So you are implying that as an atheist, I am unable to be a good person, because the only yardstick YOU have to define being good is your religion?
I'm not trying to continue a flame war, rather I feel the need to clarify and apologize. I don't believe atheists are any worse or better than religious people, but I understand how you could get that from my post, and I apologize. In fact, I have sometimes wondered if people who naturally find it easy to act morally are LESS likely to become Christian because they already feel like they are "pretty good" compared to everyone else.
I define "good" as obeying God and that God's 2 greatest commandments are to love Him, and to love your neighbor as yourself. I was just asking out of curiosity how an atheist defines "good". I expected to get a lot of different answers and I knew they'd be different than mine. Of course, I still think I'm right.
I believe Jesus has helped me to become a better person. I have believed in Christianity most of my life (I went through a time of questioning and doubt in high school and early college), but it's really only in recent years that I've really seen how much help I needed. I used to be a loner, and it's easy to be a "good guy" when you don't interact with people much. Now as a husband and father, when I have people who really rely on me, to the point where a careless word (or silence!) can harm them, I realize I need more help than I thought.
This is the difference between us, I take responsibility for my definition of "good". You, your lot, (and by "your lot" I mean, the witch burners, aborigine torturers, jet plane into high rise building fliers, you're all the same to me), think that as long as you can take a holiday from responsibility by passing it up to some "higher being" / (voices in some camel drivers head / revelations made by a sci-fi author to make money) you're perfectly justified in not being very damned "good" AT ALL!!
Yes, a lot of religious people have done a lot of bad things. That doesn't necessarily make religion bad, it could just mean religion doesn't ALWAYS make people good. You can also point to badness done in the name of atheism (communist persecution of religion, for example). You sound pretty prejudiced against religious people. I've known some very nice Muslims. They aren't all closet suicide bombers any more than all Christians are racists any more than all fps gamers are on the verge of acting out a shooting spree.
One way an atheist could define good is "a type of adaptive decision making that leads to making altruistic and innocuous decisions when ones actions could foreseeably affect the well-being of others, with the ultimate result of gaining all the advantages of living as a part of a community." Theres probably someone out there who has worded it better, thats just off the top of my head, but the basic idea is its in your own best interest to act "good" because as long as most other people are doing the same everyone benefits. Also if you go around pissing people off eventually its goign to be the wrong person and it won't end well for you.
So basically, you're saying altruism is just sophisticated selfishness?
People, being social animals, naturally live their lives this way for the most part anyway, ethics and all that are just philosophical justifications for what people already know "feels right." Of course theres some cases (abortion for example) where there is no obvious guiding instinct so the ethical rules mentioned above need to be generalized to take that situation into account as well. At which point the philosophy has come to be its own guiding principle. Thats not really inherently bad or anything, just worth thinking about. Anyway thats a rough Atheists guide to justifying good behavior.
What you seem to be calling instinct, I would call a conscience. Interesting answers, though. Thanks.
Like those egomaniacs that think "My children are deformed, God must be punishing me."
WTF? you did something so awesome, God himself took an interest in you AND made your children suffer?
If, for the sake of argument, you accept the premise of an omnipotent God, he may actually be able to pay attention to each and every one of us, and not just the "most important ones".
Meh. I'll stick to being an Atheist. God never punishes me, the Devil never tempts me, and I get to do good deeds just because they are good.
How does an atheist define "good"?
Regarding the actual article, consider these 2 sayings: "Knowledge is power", "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". I love science, but sometimes the power that is being put into fallible, corruptible human hands really concerns me.
I honestly don't know, but are game ratings purely advisory? I mean, can a 12 yr old walk into a store by himself and buy an M-rated game? He couldn't just walk into an R rated movie.
Personal Experience: I briefly worked for IBM when one of my employers "sold" my whole department to them (we went from being full time employees to being IBM contractors doing the same job). IBM looked like a pretty good deal at first -- same pay, same job, but better benefits and more time off. The catch is, they require a minimum of 2000 "billable hours" per year. 52 wks x 40hr/wk is 2080 hours, so that may sound reasonable at first, but the 12 holidays and 2 weeks of vacation you get and any sick days you need are not "billable". Nor is time spent at IBM company meetings. So in effect you get 2 weeks off and anything beyond that you are expected to make up for with unpaid overtime.
I left IBM after about a year. Many companies expect or pressure their employees to work unpaid overtime and have been getting away with it for years, but IBM actually made it an official policy - I suspect that's why they are getting in trouble. I'm a big free market proponent, and normally would say, "if a company's compensation plan is bad, then don't work there!". Well, I did leave, but you could say I didn't exactly choose to work for IBM in the first place.
Just because I said it was confusing doesn't mean I think it needs to be made simpler by regulation or any other means. All those confusing plans arise from healthy competition between businesses. If you think simpler is better, you're free to enter the market with your simpler plans (be a reseller - then you don't even have to build a network!). I was just pointing out that it is confusing enough that some people would welcome a "cell phone expert" to help them decide. However, I also think that should be a private sector service. Let consumers decide whether such services are worth it.
... the voice plans themselves can be confusing. If you just had a fixed rate per minute, or even a number of included minutes plus a fixed rate per minute thereafter, it wouldn't be that bad, but there are so many kinds of minutes: peak, off-peak, evening (and when does "evening" start?), weekend, same carrier, same account, "friends/family", rollover, etc.
That's in the U.S. I've never looked at a Japanese cell plan. For all I know, they might be even more complicated
Yarr, it be an average, I'm sure you've heard of them. Oh yes, and 0.2mm is a pretty big number, rather easy to measure.
I think it's a valid question how they came up with that number. I suspect they estimated the volume of melted ice per year and divided that by the surface area of the oceans.
Watch for increasingly asymmetric ISP plans (download good,
upload bad), and protocol-based throttling or filtering, by the pipe providers.
That started with 56k for dialup and was an optimization based on common usage -- most people download more than they upload. If you're going to claim that there is some sinister intent behind optimizing for download, you ought to provide some evidence.
I've heard it said that death itself (from 'old age') may have been an evolutionary convention - in fact, evolution seems to require it to operate at all.
Yes. Early on there were organisms that never died, but they died out.
Contemplate why many people claim that tort reform
is necessary. If you are not senile, you will get
the connection.
Okay, I'll take a stab at it. If tort reform is about limiting civil litigation and damage awards, then maybe you're saying it will benefit companies whose hiring and compensation practices might invite litigation? If that's what you meant, I think it represents a pretty narrow, biased view of tort reform.
Especially as we get into transhumanism, the religious will be less important to the technology economy.
transhumanism?! you sound like one of the bad guys in "That Hideous Strength". It's Christian science fiction. You might enjoy reading it if religion is something you just don't care about and not something you absolutely hate.
Do you have any evidence that atheists buy more technology? I wouldn't assume that. My church is full of people with fancy computers and PDAs and other gadgets.
As we get more people into atheism and computing, the demand for those same people grows.
I'm sorry, "atheism"? What does that have to do with anything? I'm genuinely curious, did you mean a different word or was that some kind of subliminal message attempt?
No, but you may have no idea how difficult it it to make them look that great. Most of the lighting, even in modern games, is pre-calculated, and they use a lot of "tricks" to get those realistic effects, but if you look closely enough, you start to notice the shortcuts. My current favorite games are the half life 2 series. The flashlight shadows look good, but they are unidirectional and don't "fan out" like they should. It looks fine at medium distance (and I think it just cuts off at some distance), but for very close objects it doesn't look right. An object very close and to one side of you will still cast it's shadow directly forward (rather than directly away from you). Sometimes the pre-calculated and dynamic lighting don't blend well. I remember one place where I pushed a door from a light room into a dark room, and part of the door still looked brightly lit.
If you look at a map editor, there are all kinds of lighting "things" placed all over it, and reflection maps are placed at certain points and pre-calculated based on static lighting (which would imply, I guess, that you wouldn't ever see a reflection of a dynamic light, or even the light it casts). With ray tracing, lighting and reflections could all be calculated in real time, so the mapper's job would be easier with ray tracing, and you wouldn't necessarily have to throw any existing content - it would just be rendered differently (e.g., the author's ray traced version of Quake 4).
I'm sure some things would be MORE difficult with ray tracing. I think diffuse lighting is pretty expensive, so maybe soft shadows and volumetric fog would be difficult. The author makes a compelling argument that ray tracing will become cheaper than rasterization at some point, but I'm sure it will have a rough start. I would expect the first big RT games to be designed to show off what RT does well, and cover up what it does not. Eventually, they will come up with tricks (and probably specialized hardware) to make "everything" look good, even if it's not always quite "right". Just like they've done with raster graphics. Then we'll have to work on getting real time
photon mapping into games!
Seriously, if you were trying to rebut, I didn't grasp that which you were hinting at.
I believe he meant something like: by the time we notice detrimental effects of GM food, it might be too late to avoid a disaster. (like if in 10 yrs all the people who've been eating GM beef from McDonald's get cancer or something).
By 2038 I'd expect everyone to be on 64-bit processors, if not 128- or 256-bit hardware
Not to nitpick, but a system's cpu instruction and date representation don't have to be the same bit length. An 8bit computer could use 64bit dates and be safe, and a 128bit computer could use a 32bit date and have a problem.
You can come up with any number of numerological associations for any event. Seriously. Try it some time. Pick any event, and you can come up with a dozen, if you try.
Really?! So there are always at least 12 numerological associations with every event in history?! OMG, I'm totally freaking out!!!11!1!
There's a price point below which CDs would no longer be economically feasible to copy, and I reckon that's about £4.
I think it would be lower, or maybe even zero. If you're going to copy music, why buy even a £4 cd when you can rip mp3's off of a friend's cd and load them to a player. Now it's MORE convenient than the cd and I paid nothing.
And with your book example, sure it doesn't make economic sense to "xerox" a whole book instead of buying it, but book piracy does occur, because the per book cost of printing 1000s of books is very low.
This might sound out of place, but isn't at some point TV (for entertainment) just...TV? While increasing resolution is something I'm sure the enthusiast can appreciate, isn't there a point where size and quality of image cease to matter?
I agree. Look at the article and the pictures. HDTV was supposed to be "30 degree tv". It's supposed to look "perfect" (meaning you can't see pixels or scan lines) if it's taking up 30 degrees of your horizontal field of vision. Since you can only perceive detail in about the center 30 degrees of your view, this was intended to be "high enough" resolution for anyone. This Japanese monster is basically a 1080 line HDTV x 16 (4x width and 4x height). It looks perfect taking up 100 degrees of your view. I have to think this is only useful for niche venues. E.g., I could see it being used in a digital "IMAX" theater where you may actually be that close to the screen.
Same with the audio... can you really distinguish 24 audio channels with only 2 ears? Could you distinguish it from, say, 12 channels? Maybe some could, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't.
Hey, why is there such a shortage of resources? Can't capitalism solve that? Is it that the damn Earth doesn't get this whole supply/demand thing? Aargh, we're living on a commie planet!
I know you're just making a joke, but I don't think you understand what you're joking about. The capitalist idea of letting the free market determine price based on supply and demand does not mean a capitalist thinks the supply of anything is endless. If Helium is in short supply, the free market price should increase, which should result in less consumption of Helium. If the price gets high enough, those natural gas producers will start capturing helium because it will become profitable to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Not after you've played them many times.
I'm not trying to continue a flame war, rather I feel the need to clarify and apologize. I don't believe atheists are any worse or better than religious people, but I understand how you could get that from my post, and I apologize. In fact, I have sometimes wondered if people who naturally find it easy to act morally are LESS likely to become Christian because they already feel like they are "pretty good" compared to everyone else.
I define "good" as obeying God and that God's 2 greatest commandments are to love Him, and to love your neighbor as yourself. I was just asking out of curiosity how an atheist defines "good". I expected to get a lot of different answers and I knew they'd be different than mine. Of course, I still think I'm right.
I believe Jesus has helped me to become a better person. I have believed in Christianity most of my life (I went through a time of questioning and doubt in high school and early college), but it's really only in recent years that I've really seen how much help I needed. I used to be a loner, and it's easy to be a "good guy" when you don't interact with people much. Now as a husband and father, when I have people who really rely on me, to the point where a careless word (or silence!) can harm them, I realize I need more help than I thought.
This is the difference between us, I take responsibility for my definition of "good". You, your lot, (and by "your lot" I mean, the witch burners, aborigine torturers, jet plane into high rise building fliers, you're all the same to me), think that as long as you can take a holiday from responsibility by passing it up to some "higher being" / (voices in some camel drivers head / revelations made by a sci-fi author to make money) you're perfectly justified in not being very damned "good" AT ALL!!Yes, a lot of religious people have done a lot of bad things. That doesn't necessarily make religion bad, it could just mean religion doesn't ALWAYS make people good. You can also point to badness done in the name of atheism (communist persecution of religion, for example). You sound pretty prejudiced against religious people. I've known some very nice Muslims. They aren't all closet suicide bombers any more than all Christians are racists any more than all fps gamers are on the verge of acting out a shooting spree.
So basically, you're saying altruism is just sophisticated selfishness?
People, being social animals, naturally live their lives this way for the most part anyway, ethics and all that are just philosophical justifications for what people already know "feels right." Of course theres some cases (abortion for example) where there is no obvious guiding instinct so the ethical rules mentioned above need to be generalized to take that situation into account as well. At which point the philosophy has come to be its own guiding principle. Thats not really inherently bad or anything, just worth thinking about. Anyway thats a rough Atheists guide to justifying good behavior.What you seem to be calling instinct, I would call a conscience. Interesting answers, though. Thanks.
If, for the sake of argument, you accept the premise of an omnipotent God, he may actually be able to pay attention to each and every one of us, and not just the "most important ones".
Meh. I'll stick to being an Atheist. God never punishes me, the Devil never tempts me, and I get to do good deeds just because they are good.How does an atheist define "good"?
Regarding the actual article, consider these 2 sayings: "Knowledge is power", "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". I love science, but sometimes the power that is being put into fallible, corruptible human hands really concerns me.
I honestly don't know, but are game ratings purely advisory? I mean, can a 12 yr old walk into a store by himself and buy an M-rated game? He couldn't just walk into an R rated movie.
Personal Experience: I briefly worked for IBM when one of my employers "sold" my whole department to them (we went from being full time employees to being IBM contractors doing the same job). IBM looked like a pretty good deal at first -- same pay, same job, but better benefits and more time off. The catch is, they require a minimum of 2000 "billable hours" per year. 52 wks x 40hr/wk is 2080 hours, so that may sound reasonable at first, but the 12 holidays and 2 weeks of vacation you get and any sick days you need are not "billable". Nor is time spent at IBM company meetings. So in effect you get 2 weeks off and anything beyond that you are expected to make up for with unpaid overtime.
I left IBM after about a year. Many companies expect or pressure their employees to work unpaid overtime and have been getting away with it for years, but IBM actually made it an official policy - I suspect that's why they are getting in trouble. I'm a big free market proponent, and normally would say, "if a company's compensation plan is bad, then don't work there!". Well, I did leave, but you could say I didn't exactly choose to work for IBM in the first place.
Just because I said it was confusing doesn't mean I think it needs to be made simpler by regulation or any other means. All those confusing plans arise from healthy competition between businesses. If you think simpler is better, you're free to enter the market with your simpler plans (be a reseller - then you don't even have to build a network!). I was just pointing out that it is confusing enough that some people would welcome a "cell phone expert" to help them decide. However, I also think that should be a private sector service. Let consumers decide whether such services are worth it.
But if it does that, it gets inherited by init, and init's such a taskmaster!
... the voice plans themselves can be confusing. If you just had a fixed rate per minute, or even a number of included minutes plus a fixed rate per minute thereafter, it wouldn't be that bad, but there are so many kinds of minutes: peak, off-peak, evening (and when does "evening" start?), weekend, same carrier, same account, "friends/family", rollover, etc.
That's in the U.S. I've never looked at a Japanese cell plan. For all I know, they might be even more complicated
I think it's a valid question how they came up with that number. I suspect they estimated the volume of melted ice per year and divided that by the surface area of the oceans.
That started with 56k for dialup and was an optimization based on common usage -- most people download more than they upload. If you're going to claim that there is some sinister intent behind optimizing for download, you ought to provide some evidence.
...new weapons that rely on 'contagious' stress.Hopefully they can separately trigger the "fight" and "flight" responses.
Yes. Early on there were organisms that never died, but they died out.
Okay, I'll take a stab at it. If tort reform is about limiting civil litigation and damage awards, then maybe you're saying it will benefit companies whose hiring and compensation practices might invite litigation? If that's what you meant, I think it represents a pretty narrow, biased view of tort reform.
transhumanism?! you sound like one of the bad guys in "That Hideous Strength". It's Christian science fiction. You might enjoy reading it if religion is something you just don't care about and not something you absolutely hate.
Do you have any evidence that atheists buy more technology? I wouldn't assume that. My church is full of people with fancy computers and PDAs and other gadgets.
Maybe it's the senility, but I don't see the connection to tort reform.
I'm sorry, "atheism"? What does that have to do with anything? I'm genuinely curious, did you mean a different word or was that some kind of subliminal message attempt?
No, but you may have no idea how difficult it it to make them look that great. Most of the lighting, even in modern games, is pre-calculated, and they use a lot of "tricks" to get those realistic effects, but if you look closely enough, you start to notice the shortcuts. My current favorite games are the half life 2 series. The flashlight shadows look good, but they are unidirectional and don't "fan out" like they should. It looks fine at medium distance (and I think it just cuts off at some distance), but for very close objects it doesn't look right. An object very close and to one side of you will still cast it's shadow directly forward (rather than directly away from you). Sometimes the pre-calculated and dynamic lighting don't blend well. I remember one place where I pushed a door from a light room into a dark room, and part of the door still looked brightly lit.
If you look at a map editor, there are all kinds of lighting "things" placed all over it, and reflection maps are placed at certain points and pre-calculated based on static lighting (which would imply, I guess, that you wouldn't ever see a reflection of a dynamic light, or even the light it casts). With ray tracing, lighting and reflections could all be calculated in real time, so the mapper's job would be easier with ray tracing, and you wouldn't necessarily have to throw any existing content - it would just be rendered differently (e.g., the author's ray traced version of Quake 4).
I'm sure some things would be MORE difficult with ray tracing. I think diffuse lighting is pretty expensive, so maybe soft shadows and volumetric fog would be difficult. The author makes a compelling argument that ray tracing will become cheaper than rasterization at some point, but I'm sure it will have a rough start. I would expect the first big RT games to be designed to show off what RT does well, and cover up what it does not. Eventually, they will come up with tricks (and probably specialized hardware) to make "everything" look good, even if it's not always quite "right". Just like they've done with raster graphics. Then we'll have to work on getting real time photon mapping into games!
To me, the interesting thing was embedding the OS in the BIOS.
I believe he meant something like: by the time we notice detrimental effects of GM food, it might be too late to avoid a disaster. (like if in 10 yrs all the people who've been eating GM beef from McDonald's get cancer or something).
Not to nitpick, but a system's cpu instruction and date representation don't have to be the same bit length. An 8bit computer could use 64bit dates and be safe, and a 128bit computer could use a 32bit date and have a problem.
Really?! So there are always at least 12 numerological associations with every event in history?! OMG, I'm totally freaking out!!!11!1!
I think it would be lower, or maybe even zero. If you're going to copy music, why buy even a £4 cd when you can rip mp3's off of a friend's cd and load them to a player. Now it's MORE convenient than the cd and I paid nothing.
And with your book example, sure it doesn't make economic sense to "xerox" a whole book instead of buying it, but book piracy does occur, because the per book cost of printing 1000s of books is very low.
I agree. Look at the article and the pictures. HDTV was supposed to be "30 degree tv". It's supposed to look "perfect" (meaning you can't see pixels or scan lines) if it's taking up 30 degrees of your horizontal field of vision. Since you can only perceive detail in about the center 30 degrees of your view, this was intended to be "high enough" resolution for anyone. This Japanese monster is basically a 1080 line HDTV x 16 (4x width and 4x height). It looks perfect taking up 100 degrees of your view. I have to think this is only useful for niche venues. E.g., I could see it being used in a digital "IMAX" theater where you may actually be that close to the screen.
Same with the audio... can you really distinguish 24 audio channels with only 2 ears? Could you distinguish it from, say, 12 channels? Maybe some could, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't.
I know you're just making a joke, but I don't think you understand what you're joking about. The capitalist idea of letting the free market determine price based on supply and demand does not mean a capitalist thinks the supply of anything is endless. If Helium is in short supply, the free market price should increase, which should result in less consumption of Helium. If the price gets high enough, those natural gas producers will start capturing helium because it will become profitable to do so.