I disagree. We don't "have faith" that it works. We KNOW FOR A FACT IT WORKS. How? I may not have any idea how gcc works, but I can actually use it to compile a program. I don't have to have faith that it compiled, because I have hard evidence: the binary!
Simply because you don't experience something firsthand doesn't defy it's existance.
I did not make this claim. It is dishonest of you to imply that I did. I said that it is irrational to claim the existence of anything for which there is no evidence.
Unfortunately, "agnostic" has been mutilated from its original meaning. It was coined by 19th-century British scientist Thomas H. Huxley to mean as I have described (sic, "It is immoral to claim to have any knowledge that one cannot possibly have"). The word was defined as a combination of "a" (not) and "gnostic" (of or pertaining to knowledge). There was no specific religious overtone when Huxley defined it. Modern dictionaries unfortunately misreport the definition as only referring to God, an error I usually attribute to the tragedy of the verbal commons (but have no evidence for -- ha ha!).
Any intelligent atheist will *self-describe* as someone who *fails* to believe in god, not someone who *actively disbelieves* in God. I would be curious as to the person who wrote that definition of "atheist", because religion is such a polarized topic that it would be hardly surprising for someone to misdefine it.
As such, "atheist" and "agnostic" are not mutually exclusive. I stand by my definition.
Atheism is the LACK of belief in any deity. It is *NOT* (repeat **NOT**) the belief that the deity does not exist. This is a CRITICAL DIFFERENCE (and the reason why people like yourself often make claims like you just did, which are straw man arguments, and absurd, to boot). I am not claiming that God does not exist. I AM claiming that, since there is no evidence that God exists, it is irrational to think that he does.
Your "Proof" is faulty, since it assumes I claim to have proof of God's non-existence. But that is a non-issue, as I have demonstrated. Atheists (intelligent ones, anyway) do not seek to prove that God does not exist. They merely say, "There is no reason to think he does," and go about their business.
Allow me to point out an error you made in your first paragraph:
There are plenty of things which are ordinarily undetectable, but which leave evidence of their existance.
Things that leave evidence of their existence are not "ordinarily undetectable". The fact that they leave evidence by definition means they are detectable. When I say "detectable" I do not mean "directly observable via sight, sound, touch, smell, etc.", I mean "able to be detected." Keep that in mind.
Now, that aside, I do not claim that if I have not personally detected something, it does not exist. Rather, I claim that if I (or someone I trust) has no evidence that something exists, there is no logical reason to assume that it does. This is the critical point. I am not saying, "I can't see God, therefore God does not/cannot exist." What I AM saying is, "I have no evidence that God exists, therefore I assume that God does not exist; however I am open to evidence."
I also NEVER say (or at least, I really try not to), "There is no evidence that X exists, therefore, there will never be evidence that X exists." This is clearly ludicrous.
I may have miscommunicated. I don't explicitly deny the existence of anything I don't have evidence for. I simply fail to accept its existence. It's the difference between saying, "There is no book in that room," and saying, "I have no information about whether there is a book in that room, and, lacking said information, have no rational choice but to continue on as if there is no book."
And I did not say, "easy detection," please do not twist my words. I merely said that there is no reason to think that anything exists aside from what we can detect with our senses (and devices that enhance our senses). Please explain how that became "easy detection". If you can demonstrate the existence of things that we cannot detect, please do so.
Your second paragraph is fairly meaningless. For one, you do not describe or even name what this basis of reality is, so I cannot really say anything particular on that (please, elaborate! I'd love to continue this discussion). Simply because "ancient traditions" speak of something does not necessarily have any bearing on whether it is true. Dreams are (common phrase coming up) a mental manifestation of physical and chemical processes in our brains. They are as "real" as waking life, because they are part of the real, physical world.
"Time", as far as I know, is another physical manifestation of the nature of the universe. Hallucinations are manifestations of peoples' brain chemistry. They are equally "real" in the sense that they both spring from the properties of spacetime.
You seem to think that because I don't accept the existence of the supernatural, mystical, etc. that I don't use my imagination and intuition to solve problems when the need arises. You could not be more wrong. I love my imagination; I write quite a lot, and very little of it is based in reality.
But keep in mind that my imagination is the manifestation of physical and chemical processes that occur inside my brain. It is, thus, entirely a part of the real, physical, detectable and measurable world. I don't have any reason to think that my imagination comes from any external source, or is influenced by any supernatural or other such "mystical" concepts. If you would like to provide specific examples of how that's incorrect, I am all ears.
Another question: "terribly limiting" in what way? Am I less capable of insight and thoughtfulness because I don't accept the existence of the mystical? Am I less intelligent and creative because of it? How am I limited? Be specific. If you can't be specific to my case (as you don't know me very well, I would imagine:) then be specific about what kinds of ways I might be "terribly limit[ed]" by such a philosophy.
For my part, I am an atheist. (Strictly speaking, I am also an agnostic -- "agnostic" does not mean "unsure about beliefs in god", it means "thinks that it is immoral to claim to have knowledge that you could not possibly have".)
There is no God. There are no gods. Jesus was a man. He lived, he died. End of story. There are no UFOs hovering over earth. The Loch Ness Monster does not exit. Neither does Bigfoot. There are not an abnormal number of vanishing ships/planes in the Bermuda Triangle compared to anywhere else. Crystals do not have unexplained power. There is no such thing as chi.
I could go on. My point is, there is no reason to think that anything exists aside from what we can detect with our senses (and devices that enhance our senses, like radio telescopes).
Mysticism has its place -- in sci-fi. That's it. In the real world, all that has a place is reality.
You can buy EverQuest in the store and you get a one-month free trial before you have to pay a subscription to keep playing. I don't think that's illegal. If so, please cite the particular law that makes it so, and describe why Verant's actions fall under it.
I think one good solution is to write a program that will take the DeCSS code and write every other byte to a pair of files. Each one is useless without the other and a program to combine the two. Then people randomly keep one of the files on their page, and don't link to any other pages that have it. But they can describe how to find the other half.
The program can also be used in reverse, to combine the two files together. Whaddya think?
...and I fairly closely follow Verant's various actions as evidenced by what's on their boards. I don't think Verant is going to panic over this; they've known about it for a long time and probably will ignore it. For one thing, even if people do start playing on "public" servers, it's going to be a totally different experience from actually playing EQ on Verant's servers. Not much, if any, of the content is going to be there; basically it's a way of emulating the EQ engine. People will be able to run their own servers, sure, but without major hardware they aren't going to be able to support many players at once.
There's probably a lot more to be said about this, but I don't think Verant is going to freak out. There's not much they can do, and I don't think it's going to really affect their business anyway.
Thank you, that IS what I meant. Amazing how often people engage the Slashdot Reflex: "He defended Windows? Quick! Poke holes in his logic!" (although I didn't defend Windows in any way, but whatever...)
I guess what I meant was, Linux would have been dependent on whatever monopolistic, closed-source operating system was prevalent at the time. If it had been, I don't know, Doors 95, then Linux would have had the same opportunities.
I guess what I'm really saying is that Linux was dependent on having a niche to fill (and thankfully that niche has grown tremendously). If there had been no need, there would have been no OS.
Actually I meant "progress" in an ironic way, indicating that, "Well, that's what happens when technology progresses." More to the point, the progression of technology is going to have both positive and negative side effects. I wasn't saying that it's necessarily good or right, it's just the way it is.
...doesn't Linux really depend on Windows? I mean, if there had already been a powerful, stable, open, commonly-used Unix-like system, I don't think that Linus would have had much impetus to do what he's done (not to mention the countless others).
I'm aware that this dependency isn't the same kind of dependency that they're talking about, but it is something to keep in mind.
Around when Episode I came out, I read time and again how much of a nightmare it was to deal with the several R2 robot models on the set. For one thing, each one weighed somewhere around a hundred pounds, and more than once a model fell on someone and injured them. Also, they had to have several different models; one for closeups where R2 does something (like extend a claw), one for moving around (and of course, it couldn't go down stairs, or over bumps in the floor).
And I can honestly say that in the dozen-odd times I've watched Episode I, I never once thought, "Hey, there's Kenny Baker." It was always, "Hey, there's R2-D2." I'm sorry Kenny didn't get to work on Episode II (Oh my god! They fired Kenny! You bastards!), but, well... that's progress.
I think a much better way of doing that will be once we have mastered cybernetics, neurology, whatever, and can simply wire our brains to eliminate specific sounds just by thinking about it. Okay, sure, it's a ways off, but still...
I suppose that would lead to the nickname of "Chewy chips", which would then invariably lead to loading dock workers shouting, "Chewy Chips Ahoy!" when there was a shipment coming in.
I know this has been brought up before, but in the face of this ruling, it seems more relevant than it used to.
Why not take the DeCSS source and break it into multiple parts? Let's say halves. The first half we'll term DeCSS-A, and the second half, DeCSS-B. Even better, we could reverse-interleave the bytes, so that every odd byte is in DeCSS-A, and every even byte is in DeCSS-B. We'll also write a tiny little program to combine the two halves should they be brought together.
Then all we have to do is get everyone to only host half of the source. Each person would pick one randomly. I can't imagine that software that doesn't compile could be ruled illegal... "You can't link to that!" "Oh, you mean this random string of data that does nothing useful?"
In other news, the descendants of the Greek thinker Euclid have filed lawsuits against Nintendo, Apple, Rubik, and anyone else who has ever used a cube shape for any reason.
I'm a web programmer, I don't deal with hardware all that much. 90% of the time that I do, it's my home machine which I only use to play games. No need for large arrays there. I probably could use a SCSI drive, but I'd only need one, and I'm not really throughput-limited at this point. (That's right, I code for a job, not for fun. Not anymore, anyway. Like doing it 8 hours a day isn't enough. When I get home, screw programming, I play EverQuest!)
Also, everyone kept suggesting several small SCSI drives that would be way better than one large ATA drive. Fine fine I agree, but doesn't a RAID of 9 gig drives give you a total disk space of... 9 gigs? Yes, five 5-year-old 9 gig SCSI drives will cost less than one 75 gig ATA drive. And you've got one-sixth the capacity... (And don't come back with, "No one needs 75 gigs," because that's not my point, of COURSE a top-of-the-range 75 gig drive is gonna be expensive! Duh!)
I guess my point is, yes, SCSI is faster, and for the same amount of drive space, it's more expensive. Period. Take any SCSI drive and any ATA drive that have the same capacity, and the SCSI drive will be more expensive. (And that's because it has better performance.) That's my only point. I'm not saying more expensive is a bad thing -- if you can afford it, GREAT! I wish I had a couple hundred bucks to buy a nice 20 gig SCSI drive... and a SCSI controller... (do SCSI drives come with an interface cable? I mean, I would imagine they do...).
Honestly, I wish all the SCSI zealots would try to understand the fact that, yes, better performance is great, and yes, SCSI rules, but when all else is equal, SCSI IS STILL MORE EXPENSIVE. This is not a difficult concept!
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I disagree. We don't "have faith" that it works. We KNOW FOR A FACT IT WORKS. How? I may not have any idea how gcc works, but I can actually use it to compile a program. I don't have to have faith that it compiled, because I have hard evidence: the binary!
Any intelligent atheist will *self-describe* as someone who *fails* to believe in god, not someone who *actively disbelieves* in God. I would be curious as to the person who wrote that definition of "atheist", because religion is such a polarized topic that it would be hardly surprising for someone to misdefine it.
As such, "atheist" and "agnostic" are not mutually exclusive. I stand by my definition.
Atheism is the LACK of belief in any deity. It is *NOT* (repeat **NOT**) the belief that the deity does not exist. This is a CRITICAL DIFFERENCE (and the reason why people like yourself often make claims like you just did, which are straw man arguments, and absurd, to boot). I am not claiming that God does not exist. I AM claiming that, since there is no evidence that God exists, it is irrational to think that he does.
Your "Proof" is faulty, since it assumes I claim to have proof of God's non-existence. But that is a non-issue, as I have demonstrated. Atheists (intelligent ones, anyway) do not seek to prove that God does not exist. They merely say, "There is no reason to think he does," and go about their business.
Things that leave evidence of their existence are not "ordinarily undetectable". The fact that they leave evidence by definition means they are detectable. When I say "detectable" I do not mean "directly observable via sight, sound, touch, smell, etc.", I mean "able to be detected." Keep that in mind.
Now, that aside, I do not claim that if I have not personally detected something, it does not exist. Rather, I claim that if I (or someone I trust) has no evidence that something exists, there is no logical reason to assume that it does. This is the critical point. I am not saying, "I can't see God, therefore God does not/cannot exist." What I AM saying is, "I have no evidence that God exists, therefore I assume that God does not exist; however I am open to evidence."
I also NEVER say (or at least, I really try not to), "There is no evidence that X exists, therefore, there will never be evidence that X exists." This is clearly ludicrous.
And I did not say, "easy detection," please do not twist my words. I merely said that there is no reason to think that anything exists aside from what we can detect with our senses (and devices that enhance our senses). Please explain how that became "easy detection". If you can demonstrate the existence of things that we cannot detect, please do so.
Your second paragraph is fairly meaningless. For one, you do not describe or even name what this basis of reality is, so I cannot really say anything particular on that (please, elaborate! I'd love to continue this discussion). Simply because "ancient traditions" speak of something does not necessarily have any bearing on whether it is true. Dreams are (common phrase coming up) a mental manifestation of physical and chemical processes in our brains. They are as "real" as waking life, because they are part of the real, physical world.
"Time", as far as I know, is another physical manifestation of the nature of the universe. Hallucinations are manifestations of peoples' brain chemistry. They are equally "real" in the sense that they both spring from the properties of spacetime.
But keep in mind that my imagination is the manifestation of physical and chemical processes that occur inside my brain. It is, thus, entirely a part of the real, physical, detectable and measurable world. I don't have any reason to think that my imagination comes from any external source, or is influenced by any supernatural or other such "mystical" concepts. If you would like to provide specific examples of how that's incorrect, I am all ears.
Another question: "terribly limiting" in what way? Am I less capable of insight and thoughtfulness because I don't accept the existence of the mystical? Am I less intelligent and creative because of it? How am I limited? Be specific. If you can't be specific to my case (as you don't know me very well, I would imagine :) then be specific about what kinds of ways I might be "terribly limit[ed]" by such a philosophy.
There is no God. There are no gods. Jesus was a man. He lived, he died. End of story. There are no UFOs hovering over earth. The Loch Ness Monster does not exit. Neither does Bigfoot. There are not an abnormal number of vanishing ships/planes in the Bermuda Triangle compared to anywhere else. Crystals do not have unexplained power. There is no such thing as chi.
I could go on. My point is, there is no reason to think that anything exists aside from what we can detect with our senses (and devices that enhance our senses, like radio telescopes).
Mysticism has its place -- in sci-fi. That's it. In the real world, all that has a place is reality.
http://www.planetquake.com/que/haiku /haiku.htm has been around for a couple of years... not updated any more though.
You can buy EverQuest in the store and you get a one-month free trial before you have to pay a subscription to keep playing. I don't think that's illegal. If so, please cite the particular law that makes it so, and describe why Verant's actions fall under it.
The program can also be used in reverse, to combine the two files together. Whaddya think?
There's probably a lot more to be said about this, but I don't think Verant is going to freak out. There's not much they can do, and I don't think it's going to really affect their business anyway.
Well, you know the old saying: "Ich bin Ayn Rand."
Thank you, that IS what I meant. Amazing how often people engage the Slashdot Reflex: "He defended Windows? Quick! Poke holes in his logic!" (although I didn't defend Windows in any way, but whatever...)
I guess what I'm really saying is that Linux was dependent on having a niche to fill (and thankfully that niche has grown tremendously). If there had been no need, there would have been no OS.
They can't destroy R2, he shows up in the last three movies! Duh!
Actually I meant "progress" in an ironic way, indicating that, "Well, that's what happens when technology progresses." More to the point, the progression of technology is going to have both positive and negative side effects. I wasn't saying that it's necessarily good or right, it's just the way it is.
I'm aware that this dependency isn't the same kind of dependency that they're talking about, but it is something to keep in mind.
And I can honestly say that in the dozen-odd times I've watched Episode I, I never once thought, "Hey, there's Kenny Baker." It was always, "Hey, there's R2-D2." I'm sorry Kenny didn't get to work on Episode II (Oh my god! They fired Kenny! You bastards!), but, well... that's progress.
I think a much better way of doing that will be once we have mastered cybernetics, neurology, whatever, and can simply wire our brains to eliminate specific sounds just by thinking about it. Okay, sure, it's a ways off, but still...
I suppose that would lead to the nickname of "Chewy chips", which would then invariably lead to loading dock workers shouting, "Chewy Chips Ahoy!" when there was a shipment coming in.
Why not take the DeCSS source and break it into multiple parts? Let's say halves. The first half we'll term DeCSS-A, and the second half, DeCSS-B. Even better, we could reverse-interleave the bytes, so that every odd byte is in DeCSS-A, and every even byte is in DeCSS-B. We'll also write a tiny little program to combine the two halves should they be brought together.
Then all we have to do is get everyone to only host half of the source. Each person would pick one randomly. I can't imagine that software that doesn't compile could be ruled illegal... "You can't link to that!" "Oh, you mean this random string of data that does nothing useful?"
I hate to nitpick, but if there's no redundancy, it's more of an AID than a RAID, isn't it? :)
In other news, the descendants of the Greek thinker Euclid have filed lawsuits against Nintendo, Apple, Rubik, and anyone else who has ever used a cube shape for any reason.
Also, everyone kept suggesting several small SCSI drives that would be way better than one large ATA drive. Fine fine I agree, but doesn't a RAID of 9 gig drives give you a total disk space of... 9 gigs? Yes, five 5-year-old 9 gig SCSI drives will cost less than one 75 gig ATA drive. And you've got one-sixth the capacity... (And don't come back with, "No one needs 75 gigs," because that's not my point, of COURSE a top-of-the-range 75 gig drive is gonna be expensive! Duh!)
I guess my point is, yes, SCSI is faster, and for the same amount of drive space, it's more expensive. Period. Take any SCSI drive and any ATA drive that have the same capacity, and the SCSI drive will be more expensive. (And that's because it has better performance.) That's my only point. I'm not saying more expensive is a bad thing -- if you can afford it, GREAT! I wish I had a couple hundred bucks to buy a nice 20 gig SCSI drive... and a SCSI controller... (do SCSI drives come with an interface cable? I mean, I would imagine they do...).
Honestly, I wish all the SCSI zealots would try to understand the fact that, yes, better performance is great, and yes, SCSI rules, but when all else is equal, SCSI IS STILL MORE EXPENSIVE. This is not a difficult concept!