Wouldn't it be great, then, if Israel bothered to create a boundary between it's 1948 acquisitions, where everybody is a citizen, and its 1967 acquisitions, where almost everybody is a non-citizen (aka in your analogy as a "neighbour")? For some reason the Israeli government and public fail to see the wisdom of "good fences make good neighbours". The most consistent reason they give for this is that they got this land from God and now it's theirs.
I'd say that is entirely in the hands of the PA. They have been offered pretty much EVERYTHING they publicly profess to desire, see Clinton's effort. They turned it down because they want it all, from the river to the sea.
Not quite everything, if you look into the details, though I suppose that was a pretty good offer. At least that's the way the Israeli negotiators describe it. Since then there was a change at the Palestinian helm, though, and both sides have changed their positions.
Thought experiment for you to see if you are an honest debater or just a pro terror apologist.
Let me ask you about a real-life fact to determine if you're an honest debater or just an apartheid apologist: what might be the long-term vision of successive Israeli governments as they keep approving settlements in the depth of the west bank? Do you suppose they plan to spend billions to later uproot the same people they are now sending to live there? Do you have any idea how politically difficult it is to evacuate Israeli settlements after they have been built?
Imagine tomorrow Abbas announced his desire for a two state solution (something he publicly denounces btw, and he is the moderate)
That's news to me - unless you're referring to Israel's precondition that they recognize it as a "Jewish" state - which was an attempt to get the Palestinians to compromise the "right of return" as a precondition to negotiations. If you mean something else, please provide a citation.
and to live in peace with Israel. That it is time to end this terrible bloodshed and finally have peace and a future.
Note that the tiny enclaves ruled by Abbas already live in de-facto peace with Israel. While the Israelis certainly enjoy the great reduction in violence, I see no sign that they have come any closer to recognizing the Palestinians' human and national rights.
Now imagine he not only lived through the next twenty four hours but that the people were finally tired of the fighting and rose up in public demonstrations of support so profound that Hamas went to ground. The suicide and mortar fire ceased and it really looked like THIS time they meant it. How long could an Israeli politician hold out against signing a treaty? That is what I mean, it is all up to them, they will have peace the second they decide they have to settle for it instead of the total victory they keep dreaming is coming real soon now. Now explain how I'm totally wrong.
Did you know that something similar has actually happened in real life? So far Netanyahu is holding out just fine and doesn't seem like he ought to be concerned in the least about peace talks. So based on what has actually happened - the Palestinian authority denouncing and actively fighting terrorism, and publicly stating very clearly that it is interested in a two-state solution - I'd say that your thought experiment does not lead where you think it leads.
> Either way, it does not annex the land and make it a part of the legal definition of Israel. The legal terms that apply to the west bank > are the same terms that applied to Japan after its defeat in 1945. Would you say that the occupied Japan was part of the US and > that its post-war status was an internal matter? If you would, then you have a very peculiar definition of "internal".
Yes, exactly the same. Except for the detail that Japan was administered by the Allied Forces instead of just the U.S. That is why half of Japan uses 60Hz electricity and the othe
You must be joking, but I'm afraid many slashdot readers might miss the sarcasm. For the less-informed, I should note that there is a de-facto Palestinian state in Gaza, which has frequently launched missiles into the Negev, and no carpet bombing has followed - much less world war III.
BTW, any claim of the form "the palestinians/Israelis aren't interested in foo, they really want bar" is always false because both Palestinians and Israelis are heterogenous groups composed of millions of people, with many and varied political groups active among them pushing vastly different agendas.
The west bank is not part of Israel, by Israel's own definitions.
Palestine certainly exists, though not by that name, in Israeli legislation. You see, inhabitants of the occupied territories are not, by and large, Israeli citizens, and the law applied there is not the same law that applies in the pre-1967 Israel. According to Israel's own legal experts, the west bank is held under military occupation. When a palestinian from the west bank breaks the law, it is the military law that he is breaking and he is brought to trial in Israeli military court. Unlike palestinians living on the other side of the green line, that person does not vote for Israeli parliament, and is not afforded any rights by Israel (like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of movement). Thus, Israel itself makes a very strong distinction between the west bank and its previous acqusitions.
This situation is further complicated by the presence of the Palestinian authority in parts of the west bank. Agreements signed by Israel and the PLO have granted the PLO partial powers in those places, which is a formal recognition that those territories are not, in fact, part of Israel.
To further underscore this distinction between Israel and the west bank, consider that Israel formally annexed a large area around Jerusalem shortly after the 1967 war. It did not do the same in the rest of the west bank, because the Israelies anticipate that such annexation would put them under pressure to grant voting rights to the Palestinian inhabitans, and they do not want that.
So Israel is in essence playing a very dishonest game here. They don't want to grant human beings their political rights, so they avoid annexation. Not annexing the land gives the Israeli government the subterfuge of military occupation, a supposedly temporary measure. But is it really temporary? Here the Israeli public is split. A very large contingent views the occupation as entirely permanent, and that contingent has managed to further its agenda to the extent that roughly 8% of Israel's Jewish population has resettled in the occupied west bank. Many of those settlers resettled with the express intention of preventing a peace agreement where the land would be partitioned. A smaller contingent would rather end the occupation, but that contingent's influence is steadily diminishing, possibly due to demographic forces.
The bottom line is that the ruling party in Israel pretends that the occupation is temporary, and acts like it is permanent. Either way, it does not annex the land and make it a part of the legal definition of Israel. The legal terms that apply to the west bank are the same terms that applied to Japan after its defeat in 1945. Would you say that the occupied Japan was part of the US and that its post-war status was an internal matter? If you would, then you have a very peculiar definition of "internal".
Good code has correctness proofs, even if they're informal and only in the author's head.
But that's still a completely different situation than a structural engineer designing a bridge, and testing its strength by a number of fairly well defined methods and adherence to building codes. An informal proof, existing only in the author's head, is poorly defined, and can easily be wrong.
If it can't be made right, then the code is wrong - that's the point of making the proof formal, rather than keeping it informal. I was replying to your notion that proving code is impossible due to the halting problem.
And, of course, in many cases the specification isn't clear. How would you formally verify a climate model, for instance ?
Is formal verification really that expensive, or are does it just seem expensive because we habitually ignore the costs of skipping it?
I think it's really expensive, but in either case, it's not fair to blame the software engineer for the mess.
You can't formally verify scientific hypotheses (such as a climate model) but you can certainly verify that a supposed implementation of a climate model is indeed an implementation of that climate model (given enough time and competence). You seem to confuse formal proof with hypothesis testing in this case. You are correct that verifying the implementation's correctness would be expensive, but I was replying to your contention that it is somehow impossible or pointless to prove program correctness. In the case of climate models, making wrong policy decisions because of buggy implementations would probably be no less expensive than the verification process.
It's true that formal verification can't prove the program "does what I want" if you screw up specifying what you want
Which is exactly my point. For any sufficiently interesting problem, specifying what you want in a 100% perfect way is impossible.
In addition, there's no formal way to prove that two programs produce the same output (that would be equivalent to solving the Halting Problem), and as a consequence there's no general way to prove that a program is equivalent to the specification.
You overstate the theorem. Determining whether or not two programs produce the same output is undecidable. That doesn't mean that given two non-trivial programs, you can never prove that they produce the same output (rather, it means that there's no algorithm that can receive the representation of the programs and determine in finite time and without mistakes whether or not they have the same output).
So, where does this put us? To get safety and correctness guarantees about programs, we need not write algorithms that prove correctness about any program provided to them. Rather, we need to write proofs concerning the particular program that we wrote - and it helps if we wrote our program in certain ways that make those proofs easier to develop. This is certainly possible.
You might counter that certain correct programs have no correctness proof. This is true only in a superficial way. A program may have correct behaviour, but if its author cannot write a correctness proof for it - even an informal one - then that means the program isn't understood by its own author, and should be fixed. Good code has correctness proofs, even if they're informal and only in the author's head.
I must make one exception to this rule, however. In AI code, there are sometimes heuristics that have no proof, not even an informal one, because the author doesn't have more than an intuition about why the heuristic should work. But that's a small minority of the total amount of code being written.
Of course, like you said, parts of the program can be simple enough to prove in a formal sense, but that doesn't nearly cover all the interesting cases. There's still plenty left over.
And, like I said in my first post, even formally verifying the parts where it is possible would lead to unacceptable budget and deadline overruns, so it's rarely done.
This is often true, but as you probably know, there are cases where verification is worth the cost. Aerospace and medicine come to mind. I'd also hazard a guess that operating systems deserve the extra investment of formal verification. Has anybody ever made a quantitative comparison of the up-front cost of formal verification with the cost of bugs and maintenance work that would have been prevented by formal verification? Is formal verification really that expensive, or are does it just seem expensive because we habitually ignore the costs of skipping it?
This is obviously not the same thing - having the choice between paying more and saving electricity is not the same as having the power plug yanked out when you're trying to read. The consumer gets to prioritize her electricity use and give up uses that are not as important to her.
More generally, you seem to be saying that setting a market price for something is equivalent to forcing people to give it up. Does this mean that setting a market-price for medical services is the same as forcing people to give up medicine?
Well, there was the case of Chomsky recently, mentioned above. I don't know that it's government policy though, as I haven't heard of other cases, and the fact that Chomsky was barred entrance might be a case of profound stupidity (coupled with an arbitrary and immoral exercise of power) rather than a consistent policy.
That's a false analogy if I ever saw one. Stallman is not an employee of a Palestinian university, and is under no obligation to act according to anybody else's agenda (unlike the employee in your analogy, which is supposed to work on behalf of his employer). Stallman had a deal with the university, and then the university added a new clause. Stallman chose to accept this clause, which I think is not unreasonable, all things considered. But that doesn't mean he's bound by loyalty to the Palestinian university as an employee would have been.
1. As far as I know, it is not seriously disputed that many of the refugees did not leave voluntarily. If you don't know what I'm talking about, please read about Ramle, Lod, Al-Majdal and (more recently) Imwas, Yalo and Bayt Nuba.
In most cases that I'm aware of, the bulk of the exodus occurred shortly before or after conquest, which undermines your proposed explanation - if the refugees' motives in leaving were as you propose, then one would expect them to evacuate somewhat ahead of the fighting.
2. There are several proposed explanations for the mass emigration and it's quite plausible that most of the causes suggested had played a part. Can you point out to any study that managed to conclusively quantify the motives of the refugees? Is such a study even possible, being as you wouldn't really expect them to be honest about their motives at the time, if their motives are what you say they were?
3. Returning to the original question of Hamas ideology, the motives that the refugees had are in fact entirely tangential. If we wish to understand why Hamas has the ideology it has, we must ask how the Palestinians perceived their history, rather than ask what actually happened. This is not to say that "what actually happened?" is not an important question in its own right - it certainly is. It's just not as relevant a question to understanding the origins of Hamas' ideology as the question "what did the Palestinians believe about the Nakba?".
Well, maybe, but it seems far more plausible to me that it's the other way around - Hamas are murderous anti-semites because this movement developed under the occupation, amongst the people who suffered the Naqba. As Moshe Dayan famously said, we can't blame them for hating us, as we took their homes and fields from them (not in those precise words, but that was his intent).
What you describe (robot taxis) sounds somewhat sensible for in-city traffic. Aren't high-speed trains meant for cross-country traffic? Particularly if the robot taxis aren't very fast, as you suggest.
Actually, I believe these questions haven't been dealt with. Otherwise, they wouldn't still be here. What we've learned on this kind of issue is that wishful thing trumps philosophy. Some people are willing to spend vast chunks of their life shoehorning reality and logic rather than question their basic wants.
I'm afraid that you severely underestimate the power of ignorance to forge ahead in the face of all knowledge.
Well, you nearly had me there, but then a I though: "what the heck, I'll google it".
There's Thomas Aquinas, the "immensely influential philosopher and theologian": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnipotence_paradox#Proposed_answers
The same article says: "Another common response to the omnipotence paradox is to try to define omnipotence to mean something weaker than absolute omnipotence, such as definition 3 or 4 above. The paradox can be resolved by simply stipulating that omnipotence does not require the being to have abilities which are logically impossible, but only to be able to do anything which conforms to the laws of logic."
Suit yourself. I don't see how your choices of definitions are relevant, though, because some theists clearly do define God's omnipotence as limited by logic:
"Thomas Aquinas asserts that the paradox arises from a misunderstanding of omnipotence. He maintains that inherent contradictions and logical impossibilities do not fall under the omnipotence of God.[14] J. L Cowan sees this paradox as a reason to reject the concept of absolute omnipotence,[15] while others, such as Rene Descartes, argue that God is absolutely omnipotent, despite the problem.[9]"
You're right, the logical impossibility of such a rock requires the assumption of omnipotence (that is, omnipotence per my definition). Let me duplicate a reply I wrote to another gentleperson in this forum:
A possible argument would be: 1. God is omnipotent 2. Therefore, no rock could exist that God would not be able to lift. 3. God's omnipotence does not imply His ability to create things that cannot exist. He can only create things that can exist. That's still one heck of a superpower, mind you. 4. Therefore, God cannot create a rock so heavy that He himself cannot lift.
I put forth that this argument is consistent, though not necessarily correct.
As I hinted elsewhere, I'm actually an atheist, but this supposed paradox does not strike me as a good argument.
OK. A theist might believe in a God that is not quite omnipotent but is still capable of doing anything that is logically possible. Call it quasi-omnipotent. All the politics follow as before, and the rock argument got us nowhere. That's my point.
When we speak of God, which God is that? The God I posit did not necessarily create the laws of logic, and hence they may as well be fixed for all I know.
1. God is omnipotent 2. Therefore, no rock could exist that God would not be able to lift. 3. God's omnipotence does not imply His ability to create things that cannot exist. He can only create things that can exist. That's still one heck of a superpower, mind you. 4. Therefore, God cannot create a rock that he himself cannot lift.
I put forth that this argument is consistent, though not necessarily correct.
"Evolutionists" can't provide sufficient evidence to disprove this so-called "null hypothesis" because this hypothesis is unfalsifiable. So making intelligent design the null hypothesis is a way of rigging the debate such that only ID can win. Nice try.
The ID hypothesis is unfalsifiable because it gives rise to 0 predictions. Hence, there's really no point debating the ID hypothesis - it cannot be used to make any judgement about the probability of events, and therefore cannot lead us towards or away from useful (or harmful) choices of action.
The term "null hypothesis" is used in statistics to indicate the hypothesis that a suggested effect does not exist. In this case, a proper null hypothesis might be: "organisms developed completely at random, and long-term genetic change is unaffected by the environment". Or the null hypothesis might be "organisms have always the way they are now". Note that both of these hypotheses are falsifiable, in that they state things that can be indirectly observed and hence falsified.
So, to distinguish science from faith, we need to look at the falsifiability of a theory. It would be a start, anyway - if we don't agree on that, we cannot proceed to more complicated notions like parsimony (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor#Science_and_the_scientific_method).
What if we define omnipotence as "can do anything that is logically possible"? As in, not bound by physical laws, but still bound by logical laws?
In this case, God cannot create a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it, because no such rock could logically exist. So God's inability to create such a rock does not diminish His omnipotence. It's as if you asked: "Can God create a white sheet of paper that is also completely black?" Either the sheet is white or it is black. Similarly, either God can lift the rock, or the rock's existence is logically impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
No data has been cited during the creation of that blog post.
Opinion is fine, but when the observations are so weeping, just a little bit of substantiation is nice to have.
Wouldn't it be great, then, if Israel bothered to create a boundary between it's 1948 acquisitions, where everybody is a citizen, and its 1967 acquisitions, where almost everybody is a non-citizen (aka in your analogy as a "neighbour")? For some reason the Israeli government and public fail to see the wisdom of "good fences make good neighbours". The most consistent reason they give for this is that they got this land from God and now it's theirs.
> But is it really temporary?
I'd say that is entirely in the hands of the PA. They have been offered pretty much EVERYTHING they publicly profess to desire, see Clinton's effort. They turned it down because they want it all, from the river to the sea.
Not quite everything, if you look into the details, though I suppose that was a pretty good offer. At least that's the way the Israeli negotiators describe it. Since then there was a change at the Palestinian helm, though, and both sides have changed their positions.
Thought experiment for you to see if you are an honest debater or just a pro terror apologist.
Let me ask you about a real-life fact to determine if you're an honest debater or just an apartheid apologist: what might be the long-term vision of successive Israeli governments as they keep approving settlements in the depth of the west bank? Do you suppose they plan to spend billions to later uproot the same people they are now sending to live there? Do you have any idea how politically difficult it is to evacuate Israeli settlements after they have been built?
Imagine tomorrow Abbas announced his desire for a two state solution (something he publicly denounces btw, and he is the moderate)
That's news to me - unless you're referring to Israel's precondition that they recognize it as a "Jewish" state - which was an attempt to get the Palestinians to compromise the "right of return" as a precondition to negotiations. If you mean something else, please provide a citation.
and to live in peace with Israel. That it is time to end this terrible bloodshed and finally have peace and a future.
Note that the tiny enclaves ruled by Abbas already live in de-facto peace with Israel. While the Israelis certainly enjoy the great reduction in violence, I see no sign that they have come any closer to recognizing the Palestinians' human and national rights.
Now imagine he not only lived through the next twenty four hours but that the people were finally tired of the fighting and rose up in public demonstrations of support so profound that Hamas went to ground. The suicide and mortar fire ceased and it really looked like THIS time they meant it. How long could an Israeli politician hold out against signing a treaty? That is what I mean, it is all up to them, they will have peace the second they decide they have to settle for it instead of the total victory they keep dreaming is coming real soon now. Now explain how I'm totally wrong.
Did you know that something similar has actually happened in real life? So far Netanyahu is holding out just fine and doesn't seem like he ought to be concerned in the least about peace talks. So based on what has actually happened - the Palestinian authority denouncing and actively fighting terrorism, and publicly stating very clearly that it is interested in a two-state solution - I'd say that your thought experiment does not lead where you think it leads.
> Either way, it does not annex the land and make it a part of the legal definition of Israel. The legal terms that apply to the west bank
> are the same terms that applied to Japan after its defeat in 1945. Would you say that the occupied Japan was part of the US and
> that its post-war status was an internal matter? If you would, then you have a very peculiar definition of "internal".
Yes, exactly the same. Except for the detail that Japan was administered by the Allied Forces instead of just the U.S. That is why half of Japan uses 60Hz electricity and the othe
You must be joking, but I'm afraid many slashdot readers might miss the sarcasm. For the less-informed, I should note that there is a de-facto Palestinian state in Gaza, which has frequently launched missiles into the Negev, and no carpet bombing has followed - much less world war III.
BTW, any claim of the form "the palestinians/Israelis aren't interested in foo, they really want bar" is always false because both Palestinians and Israelis are heterogenous groups composed of millions of people, with many and varied political groups active among them pushing vastly different agendas.
The west bank is not part of Israel, by Israel's own definitions.
Palestine certainly exists, though not by that name, in Israeli legislation. You see, inhabitants of the occupied territories are not, by and large, Israeli citizens, and the law applied there is not the same law that applies in the pre-1967 Israel. According to Israel's own legal experts, the west bank is held under military occupation. When a palestinian from the west bank breaks the law, it is the military law that he is breaking and he is brought to trial in Israeli military court. Unlike palestinians living on the other side of the green line, that person does not vote for Israeli parliament, and is not afforded any rights by Israel (like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of movement). Thus, Israel itself makes a very strong distinction between the west bank and its previous acqusitions.
This situation is further complicated by the presence of the Palestinian authority in parts of the west bank. Agreements signed by Israel and the PLO have granted the PLO partial powers in those places, which is a formal recognition that those territories are not, in fact, part of Israel.
To further underscore this distinction between Israel and the west bank, consider that Israel formally annexed a large area around Jerusalem shortly after the 1967 war. It did not do the same in the rest of the west bank, because the Israelies anticipate that such annexation would put them under pressure to grant voting rights to the Palestinian inhabitans, and they do not want that.
So Israel is in essence playing a very dishonest game here. They don't want to grant human beings their political rights, so they avoid annexation. Not annexing the land gives the Israeli government the subterfuge of military occupation, a supposedly temporary measure. But is it really temporary? Here the Israeli public is split. A very large contingent views the occupation as entirely permanent, and that contingent has managed to further its agenda to the extent that roughly 8% of Israel's Jewish population has resettled in the occupied west bank. Many of those settlers resettled with the express intention of preventing a peace agreement where the land would be partitioned. A smaller contingent would rather end the occupation, but that contingent's influence is steadily diminishing, possibly due to demographic forces.
The bottom line is that the ruling party in Israel pretends that the occupation is temporary, and acts like it is permanent. Either way, it does not annex the land and make it a part of the legal definition of Israel. The legal terms that apply to the west bank are the same terms that applied to Japan after its defeat in 1945. Would you say that the occupied Japan was part of the US and that its post-war status was an internal matter? If you would, then you have a very peculiar definition of "internal".
But that's still a completely different situation than a structural engineer designing a bridge, and testing its strength by a number of fairly well defined methods and adherence to building codes. An informal proof, existing only in the author's head, is poorly defined, and can easily be wrong.
If it can't be made right, then the code is wrong - that's the point of making the proof formal, rather than keeping it informal. I was replying to your notion that proving code is impossible due to the halting problem.
And, of course, in many cases the specification isn't clear. How would you formally verify a climate model, for instance ?
I think it's really expensive, but in either case, it's not fair to blame the software engineer for the mess.
You can't formally verify scientific hypotheses (such as a climate model) but you can certainly verify that a supposed implementation of a climate model is indeed an implementation of that climate model (given enough time and competence). You seem to confuse formal proof with hypothesis testing in this case. You are correct that verifying the implementation's correctness would be expensive, but I was replying to your contention that it is somehow impossible or pointless to prove program correctness. In the case of climate models, making wrong policy decisions because of buggy implementations would probably be no less expensive than the verification process.
Which is exactly my point. For any sufficiently interesting problem, specifying what you want in a 100% perfect way is impossible.
In addition, there's no formal way to prove that two programs produce the same output (that would be equivalent to solving the Halting Problem), and as a consequence there's no general way to prove that a program is equivalent to the specification.
You overstate the theorem. Determining whether or not two programs produce the same output is undecidable. That doesn't mean that given two non-trivial programs, you can never prove that they produce the same output (rather, it means that there's no algorithm that can receive the representation of the programs and determine in finite time and without mistakes whether or not they have the same output).
So, where does this put us? To get safety and correctness guarantees about programs, we need not write algorithms that prove correctness about any program provided to them. Rather, we need to write proofs concerning the particular program that we wrote - and it helps if we wrote our program in certain ways that make those proofs easier to develop. This is certainly possible.
You might counter that certain correct programs have no correctness proof. This is true only in a superficial way. A program may have correct behaviour, but if its author cannot write a correctness proof for it - even an informal one - then that means the program isn't understood by its own author, and should be fixed. Good code has correctness proofs, even if they're informal and only in the author's head.
I must make one exception to this rule, however. In AI code, there are sometimes heuristics that have no proof, not even an informal one, because the author doesn't have more than an intuition about why the heuristic should work. But that's a small minority of the total amount of code being written.
Of course, like you said, parts of the program can be simple enough to prove in a formal sense, but that doesn't nearly cover all the interesting cases. There's still plenty left over.
And, like I said in my first post, even formally verifying the parts where it is possible would lead to unacceptable budget and deadline overruns, so it's rarely done.
This is often true, but as you probably know, there are cases where verification is worth the cost. Aerospace and medicine come to mind. I'd also hazard a guess that operating systems deserve the extra investment of formal verification. Has anybody ever made a quantitative comparison of the up-front cost of formal verification with the cost of bugs and maintenance work that would have been prevented by formal verification? Is formal verification really that expensive, or are does it just seem expensive because we habitually ignore the costs of skipping it?
I checked. What you wrote isn't true. I think you should apologize to cgens.
This is obviously not the same thing - having the choice between paying more and saving electricity is not the same as having the power plug yanked out when you're trying to read. The consumer gets to prioritize her electricity use and give up uses that are not as important to her.
More generally, you seem to be saying that setting a market price for something is equivalent to forcing people to give it up. Does this mean that setting a market-price for medical services is the same as forcing people to give up medicine?
Well, there was the case of Chomsky recently, mentioned above. I don't know that it's government policy though, as I haven't heard of other cases, and the fact that Chomsky was barred entrance might be a case of profound stupidity (coupled with an arbitrary and immoral exercise of power) rather than a consistent policy.
That's a false analogy if I ever saw one. Stallman is not an employee of a Palestinian university, and is under no obligation to act according to anybody else's agenda (unlike the employee in your analogy, which is supposed to work on behalf of his employer). Stallman had a deal with the university, and then the university added a new clause. Stallman chose to accept this clause, which I think is not unreasonable, all things considered. But that doesn't mean he's bound by loyalty to the Palestinian university as an employee would have been.
Well, that was expected. A couple of points:
1. As far as I know, it is not seriously disputed that many of the refugees did not leave voluntarily. If you don't know what I'm talking about, please read about Ramle, Lod, Al-Majdal and (more recently) Imwas, Yalo and Bayt Nuba.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Exodus_from_Lydda
If you read Hebrew, I'd also suggest this wikipedia article:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/he/wiki/%D7%9C%D7%98%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%9F#.D7.91.D7.9E.D7.9C.D7.97.D7.9E.D7.AA_.D7.94.D7.A2.D7.A6.D7.9E.D7.90.D7.95.D7.AA
In most cases that I'm aware of, the bulk of the exodus occurred shortly before or after conquest, which undermines your proposed explanation - if the refugees' motives in leaving were as you propose, then one would expect them to evacuate somewhat ahead of the fighting.
2. There are several proposed explanations for the mass emigration and it's quite plausible that most of the causes suggested had played a part. Can you point out to any study that managed to conclusively quantify the motives of the refugees? Is such a study even possible, being as you wouldn't really expect them to be honest about their motives at the time, if their motives are what you say they were?
3. Returning to the original question of Hamas ideology, the motives that the refugees had are in fact entirely tangential. If we wish to understand why Hamas has the ideology it has, we must ask how the Palestinians perceived their history, rather than ask what actually happened. This is not to say that "what actually happened?" is not an important question in its own right - it certainly is. It's just not as relevant a question to understanding the origins of Hamas' ideology as the question "what did the Palestinians believe about the Nakba?".
Well, maybe, but it seems far more plausible to me that it's the other way around - Hamas are murderous anti-semites because this movement developed under the occupation, amongst the people who suffered the Naqba. As Moshe Dayan famously said, we can't blame them for hating us, as we took their homes and fields from them (not in those precise words, but that was his intent).
What you describe (robot taxis) sounds somewhat sensible for in-city traffic. Aren't high-speed trains meant for cross-country traffic? Particularly if the robot taxis aren't very fast, as you suggest.
Actually, I believe these questions haven't been dealt with. Otherwise, they wouldn't still be here. What we've learned on this kind of issue is that wishful thing trumps philosophy. Some people are willing to spend vast chunks of their life shoehorning reality and logic rather than question their basic wants.
I'm afraid that you severely underestimate the power of ignorance to forge ahead in the face of all knowledge.
Well, you nearly had me there, but then a I though: "what the heck, I'll google it".
There's Thomas Aquinas, the "immensely influential philosopher and theologian":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnipotence_paradox#Proposed_answers
The same article says:
"Another common response to the omnipotence paradox is to try to define omnipotence to mean something weaker than absolute omnipotence, such as definition 3 or 4 above. The paradox can be resolved by simply stipulating that omnipotence does not require the being to have abilities which are logically impossible, but only to be able to do anything which conforms to the laws of logic."
This is really old stuff.
Suit yourself. I don't see how your choices of definitions are relevant, though, because some theists clearly do define God's omnipotence as limited by logic:
"Thomas Aquinas asserts that the paradox arises from a misunderstanding of omnipotence. He maintains that inherent contradictions and logical impossibilities do not fall under the omnipotence of God.[14] J. L Cowan sees this paradox as a reason to reject the concept of absolute omnipotence,[15] while others, such as Rene Descartes, argue that God is absolutely omnipotent, despite the problem.[9]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnipotence_paradox#Proposed_answers
So what? Are you going to stop using logic because of that? If you are, then let me wish you the best of luck with your next argument!
You're right, the logical impossibility of such a rock requires the assumption of omnipotence (that is, omnipotence per my definition). Let me duplicate a reply I wrote to another gentleperson in this forum:
A possible argument would be:
1. God is omnipotent
2. Therefore, no rock could exist that God would not be able to lift.
3. God's omnipotence does not imply His ability to create things that cannot exist. He can only create things that can exist. That's still one heck of a superpower, mind you.
4. Therefore, God cannot create a rock so heavy that He himself cannot lift.
I put forth that this argument is consistent, though not necessarily correct.
As I hinted elsewhere, I'm actually an atheist, but this supposed paradox does not strike me as a good argument.
OK. A theist might believe in a God that is not quite omnipotent but is still capable of doing anything that is logically possible. Call it quasi-omnipotent. All the politics follow as before, and the rock argument got us nowhere. That's my point.
When we speak of God, which God is that? The God I posit did not necessarily create the laws of logic, and hence they may as well be fixed for all I know.
A possible argument would be:
1. God is omnipotent
2. Therefore, no rock could exist that God would not be able to lift.
3. God's omnipotence does not imply His ability to create things that cannot exist. He can only create things that can exist. That's still one heck of a superpower, mind you.
4. Therefore, God cannot create a rock that he himself cannot lift.
I put forth that this argument is consistent, though not necessarily correct.
Who said anything about logic alone? Logic sets the boundaries, and He makes the moves (or not, I'm not really a theist, I just play one on slashdot).
"Evolutionists" can't provide sufficient evidence to disprove this so-called "null hypothesis" because this hypothesis is unfalsifiable. So making intelligent design the null hypothesis is a way of rigging the debate such that only ID can win. Nice try.
The ID hypothesis is unfalsifiable because it gives rise to 0 predictions. Hence, there's really no point debating the ID hypothesis - it cannot be used to make any judgement about the probability of events, and therefore cannot lead us towards or away from useful (or harmful) choices of action.
The term "null hypothesis" is used in statistics to indicate the hypothesis that a suggested effect does not exist. In this case, a proper null hypothesis might be: "organisms developed completely at random, and long-term genetic change is unaffected by the environment". Or the null hypothesis might be "organisms have always the way they are now". Note that both of these hypotheses are falsifiable, in that they state things that can be indirectly observed and hence falsified.
So, to distinguish science from faith, we need to look at the falsifiability of a theory. It would be a start, anyway - if we don't agree on that, we cannot proceed to more complicated notions like parsimony (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor#Science_and_the_scientific_method).
What if we define omnipotence as "can do anything that is logically possible"? As in, not bound by physical laws, but still bound by logical laws?
In this case, God cannot create a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it, because no such rock could logically exist. So God's inability to create such a rock does not diminish His omnipotence. It's as if you asked: "Can God create a white sheet of paper that is also completely black?" Either the sheet is white or it is black. Similarly, either God can lift the rock, or the rock's existence is logically impossible.