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You should ask for your money back.

Metaphysics is quite important to the topic of the goal of science, actually. Without it, mathematical physics becomes nothing more than mathematics and science in general becomes hyper-antirealistic idealism. A theory in physics is about taking one point on a phase space, giving it to a function, and the function giving you back another point on the phase space. The phase space is just a cotangent bundle of a manifold and some cotangent space. That's all you get without metaphysics. You don't get anything about the world. It takes metaphysics to say what in the math is supposed to be real. It takes metaphysics to say whether a theory is deterministic or deterministic. For science in general, you end up with layers of lies building on idealism. Mach denied that this is idealism, but the primitive of the ensuing worldview is mental in nature, so it is actually idealism. You never have observational access to an underlying substance (Kant's noumena). All you have is a sequence of experiences. These experiences differ from one another. In one experience, there's a red blob. In another experience, you have a slightly different red blob. Without metaphysics, you don't get to assume an underlying object giving the sensations, so you don't get to say that they're the same red blob. It's only in using fictive abstraction that you get 'objects' on a metaphysics free picture. These 'objects' are related via yet more fictive abstraction when we construct the idea of measurement. Then yet another layer is added when we collect these multilayered fictive versions of observation into generalized laws. That's all science becomes without metaphysics: layers of organization of functional fictive abstractions. And you don't get the standard difference between primary and secondary properties. Color and taste, for example, are on the same playing field as length. It has nothing to do with a proper reading of Aristotle. No topos that can support QM has Boolean structure. The law of excluded middle simply can't hold everywhere in a QM universe. This isn't about any sort of observation, but it's part of the deepest structure of the theory.

That's pretty bad metaphysics if it uses Aristotle's logic. The topoi which admit QM do not admit a Boolean structure, but rather a more general Heyting structure in which the law of excluded middle does not always hold.

And the none of the sciences describing them require any gods.

More data: most Americans are in favor of more gun control.

Why did you tell them that?

So, let's swap out your pistol for a water gun that we spray paint black. It's functionally the same, right?

We should add that for every justifiable homicide using a gun, there are 34 murders, 78 suicides, and 2 accidental deaths with guns.

Apparently not.

You may want to follow the Angie Project on Twitter.

I did notice that we've got a lot of non-CS and non-techsupport computer threads. Perhaps it's time to reorganize the computer section to add subforums for programming and for hardware.

Consider, for a moment, the greatest possible Santa. Now, wouldn't that Santa be even better if it were real? Therefore, Santa exists......somehow.

I'm not sure what all, yet. As far server-side stuff, Overviewer is currently on an Apache server, and that was fairly out of the box; no coding required. The Minecraft server just kind of does its own thing. I was thinking of maybe taking the list of current players and displaying it on a webpage. Facebook's hack?

I'm just starting out with web development. I've got Minecraft and Overviewer running on a home server and I'm thinking of expanding it, and honestly just playing around. Which is better: PHP or Ruby? I've done the PHP module on codeAcademy and i'm about a third of the way through the Ruby module. I think, at this point, I prefer Ruby. Is one "better", or is it more or less personal preference?

You didn't look at all of the links, did you? Come back once you have.

Only 34% of American households have at least one gun. The number of people per household is 2.54, so it's not like you can say that even as much as 34% of Americans own guns. The vast majority of guns are owned by NRA brainwashed nutjobs who horde guns thinking that Obama is going to march his secret Gun Confiscation Force into their homes and take all of the guns away. These people are impulsive, angry, and at risk for mental disorders. The fact is, gun control works. study after study after study after studies show that gun control curbs homicide. More guns means more murder. This isn't a fringe opinion. In fact, the lies pushed by the NRA are fringe. There's quite the consensus in the field that just about everything the NRA has told you about gun control and gun availability is false. At this point, you may as well argue that global warming isn't real or that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Even then, the number of gun owners is decreasing, so you're doubly wrong about the gun ownership and you're wrong about the effectiveness of gun control. Actually, yes. It's quite the consensus in the field and there are just tons and tons and tons of studies demonstrating as much. See the links above in this post for a start. In case anyone was wondering, good guys with guns don't actually stop bad guys with guns. No mass shooting has ever been stopped by an armed civilian.

In what century, or decade, for that matter, was Jesus born? Matthew and Luke give us two different answers. Matthew's nativity: Around 6BCE, Joseph and Mary were living in Bethlehem. Sometime around then, Jesus was born. Herod the Great heard rumors of the birth of the King of the Jews (at the time, Judea was a client kingdom of Rome and Herod was its ruler). Since that was him, he was quite angered. Herod ordered the death of all of the children 2 years or younger. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus were given advance warning by an angel, and they fled to Egypt. For an unspecified amount of time, they lived in Egypt and only left when the Angel told them that Herod was dead. Since Herod's rule was split among his sons (creating the Tetrarchy) upon his death in 4BCE, they didn't want to chance it. Instead of returning home to Bethlehem in Judea, they moved to Nazareth where they would raise Jesus. Herod died in 4BCE, and some time before that, he ordered the death of all of the children 2 and younger. So, Jesus must have been born around or before 6BCE. Luke's Nativity: Around 6CE, Joseph and Mary are living in Nazareth and Mary is pregnant with Jesus. That year, Herod's son in charge of Judea was deposed, and thus Judea fell under Roman control. Since it was no longer a client kingdom, according to the taxation reform of Augustus, it must now be censused so that it may be accurately taxed. This is not only the first Roman census of Judea, but the first time Rome could have a census of Judea. For some reason, Joseph took Mary and the unborn Jesus to Bethlehem for the census. While in Bethlehem, Jesus was born. After some time, they returned to Nazareth where Jesus would be raised. Jesus wasn't born until after the declaration of census in 6CE. As though Luke wanted us to be extra sure that we knew it was 6CE, he also drops the historical anchor of Quirinius being the governor of Syria which started in 6CE. So, Matthew gives us a date of 6BCE or before, and Luke gives us a date of 6CE or later. That's a minimum discrepancy of 12 years. It's different decades in different centuries. Furthermore, the historical anchors for Matthew's story are the direct causal factors leading to the historical anchors for Luke's. Again, when was Jesus born?

(emphasis mine) So, you're a Christian for the same reason most are.

A Byte of Python is also good, but it's written for Python 2 instead of Python 3, so either use 2 or you'll need to do some googling to find the right name for some things.

Uh, no. The part after the comma does not follow from the part before it.

Because he disagrees with Jesus. You still didn't answer, when exactly, did the heavans and Earth pass away?

So, when considering the teachings of Jesus, you give men using scripture to jockey for power more weight than what Jesus said?

Except that he didn't. As a matter of eschatological doctrine, he's coming back to fulfill prophecy. As a matter of scriptural fact, he didn't fulfill all of the messianic prophecies. As a matter of what Jesus is recorded as saying, he won't fulfill it until heaven and Earth pass away (if you want a source, see the good chunk of Matthew I quoted for you which you completely ignored).

In both cases, they're C->R, and that's a really simple process between them. If the product were RxZ, they wouldn't be the same process. Why would we want two different processes from C to R for the product?

In the complex field example, f1=f2 is a mapping from the real parts of the complex field to the corresponding parts of the real field, essentially chopping off the imaginary parts of the points. Is there any way to think about the induced morphism in this case other than just the composite p2-1(f1)?