kenstauffer

You're quite right. It just occured to me, that my argument is just a special case of a more general argument that could be leveled against any new formalism. Since the church-turing thesis claims that all formal systems can be mapped to number theory, then EVERY formal system claim can be countered by saying it is just artithmetic? (Which was essentially my previous argument) So unless an advocate of a new formalism can disprove the church-turning thesis, their new formalism is just number theory with different symbols. Is this right?

Ummm, then we have always had "fuzzy logic", or atleast since numbers were invented. So really fuzzy logic is what we call "arithmetic". I like the original, 2,000 year old name better. 1/2 cooked, 1/3 cooked, .999 cooked, .5 cooked, etc.... This is what all these PHD computer scientists are refering to when they discuss fuzzy logic???

That's a very heroic story! Good for you.

It can't be me, as I have consistently failed to spell Intelligent properly. Oh well. :-)

If ID is true, who is the intellegent designer?

I'm glad religion is making this issue important to them, because the facts are so clearly contrary to intellegent design. This is religions last pathetic stand. I for one would not care if they succeed in having intellegent design "taught" along side evolution, because the innocent children will make the correct choice. And they will leave school with a much better appreciation for science and disdain for religion. (And it also might have the added benfit of making people question the value of state run education -- a favorite liberal cause. Let us see how eagerly the liberals encourage public education when a republican run government gets to inject "intellegent design" into their beloved public schools)

If you really want random & incomprehensible data use Kant(), not Rand()

Hee hee hee. Can god make a mountain that is so heavy that he cannot lift it? Just one of the many condradictions in the notion of an "all powerful god".

A dictator could make so many things felonies that only he and a few other can vote. Think of all the smugglers through history that would have voted for leaders that advocated free trade policies? Or viewing this point darwinistically: A positive feedback loop is setup that excludes from voting those people that violate certain laws, the remaining voters by definition have not broken these laws. Since these laws are not being broken by the voters, the laws must not cramp their style too much, and therefore they are less motivated to change the law (since the status quo works for them). Darwinistically, this would not be considered and evolutionary stable setup, and in the long-term must result in the elimination of all voters. I seriously doubt this would happen (or is happening), but it made me go, "hmmmmm..."

Wearing a tattoo is really a neutral cultural decoration, like ties, nose piercing, thong underwear. What bugs me is the pierced/tattoo crowd walking around with an attitude that they are rebels/individualistic. I think that is a far from the truth. I wear ties because it is an unfortunate cultural requirement for working in business. I don't pretend I am doing anything more than copying this standard in order to earn a living. Would Howard Roark get a tattoo? I think he might, if he lived in some wierd culture that thought tatoos were like ties in our culture. He would get a tatoo on the grounds that it will enable him to achive his goals. Even in this example, he might struggle to find other ways to achieve his goals without a tatoo. Cultural norms change, tattoos don't. A rational person knows this and acts accordingly. If you think tattoos look good, then you can claim to be a first hander. I think the human body is too beautiful naked. I don't think it can be improved upon with gangreen-ish coloration. And when I see a tattoo I immediately wonder what mental problem the person suffers from to make them mutilate their body in order to conform (a generalization that I am willing to ammend with further information).

A: Earth

Q: What is the name of the first satellite put into synchronous orbit around the moon?

I loaded it earlier today, and I am testing driving it. Thanks everyone for advice/feedback on this topic. My first impression is similar to my first impression using Firefox. I am excited and impressed with the smoothness of the tools, and for free you cannot go wrong. The drawing program is a huge plus in my job (technical diagrams), and VISIO was always out my price range (unless I ripped off a copy from a client). The few word documents I regularly use seem to load fine and edit fine. The spread sheet also looks nice. Of course, since I am upgrading from Office98, it doesn't take much to impress me. The funny thing is, on client sites their latest/greatest edition of Office looks pretty much like my 7 year old version. Part of the reason is (as mentioned earlier) that MS has focused on all kinds of "groupware", mega-features, instead of just making the core programs easy to use. Again, this very much reminds me of how Firefox has been able to upstage Internet Explorer. Also, the download was a 65MB zip file. Installation was very easy and straight forward. When I launch the tools I don't get the feeling it is taking over my computer, unlike how I feel when I run the Office suite. And of course its completely free. Cheers all from a happy hacker.

Judge Judy Simpsons King of the Hill Malcom in the MIddle King of Queens Boston Legal Fear Factor Antique Road Show Nanny 911 Apprentice Dr. Phil Law & Order Dharma & Greg Bull Sh*t!

I am seeking opinions about OpenOffice for windows? I am getting kind of annoyed with MSOffice (especially Word). Also MSOffice is very expensive, I am still running MSOFFICE 1998! And I do not want to spend mucho dollars to upgrade. This OpenOffice sounds really neat, as it is totally free. So anybody try it? I am most interested in experiences with running on windows XP, and how easy the tools are, and how well they inter-operate with Word files. Here's the website: www.openoffice.org Thank's in advance.

Comedy clubs. Scuba diving is very popular in austin (people from Dallas come to austin because lake travis is pretty decent for scuba). Also boating, fishing, sailing. Volunteer on crappy artsy communist movie productions. Biking. I don't drink, or smoke, but since I hate staying in at night, I play pool at a few dive bars. And I don't like loud music either so I stick to bars with a quiet atmosphere. I spend all my free time at the lake it seems, and I also have done backpacking around Austin. When you get to Austin, you can look me up and we can make fun of the Central Austin hippies as they protest everything (stun guns are their latest "issue"). http://www.stauffercom.com By the way, Lake travis has a nude beach called Hippy Hollow. Last year a party boat capsized near this beach!!! It was full of college partiers and everybody ran to the side of the boat facing the nude beach and it flipped. Hee heee, heee. If the terrorists ever wanted to take over this country all they need to do is hold a wet t-shirt contest. PS. Thanks everyone for the feedback about Maryland. I decided I love Austin too much to move just now.

(I should have read the whole thread before my previous post.) I think you have something here, in distinquishing blood sports from suicide etc... I think its an interesting question. A proper, principled answer would be nice for me as in a debate on capitalism, my opponent might wander into this territory. It would be nice to have a good answer why this is not an example of something capitalism would permit.

How can the laws be worded so that Dr. Kvorkian can exist and gladiator games cannot exist? or should both not be allowed to exist? What scares me, is that I could see people stupid and gulliable enugh to be sucked into such a russian-roullette for money scheme, and that there would be a market for this. (The existence of cock fighting, porn, body piercings, and other activities is my evidence) But in principle I would have to defend the right to have such gladiator sports. I am hopeful that when mankind reaches the spirit and sense of life captured by Galts Gulch such activities will be very marginal.

An example of traits that get weeded out by evolution would be a community of fish that that have ventured into a dark cave environment. In time they lose their eyes and become blind. The trait of having eyes is weeded out. Why is this? Because mutations in the genes for the eye organ will not impact the life of such fish. There exist fish/salamanders with various degrees of eyelessness in nature. Ultimately the organ will be completely weeded out.

Here is my take on the relationship between life and evolution. I believe that the first objects on this planet to be subject to the forces of evolution were simple molecules -- hardy more interesting than rust. The only property I am confident to say they possesed was self-replication. Thus began darwinism, natural selection, evolution, et al. It would be difficult to ascribe the concept of life (a capacity for self generated, goal-directed action) to these self-replicators. Are they alive? I would venture to guess that the biologist and the philosopher would disagree. But, I do believe that evolution will tend to transform these simple objects into full-fledged living entities that we all would agree were alive. So evolution may occur for billions of years without anything we might call life. But I would say that evolution is progressive, and it will tend to create life from non-life. Is evolution required for life? I cannot think of any process that more beautifully explains how life on this planet emerged, but it may be the case that another processes is operating on some planet causing the creation of complex entities (that want to sustain themselves). In conclusion, my views are: 1. Evolution depends on self-replicating objects, but does not require life. 2. Evolution is progressive and will tend to cause life to come into existance from non-living matter. 3. Another undiscovered process may exist that creates life, so it need not be an absolute that evolution is required to create life.

He could punk the whole world then!

Let the language wars begin.... I don't mind. I am up for the challenge. But on an Objectivist/Ayn Rand specific forum? Yes. I think if this topic is moved to appropriate group. I would love to see a critique of various computer languages. And Ayn Rand's epistemology could be the key to make such a topic relevent. How does a language help the programmer respect the crow epistemology? How does the language allow the programmer to combine abstractions into higher level abstractions. By the way, I don't believe the evolution of computer languages has anything to do with the computer. The trend from assembly to modern Object-Oriented languages is really about a new industry discovering the best way to organize programmatic information for the human to cope with. (This view differs from the view that the evolution of better and better languages is in some way implementing consciousness on the computer). The computer is flipping switches, and if the switch settings came from assembly or from a visual basic representation has no effect on the execution of the computer.

Yes. You should have no trouble becoming a proficient programmer by selecting a decent language and learning on your own. C++ is a terrible language for learning (heck, it's terrible for experienced programmers too) That is C++'s big problem. It isn't always obvious when viewing a snippet of C++ code what is going on. The syntax is highly cryptic for one reason. And code locality is hurt by header file/implementation file concepts, macros, and so on. I would recommend learning programming principles using a clean language, Visual Basic isn't a bad choice, as it is fairly easy to learn, is widely available, "fun", and the development environenment is very friendly and intuitive. Plus Visual Basic is used in many real world, industrial strength applications (unlike some toy languages that are designed specifically for learning). I could bash C++ all day long, and discuss my favorite language Eiffel for years. Bertrand Meyer is a genius (the inventor of Eiffel), and his understanding of what Object Oriented programming is (and should be). His book Object Oriented programming is a masterpiece and I highly recommend it to Objectivist software developers. I implemented a chess engine using Eiffel with fairly decent performance (this is with full garbage collection). See http://www.stauffercom.com/hotbabe (Obviously I am responding to an ancient post, but I love, love, love Eiffel and hate, hate, hate, C++ so I could not pass on adding my $0.02. and I have had 3 cups of coffee just now)

It may have been "chocolat", what year was the lecture? He praised chocolat on his radio show around 1999.

Is Evolution evidence enough?