padren

When you have a man in custody' date=' and you control where he eats, what he eats, where he sleeps, where he can walk, who he can associate with, if anyone...you pretty much can say he poses no risk. Is he going to overpower armed guards? Can you think of any condition where a living human being is more impotent and subject to the control of others? I wasn't talking about the conventions as they apply to their own justice system (as they don't), I am saying we apply those conventions to our enemies (which I stated), even the ones we consider monsters who don't respect the conventions themselves. The reason we still treat them humanely is not for their benefit but for our own, so we do not become even a little like them.

The only reason I'd have for wanting him hurt would be emotional, and has nothing to do with punishment, seperating him from general society, etc, so on principle I have to buck up and say life in prison. Some principles, such as that one should not kill a defenesless human being who poses no risks, are more important than an emotional reaction to the horrible acts that human being did. We don't "not kill them" for their benefit, just like we don't uphold the Geneva conventions for the benefit of our enemies. Those are things we do for ourselves, so we can keep being the people we like to be.

Perhaps the term "creationism" has been hijacked, but as far as I know it isn't the idea that God created the universe, its the idea that God created the universe in 7 days, according to Genesis. I think the vast majority of people that believe that God created everything also believe evolution was the process by which we came to be. Its the loud, cranky, dying breeds of fundamentalism that proclaim they are mutually exclusive. PS: How many creationists does it take to strawman evolution with a lightbulb analogy?

Pure speculation as I walked home with my coffee, so don't think too much of it: Concept Device: A glass contianer is filled with a low density of a clear gas, two laser beams swivel on 2 axis much like the reader of a CD ROM. Laser one, is a simple coler/brightness beam. Laser two, is a higher powered ultraviolet beam (or infrared if you can get it to high enough energy, which may be a contraction with infrared by nature..I am not sure) Laser three, is another higher powered ultraviolet beam identical to laser two. Process: A 3D graphics system sends data for the 3D model to the base controller for the three lasers, which then target the points in x,y,z to be rendered with the appropriate brightness and color. Laser one sends the beam of the right color and brightness. Lasers two and three also converge on that point, exciting the gas enough to reflect the light of laser one. The energy from just laser two or three is not enough to excite the gas, so only the pin point location of the convergence can be luminated by the laser one. The gas is only excited long enough to maintain the brightness for a fraction of a second, (1/20th or 1/60th would result in those frame rates, etc), by which time the lasers would have finished their sweep and started back at point one. Additional trios of lasers could be added to speed up the system with parallel rendering. Failings: There would be no way to project black, nor any way to ensure if you look at the screen from the front where a dimmer patch of texture resides, that bright textures on the opposing side won't make them hard to view, so it would only really work if it only rendered the faces facing forward, preventing you from walking around the display, etc. The heat differences could cause the gas to circulate, though the framerate would likely be too fast to notice this. Unlike systems that trick the left and right eye into seeing fake depth, this system is limited to 3D renderings within the space of the glass container. Edit: And one other failing: the radiant light reflecting off the gas could interfere with other luminated areas of the same scene, and it would be impossible to prevent colors from bleeding this way. I suppose the system could be pretty but even if it could be engineered I guess it would be mostly useless.

After looking at that site it looks just like a big ol image map. If it helps check out: http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/images/images_famsupp_220.html Most fairly basic paint programs (not MSPaint though) can give you the X,Y location of the mouse over the image, so you can those coords to plot out the borders to your ads' rectangles. I am not sure how valueable those types of sites are: I'd never click a single one of those ads...they don't even say what they do and they clearly aren't selected by relevance to the topic of the site they are on.

Thats an interesting thought...I haven't really thought much about the number of "input variables" that went into creating this universe. I actually suspect though that since things like the planck's length constant are based on observations of the universe as it is, we would never "feed" the desired planck constant into our Universe Maker device, but instead would put more fundamental variables in that would result in a universe where the planck length would end up the same. Its worth noting too that it may be very hard to create a "near clone" of the universe...that either it would be bang on identical or very different. Any little shift in iterrative systems can often make the complex long term results look incredibly different.

I can understand the intuitiveness of that, given the nature of thermodynamics, but I disagree because the complexity in the universe arise out of such simple processes and laws. I would go as far as to say its the simplicity that seeds the complexity and shows through that makes so much of the inatimate world feel beautiful. You don't need to know every "pixel" value on a grid to create an amazingly complex fractal image, just the base formula. I think whether a fractal or a universe, the principle is the same. I think its pretty facinating and I hadn't really thought about the implications of the factors that are leading us in that direction until singularity die-hard(s) on this forum brought it to my attention. I should thank you for pointing Kurzweil out as well, I taped him on CNN a while back and it was pretty interesting. I'll look at that video soon, now that I found out what the thread is about: To be honest, I saw the title "Building Gods" and assumed it was a "manufactured christianity" type threads and never really looked lol.

It is basically like natural selection because natural selection is based on the critter's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment. Since the environment in this case happens to include a guy with a pair of tweezers and a DNA analyzer playing cockroach god deciding who lives and dies...I'd say its basically the same thing. Still, you could do away with the cockroaches entirely, and just take their DNA...replicate a large batch...hit it with a little radiation to break the chains and let them repair (ie mutate) and then grab the most humanish ones to replicate the next batch from. Then you don't have the pesky problems of if the mid-species die off due to natural incompatabilities. The biggest issue with the selective system you are proposing though, is that the ones you select as having the most humanish DNA may also be the least likely to be fertile, have functional digestive systems, etc. You would to pick a compromise out of the most humanish AND the most healthy, ie, the healthiest kinda-humanish ones. There are a lot of breeds of dogs with chronic health problems, and you are trying to push things a lot farther than dog breeders.

oh but how sweet such power must be

I am always a fan of dynamic website design. Just this month I got a new partner, a downtown office, and moved up from 35/hr to 65/hr. My partner is in marketing and graphics design, I am a programmer, so it works out quite well. The nice thing about that line of work is it lets you leverage your previous experience very well, and it gives you the tools to do your own "get rich" side projects. My goal now is to move out of by-the-hour work and build systems that just make income and grow. The lovely thing is with distributed services, is that there is no real expense to adding a new paying customer so growth is easier than any other industry. Its still the sort of thing you need to know what you are doing and you'd be competing with many people, but with an Engineer and two IT guys, plus someone from retail (business management and marketing is a must), all you need to add is the design angle. Its more than using design software though, it takes a really artistic touch, imo. Just never underestimate the power of a good marketer/sales guy, and good graphics design. As a programmer I always thought good programming spoke for itself...the problem is most clients can't speak that langauge and have to follow the pretty pictures. PS: I am all self taught, and never so much as filled in a college app, so its not the sort of thing that you need to spend a lotta years learning to do.

By all appearances where and how anyone is born is a complete lottery. To say science cannot prove this is like saying science can't prove that oranges don't dance when unobserved. I mean think about it: The statement "all men were created equal" refers to no one has any inherent rights that others do not, ie, no divine right etc. If you examine history, every case of a claim to Divine Right has been pretty clear cut and nothing more than an agreement between the people involved to act as if that were so. In other words, only when people treated a king like a king, did kings ever have power. Only when people would treat his son as an heir by divine right would he benefit from divine right. When people decided it was bunk...their heads were as easy to chop off as anyone elses. And with all that aside, it could also read: "We hold this truth to be self evident, that listening to music at least once a week is good for any person's mental well being," which could not be scientifically proven and may ignore entire populations of deaf people. It doesn't even have to be true. It just has to be something "we" hold to be self evident, rightly, wrongly, logically, emotionally, intuitively, whatever...there are tons of other ways to hold a conviction that have absolutely nothing to do with any type of spiritual faith.

One issue with genes is that they are instructions on how to build an embyro and turn that into a fetus, and into a baby, and that into a grown human adult. The genes that grow the muscles may or may not be the ones that maintain their cells (not sure how all that works) but you couldn't say, replace your DNA with that of someone taller and have all your bones suddenly want to grow as tall as that person. If we change some maintenance DNA, then that will likely show changes retroactively, but it would probably only work within a narrow range of feasible alterations, dictated by how the DNA does its job in the first place. As for changing the DNA in the fertalized egg before it starts splitting...that could be done, and I think that is how we cloned Dolly for the most part (just replacing all of it instead of part of it). Part of the problem is that it would be largely trial and error, and each error would result in a horrible quality of life (if any) for the test subject child, so if it is going to happen, it will be on a tropical island with a dormant volcano on it, in some mad scientist's lab.

Fellbeast, the age of the sun is a matter of basic physics. I am curious how much of basic science you think is wrong, so far it sounds like: Astronomy (the amount of time it takes to form planets, stars, etc) Cosmology (the evidence supporting a very long history to the universe) Classical Physics (mass of the sun by volume and how much hydrogen fuel it actually contains) Nuclear Physics (ie, how the sun can turn hydrogen into helium and release so much energy) Evolutionary Biology (if all mutations are negative or neutral, I guess the evolutionists still have credibility simply because they never went up against a genius like yourself who could point out such a simple flaw in their work) Geology (again, the age issue) ...to start with. It sounds to me like those disiciples have really simplistic reasons why they are simply and incontravertably flawed, yet somehow people still dedicate whole lives to those fields. So, how is it that people of science can be so dumb as to be so wrong about so many things, and yet we can send probes to mars, collect samples from comets, and the computer you yourself are using doesn't fissle and blink out? I am not saying you should accept scientific findings at face value, but have some respect for what the disciplines have accomplished and put more thought into your arguments. If you think you have found a really simple reason why evolution cannot be true, then see who else has asked that and find the rebuttals, and make a great effort to understand them.

Anytime you have multiple elements of information that seem to test "true" in your head that are mutually exclusive, you'll find that sort of situation. Its all you. Sometimes we can allow data to not reconcile as we really don't care about the quality of that data, and other times it can nearly drive us nuts, especially when its tied to an emotional need to resolve contradiction.

There is also the issue of complexity. No matter what the science is based on, on what the cause and effect chains are triggered by and in turn trigger...etc...if you want to achieve a complex result you'll need complex knowledge of the science. So I would say you could change the rules of the universe in many ways to change the resulting sciences in many ways, but I think it would still be limited in the simplicity/complexity department.

Out of curiousity, I am reminded of various accounts of intense situations including fighter jet pilots reporting the feeling of time slowing down, and counting say, the number of rivets in the tail section of a mig as it crosses over in a dog fight. I have no idea to what degree such accounts of been credited/discredited/debunked/confirmed etc, as well as other incidents such as people with autism performing exceptional mathmatics mentally...these aren't incidents of "using a higher percentage of the brain" but if credible they are certainly accounts of using the brain in more effective ways (with regards to specific capacities) spurred by either highly stressful conditions (the dogfighter) or something different in the development of the mind (ie with autism). I don't mean to hijack the thread but it does tie into the OP's topic.

God no. Why on this earth would you want the government messing around with your personal views on what makes life worth living? Maybe you don't have enough Shiva in your life or maybe you need the clarity that only Dianetics can bring - but who do you want in charge of determining what makes your life worth living? If there is any single thing that the government should not be involved in - that would be it. Well-being is one thing, and only within limits (if I want to buy unhealthy amounts of scotch and cigs thats my business) - but the ideas of what life worth living are so varied and so often contradictory that government should at most try to cause the least hinderances to its citizens own pursuits of worth and happiness...not determine what that is. And as far as having a "comprehensive set of ideas" behind its laws that is why reason and rationality exist. Laws based on faith are little more than Appeals to Authority, when it should be self evident that if they have any use to a society, that they'll be able to stand on their own merits by means of reason and logic.

No, they quite simply are not. The closest that comes to truth is to say that laws are as much based on faith as that we believe what we see with our eyes. You could argue that you don't know a car is really coming at you but as a matter of "faith" in your senses you get out of the way when you perceive one coming. While you could argue that is true, you're basically quibbling over an iota so small that terms like "trivial" do not begin to do it justice. How is the belief that all people are created equal based on faith? Its based on the fact that as far as we can observe, people are simply born where they are born and how they are born, with no control over the matter, in a large randomized lottery. While that does not prove the matter to be true and you can argue it could still be false value judgement, it is no greater leap of faith than to believe we are not being observed by a gaint invisible spegetti monster. We maintain laws because when we protect everyone we protect ourselves within that number, and the result is a society people in general are happier with. Societies that hold other concepts tend to fail to do as well as societies that do believe everyone is created equal, at least in terms of the happiness and well being of the entirety of that society. It may be a matter of "faith" to say that trend will continue to be true, but again it is no more a matter of faith than it is to believe that gravity won't just "run out" and send us hurtling into space at next morning's light. So when I said: I will go as far as to say there is not a single law that has a basis in faith that is healthy for a nation, that does not have a stronger rational basis completely independant of any religious point of view. So let me add the caveat of "basis in faith greater than the level of faith that is required to believe it is wise to act in concert with our own senses..." and put to you whether you still feel all laws are based in faith.

In an infinite randomized pool of people I would agree. However, if it could be established that there is a specific diverse pool of individuals, in which some have preferences that favor rejection while others have preferences that favor interest, then statistically each person that rejects you is more likely to be the former and not the latter, and by taking them out of the pool the remaining pool is slightly skewed a little more in your favor. But in a generalized statistical sense I know what you mean: getting 4 heads in a row in a coin toss is 1:16 (2^4), but getting a heads after 3 heads in a row, is still 1:2 no matter how you cut it.

Been there, done that, and after eight years which started out great, living on my own is a god send. Given that I can say I now know my life is in flux, why would I want to kid myself into thinking otherwise? If I do meet someone that rings true - yeah, I know I'll rethink everything because thats what you do when you meet the right person...they change your whole line of thinking. Till then, it would be dishonest to strive for an ideal I just don't feel I want.