Little guy? US Population ~300million - EU Population ~500 million. Unless you're suggesting that the average US citizen weighs twice as much as the average EU citizen, then in terms of aggregate body mass we're the little guy.;)
I think the point was that he was lampooning what he perceives as "i'm more old-skool that you" dick swinging in the original posters' post. To do this he mentioned things that happened one technology iteration previous to GeoCities.
How on earth does linus torvalds expect to make a living if he just lets everyone copy his work for free? Or any of these free software loonies - don't they realise the ONLY WAY to monetise intellectual works is to charge money for copies?
Forcing everyone to pretend that information can be contained like a physical object by enacting laws to that effect has simply created an artificial business model that is no longer tenable in the face of the global explosion of the information age. If copyright were abolished people would find a way to get paid to generate intellectual works.
Of course, it isn't going to be abolished, but as the information age moves on, more and more people will figure out how to get paid for what they do, and paid better that if they signed a contract with a big content company like Sony, and will voluntarily opt out of the copyright framework by way of creative commons/open software etc, until copyright's monopolistic nature renders it unable to compete, and ultimately irrelevant.
Of course the people like pirate bay who actively transgress the current system are going to face consequences in the meantime.
Hopefully a limited budget forces the BBC to compete on substance rather than style. Two things though, Skins is a channel 4 program and it's utter drivel (although i suppose it breaks new ground in the race to the bottom of squalid mindless lowest common denominator titillation) and I don't really know why you'd regard Ab-Fab as cutting edge. It was generally funny but I didn't remember anything revolutionary about it at the time.
You've invented a hypothetical scenario and are demanding the name of an individual or company that exists only in your hypothetical scenario, but that simultaneously is a real entity. Your key argument is unintelligible. The only answer to your question is "the copyright holder". To arbitrarily give that holder a name adds nothing to the argument. How about Derek Smith? Or perhaps Derek Smith isn't the current copyright holder in your own personal imagined alternative history of the world that you're asking everyone to guess about.
The "skeptics' annotated bible" puts forward some very strained and weak arguments. Speaking as a commited skeptic and someone who finds the bible deeply unconvincing, I have to say I wish there was a far better equivalent to this website on the internet. If there are any legitimate examples on there they're near impossible to find amongst the haystack of straw men.
The thing about the bible and those passages you linked to in particular is that the whole thing has been translated from another language and the resulting jumbled and ambiguous grammar means it's possible to read it a number of different ways. All those passages do is list a bunch of events. There's nothing explicit in them the indicates what order the events happened in. The fact that it says god brought the animals to adam doesn't require that adam was made before the animals. It just means they didn't come into contact with one another until both existed (which is self evident).
As for the claim that gen1:27 states that god made adam and eve simultaneously, it says nothing of the sort. It just says that he made both of them. It's not even implicit.
These are both weak, grasping examples on the part of the skeptics' annotated bible that do nothing but undermine the credibility of the person arguing them.
There are many glaring inconsistencies in the bible, but few of them are straight forward enough to be a simple case of quoting two short pieces of text that directly contradict one another. That's not to say there are none. For instance Proverbs 15:3 and Hosea 8:4, where it is declared that god is omniscient, but god admits that something occured of which he was unaware.
Give your reasoning - for the 1 or 2 people who reply missing the point or trolling, there are hundreds more that just read it, some of whom would agree with you. You're far better off saying what you think on your own terms than trying to find a way to say it in such as way that no one reading will attack you for it.
For all their obnoxiousness, the discussions on slashdot are a very good way to test the rigorousness of a belief or argument by exposing it to both reasoned debate and open hostility.
If your position is sound, a calm and reasoned exposition stands on its own merits, even if the person you're discussing it just responds by sneering.
A scientist may be biased, but the process of science plays the biases of different scientists off against one another to produce an objective consensus, rendering the scientific process a "creative robot".
The entire purpose of the scientific method is to mitigate the effects of human bias. The degree to which it succeeds increases with the number of people studying a subject.
It's wholly probable that if only 1 group has conducted a small number of studies that some bias may creep in. But as more and more independent refutations or confirmations accumulate, the chance of human bias skewing the consensus falls off rapidly.
Ideologues and pseudo-scientists with agendas and scientifically indefensible axes to grind regularly ignore this distinction in order to assert that all scientists (being human) have biases, therefore the scientific consensus science must be biased. This is misleading, especially when you use that line of reasoning to try and cast doubt on absurdly well supported consensuses such as (for a very common example) the scientific fact of common descent.
Of course you could argue that given that our knowledge is sketchy we should err on the side of caution and assume crabs are concious, but if you take that to it's conclusion we have to assume anything with a brain might be concious, in which case pesticides are genocidal. Also another point to consider is that Starfish have no brain, yet display complex predatory behaviour.
It all boils down to a sketchy "given what we know about brains, crabs are unlikely to be concious" and it's a personal value judgement on whether or not you are comfortable with that as enough to disregard the issue.
It's one thing to (fail to) erase a monarch from the history books, quite another to pretend that every last person living in your country was killed by a global flood, and then you (some total strangers) came in later and reconstructed a replica of that civilisation and carried on as if nothing had happened.
your scenario vs the parent posters scenario hinge on how many escape. if it isnt enough to sustain a viable population then the zebras die out, followed by presumably the lions. If there are enough, equilibrium is restored. It's all about how far out of equilibrium that you throw the system.
Only if there is more that you want your system to do. If you're using all the RAM on your system and it is accomplishing everything you want it to, then you have exactly the right amount of RAM. Anything more is a waste of money.
it's not possible to "truly know" anything at all. being present during an event may be advantageous but it certainly doesn't confer any absolute metaphysical certainty about what you perceived.
using the scientific method to physically examine evidence of past phenomena is completely different to reading books about them. You are still "doing", and are thus able to uncover previously unrecorded knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
because it's likely to attract flames?
Little guy? US Population ~300million - EU Population ~500 million. Unless you're suggesting that the average US citizen weighs twice as much as the average EU citizen, then in terms of aggregate body mass we're the little guy. ;)
RISCOS was doing realtime antialiased desktop fonts on an 8MHz ARM chip in 1988.
I think the point was that he was lampooning what he perceives as "i'm more old-skool that you" dick swinging in the original posters' post. To do this he mentioned things that happened one technology iteration previous to GeoCities.
perhaps they weren't mainstream in america.
what a magnificently witless way to top off a fairly droll thread.
How on earth does linus torvalds expect to make a living if he just lets everyone copy his work for free? Or any of these free software loonies - don't they realise the ONLY WAY to monetise intellectual works is to charge money for copies?
Forcing everyone to pretend that information can be contained like a physical object by enacting laws to that effect has simply created an artificial business model that is no longer tenable in the face of the global explosion of the information age. If copyright were abolished people would find a way to get paid to generate intellectual works.
Of course, it isn't going to be abolished, but as the information age moves on, more and more people will figure out how to get paid for what they do, and paid better that if they signed a contract with a big content company like Sony, and will voluntarily opt out of the copyright framework by way of creative commons/open software etc, until copyright's monopolistic nature renders it unable to compete, and ultimately irrelevant.
Of course the people like pirate bay who actively transgress the current system are going to face consequences in the meantime.
life imitating art
Hopefully a limited budget forces the BBC to compete on substance rather than style. Two things though, Skins is a channel 4 program and it's utter drivel (although i suppose it breaks new ground in the race to the bottom of squalid mindless lowest common denominator titillation) and I don't really know why you'd regard Ab-Fab as cutting edge. It was generally funny but I didn't remember anything revolutionary about it at the time.
limited in what regard?
i think he meant an external interface, not an internal bus.
You've invented a hypothetical scenario and are demanding the name of an individual or company that exists only in your hypothetical scenario, but that simultaneously is a real entity. Your key argument is unintelligible. The only answer to your question is "the copyright holder". To arbitrarily give that holder a name adds nothing to the argument. How about Derek Smith? Or perhaps Derek Smith isn't the current copyright holder in your own personal imagined alternative history of the world that you're asking everyone to guess about.
NASA didn't invent Tang. They just drank it. In fact the space program didn't invent any of the things people think it did. There is however a long list of things it has has done for us.
i had to install a JRE to record/run macros in Calc.
You aren't listening. He said "rigorous scientific debate" - you are talking about rudimentary science education. They are not the same thing.
In which case, you no longer have enough RAM and should buy some more. Until that time, you have enough RAM.
The "skeptics' annotated bible" puts forward some very strained and weak arguments. Speaking as a commited skeptic and someone who finds the bible deeply unconvincing, I have to say I wish there was a far better equivalent to this website on the internet. If there are any legitimate examples on there they're near impossible to find amongst the haystack of straw men.
The thing about the bible and those passages you linked to in particular is that the whole thing has been translated from another language and the resulting jumbled and ambiguous grammar means it's possible to read it a number of different ways. All those passages do is list a bunch of events. There's nothing explicit in them the indicates what order the events happened in. The fact that it says god brought the animals to adam doesn't require that adam was made before the animals. It just means they didn't come into contact with one another until both existed (which is self evident).
As for the claim that gen1:27 states that god made adam and eve simultaneously, it says nothing of the sort. It just says that he made both of them. It's not even implicit.
These are both weak, grasping examples on the part of the skeptics' annotated bible that do nothing but undermine the credibility of the person arguing them.
There are many glaring inconsistencies in the bible, but few of them are straight forward enough to be a simple case of quoting two short pieces of text that directly contradict one another. That's not to say there are none. For instance Proverbs 15:3 and Hosea 8:4, where it is declared that god is omniscient, but god admits that something occured of which he was unaware.
Give your reasoning - for the 1 or 2 people who reply missing the point or trolling, there are hundreds more that just read it, some of whom would agree with you. You're far better off saying what you think on your own terms than trying to find a way to say it in such as way that no one reading will attack you for it.
For all their obnoxiousness, the discussions on slashdot are a very good way to test the rigorousness of a belief or argument by exposing it to both reasoned debate and open hostility.
If your position is sound, a calm and reasoned exposition stands on its own merits, even if the person you're discussing it just responds by sneering.
fair enough - i didn't realise the distinction, but hopefully what i meant was apparent.
A scientist may be biased, but the process of science plays the biases of different scientists off against one another to produce an objective consensus, rendering the scientific process a "creative robot".
The entire purpose of the scientific method is to mitigate the effects of human bias. The degree to which it succeeds increases with the number of people studying a subject.
It's wholly probable that if only 1 group has conducted a small number of studies that some bias may creep in. But as more and more independent refutations or confirmations accumulate, the chance of human bias skewing the consensus falls off rapidly.
Ideologues and pseudo-scientists with agendas and scientifically indefensible axes to grind regularly ignore this distinction in order to assert that all scientists (being human) have biases, therefore the scientific consensus science must be biased. This is misleading, especially when you use that line of reasoning to try and cast doubt on absurdly well supported consensuses such as (for a very common example) the scientific fact of common descent.
We haven't figured that out with any degree of accuracy yet. But current evidence indicates that conciousness is a function of the cerebral cortex, specifically the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes. Crabs don't possess any of these brain components, so it would be reasonable to expect a crab to be unlikely to possess conciousness. Of course there is still a vast amount of knowledge to be uncovered in this area.
Of course you could argue that given that our knowledge is sketchy we should err on the side of caution and assume crabs are concious, but if you take that to it's conclusion we have to assume anything with a brain might be concious, in which case pesticides are genocidal. Also another point to consider is that Starfish have no brain, yet display complex predatory behaviour.
It all boils down to a sketchy "given what we know about brains, crabs are unlikely to be concious" and it's a personal value judgement on whether or not you are comfortable with that as enough to disregard the issue.
It's one thing to (fail to) erase a monarch from the history books, quite another to pretend that every last person living in your country was killed by a global flood, and then you (some total strangers) came in later and reconstructed a replica of that civilisation and carried on as if nothing had happened.
your scenario vs the parent posters scenario hinge on how many escape. if it isnt enough to sustain a viable population then the zebras die out, followed by presumably the lions. If there are enough, equilibrium is restored. It's all about how far out of equilibrium that you throw the system.
Only if there is more that you want your system to do. If you're using all the RAM on your system and it is accomplishing everything you want it to, then you have exactly the right amount of RAM. Anything more is a waste of money.
it's not possible to "truly know" anything at all. being present during an event may be advantageous but it certainly doesn't confer any absolute metaphysical certainty about what you perceived.
using the scientific method to physically examine evidence of past phenomena is completely different to reading books about them. You are still "doing", and are thus able to uncover previously unrecorded knowledge.