it'd be interesting to see what would happen if the only reason people produced reproducible artistic works was for the love of it or the urge to express oneself, and if the only reason people produced reproducible reference texts was because they needed to use them themselves.
of course this situation would be augmented by the odd occasion when people would pay someone to produce one of these works because they wanted one for themselves.
i've just re-read that and realised that is exactly how free software works, so i suppose such a system would work just as well as free software has. which is very very well indeed.
i remember hearing an astronomycast episode where pamela gay said that jupiter redirects as many comets and asteroids towards us as it deflects, so that idea that jupiter protects us is not true.
ever? given how much technology has progressed in the last 500 years, you dont think another milion years would produce a cure for the common cold? I would guess we wouldnt even need another 500.
Unfortunately for her my mum is a jehovah's witness; it's pretty much just them and maybe one other sect (cant remember who) that reject evolution in the UK (although the pope speaks out of both sides of his mouth on the issue so i guess you could count catholics). The Jehovah's witnesses have their own anti-evolution tome that contains the usual canards, and heavily relies on the most strident quote mining to support it's case. It hasn't had any significant revision since it was written in 1980 so as you might guess, lots of it is completely out of date.
Having spent a few years in "the truth" as a kid i would say they are self deluded rather than mendacious, but checking some of the citations for quotes in the "Life, How Did It Get Here: Evolution or Creation?", really stretches the benefit of the doubt. They selectively quote portions from sentences so that it inverts the meaning. Quite a few times. It's hard to picture how someone could do this innocently but then most creationist quotes are just cribbed from other creationists, so they very well may have innocently repeated most of the falsehoods and misrepresentations in their book. If they knew they were lying, why would they provide citations? Is the way I look at it.
according to TFA raster processes are a rough approximation of ray tracing, and an ultimately inefficient and non scalable one at that. once you get to certain number of polys ray tracing becomes better than raster processes in every regard (faster, more efficient, more detail), and can even be merged with the collision detection process for further efficiency and pinpoint detection. The point of TFA is that the advent of multicore CPUs will make it more efficient and less expensive to raytrace than to rasterize, eliminating the need for expensive power hungry video cards.
if this turns out to be the case, this will also be a boon for linux by eliminating the need for complex proprietary video card drivers. The CPU can do all the work. And it introduces an immediate mainstream use for multicore cpus, instead of just video encoding and SETI.
perhaps the dude putting stuff on piratebay is the only thing that will take the power away from the MPAA and change the way everything works. Sometimes you need to tear down what's there to make room for something better. Even if very few of the people doing the tearing down are doing it for altruistic reasons, it still might end up being better for everyone if they carry on.
everyone is arguing over equivocated and ambiguous uses of the word "wrong". The point everyone is making from different directions is that if you use the word "wrong" to mean absolutely false, then relativity can never be proved absolutely false, since it has be proven to be true in lots of circumstances. If however you use the word "wrong" to mean not absolutely true then that is precisely what happened to newtons theory, and would be a perfectly plausible development for relativity.
it doesnt make me proud as i'm not an american, i'm just accepting reality. i never said america brings peace and prosperity to the world, you're falling into typical idealogical binary false dichotomy black and white thought patterns. reality is more complicated than that. as i said, i'd like nothing more than for everyone to just get along, and america is a bully, and they do terrible things to anyone who gets in their way. but if america disarmed, absolutely ANYTHING could happen. The 800lb gorilla of america prevents atrocities like the world wars from occurring right now. not that it is any way ideal, but i prefer the situation we are in now to being drafted for the trenches. it might not suit your taste in fairness, but one giant bully is better than chaos. and yeah yeah yeah i know that leads to fascism blah blah blah, but give us an alternative and i'll gladly support it. i'm sure with time paths to improvement of the situation will become viable but right now america throwing away their power would just destroy the world.
you're conflating is and ought. He is just being pragmatic. You are just burying your head in the sand and hoping for a magical land of pixies where the US can dismantle it's weapons and send the world flowers and everyone will suddenly get along just fine. Who wouldn't want that? I know i would. Trouble is, it ain't gonna happen like that. So in the mean time the least bloody solution is for the americans to keep (albeit hamfistedly) casting a shadow over all the upstart dictatorships. That's the difference between is and ought.
"when confronted with the fact that in order for selection to work people have to die (or at least not reproduce)"
they dont have to die. you placed too much emphasis on death saying they "have too" then relegated the far more crucial element of whether or not an individual reproduces to an afterthought in brackets. my point is, that is backwards.
You also leave unanswered the dual contradiction in belief systems I raised.
becuase i wasnt addressing it. to be honest it was too rambling to follow. but since you've clarified...
What is the motivation of atheists/evolutionists who seem to overwhelmingly support the drain on their resources caused by public charity?
the same motivation as anybody else - human compassion / social pragmatism. i find it bizarre that Christians ascribe their innate psychological characteristics and the realities of social dynamics to a set of confused, self contradictory and ill advised pronouncements from one particular medieval scrapbook of bronze age mythology, when the barest piece of objective logic will tell anyone that the fact of the existence of all the decent, socially cohesive people on the earth that don't subscribe to your particular brand of cosmetically modified Ra worship would suggest that decent selfless qualities seem to be perfectly capable of arising innately from humanity itself, rather than requiring proscription from on high.
Also, many who have mutations that would never have allowed them to survive childhood to reproduce are today doing so, which means that the power of evolution to produce the utility in the environment at large is diminished
you are artificially putting a distinction between an environment shaped by man and an environment not shaped by man. evolution doesn't care about that. you are also asserting your own value judgement of "utility". evolution doesnt care about utility - it doesnt care about anything it is a mindless process. if you have a "bad" mutation that would normally prevent or hamper the reproduction of an individual, but society compensates for this mutation's detrimental effect, it becomes a "neutral" mutation. the more neutral mutations that are possible, the more variation there is in the gene pool and the more chance a beneficial mutation will arise as these neutral mutations are spliced around by sexual reproduction, or mutate again. who's to say that a genetic predisposition to heart disease if allowed to course through the gene pool, would not lay the groundwork for further mutations that create immunity to AIDS?
we are certainly not putting it into service to see that our effects on our evolutionary process yield long term positive results, which ought to be part of the point of good adaptations (which we are led to believe our intellect is).
you are advocating eugenics, which any biologist or historian will tell you is not a sound or moral policy. there is no point trying to direct a process as supremely complex as evolution to fit some short sighted goal of enforcing some arbitrarily "desirable" traits on the population. perhaps in time people will be able to control their own genome and this will present some interesting ethical and practical considerations about where this would lead us but right now it is out of the question
Personally, I look at evolutionary and genetic determinists in the same way as I do religions that endorse some form pre-destination, fate, or inevitability: with a great deal of skepticism.
and what does any of the other stuff you said have to do with genetic determinism? evolution does not equal genetic determinism, and neither does the entirely unrelated philosophical standpoint of atheism.
All you need for selection to work is for people to mate or not mate. Death is a side issue. Everyone could live forever and evolution would still occur, provided new people were still being born.
Evolution only stops if everyone stops having offspring. Hardship and danger aren't some necessary component for evolution to occur. Sure they have an effect on the process, but no more than any of the other factors involved.
just because we have it cushy in terms of mortality doesn't mean we aren't evolving. We are just adapting to maximise our mating potentials in the circumstances presented to us today.
thats a very creative way to avoid admitting you're totally clueless. uh... yeah.. i meant to get everything wrong! hahaha! i sure fooled you! is your face red!
Slashdot Mirror
it'd be interesting to see what would happen if the only reason people produced reproducible artistic works was for the love of it or the urge to express oneself, and if the only reason people produced reproducible reference texts was because they needed to use them themselves. of course this situation would be augmented by the odd occasion when people would pay someone to produce one of these works because they wanted one for themselves. i've just re-read that and realised that is exactly how free software works, so i suppose such a system would work just as well as free software has. which is very very well indeed.
i remember hearing an astronomycast episode where pamela gay said that jupiter redirects as many comets and asteroids towards us as it deflects, so that idea that jupiter protects us is not true.
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2007/03/perpetuating_na.html
ever? given how much technology has progressed in the last 500 years, you dont think another milion years would produce a cure for the common cold? I would guess we wouldnt even need another 500.
Why has no one replicated this?
so are you?
Having spent a few years in "the truth" as a kid i would say they are self deluded rather than mendacious, but checking some of the citations for quotes in the "Life, How Did It Get Here: Evolution or Creation?", really stretches the benefit of the doubt. They selectively quote portions from sentences so that it inverts the meaning. Quite a few times. It's hard to picture how someone could do this innocently but then most creationist quotes are just cribbed from other creationists, so they very well may have innocently repeated most of the falsehoods and misrepresentations in their book. If they knew they were lying, why would they provide citations? Is the way I look at it.
Are you a native american indian then? Cos otherwise europe hasnt "dumped" anything on you, europe dumped you on them.
that's a very very transparent troll. C- for effort though.
if this turns out to be the case, this will also be a boon for linux by eliminating the need for complex proprietary video card drivers. The CPU can do all the work. And it introduces an immediate mainstream use for multicore cpus, instead of just video encoding and SETI.
NewYorkCountryLawyer seems to the be the slashdot lawyer guru for this particular war.
If only they'd built them with 26 layers!
i assumed your sig was ROT13'd till i googled it :)
deep packet inspection puts paid to that game unfortunately.
what the fuck did all that gibberish mean?
perhaps the dude putting stuff on piratebay is the only thing that will take the power away from the MPAA and change the way everything works. Sometimes you need to tear down what's there to make room for something better. Even if very few of the people doing the tearing down are doing it for altruistic reasons, it still might end up being better for everyone if they carry on.
everyone is arguing over equivocated and ambiguous uses of the word "wrong". The point everyone is making from different directions is that if you use the word "wrong" to mean absolutely false, then relativity can never be proved absolutely false, since it has be proven to be true in lots of circumstances. If however you use the word "wrong" to mean not absolutely true then that is precisely what happened to newtons theory, and would be a perfectly plausible development for relativity.
that's the best sig i've ever read
are you saying the whole thing is joke?
It beggars belief that you're bragging about being that much of a cunt.
it doesnt make me proud as i'm not an american, i'm just accepting reality. i never said america brings peace and prosperity to the world, you're falling into typical idealogical binary false dichotomy black and white thought patterns. reality is more complicated than that. as i said, i'd like nothing more than for everyone to just get along, and america is a bully, and they do terrible things to anyone who gets in their way. but if america disarmed, absolutely ANYTHING could happen. The 800lb gorilla of america prevents atrocities like the world wars from occurring right now. not that it is any way ideal, but i prefer the situation we are in now to being drafted for the trenches. it might not suit your taste in fairness, but one giant bully is better than chaos. and yeah yeah yeah i know that leads to fascism blah blah blah, but give us an alternative and i'll gladly support it. i'm sure with time paths to improvement of the situation will become viable but right now america throwing away their power would just destroy the world.
you're conflating is and ought. He is just being pragmatic. You are just burying your head in the sand and hoping for a magical land of pixies where the US can dismantle it's weapons and send the world flowers and everyone will suddenly get along just fine. Who wouldn't want that? I know i would. Trouble is, it ain't gonna happen like that. So in the mean time the least bloody solution is for the americans to keep (albeit hamfistedly) casting a shadow over all the upstart dictatorships. That's the difference between is and ought.
they dont have to die. you placed too much emphasis on death saying they "have too" then relegated the far more crucial element of whether or not an individual reproduces to an afterthought in brackets. my point is, that is backwards.
You also leave unanswered the dual contradiction in belief systems I raised.becuase i wasnt addressing it. to be honest it was too rambling to follow. but since you've clarified...
What is the motivation of atheists/evolutionists who seem to overwhelmingly support the drain on their resources caused by public charity?the same motivation as anybody else - human compassion / social pragmatism. i find it bizarre that Christians ascribe their innate psychological characteristics and the realities of social dynamics to a set of confused, self contradictory and ill advised pronouncements from one particular medieval scrapbook of bronze age mythology, when the barest piece of objective logic will tell anyone that the fact of the existence of all the decent, socially cohesive people on the earth that don't subscribe to your particular brand of cosmetically modified Ra worship would suggest that decent selfless qualities seem to be perfectly capable of arising innately from humanity itself, rather than requiring proscription from on high.
Also, many who have mutations that would never have allowed them to survive childhood to reproduce are today doing so, which means that the power of evolution to produce the utility in the environment at large is diminishedyou are artificially putting a distinction between an environment shaped by man and an environment not shaped by man. evolution doesn't care about that. you are also asserting your own value judgement of "utility". evolution doesnt care about utility - it doesnt care about anything it is a mindless process. if you have a "bad" mutation that would normally prevent or hamper the reproduction of an individual, but society compensates for this mutation's detrimental effect, it becomes a "neutral" mutation. the more neutral mutations that are possible, the more variation there is in the gene pool and the more chance a beneficial mutation will arise as these neutral mutations are spliced around by sexual reproduction, or mutate again. who's to say that a genetic predisposition to heart disease if allowed to course through the gene pool, would not lay the groundwork for further mutations that create immunity to AIDS?
we are certainly not putting it into service to see that our effects on our evolutionary process yield long term positive results, which ought to be part of the point of good adaptations (which we are led to believe our intellect is).you are advocating eugenics, which any biologist or historian will tell you is not a sound or moral policy. there is no point trying to direct a process as supremely complex as evolution to fit some short sighted goal of enforcing some arbitrarily "desirable" traits on the population. perhaps in time people will be able to control their own genome and this will present some interesting ethical and practical considerations about where this would lead us but right now it is out of the question
Personally, I look at evolutionary and genetic determinists in the same way as I do religions that endorse some form pre-destination, fate, or inevitability: with a great deal of skepticism.and what does any of the other stuff you said have to do with genetic determinism? evolution does not equal genetic determinism, and neither does the entirely unrelated philosophical standpoint of atheism.
Evolution only stops if everyone stops having offspring. Hardship and danger aren't some necessary component for evolution to occur. Sure they have an effect on the process, but no more than any of the other factors involved.
just because we have it cushy in terms of mortality doesn't mean we aren't evolving. We are just adapting to maximise our mating potentials in the circumstances presented to us today.
thats a very creative way to avoid admitting you're totally clueless. uh... yeah.. i meant to get everything wrong! hahaha! i sure fooled you! is your face red!