I never said it wasn't. It's also factually correct. But your original statement that I responded is still incorrect, ie. he doesn't insult everyone who believes in any possible supernatural entity.
also, adding a layer of abstraction..."he's not insulting all believers, just any believer that claims to be sane and not delusional" is bullshit....everyone sees throught it
That's not the argument I made. Stop attacking a strawman.
Any and every person on the planet holds one or more beliefs or opinions you will disagree with. Singling out religion as one harmful dark and sinister belief is absolutely baseless.
Other beliefs and opinions often have at least some rational basis and are subject to debate, religion does not. Furthermore, religion is directly responsible for much death and suffering throughout history, even into the present day. Other beliefs and opinions have nowhere near that death toll. So no, focusing on religion is not absolutely baseless. At all.
It's particularly hard to understand this view today, when religious views are hardly ever deciding factors in legislation.
Whether it's the deciding factor in your country is irrelevant. Religion drives a great many political ideologies which still cause harm to this day, including abortion and LGBT oppression. Regardless of whether votes ultimately fall along religious lines, we wouldn't even be wasting time on these issues if it weren't for religion.
Where is the great harm that all these damn religious politicians are causing?
Wow, seriously, open your eyes. Even if you're British or Canadian where the religious right isn't nearly as rabid as they are in the U.S., they still influence legislation to the nation's detriment.
He insults everyone who believes in any possible supernatural entity
That's incorrect. Dawkins has acknowledged many times that deities could exist, but we have no reason to believe in them (empirical or a priori). Any such insults are directed at the arguments of people who profess to have such a legitimate reason to believe in a particular deity. And he's right to. Such arguments are invariably foolish at best.
You may not support criticizing others for unjustifiable beliefs, but consider that the religious people who represent you in government essentially believe in unicorns and faeries. It's more than a little troubling that the people with so much power have such flawed reasoning.
I don't know I am right, so how can I tell someone else with certainty they are wrong?
You can't. But you can say with certainty that their beliefs are completely unjustifiable, and they have no legitimate, rational reason to believe them. And that's what atheism is. You have quite a distorted view of what atheist proponents like Dawkins actually do and say.
They never say that "the Christian god certainly does not exist", they only say, "the Christian god ALMOST certainly does not exist". In other words, the probability that such a deity exists is negligable for many, many reasons.
[...] even though [the NSA] been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions,' says Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general
Are the intelligence missions the public approved of the ones they had no knowledge of? Irrefutable logic, that. Clearly if no one vocally objects, they must tacitly approve.
Your neighbor earns a hundred times more than you. This creates a gap between him and you, therefore bad for society.
Except your neighbour now can afford to move to a neighbourhood with people of comparable income, and now your neighbourhood is affordable to people of your income or lower. Perhaps you haven't heard of this ghetto problem?
It's funny that the government shouldn't pick winners and losers in energy markets, and yet Conservatives are so willing to spend trillions invading and defending foreign countries under the guise of "protecting national interests". Shouldn't that be protecting fossil fuel interests? If fossil fuels are so volatile, why are Conservatives willing to use military force to stabilize those sources instead of letting them compete fairly against less volatile energy sources?
If renewables had gotten as much direct and indirect funding as fossil fuels got way back when this military interventionist agendas started decades ago, renewables would already be cost competitive, and fossil fuels prices would have stabilized due to economic competition instead of necessitating military intervention. We'd probably be much better off in terms of emissions too. Nothing good comes from proactive military intervention in the long-term.
What you can scalably do on a weekend depends entirely on the framework on which you build. If your framework only exposes primitives that can scale across clusters, then you'll get a lot more done more quickly than if you're starting with a PHP page.
Oh really? So, the SEC will fine me for not being invested in a minimum government approved set of funds, that I may or may not need?
The difference is that you may not need funds, but you WILL need healthcare. You will, you just never know when. It's inevitable, unless you're somehow immortal.
Except the whole premise is ridiculous, the monsters don't die from bullets and grenades and missiles and bombs (well except one, but spoiler) but they die from getting punched to death by a giant robot.
I remember thinking this too at the time, and your comment made me laugh. Then I realized that with America's poor science literacy, most people probably wouldn't even get why the premise is ridiculous. Then I was sad.
That only those who serve in the military and commit violence in the name of their country should truly be considered "citizens" of the country.
Except "serving" consisted of civil service of all different types, not just military service. Heinlein made the infantry the heroes of his book because they have the worst jobs in civil service, not because he thought they were the most glorious.
I'm skeptical that you even read the book at this point.
The take away is that you can't code morality using a few simple rules.
No, the take away is that precision matters, as does understanding the limits of prediction. The rules are all fine, but various twisted interpretations can be made if we're overly loose with the concepts, or if we stick to only naive predictions based on the laws.
The US government isn't pissed about Snowden because "the entire US population" learned about their foreign eavesdropping operations, but because foreign intelligence agencies did.
Actually, I think the far more interesting question is "How the hell can someone think a test valid that he himself believes would yield a positive on a damned iPhone?"
How do you know your brain power is really that much greater than an iPhone's?
Due to the Bekenstein bound and other constraints, our brains aren't even Turing complete. At best, we're finite state automotons (with a large set of states). Also, your characterization of free will is incorrect:
The basic question is whether we are able to make decisions for ourselves or whether the outcomes are predetermined and the notion of choice is merely an illusion.
The free will debate in philosophy is about defining free will. You can't just assume the above definition of free will = non-determinism, because then you've already set the premises framing the debate, and so we already know with reasonable certainty that we don't have this sort of free will.
Compatibilism is a definition of free will which is compatible with determinism, and with this paper. For a more accessible reference, it's also the notion of free will you'll find in the Matrix sequels, ie. programs and people like Neo can see into the future, but don't necessarily understand what they see until they've gathered enough context to understand why their future selves make the decisions they do.
Before you can make that determination, you need a formal test for self-awareness. Do you have one? This paper is an attempt to provide exactly what you're suggesting.
Disabling wifi doesn't remove the danger. Directed energy weapons, like RF guns, can still target and disrupt the device in various ways since it contains electronics.
Where did I claim it was? And yet, the general welfare clause is pretty solidly within Congress's mandate on taxation and spending, and the Farm Bill falls within that mandate.
Agricultural subsidies are needed to incentivise food overproduction as risk compensation for possible disasters in other parts of the country. The Farm Bill also funds the food stamp programs providing food for people who can't even afford to feed themselves. How does both of those not fall under "general welfare"?
Anything can be 'Turing-complete' or w/e term you use
Anything cannot be Turing complete. There are whole classes of useful languages that aren't Turing complete, like regular expressions, cellular automota, and total programming languages. Turing complete is a useful distinction because it tells you whether you can check various incompleteness properties of programs written in your language, like checking whether your program terminates.
And Turing machines aren't the only way this has been approached. Church's lambda calculus is even more widely used in computation literature. Combinator calculi are also sometimes used. But there is a formal equivalence between them all, so the choice of one immediately implies results for the others.
Turing completeness is not going away, and it's not harmful to CS in any way.
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They were abandoned because they didn't produce weapons-grade output, which was a priority at the time, not due to any real technical failures.
I never said it wasn't. It's also factually correct. But your original statement that I responded is still incorrect, ie. he doesn't insult everyone who believes in any possible supernatural entity.
That's not the argument I made. Stop attacking a strawman.
Other beliefs and opinions often have at least some rational basis and are subject to debate, religion does not. Furthermore, religion is directly responsible for much death and suffering throughout history, even into the present day. Other beliefs and opinions have nowhere near that death toll. So no, focusing on religion is not absolutely baseless. At all.
Whether it's the deciding factor in your country is irrelevant. Religion drives a great many political ideologies which still cause harm to this day, including abortion and LGBT oppression. Regardless of whether votes ultimately fall along religious lines, we wouldn't even be wasting time on these issues if it weren't for religion.
Wow, seriously, open your eyes. Even if you're British or Canadian where the religious right isn't nearly as rabid as they are in the U.S., they still influence legislation to the nation's detriment.
That's incorrect. Dawkins has acknowledged many times that deities could exist, but we have no reason to believe in them (empirical or a priori). Any such insults are directed at the arguments of people who profess to have such a legitimate reason to believe in a particular deity. And he's right to. Such arguments are invariably foolish at best.
You may not support criticizing others for unjustifiable beliefs, but consider that the religious people who represent you in government essentially believe in unicorns and faeries. It's more than a little troubling that the people with so much power have such flawed reasoning.
You can't. But you can say with certainty that their beliefs are completely unjustifiable, and they have no legitimate, rational reason to believe them. And that's what atheism is. You have quite a distorted view of what atheist proponents like Dawkins actually do and say.
They never say that "the Christian god certainly does not exist", they only say, "the Christian god ALMOST certainly does not exist". In other words, the probability that such a deity exists is negligable for many, many reasons.
Are the intelligence missions the public approved of the ones they had no knowledge of? Irrefutable logic, that. Clearly if no one vocally objects, they must tacitly approve.
Except your neighbour now can afford to move to a neighbourhood with people of comparable income, and now your neighbourhood is affordable to people of your income or lower. Perhaps you haven't heard of this ghetto problem?
It's funny that the government shouldn't pick winners and losers in energy markets, and yet Conservatives are so willing to spend trillions invading and defending foreign countries under the guise of "protecting national interests". Shouldn't that be protecting fossil fuel interests? If fossil fuels are so volatile, why are Conservatives willing to use military force to stabilize those sources instead of letting them compete fairly against less volatile energy sources?
If renewables had gotten as much direct and indirect funding as fossil fuels got way back when this military interventionist agendas started decades ago, renewables would already be cost competitive, and fossil fuels prices would have stabilized due to economic competition instead of necessitating military intervention. We'd probably be much better off in terms of emissions too. Nothing good comes from proactive military intervention in the long-term.
There are plenty of these around. F# has one. Check out their papers on dimension checking.
What you can scalably do on a weekend depends entirely on the framework on which you build. If your framework only exposes primitives that can scale across clusters, then you'll get a lot more done more quickly than if you're starting with a PHP page.
The government isn't providing healthcare, the government created a regulated market for healthcare, just like it regulates the food market.
The difference is that you may not need funds, but you WILL need healthcare. You will, you just never know when. It's inevitable, unless you're somehow immortal.
I remember thinking this too at the time, and your comment made me laugh. Then I realized that with America's poor science literacy, most people probably wouldn't even get why the premise is ridiculous. Then I was sad.
Except "serving" consisted of civil service of all different types, not just military service. Heinlein made the infantry the heroes of his book because they have the worst jobs in civil service, not because he thought they were the most glorious.
I'm skeptical that you even read the book at this point.
No, the take away is that precision matters, as does understanding the limits of prediction. The rules are all fine, but various twisted interpretations can be made if we're overly loose with the concepts, or if we stick to only naive predictions based on the laws.
Ha, keep telling yourself that. They all knew.
Google bought Motorola Mobility that has patents on plenty of communication related "innovations". Sony, Apple and RIM should watch out.
How do you know your brain power is really that much greater than an iPhone's?
Due to the Bekenstein bound and other constraints, our brains aren't even Turing complete. At best, we're finite state automotons (with a large set of states). Also, your characterization of free will is incorrect:
The free will debate in philosophy is about defining free will. You can't just assume the above definition of free will = non-determinism, because then you've already set the premises framing the debate, and so we already know with reasonable certainty that we don't have this sort of free will.
Compatibilism is a definition of free will which is compatible with determinism, and with this paper. For a more accessible reference, it's also the notion of free will you'll find in the Matrix sequels, ie. programs and people like Neo can see into the future, but don't necessarily understand what they see until they've gathered enough context to understand why their future selves make the decisions they do.
Before you can make that determination, you need a formal test for self-awareness. Do you have one? This paper is an attempt to provide exactly what you're suggesting.
Disabling wifi doesn't remove the danger. Directed energy weapons, like RF guns, can still target and disrupt the device in various ways since it contains electronics.
Are you really so ignorant of your own history? Assuming you're North American of course.
Where did I claim it was? And yet, the general welfare clause is pretty solidly within Congress's mandate on taxation and spending, and the Farm Bill falls within that mandate.
Agricultural subsidies are needed to incentivise food overproduction as risk compensation for possible disasters in other parts of the country. The Farm Bill also funds the food stamp programs providing food for people who can't even afford to feed themselves. How does both of those not fall under "general welfare"?
Anything cannot be Turing complete. There are whole classes of useful languages that aren't Turing complete, like regular expressions, cellular automota, and total programming languages. Turing complete is a useful distinction because it tells you whether you can check various incompleteness properties of programs written in your language, like checking whether your program terminates.
And Turing machines aren't the only way this has been approached. Church's lambda calculus is even more widely used in computation literature. Combinator calculi are also sometimes used. But there is a formal equivalence between them all, so the choice of one immediately implies results for the others.
Turing completeness is not going away, and it's not harmful to CS in any way.