The deep field is a single image, it was not compiled from smaller ones.
The stealth bomber shape of the picture is the actual shape of the CCD that took the photos. That chip was replaced in the last servicing mission, so they'll not be batwing shaped in the future.
Not true. You just need to have at least two of them. When one needs to come down, the other goes up. This is better than satellites because every couple months you can upgrade the router in the sky.
I have to disagree with that. I run VMWare on my computer which has an Nvidia MX400 card. When the thing goes full screen it sometimes crashes X. When it switches screen resolutions, it displays garbage on the screen. After I exit VMware, if I ctl-alt-F1 switch to a console, the screen has garbage on it.
These are the Nvidia drivers that I downloaded from the Nvidia site, and inserted into a plain vanilla kernel.
The thing runs fast, and flawlessly if I'm only working with X. But when VMware goes full screen it's less than satisfactory.
It's obvious to me that lighter elements are fusing into heavy elements at the south pole. The evidence is that what was obviously an S orbital is now a P orbital. Just look at the picture.
Eavesdropping is illegal. I imagine that the judge's reasoning was that upskirting was more like foundationdropping than like eavesdropping, because the eaves are much higher up on a house.
Richard Stallman, director of the Free Software Foundation, wrote a 43 page letter to Lindows telling them why they should NOT call their operating system GNU/Lindows.
This is true. We get a lot of our facts out of a book. But someone somewhere *did* observe and write them down. If you really wanted to, you could verify the facts for yourself.
Just about everyone has to take it on faith (however little)
The definition of faith is almost identical to the definition of irrational. Faith is a belief that has no justification. Irrational means without justification.
Remember the burden of proof. It's not up to you to do the work to prove something. If someone tells you something (including me!) you have every right to come back with another question. You have every right to keep coming back with as many questions as you wish until you are personally satisfied that one or the other person is right.
That means that absolutely *no* faith is involved. When I tell you something, I don't expect you to just eat it up and believe it. If I did, that would be asking you to just have faith. See the difference?
The only difference between science and religion is the number of people who profess to follow their respective precepts.
This is absolutely untrue. If a statement such as 1+1=2 is true, then that statement is true even if *nobody* believed in it. Likewise, if everyone believed that 1+1=3, that would not make it true. Truth is a function independent of how many people believe in it. Science develops truth, and that's why people utilize it. How do we know what truth is? Because we can support our statements with facts and sound reasoning. Skeptics can ask questions, try to poke holes, etc. Nobody is required to believe anything. The person who comes up with an idea has the burden of convincing everyone that it is true. If they can't, then that idea never is developed into a theory.
That being said, let me state that I wholey appreciate the scientific method and the rewards we have gained from using it.
Forgive me, but I'm not sure that you do. The questions you ask reveal a certain naievity about what science is, what faith and reason are, how we know things, and why rationality is important. One can never truly appreciate something unless they truly understand it.
we can attain it either through divine enlightenment
OK, I'll bite. How can we attain truth through divine enlightenment? How do we know that? How can you convince me of that?
indeeed you could- if you knew what outcome you were trying to achieve. if you just set about randomly flipping bits (er, letters) until you ended up with hamlet, you'd find that it would take much longer.
Missing the point. I'm talking about changing letters to match a fitness function. The function that I chose was (text == Hamlet)?fit:notfit
where did that hamlet lenght sequence of random characters come from?
A random number generator, initially.
just making assumptions about your initial state, and moving from there.
I am making no assumptions. The intial state could be ANY state. That's why I specified a random sequence to start with.
cited professor's does not invalidate the point that your start state still sprang into being somehow. and we dont know how.
It also doesn't invalidate the idea that the moon is made of green cheese. So what?
Who are we to judge the correctness of any one belief just because of our contrived scientific process?
Excellent question. Who we are is intelligent beings who can form ideas based on either what we see and can test, or form ideas based on what we make up.
I don't think I would describe the scientific process as contrived. It works, better than anything else we know of. And it doesn't just work a little bit better than the rest, it far outpaces every other way of thinking. Superstitions like horoscopes, dowsing, ESP, and the rest don't even come close to the accomplishments that rational scientific thinking has produced. When you have two competing ideas, how do you distinguish between the two of them? Test them to see if one breaks, determine which one has greater explanatory power. If a person doesn't do that, then there's really no method to choose between ideas. I think that truth is something that is important, and it matters probably more than anything else. Therefore, a powerful method to discriminate between superior and inferior ideas should not be ignored.
So, in the end, the answer is intuitive. Why should we favor ideas that are based in observation and tested over time? Because those ideas work way way better than the rest.
I am, however extremely curious to understand how others view this classic question, "Where did I come from?".
I am presuming that you mean something other than a sperm and an egg...:-)
The honest answer is "I don't know." But we might figure it out eventually.
That's a good question, and the most correct answer that anyone can give is "we don't know". If you study cosmology, then you know that we have a pretty good idea of what our universe looked like from perhaps a second after the big bang until today. But, understanding what the universe looked like in the first moment is harder. We might be able to understand it better if we can understand the physics. So, the correct open-minded position is just to honestly say "I don't know."
Even the religionists answer "God", is at least an answer.
It's a far worse answer than "I don't know". Our ignorance can be backed up with rationality, and it is supported by the full weight of observation. Ironic, huh? We can point out that we don't have the physics, the observations, or any idea at all, and that completely justifies our statement that "We don't know." Life is funny.
Someone who says that "god did it" cannot make a justification for that. There's no support or reason for their hypothesis that god did it. That theory makes no predictions that we can test.
So, with our brains that are capable of putting together facts, coming to conclusions, and then testing our explanations, why should we adopt an irrational explanation when everything that we have justifies a statement of "I don't know?"
And that's completely useless. If you're going to go that far, what keeps you from complete Solipcism? You've described the theory of "last Tuesdayism". Congratulations.
If you gave me a computer, a day, and a completely random sequence of letters equal in length to Shakespeare's Hamlet, I could use that procedure to turn those random letters into Hamlet.
See - the algorithm is quite a lot different from random chance. If I were just to use the million monkeys algorithm, it's take a lot longer than lunch.
I've always thought that cursing was a cathartic release. Get a little built up rage, let out a good string of 4 letter words, and you feel much better. You don't kick the dog as often.
It might not be proven that these games are good for kids, but it seems to be an intuitive conclusion. Doing violent things in fantasy is always preferable to doing violent things in real life.
A lot of things that uppity people label as "bad" are made worse if you ban them! Now we can tie this entire thread into everything from porn to alcohol and drugs. Quit banning things! There's a REASON people seek an escape from real life! Sometimes that reason is to deflect seriously unsocial behaviors into a harmless fantasy world.
Sorry, I'm looking for liberalisn the political movement
Aha! I think I figured out something. You see liberalism as a political movement, and I see it as a philosophy for an individual.
Universal Education: Having this as an ideal doesn't violate human rights, but the political enacting of this ideal does. Rather than making sure an education is available to everyone, you steal from some to educate others. That violates the rights of those who are having their money taken from them (by force) to pay for the education of others.
I have had many arguments with objectivists about this. As I understand it, and objectivist is not opposed to universal education, but the coercion of it. True or not? I don't know how much of an objectivist you are, but Libertarianism is somewhat inspired by it. I think that this idea ignores the fact that individuals can benefit from a collective work, particularly when that collective work involves things that are not physically limited. For example, education unleashes the potential of the human mind which has limits we do not know; free software is also unlimited in the sense that I can give it away and still have complete use of it myself.
regarding your statement that items #2 and #3 conflict
They don't because scientific skepticism is the definition of an open mind. In hindsight, I'd roll them both up into "open mindedness" but that term is just about as misunderstood as "liberal" so maybe it's better that I didn't. Dogma is a belief that is presented as the truth, and must not be questioned. To pick on what you term a "liberal" idea - unions - I'd say that the idea that unions should be powerful and that stronger unions would help workers is definitely dogma. With the immense shifts in our society in the last 100 years, that is probably not true anymore.
regarding point #4 - rejection of privelidged birth
It's not just kicking out the queen, it's mainly the idea that the law applies to princes and paupers equally. Not a terribly new idea, but it still applies today. A person who is born wealthy should not have more privelidges than someone who made their money through hard work. We're pretty good about this in the US, but in many parts of the world it's not the case.
On another point, if you reject dogma, how can you ever agree with anyone? How can you agree with anyone on any kind of common basis? If you reject all concepts of authoritarin information or morality, on what basis can you make any decision about what is morally correct? Murder is not illegal because of religious dogma, it is illegal because it violates the universal reality of human rights.
About the "taxes are theft" argument you make: I haven't made up my mind about that. I view that part as a bit of Libertarian dogma, and honestly haven't invested enough thought into it to either agree or disagree with you. Rest assured that it has been on my "to think about" list for a while now, and eventually I'll make up my mind on it.
Rejecting dogma doesn't mean that I can't agree with someone. All it means is that if someone tells me "that's the way it is" I won't believe it. I'll judge for myself. Virgin birth dogma? I don't believe it. Taxes are theft? I don't believe it either. If I freely come to the same conclusion that a particular dogma espouses, it's not the same as accepting dogma without questioning it.
I'm also not a believer in an absolute morality, for the same reason that I'm not a believer in a consistent and complete derivation of mathematics. Have you read Goedel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid? If there's one math book everyone should read, that one is it.
I suspect that the liberal rejection of dogma amounts to "whatever I want to do, even if it violates others rights, is ok" in practice, if not intent.
Just to be redundant here: a "liberal" who accepts that unions are universally good is neither liberal, nor rejecting dogma. If you go back to the dictionary definition of liberal it says not limited to... dogma. A person who accepts dogma cannot be a liberal, by definition.
When liberals stop calling for gun control, then I'll believe they actually support human rights. By your statements, you want me to believe that liberals by defintion oppose gun control, and I find that hard to believe.
I'm not sure how you parsed what I said to get that. It certainly wasn't implied at all.
List the top 5 positions you consider to be core of liberalism and I'll explain how they violate human rights
Now that's interesting. Here we go - the core of liberalism according to me:
1) Universal education 2) Scientific skepticism 3) Rejection of dogma 4) Rejection of priveliged birth (royalty) 5) Freedom of thought.
Some of the items might appear related, but in my opinion if you have those things as the highest ideal, you are a liberal. Stand up and be proud!
It's understandable. For a few billion dollars I'd jump around like a monkey on a stage too. I'd even gain 100 pounds and pull out all my hair just to make the effect complete. And I would have sweat glands surgically implanted so I could effectively soak a shirt.
If even one cancel bot continues to operate, then it's not a good test! I know that actually getting everyone to cooperate is impossible, so it'll probably never happen.
I have copyrighted the act of NOT posting on Slashdot. If you don't post, you're in violation. If you don't post twice, you're OK. I haven't copyrighted that. As far as I know, that one's under the GNU copyleft.
Slashdot Mirror
The deep field is a single image, it was not compiled from smaller ones.
The stealth bomber shape of the picture is the actual shape of the CCD that took the photos. That chip was replaced in the last servicing mission, so they'll not be batwing shaped in the future.
we have observed pretty much everything that is visible from that location.
Except for the aliens?
Not true. You just need to have at least two of them. When one needs to come down, the other goes up. This is better than satellites because every couple months you can upgrade the router in the sky.
Nvidia produces accaptable Linux drivers
I have to disagree with that. I run VMWare on my computer which has an Nvidia MX400 card. When the thing goes full screen it sometimes crashes X. When it switches screen resolutions, it displays garbage on the screen. After I exit VMware, if I ctl-alt-F1 switch to a console, the screen has garbage on it.
These are the Nvidia drivers that I downloaded from the Nvidia site, and inserted into a plain vanilla kernel.
The thing runs fast, and flawlessly if I'm only working with X. But when VMware goes full screen it's less than satisfactory.
Message to whoever moderated me as a troll: LEARN SOME CHEMISTRY YOU IGNORAMUS
It's obvious to me that lighter elements are fusing into heavy elements at the south pole. The evidence is that what was obviously an S orbital is now a P orbital. Just look at the picture.
I think that it is a simpler explanation and thus MORE likely that this is just a bunch of kids who are testing a trebuchet.
Eavesdropping is illegal. I imagine that the judge's reasoning was that upskirting was more like foundationdropping than like eavesdropping, because the eaves are much higher up on a house.
Richard Stallman, director of the Free Software Foundation, wrote a 43 page letter to Lindows telling them why they should NOT call their operating system GNU/Lindows.
You can't imagine how good I feel now.
I know what you mean:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e4d'
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Too many client tasks.
Almost nothing is directly learned.
This is true. We get a lot of our facts out of a book. But someone somewhere *did* observe and write them down. If you really wanted to, you could verify the facts for yourself.
Just about everyone has to take it on faith (however little)
The definition of faith is almost identical to the definition of irrational. Faith is a belief that has no justification. Irrational means without justification.
Remember the burden of proof. It's not up to you to do the work to prove something. If someone tells you something (including me!) you have every right to come back with another question. You have every right to keep coming back with as many questions as you wish until you are personally satisfied that one or the other person is right.
That means that absolutely *no* faith is involved. When I tell you something, I don't expect you to just eat it up and believe it. If I did, that would be asking you to just have faith. See the difference?
The only difference between science and religion is the number of people who profess to follow their respective precepts.
This is absolutely untrue. If a statement such as 1+1=2 is true, then that statement is true even if *nobody* believed in it. Likewise, if everyone believed that 1+1=3, that would not make it true. Truth is a function independent of how many people believe in it. Science develops truth, and that's why people utilize it. How do we know what truth is? Because we can support our statements with facts and sound reasoning. Skeptics can ask questions, try to poke holes, etc. Nobody is required to believe anything. The person who comes up with an idea has the burden of convincing everyone that it is true. If they can't, then that idea never is developed into a theory.
That being said, let me state that I wholey appreciate the scientific method and the rewards we have gained from using it.
Forgive me, but I'm not sure that you do. The questions you ask reveal a certain naievity about what science is, what faith and reason are, how we know things, and why rationality is important. One can never truly appreciate something unless they truly understand it.
we can attain it either through divine enlightenment
OK, I'll bite. How can we attain truth through divine enlightenment? How do we know that? How can you convince me of that?
But thank goodness they rescued the pussy
indeeed you could- if you knew what outcome you were trying to achieve. if you just set about randomly flipping bits (er, letters) until you ended up with hamlet, you'd find that it would take much longer.
Missing the point. I'm talking about changing letters to match a fitness function. The function that I chose was (text == Hamlet)?fit:notfit
where did that hamlet lenght sequence of random characters come from?
A random number generator, initially.
just making assumptions about your initial state, and moving from there.
I am making no assumptions. The intial state could be ANY state. That's why I specified a random sequence to start with.
cited professor's does not invalidate the point that your start state still sprang into being somehow. and we dont know how.
It also doesn't invalidate the idea that the moon is made of green cheese. So what?
Who are we to judge the correctness of any one belief just because of our contrived scientific process?
:-)
Excellent question. Who we are is intelligent beings who can form ideas based on either what we see and can test, or form ideas based on what we make up.
I don't think I would describe the scientific process as contrived. It works, better than anything else we know of. And it doesn't just work a little bit better than the rest, it far outpaces every other way of thinking. Superstitions like horoscopes, dowsing, ESP, and the rest don't even come close to the accomplishments that rational scientific thinking has produced. When you have two competing ideas, how do you distinguish between the two of them? Test them to see if one breaks, determine which one has greater explanatory power. If a person doesn't do that, then there's really no method to choose between ideas. I think that truth is something that is important, and it matters probably more than anything else. Therefore, a powerful method to discriminate between superior and inferior ideas should not be ignored.
So, in the end, the answer is intuitive. Why should we favor ideas that are based in observation and tested over time? Because those ideas work way way better than the rest.
I am, however extremely curious to understand how others view this classic question, "Where did I come from?".
I am presuming that you mean something other than a sperm and an egg...
The honest answer is "I don't know." But we might figure it out eventually.
That's a good question, and the most correct answer that anyone can give is "we don't know". If you study cosmology, then you know that we have a pretty good idea of what our universe looked like from perhaps a second after the big bang until today. But, understanding what the universe looked like in the first moment is harder. We might be able to understand it better if we can understand the physics. So, the correct open-minded position is just to honestly say "I don't know."
Even the religionists answer "God", is at least an answer.
It's a far worse answer than "I don't know". Our ignorance can be backed up with rationality, and it is supported by the full weight of observation. Ironic, huh? We can point out that we don't have the physics, the observations, or any idea at all, and that completely justifies our statement that "We don't know." Life is funny.
Someone who says that "god did it" cannot make a justification for that. There's no support or reason for their hypothesis that god did it. That theory makes no predictions that we can test.
So, with our brains that are capable of putting together facts, coming to conclusions, and then testing our explanations, why should we adopt an irrational explanation when everything that we have justifies a statement of "I don't know?"
Living in a small town and being able to work command lines has people in total fear of me.
!!!!!!!!
Holy crap man! Don't you see the possiblities here? You can make them all your PERSONAL SLAVES! Get on it right away!
And that's completely useless. If you're going to go that far, what keeps you from complete Solipcism? You've described the theory of "last Tuesdayism". Congratulations.
If you gave me a computer, a day, and a completely random sequence of letters equal in length to Shakespeare's Hamlet, I could use that procedure to turn those random letters into Hamlet.
See - the algorithm is quite a lot different from random chance. If I were just to use the million monkeys algorithm, it's take a lot longer than lunch.
That's where the flaw in your understanding is.
Trust me, I am not a troll...
I've always thought that cursing was a cathartic release. Get a little built up rage, let out a good string of 4 letter words, and you feel much better. You don't kick the dog as often.
It might not be proven that these games are good for kids, but it seems to be an intuitive conclusion. Doing violent things in fantasy is always preferable to doing violent things in real life.
A lot of things that uppity people label as "bad" are made worse if you ban them! Now we can tie this entire thread into everything from porn to alcohol and drugs. Quit banning things! There's a REASON people seek an escape from real life! Sometimes that reason is to deflect seriously unsocial behaviors into a harmless fantasy world.
Sorry, I'm looking for liberalisn the political movement
... dogma. A person who accepts dogma cannot be a liberal, by definition.
Aha! I think I figured out something. You see liberalism as a political movement, and I see it as a philosophy for an individual.
Universal Education: Having this as an ideal doesn't violate human rights, but the political enacting of this ideal does. Rather than making sure an education is available to everyone, you steal from some to educate others. That violates the rights of those who are having their money taken from them (by force) to pay for the education of others.
I have had many arguments with objectivists about this. As I understand it, and objectivist is not opposed to universal education, but the coercion of it. True or not? I don't know how much of an objectivist you are, but Libertarianism is somewhat inspired by it. I think that this idea ignores the fact that individuals can benefit from a collective work, particularly when that collective work involves things that are not physically limited. For example, education unleashes the potential of the human mind which has limits we do not know; free software is also unlimited in the sense that I can give it away and still have complete use of it myself.
regarding your statement that items #2 and #3 conflict
They don't because scientific skepticism is the definition of an open mind. In hindsight, I'd roll them both up into "open mindedness" but that term is just about as misunderstood as "liberal" so maybe it's better that I didn't. Dogma is a belief that is presented as the truth, and must not be questioned. To pick on what you term a "liberal" idea - unions - I'd say that the idea that unions should be powerful and that stronger unions would help workers is definitely dogma. With the immense shifts in our society in the last 100 years, that is probably not true anymore.
regarding point #4 - rejection of privelidged birth
It's not just kicking out the queen, it's mainly the idea that the law applies to princes and paupers equally. Not a terribly new idea, but it still applies today. A person who is born wealthy should not have more privelidges than someone who made their money through hard work. We're pretty good about this in the US, but in many parts of the world it's not the case.
On another point, if you reject dogma, how can you ever agree with anyone? How can you agree with anyone on any kind of common basis? If you reject all concepts of authoritarin information or morality, on what basis can you make any decision about what is morally correct? Murder is not illegal because of religious dogma, it is illegal because it violates the universal reality of human rights.
About the "taxes are theft" argument you make: I haven't made up my mind about that. I view that part as a bit of Libertarian dogma, and honestly haven't invested enough thought into it to either agree or disagree with you. Rest assured that it has been on my "to think about" list for a while now, and eventually I'll make up my mind on it.
Rejecting dogma doesn't mean that I can't agree with someone. All it means is that if someone tells me "that's the way it is" I won't believe it. I'll judge for myself. Virgin birth dogma? I don't believe it. Taxes are theft? I don't believe it either. If I freely come to the same conclusion that a particular dogma espouses, it's not the same as accepting dogma without questioning it.
I'm also not a believer in an absolute morality, for the same reason that I'm not a believer in a consistent and complete derivation of mathematics. Have you read Goedel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid? If there's one math book everyone should read, that one is it.
I suspect that the liberal rejection of dogma amounts to "whatever I want to do, even if it violates others rights, is ok" in practice, if not intent.
Just to be redundant here: a "liberal" who accepts that unions are universally good is neither liberal, nor rejecting dogma. If you go back to the dictionary definition of liberal it says not limited to
When liberals stop calling for gun control, then I'll believe they actually support human rights. By your statements, you want me to believe that liberals by defintion oppose gun control, and I find that hard to believe.
I'm not sure how you parsed what I said to get that. It certainly wasn't implied at all.
List the top 5 positions you consider to be core of liberalism and I'll explain how they violate human rights
Now that's interesting. Here we go - the core of liberalism according to me:
1) Universal education
2) Scientific skepticism
3) Rejection of dogma
4) Rejection of priveliged birth (royalty)
5) Freedom of thought.
Some of the items might appear related, but in my opinion if you have those things as the highest ideal, you are a liberal. Stand up and be proud!
It's understandable. For a few billion dollars I'd jump around like a monkey on a stage too. I'd even gain 100 pounds and pull out all my hair just to make the effect complete. And I would have sweat glands surgically implanted so I could effectively soak a shirt.
I think Timothy is rubbing off on Chris.
What exactly are you saying here?
If even one cancel bot continues to operate, then it's not a good test! I know that actually getting everyone to cooperate is impossible, so it'll probably never happen.
I have copyrighted the act of NOT posting on Slashdot. If you don't post, you're in violation. If you don't post twice, you're OK. I haven't copyrighted that. As far as I know, that one's under the GNU copyleft.