted to make a better comparison you should say, "asked to speak" instead of "hold a mass" (a rather odd concept for a Southern Baptist.)
In fact, evolutionists are sometimes invited to speak at pro-creationists Christian churches as participant in debates. They are normally treated courteously when they participate. Also, it is not unheard of for a Rabbi to speak at a Christian church, or vice/versa. The same goes for Muslim teachers.
The minority of staff and radical students display their intolerance by their protest.
. . . that Secunia vulnerability comparisons aren't any more reliable than numerology predictions.
I RTFA. He is not critical of Secunia per se. He quotes a lot from Secunia's advisories and claims that George Ou has misused the data. In other words, Ou is practicing Numerology with Secunia's numbers. Presumably then, Secunia's numbers can be used intelligently by others who know how to correctly interpret the data. His criticisms of Ou sound correct to me, but I don't care for all the extremely harsh ad hominem. It makes him look angry does not help.
This argument is essentially a vulgar and I would regard as invalid form of Pascal's Wager (Pascal's wager, as Pascal put it is more interesting).
It is false first because it falsely assigns equi-probable values to one version of "Christianity" versus all other forms of belief. But, if you play this game, you should distribute your probabilities over all types of belief -- Islam, Jehovah's witnesses, Mormonism, Hinduism -- perhaps Scientology -- we have quite a few thousands of choices to consider. It is false secondly due to a hidden premise -- that choosing to believe has no significant downside -- i.e you just live a life of serving others. What if choosing to believe requires that you blow yourself up performing jihad?
Before this post get's modded as off-topic, we should note that the parent's analogy does have relevance to the debate on global warming/climate change. We should not be trapped into believing that we should either spend vast resources on curbing carbon emissions which may or may not be effective versus doing nothing. We should evaluate all the alternatives rationally using a cost/benefit criteria.
We know the El Mino effects the norther Atlantic oscillations too which could be a reason why the ice shelves are appearing to be diapering and we have noticeable differences in the Atlantic current rotations.
Hmmm... just trying to get my mind around the idea an ice shelf in a diaper. Kind of weird... wouldn't it be more appropriate for a child (aka an "el nino").
You make excellent points, so I apologize for wishing to insert a clarification. The depletion of the ozone layer is a separate issue from global warming. Ozone depletion is caused by chemical pollutants, particularly CFCs (chloroflorocarbons), that catalyze chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere that break down ozone. These pollutants have leveled off and are in decline thanks to the 1987 Montreal Protocols. Global warming itself is that the direct cause of Ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere.
That said, global warming may be making matters worse for the Ozone due to indirect effects (see this article from a couple years ago.
Also, I would not regard the production of green house gases as less important the toxic chemical pollution over the long haul. Some level of global warming is now more or less inevitable, but if we do nothing now, then things in the long haul could get much worse.
Or how about: There's only one universe, and we are what happened to be possible in it. The odds of winning the lottery are tens of millions to one. The chance that someone will win the lottery is 100%.
A qualification -- If you are running a lottery, but there is only one player (i.e. no multi-verse), then the odds of winning (i.e. a universe with us in it), remain small. You only get 100% odds if there are many players (i.e. a multi-verse).
A question not really addressed or answered by the multi-verse theory -- Why is there a lottery at all? If there is no lottery, then the odds are 0%. Why is there a universe or multi-verse at all?
Religious morals are exactly relative to the individual who's preaching, who then tries to back up his own opinions by attirbuting them to deities.
Introducing the adjective "religious" misleads -- either there is a univerally applicable moral law to which all accountable, or there is not. The opinons of various individuals affect this matter not one bit. But, if morals are nothing more than a set of conventions or rules produced by humans, then they are not universal. Each individual is free to invent any type of moral system that seem right to them -- there is no higher authority to judge them differently. The choice is not between a moral law that is transcendently based and a "non-supernatural" ethical code -- it is between a moral law that is transcendently based and no moral law at all.
Second, even if there were some supernatural entities making moral decrees, so what? "Might makes right" is no argument. If your gods want me to behave a certain way, they owe me a reasoned argument, not a set of royal decrees.
Kant makes a good rational case. Like me, he regarded God as a necessary postulate for the foundation of morality. No serious religious thinker grounds moral law in arbitrary moral decrees. Rather morality derives from God's nature and character which even He cannot contradict, but which cannot exist apart from Himself (i.e. apart from a personal being) since morals are by nature a set of oughts or duties that reside only in a mind.
Third, there are non-supernatural ethical codes that are quite clear: utilitarianism, Kantian rationalism, and rights theories.
The adjective "non-supernatural" is also misleading. An arbitrary ethical code is no code at all, so all such codes are base in some way on reason, but of these ethical codes are "dead" by and in and of themselves.
I have to disagree. Morality can exist independent of religion. Many religious people make this mistake of assuming that only religious people have morals.
Moral laws, even when followed by non-religious people, derive their inherent quality of "rightness" from the minds and experiences of beings that make morals meaningful. It is the existence of a transcendent personal God who acts as a law-giver who can hold humanity accountable that makes morals both meaningful and universal. Without such a concept, morals become relative to the individual who decides what rules are right and wrong for themselves, and what meaning the rules will have for them.
That said, there are I think reasonably secular ways of deriving moral and ethical rules from agreed premises. For example, if we all agree that it is good to love our neighbor, regardless where we get this rule or why we find it meaningful, then we can use that to derive agreed upon moral principles without reference to any specific religious belief. It is just that any such principles are relative and "dead" when divorced from the One who gives morals universality and transcendent meaning. But I find morals are in fact universal and meaningful to people of all kinds. On a practical level, it is difficult if not impossible to live as if moral laws are really relative and not universally meaningful and applicable to all.
a world in which people have a right to invest and produce capitol.
I don't know about you, but every capitol I have every seen has been produced by a government of one kind of another. Hey, if Google tried to make another Washington D.C, wouldn't Congress have something to say about that?
Hell, I am old-duffer compare to most here. Remember what bill paying was like 10 years ago? Having to write checks, fill out addresses on envelopes and stamp them, make sure they get mailed on time, etc. etc. It could take hours, and I hated it. Now, I do everything on line in much less time.
Or, how about writing papers in school in the old days using a type writer! Aagh! Don't get me started on that one -- which brings us to more bullsh*t...
From the review: . ..he is confronted with mind-numbing statistics, numbers, and facts via the computer -- which he must accept. Perhaps even more important, he must master its "techniques" as the sine qua non tool to be successful in life.
What a load of crap! The internet has everything! False statistics and incorrect facts from every possible point of view. "He" does not have to accept everything, and will in fact learn much better discernment tools much earlier in life. And as for "techniques"! Gosh, maybe we should go back to the days before we could read and write so we would not have to be bothered with using pens and the alphabet and other such bother some techniques. Or perhaps we can jettison our computers for the good old days of slide rules and typewriters and mimeograph machines and telegraphs. Its not like there were techniques in the old days now were there? I am reminded of this: Monk's help desk.
I have no time to continue, but this man is a Luddite. History? Here, I am a blast from the past for a lot of you youngin's (whipper snappers the lot of you!) and here I get to speak to you. I couldn't do that in the past. I find nothing credible from the book in this review. I thank the reviewer, but I also think he is too charitable.
Microsoft is expected to distribute GPLV3 software. As soon as it does so (don't forget the coupons already sold), M$ will effectively donate any patents theoretically covered by that software.
This concisely explains the tactical reason for the exception. It is also why Microsoft will not distribute GPL V3 software. IANAL, but it may invalidate the Novell agreement anyway. I don't know that Novell can really breathe easier at all.
I regard anthropogenic global warming as an established fact, and find the minority opposition to be opposed on political grounds. It is a political conundrum, but one with an interesting possible solution from this Canadian.
The essence of his proposal is that an agreed upon yardstick that can measure anthropogenic warming be used as a tool to levy Carbon taxes on C02 emissions. He suggests that warming in the tropical troposphere is a good standard. The obviates all debate, and answers Michael Crichton's challenge. If anthropogenic warming goes up, we tax it and use the proceeds for counter measures, if it does not, there are no taxes. Everybody wins!
It reminds me of Ronald Reagan and the 1980's -- when the U.S. deployed a new generations of MIRVed nuclear missiles, Reagan named it "The Peacekeeper Missile". Speaking of the '80s, it also reminds me of 1984...
Re:Obligatory Planet of the Apes
on
The Human Mutation
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
The comparison of Santa Claus to "God" is a false analogy or comparison. God is not a particular entity that you can show someone like you could with Santa Claus. Santa Claus -- even with his enhanced mythical abilities -- is not omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. God cannot be encompassed and possibly "proved to exist" empirically, but Santa Claus -- if he existed -- could be shown to exist by empirical means. The same is not true of God. Even if God were to perform some verifiable "miracle" today -- there would be no way to discern if the miracle were really the result of an action by a transcendent supernatural being, or if there was really a natural explanation. In fact, scientific protocols would dictate that we eschew the former in favor of the later.
"God", as understood in western monotheistic belief is a transcendent being. The idea of God is more akin to a universal explanatory theory, a metaphysical framework used to interpret reality as a whole. Many aspects of God as an idea is subject to falsification to some degree. For example, the whole problem of evil is claimed to contradict the idea of a "good" God. But "God" as a universal explanatory theory is not empirically verifiable in the same sense as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. The two concepts are very different, so the analogy fails.
A more correct analogy would be to compare Santa Claus with specific religious myths that make empirical claims. For example, the Santa Claus myth could be compare with claims made for Jesus Christ, or Mohammad or Zeus.
Slashdot Mirror
I have heard this explanation before, but I never have believed it. The "game" doesn't know who is playing -- all it has is a constant feed of bets. The bets can be from one bet per player, a 1,000 bets per players, or from 10,000 players. The game doesn't care who or what is betting. The statistical rules will always dictate a certain percentage return to the Casino that will be quite consistent over time. This return does not vary based on when a gambler quits betting. The Casino is not conferred any advantage or additional return because a typical gambler quits when they are broke. The "game" doesn't care at all. There is no such thing as a lucky streak to get ahead, that chance would dictate they would run into if they could play infinite hands. The depth of the gambler's pockets makes no difference at all to the return that the Casino gets on each game.
Nah. Thanks for the interesting defense, but your wrong and the grammer Nazi is right. I was not intentionally using a contra-positive.
Gosh, your right. He isn't stupid. How about just calling him a whore?
Are you absolutely sure that you are right? (i.e. you know an absolute truth.) And if you are when you say this, does that mean you are a charlatan, liar or cheat?
Cute.
The embedded morse Code says:
SAMUEL MORSE LIVES
... on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property on account of this unfortunate event. See this article. Getting him off and getting Lessing on this committee, even as a junior Congressman could have a huge effect in getting good legislation to the floor of Congress that is currently blocked.
If the only factor in the case was the theft of the laptop, you would be correct. However, there is more involved in this case. IANAL, but it apppears that Best Buy broke a number of laws -- sometype of Fraud for repeatedly lying about the theft of the laptop, more fraud by crediting her credit card and sending her a gift card on the pretense that she had agreed to that as a settlement, plus violating Washington, DC's security breach notification laws by not telling her about the potential data loss. It seems to me to make Best Buy criminally negligent and liable for more that simple damages for the loss of the laptop.
It seems to me that she has very legitimate concerns. She admits that the $54 million dollar claim is a publicity stunt of sorts. It appears to be working. I think that this ars technica article does a better job of describing the case.
Sun is in the oil business?! What a surprise! How many oil fields do they have licenses on?
I also worked on OpenServer for a while. It is and was crap -- old and outdated. Did you know that Taco Bell used to use OpenServer systems in their restaurants, but that they recently completed a conversion to Linux?
These are all bad comparisons. The Pope was not asked to teach a class on science that the university. If you wanted to make a better comparison you should say, "asked to speak" instead of "hold a mass" (a rather odd concept for a Southern Baptist.)
In fact, evolutionists are sometimes invited to speak at pro-creationists Christian churches as participant in debates. They are normally treated courteously when they participate. Also, it is not unheard of for a Rabbi to speak at a Christian church, or vice/versa. The same goes for Muslim teachers.
The minority of staff and radical students display their intolerance by their protest.
I RTFA. He is not critical of Secunia per se. He quotes a lot from Secunia's advisories and claims that George Ou has misused the data. In other words, Ou is practicing Numerology with Secunia's numbers. Presumably then, Secunia's numbers can be used intelligently by others who know how to correctly interpret the data. His criticisms of Ou sound correct to me, but I don't care for all the extremely harsh ad hominem. It makes him look angry does not help.
This argument is essentially a vulgar and I would regard as invalid form of Pascal's Wager (Pascal's wager, as Pascal put it is more interesting).
It is false first because it falsely assigns equi-probable values to one version of "Christianity" versus all other forms of belief. But, if you play this game, you should distribute your probabilities over all types of belief -- Islam, Jehovah's witnesses, Mormonism, Hinduism -- perhaps Scientology -- we have quite a few thousands of choices to consider. It is false secondly due to a hidden premise -- that choosing to believe has no significant downside -- i.e you just live a life of serving others. What if choosing to believe requires that you blow yourself up performing jihad?
Before this post get's modded as off-topic, we should note that the parent's analogy does have relevance to the debate on global warming/climate change. We should not be trapped into believing that we should either spend vast resources on curbing carbon emissions which may or may not be effective versus doing nothing. We should evaluate all the alternatives rationally using a cost/benefit criteria.
We know the El Mino effects the norther Atlantic oscillations too which could be a reason why the ice shelves are appearing to be diapering and we have noticeable differences in the Atlantic current rotations.
Hmmm... just trying to get my mind around the idea an ice shelf in a diaper. Kind of weird ... wouldn't it be more appropriate for a child (aka an "el nino").
Global warming itself is that the direct cause of Ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere.
Man ... gotta proofread more, this was supposed to say that global warming itself is not the direct cause of Ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere.
You make excellent points, so I apologize for wishing to insert a clarification. The depletion of the ozone layer is a separate issue from global warming. Ozone depletion is caused by chemical pollutants, particularly CFCs (chloroflorocarbons), that catalyze chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere that break down ozone. These pollutants have leveled off and are in decline thanks to the 1987 Montreal Protocols. Global warming itself is that the direct cause of Ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere.
That said, global warming may be making matters worse for the Ozone due to indirect effects (see this article from a couple years ago.
Also, I would not regard the production of green house gases as less important the toxic chemical pollution over the long haul. Some level of global warming is now more or less inevitable, but if we do nothing now, then things in the long haul could get much worse.
A qualification -- If you are running a lottery, but there is only one player (i.e. no multi-verse), then the odds of winning (i.e. a universe with us in it), remain small. You only get 100% odds if there are many players (i.e. a multi-verse).
A question not really addressed or answered by the multi-verse theory -- Why is there a lottery at all? If there is no lottery, then the odds are 0%. Why is there a universe or multi-verse at all?
Not correct. The whole hell of fire concept also known as Ghenna is of Jewish Origin. See The article on this in the Jewish Encyclopedia.
Introducing the adjective "religious" misleads -- either there is a univerally applicable moral law to which all accountable, or there is not. The opinons of various individuals affect this matter not one bit. But, if morals are nothing more than a set of conventions or rules produced by humans, then they are not universal. Each individual is free to invent any type of moral system that seem right to them -- there is no higher authority to judge them differently. The choice is not between a moral law that is transcendently based and a "non-supernatural" ethical code -- it is between a moral law that is transcendently based and no moral law at all.
Second, even if there were some supernatural entities making moral decrees, so what? "Might makes right" is no argument. If your gods want me to behave a certain way, they owe me a reasoned argument, not a set of royal decrees.Kant makes a good rational case. Like me, he regarded God as a necessary postulate for the foundation of morality. No serious religious thinker grounds moral law in arbitrary moral decrees. Rather morality derives from God's nature and character which even He cannot contradict, but which cannot exist apart from Himself (i.e. apart from a personal being) since morals are by nature a set of oughts or duties that reside only in a mind.
Third, there are non-supernatural ethical codes that are quite clear: utilitarianism, Kantian rationalism, and rights theories.The adjective "non-supernatural" is also misleading. An arbitrary ethical code is no code at all, so all such codes are base in some way on reason, but of these ethical codes are "dead" by and in and of themselves.
Moral laws, even when followed by non-religious people, derive their inherent quality of "rightness" from the minds and experiences of beings that make morals meaningful. It is the existence of a transcendent personal God who acts as a law-giver who can hold humanity accountable that makes morals both meaningful and universal. Without such a concept, morals become relative to the individual who decides what rules are right and wrong for themselves, and what meaning the rules will have for them.
That said, there are I think reasonably secular ways of deriving moral and ethical rules from agreed premises. For example, if we all agree that it is good to love our neighbor, regardless where we get this rule or why we find it meaningful, then we can use that to derive agreed upon moral principles without reference to any specific religious belief. It is just that any such principles are relative and "dead" when divorced from the One who gives morals universality and transcendent meaning. But I find morals are in fact universal and meaningful to people of all kinds. On a practical level, it is difficult if not impossible to live as if moral laws are really relative and not universally meaningful and applicable to all.
I don't know about you, but every capitol I have every seen has been produced by a government of one kind of another. Hey, if Google tried to make another Washington D.C, wouldn't Congress have something to say about that?
The errors described in the review are so numerous it is hard to know where to begin. Here are a few:
From the review: However, that leisure time never materializes.
Not so! Leisure time has increased! By 6-8 hours per week for men and 4-8 hours for women!
Hell, I am old-duffer compare to most here. Remember what bill paying was like 10 years ago? Having to write checks, fill out addresses on envelopes and stamp them, make sure they get mailed on time, etc. etc. It could take hours, and I hated it. Now, I do everything on line in much less time.
Or, how about writing papers in school in the old days using a type writer! Aagh! Don't get me started on that one -- which brings us to more bullsh*t...
From the review: . . .he is confronted with mind-numbing statistics, numbers, and facts via the computer -- which he must accept. Perhaps even more important, he must master its "techniques" as the sine qua non tool to be successful in life.
What a load of crap! The internet has everything! False statistics and incorrect facts from every possible point of view. "He" does not have to accept everything, and will in fact learn much better discernment tools much earlier in life. And as for "techniques"! Gosh, maybe we should go back to the days before we could read and write so we would not have to be bothered with using pens and the alphabet and other such bother some techniques. Or perhaps we can jettison our computers for the good old days of slide rules and typewriters and mimeograph machines and telegraphs. Its not like there were techniques in the old days now were there? I am reminded of this: Monk's help desk.
I have no time to continue, but this man is a Luddite. History? Here, I am a blast from the past for a lot of you youngin's (whipper snappers the lot of you!) and here I get to speak to you. I couldn't do that in the past. I find nothing credible from the book in this review. I thank the reviewer, but I also think he is too charitable.
Microsoft is expected to distribute GPLV3 software. As soon as it does so (don't forget the coupons already sold), M$ will effectively donate any patents theoretically covered by that software.
This concisely explains the tactical reason for the exception. It is also why Microsoft will not distribute GPL V3 software. IANAL, but it may invalidate the Novell agreement anyway. I don't know that Novell can really breathe easier at all.
I regard anthropogenic global warming as an established fact, and find the minority opposition to be opposed on political grounds. It is a political conundrum, but one with an interesting possible solution from this Canadian.
The essence of his proposal is that an agreed upon yardstick that can measure anthropogenic warming be used as a tool to levy Carbon taxes on C02 emissions. He suggests that warming in the tropical troposphere is a good standard. The obviates all debate, and answers Michael Crichton's challenge. If anthropogenic warming goes up, we tax it and use the proceeds for counter measures, if it does not, there are no taxes. Everybody wins!
It reminds me of Ronald Reagan and the 1980's -- when the U.S. deployed a new generations of MIRVed nuclear missiles, Reagan named it "The Peacekeeper Missile". Speaking of the '80s, it also reminds me of 1984...
The comparison of Santa Claus to "God" is a false analogy or comparison. God is not a particular entity that you can show someone like you could with Santa Claus. Santa Claus -- even with his enhanced mythical abilities -- is not omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. God cannot be encompassed and possibly "proved to exist" empirically, but Santa Claus -- if he existed -- could be shown to exist by empirical means. The same is not true of God. Even if God were to perform some verifiable "miracle" today -- there would be no way to discern if the miracle were really the result of an action by a transcendent supernatural being, or if there was really a natural explanation. In fact, scientific protocols would dictate that we eschew the former in favor of the later.
"God", as understood in western monotheistic belief is a transcendent being. The idea of God is more akin to a universal explanatory theory, a metaphysical framework used to interpret reality as a whole. Many aspects of God as an idea is subject to falsification to some degree. For example, the whole problem of evil is claimed to contradict the idea of a "good" God. But "God" as a universal explanatory theory is not empirically verifiable in the same sense as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. The two concepts are very different, so the analogy fails.
A more correct analogy would be to compare Santa Claus with specific religious myths that make empirical claims. For example, the Santa Claus myth could be compare with claims made for Jesus Christ, or Mohammad or Zeus.