"That's not a fallacy at all. Science can most certainly investigate questions about the existence of supernatural entities."
I suppose they could, but the answers they find are going to be inconclusive.
"Just as soon as you claim that this supernatural entity does stuff for you, affects the universe, changes reality, prevents a dude from dying in a plane crash, or any number of other things that religious people attribute to gods, then those things can be investigated and experimented with."
Really? I don't think there's anything to investigate or experiment with at all in that. You could show statistical data that demonstrates people who are religious and would theoretically benefit from divine intervention more than non-believers are not collectively "luckier" than others, but that's not much of an investigation or experiment. Unless you mean to imply that an all powerful and omniscient being possessed of absolute immortality could not possibly intervene in reality without overtly breaking the normal order of things, or that such an entity would be incapable of covering up such indiscretions such that they were undetectable by humans. That also does not account for "erratic" deities that might not behave in predictable or consistent ways, or at least unpredictable and inconsistent to a human understanding. Nor does it address the idea of a deity performing acts so fundamental to existence that investigating them simply doesn't work.
"If you want to claim that your god doesn't touch any part of the world that science can investigate, then that makes you a Deist. And that's a useless sort of god to invent."
Why do you think that is? Is it not possible that a temporally inactive deity can still have psychological and spiritual relevance? The is no rule that I am aware of that requires a deity act as a cosmic strong man in order to be considered such; would you care to correct me?
"So, go ahead and try again to find a Dawkins fallacy."
He actually thinks it matters. Not specifically a Dawkins fallacy, but one that he shares with an awful lot of people. It makes no difference at all what one person believes to another, what actually matters is how the other is moved to act by what they believe, and to the extent that those actions are good or evil it is apparent that whatever they believe is good or evil, but the details remain irrelevant. If Dawkins believing that there is no god leads him act like a jerk, then the problem is that he is acting like a jerk, not what he believes.
There's a joke in there involving Steve Jobs, abortion and scat. Several, in fact. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to imagine the psychologically scarring porn troll I am simply too lazy to write.
What are YOU smoking? Unfamiliar? there was nothing unfamiliar about it, it just ran like shit. It had almost 0 backwards compatibility even with games released in 2008 designed to run under DX10, everything took forever to load, and all of the wonderful things I've heard about took so fucking long to load that I just couldn't maintain the will to care... never mind that with it hanging for 5 minutes out of every 15 and crashing most apps every 2 even the basic "functionality" was so broken that just getting the damned thing to browse the web or install an AV client was a nightmare.
You can keep your Windows 7 and shove it where the sun don't shine, and maybe I'll think about installing it once 8 is about to hit shelves, just like I finally replaced 2000 with XP 2 months before Vista.
Actually, MS usually gives these licenses away as advertising: they want students hooked on Windows in order to ensure graduates hooked on Windows. You also assume that I didn't bend the rules a little and get it through a college one of my friends was paying tuition to rather than my own (which had no such service); there was some vagueness to the rule about putting it on any computer in your home, being allowed to continue use after leaving the college and the fact that the friend is also my roommate which I interpret as making it legal (though admittedly sketchy).
As for varsity sports... depending on your school, it's entirely possible that they more than pay for themselves. Seriously. Most colleges, at least the ones with athletics people give a crap about, sell all sorts of licensed merchandise and apparel that generates revenue for the school, many are able to charge TV stations for the privilege of airing the game (generating yet more revenue) and virtually all consider varsity sports to be a highly effective recruitment tool to get new students (who then become alumni, who then donate money and generate revenue). If you go to a fairly big-name school, there's actually a pretty good chance that all of those meat heads grabbing each others' asses while they toss around an inflated animal carcass are lowering your tuition rather than raising it.
Damn, and here I am having already formatted my crappy Windows 7 partition. that would have been a bitching experiment to run on that POS.
For the record, this is not mindless MS bashing... I'm currently booted into XP which I use about 99% of the time for gaming and familiarity (it's frustrating and hard going from Windows power user to Linux n00b, sue me), and it's even a legal copy!* But when I installed the 7 Beta it was just crap... total crap. They can pry XP from my collection of ironic Charlton Heston quotes.
*I got a free student copy, which was handy since I had a brand new box and didn't feel like going to the work of cracking Windows NT yet again
You must be under the impression that a retreat covered by delaying actions is not a long standing and highly effective traditional Russian military tactic. Letting the invader take a large chunk of territory is actually key, because it means that they will have a nice long supply chain largely unable to find adequate shelter or supplies to survive the winter. They just let 60% of the enemy forces die a painful death between November and April, then march through and slaughter whatever half-starved, demoralized and poorly armed survivors weren't fortunate enough to succumb to the elements like their comrades.
Driving the Russians back to Moscow by October is just a fancy way of losing miserably. Just ask Napolean or Hitler.
Why don't we ban attacks on our public communication systems and infrastructure. Just imagine if the terrorists were able to do things like blur out schools, local government offices and other public resources from our maps in an effort to erode our basic ability to conduct the day to day business of American life. Oh, wait...
Step 1: disable anonymous posting. Step 2: require registration be made through an ISP, work, school, or otherwise personally verifiable email address.
The only "complicated" part of this is running a whitelist that contains permissible domains... have known "unreliables" (ie. Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail etc.) on a blacklist, and greylist unknowns until an admin can look into it and decide whather they trust it or not (obviously this list would be very long at first, but presumably over time it would get shorter).
It's a PITA, and a lot of people out there get very upset by any site, let alone a mere forum, demanding that sort of thing, but it's hardly impossible or even untried.
"But hey, if you want to irrationally and illogically blame the most visible party rather than the root cause, please feel free to continue your uninformed position."
But hey, if you want to irrationally and illogically blame the party you don't like rather than the root cause, please feel free to continue your uninformed position.
I know you have a signature, but I can't see it, and I'm feeling nervous.
Re:Parents choose their baby's name
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Fun fact, most people wind up with jobs that are neither terribly glamorous nor pay 6 figures. Police sergeant is actually pretty respectable to those who don't blindly hate cops.
What SHOULD they write in it? That they're a gamer? Gee, you don't say, never would have expected to read in a GAMER profile that the person is a GAMER. If you aren't writing a little bit about who you are in your profile for/just about anything/ then your profile is completely useless.
And for the record, I've heard and seen many gamers talk about their families or relationships both in game and on profile pages. It's neither uncommon nor completely inappropriate in itself. Banning somebody for it, even if there are people out there who are irrationally intimidated by and intolerant of your preferences in a sexual partner, is simply absurd.
Parent is not flamebait. If a user were to identify as black in their profile, it would have just as much impact as if they identify as homosexual... that is to say, none. Incidentally, that's also the extent of the impact either would make by walking into a store.
Yeah, they cut his pay from $30k/year to $3000/year as a cost saving tactic. Somebody in payroll must have just assumed it was a mistake, because not even teachers get paid such an abusively low amount.
"Sending someone to report on conditions in some remote area of the world doesn't happen for free. That person has to be transported, fed, clothed. Also needs some training in writing skills, probably photography. Maybe videography as well. All of that costs money. So does the cell phone, land line, or whatever means used to connect that person to online resources that are used to file the story, whether it goes into a print or online newspaper."
I think the point is that while all of these things cost money for any news source, the cost of actually publishing the stories costs a whole lot less for online sources than dead-tree ones. Compare the costs of owning/renting an office large enough and properly equipped to accomodate a commercial newspaper printing press (fills a large room, requires a great deal of ventilation/electrical/plumbing fixtures), the capital investment in owning such a machine in the first place (at least 10 grand for a small one, easily 100 for a mid-large daily publication), and the operating costs for power and consumables (wood pulp, water, ink) to actually turn the thing on to the cost of an office big enough to run a webserver (needs a large and otherwise unused closet), the cost of a webserver (if you're spending 10k you're either HUGELY successful or a total sap), and the cost of a Tx line and electricity (which you're paying for either way, really), and you'll see start seeing some pretty massive costs of entry and operation to actual print compared to online. Add to that the fact that only the largest print sources are able project outside of a fairly small geographic area and assuming that all other costs are equal, that's a pretty compelling reason to believe that the internet might kill the newspapers just like the newspapers killed the town criers... by serving more people faster and at a much lower cost.
There's no reason that a web publisher couldn't foot the bill to put professional journalists on international assignments other than that there are not currently enough deep pockets in that market. I don't think it will take long, and once there are I don't think that it bodes well for anyone trying to sell news on dead trees.
"How about we all stop thinking that we have better ideas than the guys who built these incredible pieces of machinery?"
Why? Who were these guys before they had better ideas than the last guys who designed Mars rovers? Unless you mean to say that everything about the design of the rover was absolutely perfect, then better ideas exist to be had, and somebody out there will find them.
Slashdot Mirror
"The day that marketing decides on serious development is the day I pull the trigger to end it all. It's that simple. "
Then I think it's about time you get to first base with a Beretta. In fact, you're about 40 years late to that party, but it's never too late join.
"That's not a fallacy at all. Science can most certainly investigate questions about the existence of supernatural entities."
I suppose they could, but the answers they find are going to be inconclusive.
"Just as soon as you claim that this supernatural entity does stuff for you, affects the universe, changes reality, prevents a dude from dying in a plane crash, or any number of other things that religious people attribute to gods, then those things can be investigated and experimented with."
Really? I don't think there's anything to investigate or experiment with at all in that. You could show statistical data that demonstrates people who are religious and would theoretically benefit from divine intervention more than non-believers are not collectively "luckier" than others, but that's not much of an investigation or experiment. Unless you mean to imply that an all powerful and omniscient being possessed of absolute immortality could not possibly intervene in reality without overtly breaking the normal order of things, or that such an entity would be incapable of covering up such indiscretions such that they were undetectable by humans. That also does not account for "erratic" deities that might not behave in predictable or consistent ways, or at least unpredictable and inconsistent to a human understanding. Nor does it address the idea of a deity performing acts so fundamental to existence that investigating them simply doesn't work.
"If you want to claim that your god doesn't touch any part of the world that science can investigate, then that makes you a Deist. And that's a useless sort of god to invent."
Why do you think that is? Is it not possible that a temporally inactive deity can still have psychological and spiritual relevance? The is no rule that I am aware of that requires a deity act as a cosmic strong man in order to be considered such; would you care to correct me?
"So, go ahead and try again to find a Dawkins fallacy."
He actually thinks it matters. Not specifically a Dawkins fallacy, but one that he shares with an awful lot of people. It makes no difference at all what one person believes to another, what actually matters is how the other is moved to act by what they believe, and to the extent that those actions are good or evil it is apparent that whatever they believe is good or evil, but the details remain irrelevant. If Dawkins believing that there is no god leads him act like a jerk, then the problem is that he is acting like a jerk, not what he believes.
Except that the possessive of "it" breaks the apostrophe rule, dumbass. "It's" is the contraction for "it is", "its" is the possessive in question.
English has some stupid rules and spellings, it's its biggest weakness.
There's a joke in there involving Steve Jobs, abortion and scat. Several, in fact. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to imagine the psychologically scarring porn troll I am simply too lazy to write.
And you will never get laid. You win... I guess.
What are YOU smoking? Unfamiliar? there was nothing unfamiliar about it, it just ran like shit. It had almost 0 backwards compatibility even with games released in 2008 designed to run under DX10, everything took forever to load, and all of the wonderful things I've heard about took so fucking long to load that I just couldn't maintain the will to care... never mind that with it hanging for 5 minutes out of every 15 and crashing most apps every 2 even the basic "functionality" was so broken that just getting the damned thing to browse the web or install an AV client was a nightmare.
You can keep your Windows 7 and shove it where the sun don't shine, and maybe I'll think about installing it once 8 is about to hit shelves, just like I finally replaced 2000 with XP 2 months before Vista.
Actually, MS usually gives these licenses away as advertising: they want students hooked on Windows in order to ensure graduates hooked on Windows. You also assume that I didn't bend the rules a little and get it through a college one of my friends was paying tuition to rather than my own (which had no such service); there was some vagueness to the rule about putting it on any computer in your home, being allowed to continue use after leaving the college and the fact that the friend is also my roommate which I interpret as making it legal (though admittedly sketchy).
As for varsity sports... depending on your school, it's entirely possible that they more than pay for themselves. Seriously. Most colleges, at least the ones with athletics people give a crap about, sell all sorts of licensed merchandise and apparel that generates revenue for the school, many are able to charge TV stations for the privilege of airing the game (generating yet more revenue) and virtually all consider varsity sports to be a highly effective recruitment tool to get new students (who then become alumni, who then donate money and generate revenue). If you go to a fairly big-name school, there's actually a pretty good chance that all of those meat heads grabbing each others' asses while they toss around an inflated animal carcass are lowering your tuition rather than raising it.
Because if you're not buying expensive and unnecessary products from the US, then you are a terrorist.
Damn, and here I am having already formatted my crappy Windows 7 partition. that would have been a bitching experiment to run on that POS.
For the record, this is not mindless MS bashing... I'm currently booted into XP which I use about 99% of the time for gaming and familiarity (it's frustrating and hard going from Windows power user to Linux n00b, sue me), and it's even a legal copy!* But when I installed the 7 Beta it was just crap... total crap. They can pry XP from my collection of ironic Charlton Heston quotes.
*I got a free student copy, which was handy since I had a brand new box and didn't feel like going to the work of cracking Windows NT yet again
You must be under the impression that a retreat covered by delaying actions is not a long standing and highly effective traditional Russian military tactic. Letting the invader take a large chunk of territory is actually key, because it means that they will have a nice long supply chain largely unable to find adequate shelter or supplies to survive the winter. They just let 60% of the enemy forces die a painful death between November and April, then march through and slaughter whatever half-starved, demoralized and poorly armed survivors weren't fortunate enough to succumb to the elements like their comrades.
Driving the Russians back to Moscow by October is just a fancy way of losing miserably. Just ask Napolean or Hitler.
Why don't we ban attacks on our public communication systems and infrastructure. Just imagine if the terrorists were able to do things like blur out schools, local government offices and other public resources from our maps in an effort to erode our basic ability to conduct the day to day business of American life. Oh, wait...
If anything, they'll go after the people selling the discs in the first place. Confused grandmothers are not known for their deep pockets.
Step 1: disable anonymous posting.
Step 2: require registration be made through an ISP, work, school, or otherwise personally verifiable email address.
The only "complicated" part of this is running a whitelist that contains permissible domains... have known "unreliables" (ie. Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail etc.) on a blacklist, and greylist unknowns until an admin can look into it and decide whather they trust it or not (obviously this list would be very long at first, but presumably over time it would get shorter).
It's a PITA, and a lot of people out there get very upset by any site, let alone a mere forum, demanding that sort of thing, but it's hardly impossible or even untried.
"But hey, if you want to irrationally and illogically blame the most visible party rather than the root cause, please feel free to continue your uninformed position."
But hey, if you want to irrationally and illogically blame the party you don't like rather than the root cause, please feel free to continue your uninformed position.
Fixed it for you.
Three words: Steam punk sucks.
Yeah, that's right, I said it. Bring it Doctorow.
I know you have a signature, but I can't see it, and I'm feeling nervous.
Fun fact, most people wind up with jobs that are neither terribly glamorous nor pay 6 figures. Police sergeant is actually pretty respectable to those who don't blindly hate cops.
What SHOULD they write in it? That they're a gamer? Gee, you don't say, never would have expected to read in a GAMER profile that the person is a GAMER. If you aren't writing a little bit about who you are in your profile for /just about anything/ then your profile is completely useless.
And for the record, I've heard and seen many gamers talk about their families or relationships both in game and on profile pages. It's neither uncommon nor completely inappropriate in itself. Banning somebody for it, even if there are people out there who are irrationally intimidated by and intolerant of your preferences in a sexual partner, is simply absurd.
Parent is not flamebait. If a user were to identify as black in their profile, it would have just as much impact as if they identify as homosexual... that is to say, none. Incidentally, that's also the extent of the impact either would make by walking into a store.
That requires trying?
But both look a thousand times worse than the "Classic" Win2k theme where everything is just a simple gray box.
"Or at least a small chunk of Nantucket, RI"
That would be no small feat, seeing as Nantucket isn't in Rhode Island.
Yeah, they cut his pay from $30k/year to $3000/year as a cost saving tactic. Somebody in payroll must have just assumed it was a mistake, because not even teachers get paid such an abusively low amount.
"Sending someone to report on conditions in some remote area of the world doesn't happen for free. That person has to be transported, fed, clothed. Also needs some training in writing skills, probably photography. Maybe videography as well. All of that costs money. So does the cell phone, land line, or whatever means used to connect that person to online resources that are used to file the story, whether it goes into a print or online newspaper."
I think the point is that while all of these things cost money for any news source, the cost of actually publishing the stories costs a whole lot less for online sources than dead-tree ones. Compare the costs of owning/renting an office large enough and properly equipped to accomodate a commercial newspaper printing press (fills a large room, requires a great deal of ventilation/electrical/plumbing fixtures), the capital investment in owning such a machine in the first place (at least 10 grand for a small one, easily 100 for a mid-large daily publication), and the operating costs for power and consumables (wood pulp, water, ink) to actually turn the thing on to the cost of an office big enough to run a webserver (needs a large and otherwise unused closet), the cost of a webserver (if you're spending 10k you're either HUGELY successful or a total sap), and the cost of a Tx line and electricity (which you're paying for either way, really), and you'll see start seeing some pretty massive costs of entry and operation to actual print compared to online. Add to that the fact that only the largest print sources are able project outside of a fairly small geographic area and assuming that all other costs are equal, that's a pretty compelling reason to believe that the internet might kill the newspapers just like the newspapers killed the town criers... by serving more people faster and at a much lower cost.
There's no reason that a web publisher couldn't foot the bill to put professional journalists on international assignments other than that there are not currently enough deep pockets in that market. I don't think it will take long, and once there are I don't think that it bodes well for anyone trying to sell news on dead trees.
"How about we all stop thinking that we have better ideas than the guys who built these incredible pieces of machinery?"
Why? Who were these guys before they had better ideas than the last guys who designed Mars rovers? Unless you mean to say that everything about the design of the rover was absolutely perfect, then better ideas exist to be had, and somebody out there will find them.