bascule

Just a point of order... this thread isn't about socialized medicine

By that rationale, shouldn't there be no problem because they're all on the Muslim side?

First, your usage of "impredicative" is incorrect, as impredicativity describes the definition of sets, not statements. Second, if you truly want to argue against Godel's theorems, please provide your argument in the form of predicate calculus. If you feel there is something wrong with Godel's self-referential statements, perhaps you could provide a proof which leads to a contradiction and thus demonstrates Godel's arguments to be false. Otherwise, shut the f*ck up already, you annoying troll.

If that's the case, then Saudi Arabia supports the Wahhibist side of the conflict... the ideology of the 9/11 hijackers. That's not to mention that over 3/4ths of them were Saudi nationals...

Surprise surprise... the war on terror is f*cked http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2215380,00.html Why is it we're drumming up war with Iran when the Saudis are and have always been the problem? Oh right, oil...

Martin, I saw a rather critical review of this paper, which unfortunately I cannot find anymore. The critic cited descriptions in the paper which expressed sums of certain forces which the critic considered incompatible. Have you seen anything along those lines?

Or so he claims: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7105001.stm I've hoped this festering sore of a case would finally break open and something would come of it, but so far we've seen little beyond the trial and subsequent pardon of Scooter Libby. This is direct confirmation by a White House insider that the President sought to directly deceive the American people by asking his press secretary to lie. Well, there's my spin, I'm sure there's others who will try to spin it the opposite direction somehow.

If you're talking about the Republicans prescription drug bill I mostly agree, however... How is it a socialist bubble when corporations are the ones making money hand over foot? Ever had to drive 120 miles round trip to see an in-network specialist? With a $100 copay, of course...

Computational biology offers the promise of realistic models of cellular systems. Projects like Blue Gene and Folding@home are trying to brute-force a lookup table for how proteins fold. Once this is complete, computers will also be much faster, and it will be realistic to start building accurate computer models of cellular and multicellular behavior. Once you have that, you're on your way to artificial organisms, including artificial humans, modeled down to the cellular level. Thus far there's no reason to believe that an artificial human with an artificial brain wouldn't be an intelligent, conscious being. There's plenty of systems which have emergent "creative" properties. However almost none of them are modeled after the behavior of the high level structures of the human brain. Nor are such systems generally capable of general intelligence. The closest thing to a general intelligence system based off human neurophysiology is Numenta's Hierarchical Temporal Memory. This system is not only capable of creativity but also prediction, and unlike most other "creative" systems is capable of general intelligence.

Apparently you haven't read...

The only cost control in the present system is denying care, especially particularly expensive care like organ transplants or other life saving surgeries. The US has the costliest healthcare system in the world as a percentage of GDP. Americans spend a greater percentage of their money than any other country on earth, yet for some reason report nowhere near the highest satisfaction levels. How can you possibly argue that a private system keeps costs lower when that's the exact opposite the present situation? The costliest healthcare system in the world is also one of the most privatized.

Ron Paul's support is quite real, but a big act of misdirection. A lot of his support comes from Alex Jones' anarchist movement. Alex Jones, of course, covers infowars.com with Ron Paul promotion next to a big sidebar of 9/11 conspiracy theories. There's a lot of crossover in support between those two camps as well. I don't actively support Ron Paul but I like what he's trying to do. It's too bad a lot of his support comes from anarchist nutjobs.

Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong (in)fame(y) had a mixed albeit slightly optimistic review: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=617 Most of the negative reviews of this I've seen have been in the form of ad hominem character assassination (calling him "surfer dude"), although I've seen the inclusion of a number of scientific complaints regarding the mixing of incompatible parameters. Sadly, I don't have links offhand.

Can an admin please lock this thread? This person is a known multi-forum troll spreading complete bullshit. Here's some of my canned responses to this asshole: Godel's second theorem applies to any formal system extending Peano arithmetic (the P axioms) The simple theory of types that emerges from Russel's Axiom of Reducibility does not undermine Godel's second theorem. Russel instead underestimated the expressive power of type systems emergent from the natural numbers: http://www.ams.org/notices/200604/fea-kanamori.pdf http://www.springerlink.com/content/kw175702q720007t/ Russel's type system and its surrounding axioms are irrelevant since infinite types are emergent from his logic system and furthermore infinite types are required for a complete system, yet the axiom of reducibility limits PM to finite types. To the contrary of your (vicarious) argument, the axiom of reducibility necessitates an incomplete system. Godel's non-usage of it was irrelevant, since the requisite type system was emergent from the Peano axioms alone (per the second incompleteness theorem). Including the Axiom of Reducibility in PM necessitates it be relegated to an incomplete system since Godel proved a complete system requires infinite types. Omitting AR does not make for a complete system either since the provision of an infinite type system (per the second completeness theorem) facilitates self-referential statements which are unprovable in the system in which they are declared. Can you please state a formal refutation of Godel's proof in predicate calculus? Anything else is mere sophistry and evidence that you don't know what the f*ck you're talking about.

I'd certainly hope that a degree of empathy plays a role in most people's individual morality I weep to think that many are merely guided by adherence to the social contract. That idea seems pretty Randian... and Rand argued that when the social contract isn't at play, the well-being of your friends trumps empathy for other feeling beings, and thus murder of those who oppose your friends is ok, even in cases when their life isn't in jeopardy, which I find pretty scary...

I believe empathy is a natural consequence of being a conscious being: you can recognize other conscious beings and recognize that they share similar characteristics to yourself. I also believe there may have been a sort of Baldwinesque fixing of empathic capacity in humans, although I'm wary to speculate about group selection after having read Dawkins deconstruction on it. Of course, Dawkins has also opined on the matter of genetic fixing of empathy himself, and seems to believe that some of that has taken place. If you look at morality from the perspective of Rousseau's social contract, then the minimum level of morality (i.e. being an upstanding member of society) is dictated purely by rational self-interest. I believe a combination of these factors provides the underlying mechanisms for being moral, i.e. I don't murder because: 1. I empathize with others' desire not to be killed, therefore I feel morally obligated not to murder 2. Society would seek retribution if I committed murder, therefore it's in my rational self-interest not to murder

So there are Hillary Supporters on SFN... wonder why they never spoke up for her on the "Who actually likes Hillary Clinton?" thread I voted for my in a perfect world candidate, Dennis Kucinich. Everyone else seems to have voted for the "Only realistic non-Hillary candidate", Obama. I was kinda torn on that. In the actual primaries I'll be voting for Obama, simply to vote against Hillary with some sort of effectiveness. Kucinich is clearly unelectable as a president I also voted for Ron Paul, because he's pretty much the only Republican candidate who isn't a totalitarian freedom-hating neo-Imperialist warmongering spendaholic douchebag

Ben Stein documents what he considers to be academic suppression of intelligent design proponents in a new movie: http://www.expelledthemovie.com/playground.php Check out Big Science Academy, where he sarcastically lampoons prevailing scientific opinion: http://www.expelledthemovie.com/bigscienceacademy.php He's tossing Einstein and Galileo into those expelled from "Big Science Academy" for good measure: http://www.expelledthemovie.com/bigscienceacademy_expelled.php

I found this hilarious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjgidAICoQI Yes, continental drift is a massive scientific conspiracy. The real answer is the earth is expanding! This video comes from Neal Adams, a former comic book artist. Wikipedia page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_earth_theory

And what happens when people simply don't report those purchases? You think people are going to voluntarily pay tax on the couch they bought on Craigslist?

I'll leave any further debate to adequacy.org: http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.4.28.132234.276.html

On the flipside all the income that normally goes to untraceable transactions would be lost. This includes not only transactions for illicit goods but things like Craigslist and eBay. Seems like a lot more people would want to start buying things on the gray market, as they would be substantially cheaper. Not necessarily a bad thing, unless you consider tax revenue... And while I'm at it, let me chime in with my "This tax unduly burdens the poor"

Erlang

MacOS has never used X11. The "X" in OS X simply means 10, the last release of original MacOS X being 9. OS X uses a display architecture originally stemming from NeXTSTEP's Display Postscript. The Quartz 2D graphics libraries in OS X use a PDF-like imaging model, sometimes referred to as "Display PDF"

Abiword has a native OS X port. Eclipse is written in Java and runs on the OS X JVM. I really can't stand Amarok, but I've been less vocal about iTunes after Apple started sticking everything and the kitchen sink into it. iTunes 3 was wonderful though. Terminal.app has always been underwhelming. I'm a fan of iTerm though. As I said... I run X on my Mac... for Wireshark pretty much exclusively. Actually, Firefox is built on a cross-platform abstraction framework, commonly known as "XULrunner". XUL has implementations in Win32, Carbon (one of the Mac application frameworks), and X11. There were issues with Leopard and certain dropdown dialogs in Firefox, but those were resolved in the latest update. Considering X11 is the slowest of the backends supported by XUL runner, I think it'd be pretty stupid to do that. Perhaps you're confusing an X client with an X server... It's been installed by default since Tiger. Perhaps you're thinking of Jaguar. Try cmd-Q The shared menu has a number of excellent properties. From a human interface perspective they're trying to leverage Fitts' law. Beyond that it works like a fullscreen MDI window, but doesn't obscure the background with a needless gray box.