So, if every life is equally valuable to you, this should be problematic then: You're given a choice to kill either a mass murderer who you know beyond any doubt has raped and murdered hundreds of innocent people or an innocent 12-year-old schoolgirl. Which do you choose? If you really have to think about it, I just don't know what to say.
Oh, yeah, one of these completely artificial "moral" false dilemma questions. Like those ridiculous "would you throw the fat man off the bridge to save the five railworkers ahead" questions.
Ehh I don't think I disagree. I'm assuming you mean human life but humans are not equally strong or equally intelligent or equally successful. It's hard to think of any valid metric where all people come out equal so how can we say people are equally important?
What if the question were flipped around and you had to decide who lives as opposed to who dies. Say a meteor is falling and there is only room in the fallout shelter for 1 more person, do you give it to the doctor or the drug addict?
People who hold onto all life as equally valid can make irrational decisions, such as equating the life of a person to a clump of undifferentiated cells.
Great job at quoting me completely out of context.
If you read my posts, I was talking about murder. In other words, one person killing another person with intent.
I was not talking about some hypothetical extraordinary situations where you have to choose who lives and who dies, where you have to consider what is the best choice with respect to the ones who get to live (eg. a doctor is a good and practical choice because it increases the chances of the others to live longer).
I was talking about the severity of a murder crime. Many people seem to think that some lives are "more valuable" than others, and murdering them deserves a harsher punishment. I disagree: Murder is always wrong, and there's no distinction between victims, no matter what is their age or whatever. Every life is equally valuable, and murder is always equally wrong.
Please stop quoting me out of context.
If your food is gonna spoil if you hold off too long eating it, but you feel don't feel like eating it, but feel like eating something else, do you still eat it, somewhat against your will, or do you throw it away?
(Hmm, that sentence isn't very readable... but you probably get what I meant.)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Baxter wrote:
If your food is gonna spoil if you hold off too long eating it, but you feel don't feel like eating it, but feel like eating something else, do you still eat it, somewhat against your will, or do you throw it away?
(Hmm, that sentence isn't very readable... but you probably get what I meant.)
It would depend on the situation. If the food was something I was totally sick of, then I would probably eat something else if it was available. But this situation doesn't come up for me very often.
I try to avoid wasting food on the whole, but if the value of the wasted food is low, I'm willing to eat the cost. It's inefficient, which is annoying, but trying to min-max your life tends to cause more stress than it's worth.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
OK I have a couple of questions to add to this topic
Given that finite resources i.e. fossil fuels which are being to used to fuel our energy needs. What would be the most likely alternative in the future?
The internet is increasing with new users every day and people are demanding higher speeds all the time. With people wanting to download large files and watch videos on sites like YouTube, there is a fear that the internet may grind to a halt.
What would be the most reasonable way to solve the problem?
Before giving your opinion you should note that it takes many years to replace cables, possibly decades, and costs billions of dollars.
I'm no expert concerning either question, but here is a quick attempt at an intellegent answer.
AKA wrote:
OK I have a couple of questions to add to this topic
Given that finite resources i.e. fossil fuels which are being to used to fuel our energy needs. What would be the most likely alternative in the future?
In the future? 5 years from now? 50? Well fusion (a bathtub of water would supply a person's energy needs) would be the ultimate solution compared to what we do know. And the byproduct is radioactive Helium with a MUCH shorter half life then current fission reactions. The technology is nowhere near the point of usability, so what's the answer until then?
Don't forget that food is a very important feul too, and just as our demands for fuel goes up, so will the hungry mouths. That's why I don't see this biofuel stuff as being all that effective, not to mention the hamster wheel part.
I don't really know what our alternative will be within the next 15 to 20 years, but I do know there is pleanty more we can do to ration what oil ect we still have. Factories on the other side of our planet manufacture a large number of things, which are sent over entire oceans to reach the desired market. Food is no different, we want to eat our tomatos all year, so they have to be sent all over the world from different areas as the seasons pass...
AKA wrote:
The internet is increasing with new users every day and people are demanding higher speeds all the time. With people wanting to download large files and watch videos on sites like YouTube, there is a fear that the internet may grind to a halt.
What would be the most reasonable way to solve the problem?
Before giving your opinion you should note that it takes many years to replace cables, possibly decades, and costs billions of dollars.
Any basic telephone cord that is not allready being used for a call (and even those that are) could be used to carry some of the internet's massive demands, from what I understand. They are allready laid. Basically I mean use all of the cables for all forms of data transfer, do away wiht the traditional phone system (It's really outdated just like the analog broadcasting)...
Also there of course is the wireless approach. Let's get some more efficient use of the spectrum. An apartment building would need a large slice of the spectum so tenants could have uninterfering networks. Out in a farming area a much smaller slice would suffice. The same concept could apply to WANs I hear some cities are experimenting with. Are any going? How are they doing?
What are the main bottleneck's of the internet? I'd say invest time and money in improving those with newer hardware/technologies. I'm seriously rambling so I'll stop while I can, so much for a superquick response. Thoughts?
Dear anyone,
Assuming Jesus as indicated by the Bible really existed, imagine yourself as having lived as a contemporary, in that same area.
If you lived the era Jesus ― or Yeshua, ישוע ― preached in Israel, what would you have done? How would you have reacted? (Assume that you do not know the future, i.e. you will not know what he will do next, how he will be convicted and risen from death, etc.)
(Edit: My 6000th post apparently. Yay me! Thanks Kyrsimys for pointing out.)
As for me — I don't think Jesus himself has had any substantial influence on people until after his death. So, it's likely I wouldn't really have cared. Then again, this is strongly hypothetical.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
As for me — I don't think Jesus himself has had any substantial influence on people until after his death. So, it's likely I wouldn't really have cared. Then again, this is strongly hypothetical.
Well, I don't know how many people there were in Israel at that time, but for example, in Matt. chapter 14, five thousand people were with Jesus, and in chapter 15, four thousand followed him to the mountain. So he wasn't exactly unknown. Word about the miracles he performed also spread quickly.
But then again, there was no print and no television, so not everyone heard the news, so it was well possible to not hear anything of it.
Would I live in a place where I could see what he had done, or would I simply one day be working at a farm and hear someone go "there's this guy in the next city that created bread for thousands of people from nothing! No, really! And then he made a blind man see! I'm not making this up!"? Because then I'd probably just shake my head and think he's gotten a sunstroke or something.
Of course, on the other hand, living in that period, I would have no knowledge of stage magicians or on how to decieve people, so I would probably accept anything I saw much easier.
Would I live in a place where I could see what he had done, or would I simply one day be working at a farm and hear someone go "there's this guy in the next city<...>"
I didn't specify :) You're free to imagine a fitting scenario.
I started thinking this question when I explained to someone else earlier today, how the human nature is the same in each and everyone of us, and under the different circumstances, I could see myself as if I were one of those who were shouting angrily that Pilatus release Barabbas and crucify Jesus. The gospels are written from such a protagonist perspective that it is difficult for most people to imagine themselves in such a position, but there were really a lot of people and the mob mentality against him was strong, for he had spoken straight out inconvenient things and mocked the leaders.
Then I thought of what I would have been doing if I had grown there and my nature would be the same as it is now, except without any knowledge of Jesus.
I suppose I would be such impressioned by Jesus that I would be passionately traveling to follow and listen at wherever he preaches, and I would believe that he is who he says he is. Assuming that my circumstances would permit that. But I plot such a scenario where they would permit :)
When Jesus gets arrested and convicted, I would be utterly frustrated and depressed and pulling my hair out when I see the mob mentality being so strong and people acting so shamefully.
What if you lived in Mecca around 610 AD?
If I were anything like I am now, I'd be skeptical in either case, but as I tend to see nurture as being more important than nature I could easily imagine being swept away given the proper situation...
Around that time, so I hear (in a lecture by David Pawson, snippet here (42 MB, 14 minutes)), Mecca was a center for worship of a myriad of different gods. One of those, the moon god, became the centerpiece of the Mohammedian religion.
Indeed... I picked that date as it is supposedly when he began to receive the Qur'an. Maybe a bit later then... I was wondering if there would be a difference between the various prophets :)
I'll resurrect this thread because I don't need to create a new thread just for this:
I was wondering if someone knows a bit about how micro-SD cards store information? There are now cards that can store 64GB of information, which surprises me a bit considering how small the card is (about 1 cm2 and 1mm fat). I calculated that this storage system is about 300 million times more effective than the thin papers used in the Bible.
I know how information is stored in discs like Blu ray: it's microscopic "dots" on the disc. So do the micro-SDs store information the same way? When I look at a micro-SD I also noticed that most of it seems to be just empty plastic which doesn't store anything, which makes me wonder how large the actual area where the information is stored is? Any of you computer minded people who can shed some light on this?
Congratulations on using the bible as a measure of storage density o_O
It's simply flash memory, usually the cheap NAND variant. The same stuff found in USB sticks and SSDs.
Congratulations on using the bible as a measure of storage density o_O
lol. Yeah, I wanted to know how much more efficient a modern storage medium is compared to a paper storage medium.
As for the Wikipedia link, I've skimmed through it before as I guessed it's probably flash technology, but it doesn't say where the information is stored (specifically for micro-SD cards for example) or how large the area is (in the Bible calculation I calculated the entire plastic thing in the equation, so the technology is more efficient than I calculated).
After reading 2 minutes on that page, I must say I don't really comprehend how it works either. Earlier I had considered the possibility that it might be some alien slime-technology since nobody seems to have a simple answer on how it works, but perhaps there is a natural explanation for it. A video of a manufacturing process or an electron microscope photograph might help.
Let's see if I can explain based on what I just read. That is, going in I had no more knowledge than you, and this explanation could well be wrong.
Flash uses floating gate transistors. These can be used to isolate a charge from the rest of a circuit. The charge can remain in place more or less indefinitely, because the gate is not directly hooked into the rest of the circuit (it is surrounded by insulation). Apparently you use capacitance to read it instead, but I lack the EE knowledge to adequately explain that. You can hook up secondary elements to the isolated gate if you need to change its value by modifying the amount of charge in the isolated region. Again, this isn't done directly (by hooking a wire up to the gate), but rather via something called "capacitive tunneling".
Anyway, this lets you store a bit, so there's your memory. Density then mostly comes down to how finely you can print your transistors, and we're at around 20-30 nanometers last I checked. That's pretty dang tiny.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
After reading 2 minutes on that page, I must say I don't really comprehend how it works either.
You spent 2 minutes on an 8-page article before giving up? Even the fastest readers in the world couldn't have read it in that timeframe, much less understood it. You certainly didn't click any of the links to acquire the necessary background information, either.
But that'd explain how you come up with your theories: refuse to actually spend time educating yourself, instead substituting crazy guesses. Ignorance through lazyness. Good luck with that.
@Derakon: MLC flash actually stores multiple bits in a single charge, usually two. This increases storage density (thus lowers the price), but reduces speed and reliability.
Since this topic has been resurrected, I might as well ask a couple of questions of my own.
I've been wanting to get into comic books for some time now, but I'm finding it really hard to know where to start. Comic book culture in Finland is, as far as I know, pretty much nonexistent; nobody I knew read any comics other than Donald Duck regularly as a kid, and access to comic books was (and still would be if it wasn't for the internet) very limited. Most people here are only familiar with the most famous superheroes like Superman, Batman and Spider-man, and even that is only thanks to movies and TV shows and not the original comic books. My knowledge of comic books is thus pretty limited, and I have some questions:
1) Which ones should I read? I've really enjoyed Neil Gaiman's Sandman series and this has led me to other darker-themed comic books such as V for Vendetta, Watchmen and Frank Miller's work. From what I understand they are also fairly easily approachable without having to know decades worth of history. But what about regular, monthly published comic books? Which ones are the ones to follow? Also, are the storylines connected between different comic books, i.e. can I follow the plot and not miss a lot of stuff by reading just one comic book?
2) Where to start? I know they've been publishing Superman comics, for example, since the 1930s. Do I need to start at the beginning to understand everything that's going on today? If not, what would be a good place to start? I understand the DC universe has just undergone some massive reboot, so should I just start from there or would I really be missing out if I did?
3) DC or Marvel? Do you feel one is clearly better than the other? What are the main differences between the two? Which one has more interesting characters?
4) Are comic books generally worth reading? Just your personal opinion. Are comic books just for kids or people who've at least read them as kids? Is it impossible for a 25-year-old man to get into comics without any previous exposure? Are the storylines well developed and interesting enough for an adult reader?
Thank you for your time.
