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Messages - ersi

5226
DnD Central / Re: The Problem with Agnosticism
Common sense suffices. It makes perfect sense that God is unconspicuous, because otherwise those who insist on denying God would not have a chance. It's nice to offer everyone a chance.

You are doing well in denial. You manage to will even laws of nature into non-existence. God is not a sensible topic with you.
5227
Browsers & Technology / Re: After XP — OS alternatives for Samsung NP?
@Josh
Do you know how to set boot devices?
What are the programs and functions that you need running in the netbook?

It so happens that two days ago I made an unexpected acquisition. My sister bought a new fancy laptop with Win8 and hence wanted to get rid of a Packard Bell netbook that matches your specs. The netbook had Win7 on it and it had become really slow. Just to get that netbook with Win7 up and connected to internet took literally half an hour. Granted, she had Skype and tons of adware/malware/viruses fighting for CPU power at startup, but still, it's a systemic fault too.

I didn't try for long to speed up Win 7. I replaced it already with Linux distro called Manjaro Openbox 0.8.8. Boots up and gets connected in less than a minute now. This including the 5 seconds wait time at GRUB screen. Before installing Linux I tried it from bootable USB stick.

Within the same two days, my sister has begun to hate her new laptop with Win 8 and is jealous of the netbook she gave to me :)

I already modified it a bit. Manjaro Openbox is really minimalistic to begin with. I installed the battery icon and I modified the conky to display 24H clock. It didn't even have a web browser, so I installed Luakit. Luakit somewhat works on youtube. It displays some videos, not others, but fails at sound. As to sound, I installed tons of codecs, along with Mplayer and Vlc. Skype video and sound works. I installed Skype and tried. I made the touchpad scroll to work. Etc :)
5228
DnD Central / Re: The Problem with Agnosticism
Quote from: jseaton2311 on
If there is a god who doesn't find it necessary for me to know that he's there then I must logically deduce that it does not matter to God one way or the other what I think about him.  If it makes no difference then I'll just choose not to believe in him in the first place and make things a whole lot simpler.

Supernatural means beyond or above nature. God in any meaningful sense is that, supernatural, so in any meaningful sense it's perfectly expected that we do not detect God the way you detect objects of nature. We detect God by means of seeking, investigating or contemplating the supernatural. And this is merely logical. No belief needed. You detect and conclude whatever works for you. To me at least God has nothing to do with beliefs.
5229
DnD Central / Re: The Problem with Agnosticism
Quote from: jseaton2311 on

Quote from: ersi on
Laws of nature are not physical, but they rule everything physical.

You say the laws of nature 'rule', that is an action verb meaning that they have a separate power beyond the powers which they describe.  Congratulations, you have just given birth to an entity that never existed before. 
Laws of nature don't exist? Interesting theory.

Instead of "rule" how about "govern"? Though both should be unproblematic:
Quote from: Lawrence Krauss
At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs--as long as no one is watching, anything goes.
5230
DnD Central / Re: The Problem with Agnosticism
Quote from: Frenzie on

Quote from: Macallan on
How do you test any given phenomenon for 'supernaturality' in the first place?

I posted this link last month: http://richardcarrier.blogspot.be/2007/01/defining-supernatural.html Of course, it also touches on what you said

Quote from: Richard Carrier
But were these just twisted, interdimensional aliens, or real supernatural demons? That's another question altogether. But regardless of whether you can know the difference, there is still a difference.

Interesting story, even though too long and too much about what people say, instead of about what would make sense to say. By his definition, for example laws of nature would be supernatural. Laws of nature are not physical, but they rule everything physical. Perfectly qualifies as non-physical mental entity, god or such by his definition.

I do not define supernatural that way. For me, laws of nature are entirely natural. They are just not physical. Mental phenomena are as natural as physical phenomena. Since laws of nature don't deviate from nature, there's nothing miraculous about them.

So, laws of nature, as a non-physical disembodied universal aspect of nature, are natural. A miracle or a supernatural instance would be a non-physical universal aspect of nature with a body (just one). Or a natural entity with two or more bodies, while not being a universal. At the same time, they'd very much be deviations from nature, more often undesirable than something good for anything.
5231
Browsers & Technology / Re: Keeping an eye on Opera
Quote from: krake on

Quote from: ersi on

Chropera's installer is a virus, nothing else. Good that Linux doesn't allow viruses.


Is it? Or are you exaggerating now? :)
Either way, I'm not interested in Chropera ;)

Still wonder for the case it had been a Linux package, if you would have installed it and tested that 'virus' :)
Are there any net installers on Linux? Well, there are - system-wide with full configuration options. Unless you qualify the the packaging tools or the whole opsys as a virus, there are no viruses on Linux.

I'm not interested in Chromium in any shape. Chromium by itself doesn't qualify as a virus, but a beacon meant to call home to check its version is suspicious. A program to pull in some other program without user control is a trojan, even though it's served as a great service to users. In fact, this is how all trojans and viruses are served.
5232
Browsers & Technology / Re: Keeping an eye on Opera
Quote from: j7n on

That is how most online installers work indeed. They could potentially only grab the packages/components that the user had selected. Then the network installer would have a reason to exist. But I haven't seen any such product yet. I'm sure they exist.
Old Mozilla had such an installer, and its descendant Seamonkey had it at version 1. You could download the net installer, launch it and select the components you wanted to install. It's an internet suit, you could refuse the mail and irc components, debugger. IIRC, the HTML composer and browser were required. The same options also came up with the full installer, so the net installer was specifically for those who were very particular about their downloads.

Chropera's installer is a virus, nothing else. Good that Linux doesn't allow viruses.
5233
Forum Administration / Re: Forum requirements and (un)desirables
Quote from: Frenzie on

Quote from: ersi on
@Frenzie
Is there a way to block or minimise forum posts by undesirable members?

In your profile you can edit your Buddy & Ignore lists. I haven't tried those features myself yet.

I found it and tried now. Ignore list works like at My Opera. The ignored posts show up with the content "You are ignoring this user. Show me the post." :)

Edit: But notifications when the ignored person makes a forum post do not cease :(
5234
Forum Administration / Re: Forum requirements and (un)desirables
@SF
There's the End button on every computer. In browsers it jumps to the bottom of the page. If it doesn't, then that's not a browser you are using.

@Frenzie
Is there a way to block or minimise forum posts by undesirable members?
5235
DnD Central / Re: The Problem with Agnosticism
Quote from: Belfrager on

Quote from: ersi on

The scale would be quite okay if agnosticism were centred at zero.

That's just the beginning of The Problem with Agnosticism.
Just as we have these days the "new atheism", we also have the "new agnosticism". New agnosticism means a posture of indifference towards much more than just philosophical questions, it means simply I don't care, I don't want to know. It includes philosophical questions but also much more things.

That's not Agnosticism, Agnosticism means a certainty that is not possible to the human being to know if God exists.
In others words, the ultimate truths and, very particularly - the existence of God, are not accessible to Men.

I used to be there until I realized the mistake and wrongness of the classical agnosticism.

Even though the scale comes from a new atheist, I don't see it as tendentious. I have seen similar scales in the eighties. The problem with the scale is the fact that it's one-dimensional, while the issue is more-dimensional. In addition to "knowing" if there is God or not, there's also the issue what one does with the knowledge. For example "knowers" of God may well have buried their heads in sand or hiding in the closet from the direct implications of the knowledge, and "knowers" that there is no God may have tightly tied their careers to evangelising about God, a la Dawkins.

Agnosticism also has at least two sides. One type of agnostics "know" that "Does God exist?" cannot be answered either way, while others are totally lukewarm to the question, and they think this is what agnosticism means. Or, in a slightly better case, they think "I don't know" is a good and valid answer that should be eye-opening to people and convince everybody to affirm the same.

Same trouble with skepticism. Skepticism mostly means doubt these days, but there are skeptics who see doubt as something to be removed by means of enquiry and investigation, to come up with sure knowledge in the end. Then again, other skeptics only reinforce doubt by undermining all possible positive accounts of anything, criticising everyone and everything without any purpose other than criticising, until the field of uncertainty is absolute.
5237
DnD Central / Re: Headaches
Headache as a magnetic blizzard? Maybe magnetotherapy is for you...
5238
DnD Central / Re: Grammatical Mutterings
Quote from: jax on
Somehow the imperative "don't be boring" beats "let me get this point across" in the human mind. This is the hubris speaking.

Yeah, I see your point now. See how much repetition it took. And still, "don't be boring" can be seen from problem-solving point of view also: When there's nothing to solve, we conjure up problems just for fun. I personally am a broadly problem-solving person. Everything is a problem, and I don't mean it in a bad way. Solving problems is my style of entertainment.

Quote from: jax on
[Language] expresses who we are, or who we want to be.
Right. I said that before.
5239
DnD Central / Re: Grammatical Mutterings
Quote from: jax on
The idea that language came to be to serve practical problem solving and communication needs is not popular these days. For that purpose language seems vastly overengineered.
Clearly, this looks this way only when your thinking is overly engineerial itself. Problem-solving is not practical in the mechanistic sense. In the mechanistic sense it's only practical to let things be. As some wise dude said: Work pays off on payday, laziness pays off now.

Problem-solving, when understood correctly, is entirely sufficient prerequisite for language. The correct understanding of problem-solving does not entail just any actual problem here and now, but all possible and thinkable problems any time anywhere. When problem-solving is understood this way, and it's also understood that this is what language is supposed to cover, the nature of language also becomes clear.

Computer languages are too limited for problem-solving understood as I described. When new bigger problems arise or a new angle to computational problem-solving is discovered, hackers usually create a new language to deal with it, whereas natural languages are immediately usable or readily extensible to handle any new situation.
5240
DnD Central / Re: Grammatical Mutterings
The answer to this is simple - everybody needs language, but hardly anyone is engineer. People come up with different terms for the same thing, and this must be allowed. A computer language may be precise according to your definition, but it would also be too limited, whereas natural languages handle with ease all the imaginable and even unimaginable complexities of real life. So, endless ways of expressing the same thing are not redundant after all, but rather necessary and inevitable.
5241
DnD Central / Re: The Problem with Agnosticism
Quote from: Belfrager on
And who's that Dawkins by the way?
Dawkins is associated with two things:

1. The word "meme" which sounds both cool and important, but hasn't amounted to any sort of consistently usable concept.
2. New Atheism. He is the first and greatest proponent of it.

And there's a third thing too - his name is occasionally mixed up with Stephen Hawking.
5242
DnD Central / Re: Headaches
Quote from: Belfrager on

An headache that passes with concentration, meditation, relaxation, etc, it's not a real headache.
For real headaches or migraine, only chemicals can relieve suffering.
Have you seen a man drive a nail through his own hand without flinching? That's the kind of concentration and willpower I am talking about. Except that driving a nail through the hand serves no purpose other than showmanship. But the principle is the same in extinguishing headaches, even if they be migraines or whatever. Just relax that thing between your ears and everything becomes possible. It takes some practice of course, it's not a mechanical procedure with just one kind of results each time.
5243
DnD Central / Re: Grammatical Mutterings
Quote from: jax on
Laziness and impatience simplifies the language, and hubris, or ornamentation, makes it more complex.

Not just hubris, but also actual need of communication demands a certain minimal level of relevant distinctions. Language is for conveying a message after all. If laziness and impatience were everything, then language would be reduced to one single sound which is incapable of conveying anything. But this is not the case. Where some distinctions are levelled due to laziness or haste, other distinctions crop up elsewhere in the word/sentence to compensate, and this principle of serving a purpose is as relevant as the principle of minimal effort. The conjunction of these principles produces a tender level of efficiency that is constantly changing due to the tendency of less effort on one hand and due to inevitable need to convey relevant messages about the ever-changing world on the other.
5245
DnD Central / Re: Headaches
Quote from: Josh on

Me? Suffer.
I have an axe here at hand, though...[abbr=:whistle:][/abbr]
So the other option is to try to kill someone else? I know an old couple who used to play run-and-catch games with an axe, running around the house. I haven't asked if they got rid of headaches this way.

@Frenzie
Concerning headaches, I have told my method: I see the ache coming from afar and I catch it before it does anything. The trick is in being aware of the impulses inside (I see them as some kind of colour blobs moving around) and anticipate their next change. Avert the unwanted change by means of willpower or conscious shift of perceived distance from the impulse. The distance is purely mental and you can change it at will. When the ache is mentally far, it won't have an effect. All this presupposes of course that you have a realistic picture of your internal impulses. This works for me so well that I don't take any drugs.
5246
DnD Central / Re: Headaches
Quote from: Frenzie on

I could instruct in some basic vipassanā-like things*

* Or as I call it, the natural way of calming my mind before going to sleep, which I only later found out is apparently uncommon.

So you have an innate concentration practice. I suspected that much. This is commendable :)

Vipassana is mindfulness of breathing, which doesn't work for me, so it's reasonable to expect it doesn't work on some other people too. Do you know of other types of concentration/meditation for Josh's instruction?
5248
DnD Central / Re: Headaches
Quote from: Frenzie on

It's a joke with a serious undertone. If stress is giving you a headache, try to do something about stress. If it's dehydration, drink some water. If you indeed meant reducing the symptoms only rather than addressing the cause, in most cases that doesn't sound like a great idea in the long run.
You mean meditation would not address the cause? Depends on the diagnosis of course. For example, I don't have headaches, so am I missing symptoms or am I missing the cause? Most people around me who have headaches, they get them regularly all life long, young and old, with stable lifestyle or changing lifestyle, so there seems to be a persistent rather autonomous cause. How would you address it?
5250
DnD Central / Re: The Problem with Atheism
Quote from: jseaton2311 on
Spirituality can be useful in providing the impetus for people to simply put one foot in front of the other along life's road.  No one gets through this life unscathed--we are all guaranteed to be in pain, physically and psychologically, during our brief sentience on Earth.  Our spirituality is simply something we can call on to help us through those times. 
You have a penchant for verbal disagreement when you are substantially in agreement. It's a peculiar characteristic, amusing to observe :)