Jesse_Ray's comments

You misunderstood my argument. I did not assert the existence or nonexistence of libertarian free will or compatibilist free will. Such assertions were beside the point. I was only pointing out that the argument to which I responded contained a logical error. It assumes that "people do not have libertarian free will" entails "people are causally impotent", but the former does not entail the latter.

As an aside, your omission of "libertarian" from the quote of me suggests that you might be conflating two kinds of free will. Because you talk about free will without specifying the kind, the meaning of your reply is ambiguous. Hence, I have trouble agreeing or disagreeing with it. For what it is worth, I do not deny that compatibilist free will can have various degrees of freedom, where the degree is a function of the complexity and arrangement of the things it emerges from. For example, I do not deny that humans, dogs, and cats can be said to have compatibilist free will, nor that the human wills have more degrees of freedom than dog wills and cat wills.

That argument is unsound. The color of the sky depends on atmospheric gases and suspended particles as causal factors. This shows that atmospheric gases and suspended particles are causally potent. At the same time, atmospheric gases and suspended particles do not have libertarian free will. This shows that things can be causally potent without libertarian free will. The statement that "If there is no [libertarian] free will ... The payouts are the same regardless of what you do" assumes that being without libertarian free will entails causal impotence, but that contradicts the fact that things can be causally potent without libertarian free will, as established by the argument about atmospheric gases and suspended particles. Therefore, that statement is false. When that statement has been corrected to allow people to be causally potent without libertarian free will, the conclusion of the argument does not follow.

When providing a quotation, use quotation marks.

The article discussed all people in that age group, not just the people that you consider sluggish, vacant, vapid, etc. Please read and comprehend articles before commenting on them.

I agree with the author concerning places with somewhat-level terrain, with short distances between home, work, and grocery stores, with police officers posted around these locations to ensure good traffic, and so on.

On the other hand, many places are not like that. Where I live, distances between important locations is often twenty-five miles or so, there are many hills that go up for hundreds of feet, there are many sharp curves, many cliff-like areas without rails, no sidewalks, hardly any police to ensure sane traffic conditions, people driving twenty or thirty MPH over the speed limit, vehicles taking shortcuts by cutting into opposite lanes, people driving home from bars and liquor stores in other counties which are not "dry", etc. Around places like this, biking is a fine way to die.

Please elaborate.

Articles like these are annoying/depressing.

They begin with strawmen, such as "scientists and even fellow philosophers are telling me that I'm a machine or a beast." No, they argue that humans are animals, not beasts. The terms mean different things: "frogs are animals" is true and "frogs are beasts" is false. Further, the claim that humans are animals is true by definition. The technical definition is complex, but it should suffice for anyone versed in biology to know that humans are living organisms with nervous systems and that all such organisms belong to the kingdom Animalia, which means that humans are animals.

Then they follow the strawmen with pomposity, such as "it would take more time and space than I have here to refute these views." How would the author know how much time and space it would take to refute them? He presumes that such a refutation not only exists, but that he knows it. This presumption is preposterous because there cannot be a refutation of them. You cannot refute linguistic arguments without proving that there is a One True Definition for a given word or phrase, which would require proving that some form of Linguistic (non-mathematical) Platonism is true, and that has yet to pass the threshold of being a coherent concept.

Then they rewrite to shroud their pomposity with an excuse, such as "while [insert previous quote], I'd like to suggest..."

Ugh.

I have no objection to the website operator wanting to cater only to people who want serious relationships, but calling flings and hook-ups "smut", with the implication that people who engage in such activities are "smut-makers", is extremely unprofessional and disrespectful, to say the least of it.

In addition, there are many people who are open-minded about casual sex but want serious relationships, perhaps with someone who shares their values on sexuality, but these people will have been turned away (as well as their not-so-open-minded friends who think the operator has no right to be a jerk toward their friends), thus reducing the usefulness of the website altogether, not only for those who have such values, but for anyone who might have otherwise found a good match with them or their friends.

In general, promoting your business as inclusive and caring while tarnishing the reputation of your previous employers and insulting other people have done no wrong to you is more than a little hypocritical.

The headline is misleading. The study did not find a general distrust of the Internet. Rather, it found that certain things on websites inspire distrust, such as pages with too many advertisements that create the impression that the content is fluff material designed to bring attention to the advertisements, documents published a long time ago that create the suspicion that information could be out-of-date, and so on.

There is no trouble in proving a negative that does not exist for proving a positive. For example, you can prove to your own satisfaction that there are no monkeys on your shoulder, even though that is a negative claim. The problem of proof to which you alluded with your example is just the famous problem of induction, which exists for both positive and negative claims.

The negative claim that so-and-so has never eaten a baby is difficult to prove because that claim is actually a group of claims: so-and-so was not eating babies at time one, time two, time three, etc. Each and every claim in that sequence could be proven with a photograph that shows so-and-so doing something other than eating babies. Each negative in that sequence is provable. The problem is the length of the sequence: you need hundreds and hundreds of proofs. You would have the same trouble with any similar sequence of positive claims, such as the sequence entailed by the statement that there is a human-habitable planet in one out of ten solar systems.

I visit many unpopular websites, often through search engines, such as to find out little details about video games, techniques for DIY organic lawncare, concepts used in unconventional programming languages, explanations of physics and philosophy from retired university professors, and many other things that have even less popularity, such as learning how to speak and write in the dialects of English called E-Prime and P-Prime. The probability that the top one million websites would include all of the websites that I use is very nearly 0%, so the probability that I would notice is near 100%.

I should have been more careful in choosing my words. I agree that {1,2,3,...} and {2,4,6,...} are both countably infinite and have the cardinality aleph-0. When I said they are not the same size, I did not mean to invoke the idea of set cardinality. Rather, I was thinking more in terms of set difference: if set A contains all the elements of B and set A contains other elements also, then set A is bigger than set B.

With that said, the reasoning that you two are employing seems mysterious. In my way of thinking, the cardinality of a set of dollar bills and the quantity of dollars are not the same thing. If you start with $20 and lose $20, then you lost $20, and likewise, if you start with an infinite quantity of dollars and lose $20, then you lost $20. Whether the set of dollars before and after gambling have the same cardinality is quite beside the point: $20 never equals $0, so you were $20 richer before you gambled and $20 less rich after you gambled.

There are two mistakes in your reasoning.

First, according to your definition of losing, gambling away 99% of your life savings would not count as a loss. A better definition would be: having fewer resources at the end of an act of gambling than you had before the act.

Second, you have assumed that infinite comes in only one size. To see the error in that, consider these infinite sets: {1,2,3,...} and {2,4,6,...}. The first set contains all counting numbers and the second set contains only even counting numbers. Both sets are infinite, but the second set is only half the size.

With these corrections in mind, it should become clear that you can start with infinite resources, lose half of your resources and therefore lose at gambling, but still walk away with infinite resources.

I reject the concept of self-plagiarism because I believe that people are entitled to use their own works as they see fit, provided that they have not transfered ownership or copyright. Even so, that is beside the point because the issue has nothing to do with plagiarism.

The issue has to do with the violation of the terms of the contract. If the publisher wanted something unoriginal, then they would make an explicit request to publish a previous work. (In other words, the publisher would say to the author, "We want to publish your previous work X. Can we negotiate a price?") When no such request is made and the publisher instead offers to pay the author to write something, it is implied that they want something original. That implicit request is part of the contractual agreement between the author and the publisher. When the author publishes something unoriginal and then takes money for the service of publishing something that is original, then the author has effectively stolen the money.

The reason is more economical than technological. The most popular languages became popular by holding the strongest appeal for the lowest common denominator (LCD) of coders. For example, Java bests Haskell in this regard because LCD coders have a greater appreciation for loops than recursion. The LCD coders become a source of advertising by word-of-mouth and also become a potential market for other developers to tap into. Then project managers see the software being released by the better developers and keep hearing the word-of-mouth in favor of the language and decide to have their software teams use that language. Basically, it's the "snowball rolling down a hill" effect where the LCD coders make up the initial snowball.

Thanks for the information, batista. It does not surprise me to hear that JSON has gotten popular in Javascript applications and the datastores that interact with them, and likewise with key-value datastores since the data mapping seems rather straight-forward when compared with XML (element attributes would seem to pose some problems). However, it would pique my interest to hear that other kinds of datastores prefer it. Do you have any links handy that show this about other data-stores and the technical reasons behind the preference? And at the risk of requesting too much, any links that show JSON besting XML in many RPC/SOAP use-cases?

If a lexical item composed of alphabetical characters consists of one or more morphemes and communicates a meaning which can be comprehended from the context without reference to a dictionary, then that lexical item is more of a word than most of the words in the dictionary.

Edit: Well, 'most' is stretching it, but you know what I mean.

XML may seem harder than JSON, until you actually try to work with the data. When you need to create an automated system that checks that data has a certain format, XML has support for schemas and there are many software tools for creating schemas, which is something that cannot be said of JSON. Likewise, searching for data is much easier when you have a standard like XPath. Something akin to XPath would be much harder to make for JSON, since it lacks native support for element attributes. When the data needs to be transformed into a variety of formats, XSLT comes to the rescue. When you want to give the user data in a readable way, JSON requires server-side processing whereas XML and CSS (and sometimes XSLT) support is built into the web browser. In my opinion, JSON gets too much attention for what little it offers. It could become a serious alternative to XML in the distant future, but not until it has the kind of technological environment that XML enjoys.

I think many people fail to notice that there can be many motivations behind someone's actions. When the motivation is some kind of business interest, for example, it does not make much sense to reinvent the wheel. On the other hand, when the motivation is to explore concept-space, it does not make much sense to not reinvent the wheel. Motivations determine the proper course to take and no motivation is superior to another. And we should not forget that the reinvention of the wheel is the reason we do not bustle about on wooden rims anymore.

I think you lost sight of the big picture when you put the number in terms of miles. The light emitted at the time of the death of Jesus has traveled some 1,978 light-years (that number equals 2011 AD minus 33 AD). The distance is gargantuan, but compare it to the distances that astronomers and cosmologists deal with everyday. For example, Andromeda is the closest galaxy to our own and it wheels through space at about 2,540,000 light-years away. That puts things into perspective! 1,978 light years from Earth is not even outside our own galaxy. The distance is gargantuan from one perspective, but not even a drop in the bucket from another perspective. I do not know the distances of many stars, but for what it's worth, Deneb (the 19th brightest star in the night sky) is about 1,400 light years away.