How bad would things have to be on Earth (notwithstanding my neighbors and their damn barking dog) before it would be preferable to live in a pressurized cavern on the moon?
"Yep, Uncle John was in terrible shape, what with his Alzheimer's and epilepsy and what not. But those doctors smeared some of his brain cells on that robot, and now he's just rolling around like crazy!"
'The truth is you can save 3% by keeping tires properly inflated and drilling in the arctic reserve will add 1% to our oil in 20 years'
That's assuming every car in the US is fitted with grossly under/over inflated tires. I would guess most late model cars would realize little or no benefit. This must fall into the 'audacity of hope' category.
As someone who was around in those days (mid 80's) I can say that convincing business management to invest in PC's wasn't easy. IBM PC/XT's were very expensive, and it was yet to be established that you couldn't run a competitive business without one. Clones and DOS put a computer in every office, and ten years later NT killed Novell in the LAN setting and Windows 95 put PC's in lots of houses. Sure, it could have been a lot better.. and Bill would have loved to have sucked a lot more money out of it along the way. But it's difficult to overstate Microsoft's role in how ubiquitous personal computers have become.
There's no reason the power or water company would care if you supplied your neighbors, since you pay based on the amount you use. In that respect, cable tv, phone, internet etc are really delivered in more of a service model. If wi-fi 'meshing' is something customers begin to insist on, maybe the business model will change to accommodate it?
Technically inclined customers can obviously drive this kind of change. I remember when you payed extra for phone service for additional phones (ringer equivalency number lost its meaning when electronic phones came out).. ditto cable tv.
"As it is, I think there is better evidence in the direction of God than there is in the direction of not God."
What is this evidence? What's in your God basket?
It's not that the fullness of the science basket 'disproves' God, more like the emptiness of the God basket means less evidence FOR God.
Look at it this way: if I say there's a pink unicorn in my garage and you go investigate, you would come back and report that you didn't find a trace of a unicorn. I would say you didn't see it because it's invisible, so you haven't disproved anything. You may have peeled a layer off the onion, but there's still a bright pink unicorn at the middle of that sucker.
You see why the 'believe until disproven' policy just leads to pointless arguments? I can back away as fast as you push, and even feel proud of my unwavering faith in the face of your demands for physical evidence (don't you know unicorns are magical?). When you turn your back, I can push a vase off the table and say the unicorn did it. You would say you saw me do it out of the corner of your eye. I would say yes, but the unicorn TOLD me to do it, you onion peeler!
"Of course it doesn't look anything remotely like a bomb to someone with even a day's worth of electronics experience - or at least, not the visible part"
I'm just thinking off the top of my head here.. maybe show police and security people what bombs really look like? Hint: they typically don't need a lot of circuits and wires like in the movies (no counting LED display etc). Usually a mix of 99% high explosives and 1% mechanical components including detonators.
What I meant was, it's cheaper than everyone having a cellphone AND a landline.. I think many, if not most families with older kids are in that situation now (we have a family plan). And my teenagers are 18 and 19, so it's not like I'm screening their calls. Point taken for younger teenagers though.
We cancelled our landline, since we all have cellphones. Now I don't have to answer calls from my teenagers' friends (I got to play receptionist when they misplaced or didn't bother to charge their cellphones), 'non-profit' organizations, wrong numbers etc. Plus we save money.
Unfortunately, uploading your current brain-state to an AI equipped robot will do nothing whatsoever for you personally.. you won't be making the trip to Mars, you'll just be waving goodbye to a robot that knows the punchline to all your jokes.
Besides, if we ever develop a robot that good, it would be a shame to boot it up with the jumbled contents of a particular human brain.
Innocent people get hauled in by police for being in the wrong place at the wrong time now. CCTV could also clear an innocent person by allowing police to see EVERYONE who was near the scene, and not just who a witness happened to see driving by when they glanced out their window.
So you weren't indoctrinated, but you just happened to (in an enlightened and non-sheep-like way) wander back to the same religion as your parents?
Maybe you don't even realize you were indoctrinated. After all, you apparently didn't start to think for yourself until you were 18.
we're not really trying to "prove" whether or not God exists. Just whether or not there are rational reasons to believe so
You're playing with fire here, but you don't seem to realize it. In your haste to show various reasons why even if God Himself came down and gave a tour of Heaven and Hell could still be susceptible to doubt, you opened yourself up to a bigger chasm then you meant to. What you're really talking about here is not proving God doesn't exist (proving non-existence of anything is difficult, by the way) we're talking about pretty fundamental issues of ontology itself
So if someone told you God had given him a personal tour of heaven and hell, what would your initial impression be? 1. Wow, if I doubt what he's saying, I'm flirting with the fundamental issues of ontology itself! All assertions are equally as likely! or 2. This person is probably either lying or suffering from psychosis.
During the middle ages you coudn't seperate church and state and political power as you can today, and so that actions of the Church at that time aren't necessarily applicable to the behavior of religion in general now
That may be true for most western countries.. but even in the west (and particularly in the U.S.) it's a constant struggle to keep government and religion separate.
But again, one religion differs from another as one political theory does from another.
That's because religion is just a superstitious wrapper for politics. Slavery's ok, now it's not. Abortion's ok, then it's not, now it is again. Murder's ok, sometimes, but usually.. not. It's just people trying to find the best way to live together and be happy, or at least avoid misery. Couching these issues in bizarre belief systems just seems inefficient to me.. abortion certainly seems wrong to me, and I'm not religious.
My objective is not so much to convince you that you're wrong as to show you what you're not thinking about.
Well, I think the fact that particular quote has been repeated so often by so many people (who weren't/aren't necessarily Marxists) indicates the sentiment may indeed be commonly accepted wisdom, and your attempt to shrug it off by alluding to the failure of dictatorial communism may have been unfair. Why would most people have to be Marxists for the quote to be reasonable? Maybe like me, they just think it was an astute observation, no matter who said it. As you pointed out, most people probably don't even KNOW who said it.
I'm not a Marxist and I'm not a Mormon/Christian/Muslim/Wiccan.. I think that makes me reasonably unbiased. And hey.. I know no self respecting Mormon would ever try to push his beliefs on anyone else!:)
And why do you think you know anything about my knowledge of the 'teachings' of Joseph Smith? Because I'm not a Mormon? What do you know about him, or his writings, that I don't know?
The belief that humans were created in the image of god, and that the universe was created expressly for humans as a backdrop to our existence, and our spirits will live in paradise forever after we die.. that transcends the selfishness of secular humanism?
That attitude about christian organizations that do bizarre things being 'so-called' christian is getting old too.
Since you're apparently someone who DOES take the writings of Joseph Smith as pearls of unquestionable wisdom, that doesn't exactly impugn the legacy of Marx.
Slashdot Mirror
3D will certainly allow the market to feel as though they're being penetrated.
How bad would things have to be on Earth (notwithstanding my neighbors and their damn barking dog) before it would be preferable to live in a pressurized cavern on the moon?
"Yep, Uncle John was in terrible shape, what with his Alzheimer's and epilepsy and what not. But those doctors smeared some of his brain cells on that robot, and now he's just rolling around like crazy!"
He wouldn't be throwing $1000 away. He's just giving it to somebody else. Maybe useless app developer guy would give it to the blind Africans.
'The truth is you can save 3% by keeping tires properly inflated and drilling in the arctic reserve will add 1% to our oil in 20 years'
That's assuming every car in the US is fitted with grossly under/over inflated tires. I would guess most late model cars would realize little or no benefit. This must fall into the 'audacity of hope' category.
As someone who was around in those days (mid 80's) I can say that convincing business management to invest in PC's wasn't easy. IBM PC/XT's were very expensive, and it was yet to be established that you couldn't run a competitive business without one. Clones and DOS put a computer in every office, and ten years later NT killed Novell in the LAN setting and Windows 95 put PC's in lots of houses. Sure, it could have been a lot better.. and Bill would have loved to have sucked a lot more money out of it along the way. But it's difficult to overstate Microsoft's role in how ubiquitous personal computers have become.
There's no reason the power or water company would care if you supplied your neighbors, since you pay based on the amount you use. In that respect, cable tv, phone, internet etc are really delivered in more of a service model. If wi-fi 'meshing' is something customers begin to insist on, maybe the business model will change to accommodate it? Technically inclined customers can obviously drive this kind of change. I remember when you payed extra for phone service for additional phones (ringer equivalency number lost its meaning when electronic phones came out).. ditto cable tv.
Your husband is a female computer programmer? And he has a girlfriend? I admire your honesty, ma'am. -golf clap-
Yes, I was kidding, but thanks for the reply. Very interesting!
I certainly hope farming isn't an integral part of the moonbase plan.
I'm afraid you are.
"As it is, I think there is better evidence in the direction of God than there is in the direction of not God."
What is this evidence? What's in your God basket?
It's not that the fullness of the science basket 'disproves' God, more like the emptiness of the God basket means less evidence FOR God.
Look at it this way: if I say there's a pink unicorn in my garage and you go investigate, you would come back and report that you didn't find a trace of a unicorn. I would say you didn't see it because it's invisible, so you haven't disproved anything. You may have peeled a layer off the onion, but there's still a bright pink unicorn at the middle of that sucker.
You see why the 'believe until disproven' policy just leads to pointless arguments? I can back away as fast as you push, and even feel proud of my unwavering faith in the face of your demands for physical evidence (don't you know unicorns are magical?). When you turn your back, I can push a vase off the table and say the unicorn did it. You would say you saw me do it out of the corner of your eye. I would say yes, but the unicorn TOLD me to do it, you onion peeler!
FTA: 'We think we can do whole missions for less than $10 million...'
'less than $10 million' is NASA-Speak for 'at least $350 million'
Good enough for American Idol, good enough for democracy. What could go wrong?
"Of course it doesn't look anything remotely like a bomb to someone with even a day's worth of electronics experience - or at least, not the visible part" I'm just thinking off the top of my head here.. maybe show police and security people what bombs really look like? Hint: they typically don't need a lot of circuits and wires like in the movies (no counting LED display etc). Usually a mix of 99% high explosives and 1% mechanical components including detonators.
What I meant was, it's cheaper than everyone having a cellphone AND a landline.. I think many, if not most families with older kids are in that situation now (we have a family plan). And my teenagers are 18 and 19, so it's not like I'm screening their calls. Point taken for younger teenagers though.
We cancelled our landline, since we all have cellphones. Now I don't have to answer calls from my teenagers' friends (I got to play receptionist when they misplaced or didn't bother to charge their cellphones), 'non-profit' organizations, wrong numbers etc. Plus we save money.
Cloning's better. If you just bred them, you'd lose all the training. Duh.
Unfortunately, uploading your current brain-state to an AI equipped robot will do nothing whatsoever for you personally.. you won't be making the trip to Mars, you'll just be waving goodbye to a robot that knows the punchline to all your jokes. Besides, if we ever develop a robot that good, it would be a shame to boot it up with the jumbled contents of a particular human brain.
Innocent people get hauled in by police for being in the wrong place at the wrong time now. CCTV could also clear an innocent person by allowing police to see EVERYONE who was near the scene, and not just who a witness happened to see driving by when they glanced out their window.
So you weren't indoctrinated, but you just happened to (in an enlightened and non-sheep-like way) wander back to the same religion as your parents? Maybe you don't even realize you were indoctrinated. After all, you apparently didn't start to think for yourself until you were 18.
You're playing with fire here, but you don't seem to realize it. In your haste to show various reasons why even if God Himself came down and gave a tour of Heaven and Hell could still be susceptible to doubt, you opened yourself up to a bigger chasm then you meant to. What you're really talking about here is not proving God doesn't exist (proving non-existence of anything is difficult, by the way) we're talking about pretty fundamental issues of ontology itself
So if someone told you God had given him a personal tour of heaven and hell, what would your initial impression be? 1. Wow, if I doubt what he's saying, I'm flirting with the fundamental issues of ontology itself! All assertions are equally as likely! or 2. This person is probably either lying or suffering from psychosis.
During the middle ages you coudn't seperate church and state and political power as you can today, and so that actions of the Church at that time aren't necessarily applicable to the behavior of religion in general now
That may be true for most western countries.. but even in the west (and particularly in the U.S.) it's a constant struggle to keep government and religion separate.
But again, one religion differs from another as one political theory does from another.
That's because religion is just a superstitious wrapper for politics. Slavery's ok, now it's not. Abortion's ok, then it's not, now it is again. Murder's ok, sometimes, but usually.. not. It's just people trying to find the best way to live together and be happy, or at least avoid misery. Couching these issues in bizarre belief systems just seems inefficient to me.. abortion certainly seems wrong to me, and I'm not religious.
My objective is not so much to convince you that you're wrong as to show you what you're not thinking about.
That's just condescending.
Well, I think the fact that particular quote has been repeated so often by so many people (who weren't/aren't necessarily Marxists) indicates the sentiment may indeed be commonly accepted wisdom, and your attempt to shrug it off by alluding to the failure of dictatorial communism may have been unfair. Why would most people have to be Marxists for the quote to be reasonable? Maybe like me, they just think it was an astute observation, no matter who said it. As you pointed out, most people probably don't even KNOW who said it. I'm not a Marxist and I'm not a Mormon/Christian/Muslim/Wiccan.. I think that makes me reasonably unbiased. And hey.. I know no self respecting Mormon would ever try to push his beliefs on anyone else! :)
And why do you think you know anything about my knowledge of the 'teachings' of Joseph Smith? Because I'm not a Mormon? What do you know about him, or his writings, that I don't know?
The belief that humans were created in the image of god, and that the universe was created expressly for humans as a backdrop to our existence, and our spirits will live in paradise forever after we die.. that transcends the selfishness of secular humanism? That attitude about christian organizations that do bizarre things being 'so-called' christian is getting old too.
Since you're apparently someone who DOES take the writings of Joseph Smith as pearls of unquestionable wisdom, that doesn't exactly impugn the legacy of Marx.