Ah, you have a household with children. Yeah, I don't use lock screen. My screensaver is just there to be potentially entertaining when I turn the monitor back on. Whenever I leave I simply turn it off.
According to its website, "Small as a mouse, fast as a cheetah and available for free." If the website cooperates, like this forum does, it'll pretty much give you the speed of Elinks coupled with the looks of—well, any graphical browser.
When using KDE, Konqueror seems a sensible choice for browser, because there's no other point in using KDE than KDE apps, is there? If you don't like KDE apps in general, such as KMail, Kopete, etc., then don't use KDE. I happen to like the extensive settings and options of Konqueror's interface.
Some people also like Plasma, but there's just something about the looks that doesn't sit well with me, even if I should like it reasonably well in theory.
Local dialects are a different story but not related to mismatches of cases or genders.
Not when local "dialects"* (a language is a dialect with an army and a navy) have a different case system. The German term for tussentaal seems to be Missingsch (actually more detailed in English). Something both Wikipedia articles kind of gloss over is that Missingsch will be an entire continuum from Low German to High German. Note, however, that in today's society this doesn't say much about the speaker's ability to speak standard German. It just means that your German and my Dutch formal and informal registers differ only lexically, while the formal and informal registers of a dialect or tussentaal/Missingsch speaker may well differ syntactically and phonetically as well.
None of this means that the German girl in question didn't use the proper case, because if nothing else it's simply been too long ago. But I can tell you that among those Germans who cross the border to go shopping because Enschede is closer or more pleasant than Osnabrück, it's mostly visually distinguishable immigrants who speak fully standard German in the relatively informal market context. I suspect most try to speak a form of Missingsch as close to their local dialect as they can manage in order to communicate most effectively with the Dutch speakers of Twents. There'll also be a fair bit of code-switching with some Dutch and German words thrown in. The younger generation on both sides of the border is increasingly less fluent in plat/Platt, but its influence is still present.
In conclusion, it's not simple at all. It's incredibly, terribly messy, no matter what your experience as a High German speaking city dweller might be.
* Saxon is a different language than German. Franconian is Dutch, as well as all the German "dialects" bordering the south-east of the Netherlands. Saxon (also deceptively known as Low German) is spoken in the north-east of the Netherlands as well as most of northern Germany. German, as in the language considered standard in the whole of Germany, is from the south of Germany and Austria.
The case system is not something a native has to learn at school. He/she grows up with the language in his/her ears. Even an illiterate will use the case system when speaking. Only thing he/she can't is to read and write. Mismatches of cases or genders will simply hurt his/her ears
I'll bet you can think of an occurring change in German that hurts your ears, yet is happening.
I'm aware of the German case system, even if I've not internalized it to the extent where it comes without thought. Are you aware of West Low German? Another related concept is in-between language (English). That is, she may not have been speaking a pure variety of either in an informal context. Or perhaps the case system is on some kind of move closer to Dutch and English among younger Germans in general, similar how to I've been taught "ne … pas" for French negation while in practice every French person I've ever met only said pas. Okay, that's a bit out there, because I've met plenty of Germans who certainly speak with the case system in full attire. Still, young women are apparently where language evolution starts.
That article says some pretty silly things, for instance:
Quote
As for customisation, unsurprisngly you’re going to have issues with add-ons and extensions with a new browser version.
Equating customization with extensions is exactly the problem. Say I'm on the train, so I want to turn off images and Javascript for faster browsing. Having to look for and download an extension defeats the purpose. If I'm lucky, I'll already have Elinks or Links 2 installed… Okay, so you can do that in about:config. Sorry, but should a user really know about about:config just to do something as basic as disabling images?
In Gnome they've also been struck with the same virus. By removing each and every bit of customization, suddenly I had to dive into gnome-config-editor for the most basic of settings, and I had to download a specialized utility just to change the fonts.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as 'the best of 2013' for me.
I agree, 2013 is a disastrous year in browsers. Still, Netsurf is an extremely fast and interesting browser in between Elinks and a full browser like Firefox.
If I missed any, leave a comment. I believe JoshL said I should be able to add 'em to the poll without losing any existing votes.
Some background that might inform your vote:
Chromium forked Webkit and called it Blink. Google claims to have a bigger commitment to not breaking the web with a gazillion -webkit- prefixes.
Elinks didn't really change anything, but you don't change a winning team.
Firefox removed features like an easy Javascript toggle, small icons mode, and other customization options.
Internet Explorer 11 is the best yet, including vastly improved developer tools.
Netsurf 3 adds support for user CSS, improved text selection, a more native appearance, and more.
Opera switched from Presto to Chromium/Blink. It vastly improved on Chromium's speeddial alternative, although not on Opera's own speeddial, and allegedly improved website compatibility. It lost almost all customization ability in the process, but now has access to Chromium's vast extension catalog.
Cinnamon has its own screensaver? Xfce on Debian and Ubuntu simply comes with XScreenSaver. There's a lot of good stuff there. Back on Windows, a long time ago, I used to run the Electric Sheep screensaver. It can also be setup in XScreenSaver (or maybe/hopefully it happens automatically by now).
That clock thing sounds awful inconvenient, but if the Mint people set their stuff up right this backporting guide should do the trick for completely trouble-free compiling. I think you should be able to use sudo apt-get source cinnamon-whatever instead of the first few steps but I'm not completely sure.
I haven't looked into any Zim communities; at the very least there's a mailing list. As another rather generic tip, the Arch Wiki is often more useful to me than the Debian or Ubuntu Wikis unless it pertains to something Debian-specific.
It might also be interesting to note that, while I haven't tried it, Unison is available on Android. Even though Dropbox is typically more convenient for files you're currently working on, its crippled Android client makes one look for different solutions.
For several years now, I've been using Unison to have access to all the files I might need on all devices where I might need them. Thanks to today's HDD capacities, I can have all my important files on my netbook available without an Internet connection, and due to the duplication it's also a backup in case my desktop HDD ever has any issues. Before HDDs reached this size, I used to be more selective about my synchronization, synchronizing e.g. only documents past and present while excluding music or photographs.
Anyway, if you're looking for a good way to synchronize significantly more data than Dropbox offers, or just to do it without sticking anything in the so-called cloud, especially on an American server, Unison might be just what you're looking for.
ersi, this has been fun, but it's starting to take up too much of my time and I don't think we'll get much more out of it for now. I'll try to keep things a lot shorter than I'm inclined to, which I hope will aid clarity rather than reduce it.
We do seem to disagree on a great many things. That might mean I was wrong to disregard your insistence on defining reality more precisely, although I still think I can't do much better than the two or three tentative definitions I already gave you, and even those come with a slew of explicit and implicit constraints. For instance, when I use the word mind I mean it as a description of the way we experience the world, and not as something separate from it. Next time I'll make sure not to imply the mind is separate from reality. Perhaps better than to define reality more precisely in isolation, I'll paraphrase what I already said about epistemology. That is, how we can learn about reality: our knowledge of reality is limited to that which we can perceive or indirectly derive from such through the appropriate use of reason.
Indeed, this means that an ant's experience of reality is not the same as our own. Through the use of reason, measuring instruments, analogies, etc. we might manage to form a reasonable approximation. I believe such an approximation can only be considered valid if we assume an independent reality that exists with or without a human or an ant to experience it. That is what I mean when I say that reality is that which occurs outside your mind, even if your mind is smack dead in the middle of it, and when I say reality is that which doesn't go away no matter how much you might want it to. Perhaps the Buddhist story There Is No Ego will illustrate better how I define mind.
As for the practicality of Cartesianism, I could refer to the quite practical and very recent advancements in neurosurgery that allow the removal of brain tumors without e.g. impairing the patient's speech ability, which was impossible even just a decade ago. I could talk about how stimulating certain areas of the brain can evoke sensations or disrupt certain higher functions, or how the brain seems to store memories rather than receive them. However, I don't believe I have to refer to the modern era in order to find this issue not very obscure at all, and I can simply refer to experiences common to (almost) all people who ever lived. After a hard day of physical activity, I'm generally not in the mood to read the likes of The Sound and the Fury, or to think particularly sophisticated thoughts. Why should my mind be tired when I only used my body?
Let's see, I seem to disagree with your definition of definition itself. That is, I often don't even see the need. If I say that a heterosexual couple and child are a family, a single parent and child are a family, and a homosexual couple and child are a family, I have implicitly already stated that, in the context of child-rearing, a family consists of at least one adult and one child. In both cases you should ask about particular concerns or unclarities if there are any. I'm not sure if this means that your definitions are more prescriptive while mine are more descriptive, whether it's more directly related to some kind Platonic idealism, or whether it's just an internalized philosophical reflex that's not always appropriate. (Regarding the definition of wishful thinking; there are websites that can explain what atheists tend to mean with such terms. A word of warning, that particular website might display some snarky humor. They also have an article on reality.)
In your example here, by coherence you seem to mean the internal coherence of the explanatory model, and by accuracy you mean the model's relation with observable facts. In physics these may have a variance, but in logic, concepts themselves are the only facts and, consequently, internal coherence equals accuracy. And what are we talking about here? We are talking about world views, philosophical systems, not some this or that empirical fact in isolation.
That's what I've been saying all along, isn't it? That's all perfectly fine, glorious even, so long as it's understood that philosophy is restricted only by our mental capacity, not by reality. The reality-check I keep going on about is what you off-handedly wiped under the table, even if elsewhere you speak of irrelevance due to oversimplification. Science, in contrast, is a specialized branch of philosophy which is restricted by reality.
You say that coherence is accuracy in the humanities, but I reject that because I can say the exact same thing about e.g. a grammar as I can about any other scientific model.
So, are you presupposing that the empirical/physical universe equals total reality? Yes or no.
I live my life under the assumption that physicalism in a broad sense is true, using what essentially comes down to Richard Carrier's definitions of natural and supernatural. Please do read the entire piece. However, that assumption is emphatically not embedded in what I wrote about the nature of the universe. My presuppositions about what can be meaningfully said about reality, of course, are.
I'll try to clarify more if you have any further questions about my views, but I hope to end the discussion by agreeing to disagree. If that's not something you wish to do, I'm afraid I'll have to leave you hanging.
As for children growing up in a town it's hard to make the difference between a hare and a rabbit. In cartoons they all look the same
Everything about a hare is bigger, especially its ears and legs. But even if they're too far away to see any of that clearly (which they usually are), hares jump around while rabbits run around. You can see which it is even if they're just a tiny dot at the other end of a field. That being said, they can imitate each other. There once was an escaped tame rabbit who tried to join a group of wild hares and it adopted a jumping means of movement in order to fit in. The hares simply jumped over a somewhat wide ditch and left the poor rabbit standing there, unable or too scared to make the jump.
You can use the information gleaned from an inspection to set up some kind of custom environment in ~/.gtkrc-2.0 akin to a userstyle, which could be used to e.g. hide toolbars and change colors. I briefly explained the process on MozillaZine.
Edit: I was looking around on the Zim Wiki and it actually contains instructions (more, especially under the heading "GtkRC file"). I won't remove what I wrote above because it is generically useful and goes beyond Zim.
- Is there an option to prevent timestamp being inserted in each new note? It's quite enough that it becomes the filename and is a header when opened in a plain text editor. Inserted as text in the note too it's overkill.
Yes. The default templates are located in /usr/share/zim/templates/. Copying over the /usr/share/zim/templates/wiki/Default.txt template to ~/.local/share/zim/templates/wiki/Default.txt should do the trick.
I like the fact that the notes get saved as separate files in plain text, so that they are readable with anything. So, I like how it creates files, but the interface does not seem to be so customisable.
I'm open to different suggestions. I think Zim has earned a permanent place in my software stack, but some notes or drafts might be better served in other ways.
In case you know it is a male: der Hengst. Er gefällt mir. In case you know it is a female: die Stute. Sie gefällt mir.
As if that many people in our increasingly less agricultural society still know the masculine and feminine names for all the animals. Okay, for horses it's hengst en merrie, stallion and… ummm… mare? In any case, I'm pretty sure horses are in some sort of animal top ten.
Wikipedia has an incomplete list of some masculine and feminine animal names. It's probably to be expected that I wouldn't know those of the gerfalcon, but I've never even heard any of those names for hare (haas). And for some of those, including an ooi (ewe), I might not be able to produce them without any thought even if I would easily understand them.
Anyway, we also have alternative, more generic constructions like vrouwtjeshaas and mannetjeshaas (or hazenvrouwtje and hazenmannetje). For me those are actually the correct words to refer to different-gendered hares.
Incidentally, Germans don't seem to care too much about the difference between a hare and a rabbit. "Ach, was für eine süße Hase," a German girl once said about my pet bunny. One wonders if that's how the easter hare turned into an easter bunny in America.
I'd argue that, for now, English still has those same three genders. It's just that they only show in the referent. In Dutch we have something similar: the difference between masculine and feminine is nowadays made only in the referent. In Netherlandic Dutch this has over time led to almost all "de" pronouns except abstract pronouns becoming masculine, but in Brabantic Dutch (the dominant variety of Belgian Dutch) traditionally feminine words still hold on. That might lead to a Belgian saying e.g. "the dove took her food from the gutter" and I'm like "but how do you know it's a female dove; did you also see her male partner to whom she displayed feminine dove behavior? Doves are really, really hard to tell apart and you can't do it when they're alone." I imagine a Belgian might have the same reaction if I spoke of a dove and his food.
Long story short, German is kind of on the opposite end from the Romance languages. They don't have "it" at all, even though classical Latin did. English hasn't moved quite that far from its Germanic brethren yet.
But it becomes even more complicated: The child looks hungry; give it food. Das Kind scheint Hunger zu haben. a, b, and c are correct answers. a. Gib dem Kind etwas zu essen. b. Gib ihm etwas zu essen. (if it's a boy) c. Gib ihr etwas zu essen. (if it's a girl)
What if you don't know?
In any case, in Dutch it's perfectly fine like this to me: Dat kind ziet er hongerig uit. Geef het wat te eten. I think it's ungrammatical to say hem or haar even if you know the gender. However, the girl example is different from German the other way around: "Dat meisje ziet er hongerig uit. Geef haar wat te eten." Still, I think that might be acceptable in spoken German?
in German there's even a word for an inexistent subject: "es", so that the sentence would be like "'es' is raining",
That's not necessarily any different from "it". The child looks hungry; give it food. As you said the difference in both cases is that the antecedent is missing, but es is not a dedicated word. It's simply a neuter indeterminate pronoun. A construction like "The girl went shopping. It came home with a new hat."* is quite ordinary. "She came home…" would be ungrammatical in this context.
* Das Mädchen ging einkaufen. Es kam Zuhause mit einem neuen Hut. Or something like that; I don't get to practice my German nearly enough.
Finally, whether the subject can be inexistent, either implicitly or explicitly, or it can be "nobody", such a discussion about an object requiring a subject is pointless.
You may have touched on something I overlooked. If an object was implicitly defined as needing a subject, rather than using those words descriptively to differentiate between our perceptions and what they relate to, that seems like it would be begging the question.
Sorry, but did you have something to say about what I actually wrote? Not just the length, but the contents, you know...
Quite simply, yet also rather surprisingly, you seem to have a hard time taking context into account. The few sentences I quoted did have a footnote or two in the form of the rest of the article. Most of your reply in essence regurgitated what he was responding to in the first place. Something similar applies to Russel's Teapot. It's part of a larger narrative, some of which I quoted to make that point. You then called it an awesome quote while both implicitly and explicitly rejecting that e.g the introduction might have much bearing at all on what followed.
This in turn means that dualism or idealism is a more practical philosophical perspective than physicalism, yet you expressed your reservations towards Platonic or Cartesian outlooks. Coherence does not seem to be your strong point.
I don't know if Cartasianism is more practical, although superficially it sure doesn't sound right. If mind and body are two distinct substances, and remember Descartes does support (pre)classical mechanics, how can they even act on each other? It sounds rather unpractical and incoherent. It stands to reason that Descartes was not incoherent and meant a logical distinction, i.e. different ways of describing what we experience, in which case it might be coherent and practical after all. But that aside. I suspect an enactivist-like reinterpretation of Descartes is hardly what you had in mind.
Much more important, what's practical and what's true are not the same thing. Of course something needs to be sufficiently true within certain parameters order to be practical, but that's a rather important distinction.
Okay. From a sky-scraper-sized pink elephant to colour red. Coherence is definitely not your strong point.
If the color analogy is such an incoherent shock without the inclusion of a giant elephant, just think of a pink elephant and a red elephant before you start thinking about when you'd start calling it one color or the other.
Resorting to irrationality when faced with facts of life undermining their world view is endemic among atheist physicalists these days. Vide Krauss. He is not the only example of course. Also, he is not a caricature. He is not a funny case to me. He is a sad case. I actually care about rationality. Rationality of scientists should matter more generally too, as a proof of quality of our civilisation or such.
Facts of life such as what? It's hardly my fault the answers I'm "running away from" consist of wishful thinking. Would I like to believe in kamma or some related concept? Of course! Do I like to feel cared for? Naturally. Would I like there to be easy answers? Occasionally.
I see. Yet another remark of the "coherence/rationality/truth is overrated" type. Yet coherence, rationality, and truth determine what reality is, not the other way round. If you think it's the other way round, then you can dedicate your life to the study of sky-scraper-sized pink elephants. As a joke or a dream-object, a sky-scraper-sized pink elephant is real enough, while coherence matters less according to you.
The Maxwell equations are incompatible with classical mechanics. I'm not completely sure how because I never went into those differential equations or what they represent in-depth; that's (mostly freshman-level) university-level physics. In any case, if you value coherence over accuracy, you'd be doing what exactly? Deny the way electromagnetism works just because it lacks coherence with your existing model? Stop investigating as soon as you've reached a coherent explanation for what you already know? My argument is that you should accept for now that things might seem somewhat incoherent, but everything that happened so far seems to indicate that you or someone else will figure out a way to make things coherent again in the future. And that will not happen by ignoring the facts.
NB By facts I don't mean one anomaly that seems to contradict a well-supported model, for that would be most likely to be some kind of fluke. If the anomaly is observed multiple times, however, it starts to become a problem.
As for the skyscraper-sized pink elephants, I believe whole branches of psychology already specialize in that sort of thing, not to mention theology departments.
While coherence matters less to me than truth, truth clearly doesn't matter much to you:
Quote from: ersi
Quote from: Frenzie
Quote from: ersi
If you insist that this is circular logic or that the distinction is irrelevant, then I don't call you a moral relativist any more. I call you moral nihilist.
Neither of those labels bother me, although they no more than partially apply. Just because there are no intrinsic moral values doesn't mean we can't come up with objective, universal moral values.
If moral definitions only partially apply, then what is objective and universal to you? It's becoming clear that you do not bother with objective and universal values yourself. This means you leave it to others. Then it shouldn't bother you when I "come up" with the values for you, as I consistently demonstrate better capacity to formulate ethical principles.
You seem to think calling someone a moral nihilist is an insult or something. I don't. Now, what could it mean when something partially applies? Since we're talking about sex and gender already, we could superficially examine what makes up a woman. She's got bones, nipples, hands, a head, a mouth, feet, hair, a uterus, and a vagina. The attributes of a woman don't just partially apply to me; they mostly apply to me. Yet somehow, I'm not a woman.
Your ethical principles mostly deny reality, so unfortunately they are worthless insofar as they do even if they often come to the right conclusions. "Coming up" with values "for me" illustrates that you value neither accuracy nor truth sufficiently. If I had no values I'd have no values. I certainly wouldn't have your made-up values.
Is this how you answer my point about the subject? By saying that mentioning the subject means ascribing the properties of the object to it? By implying that the subject just means the universe to you and consequently it's me making a category mistake? Coherence really is not your strong point, but I am already for a while under the impression that this is intentional.
What part of the universe is not an object inside the universe is so hard to understand? It's not my fault you decided to ignore half the noun phrase. Moreover, it's your own definition of a subject that precludes the universe from being one: the universe has characteristics like shape, size, et cetera. All I'm saying is that to think the same facts necessarily apply to the universe as to an object inside the universe is quite likely to be a category mistake. And that's why asking what caused the universe may not be a meaningful question at all.
The subject is a part of reality alright, but serves as a perfect example that not everything in reality is an object. The properties ascribable to them are a world apart. The object can be detected and observed, the subject only logically inferred. The subject is always conscious and alive, the object only sometimes, depending on the particular case or on the particular definition of conscious and alive. The object is an empirical reality in space and time with physical characteristics such as shape, size, etc., while the subject is a metaphysical reality with none of the physical features. By saying that the subject is also an object, you made a category mistake.
True, I did phrase that inadequately. Nevertheless, it seems clear now that your subject ("always conscious and alive") is just a synonym for God.
Part of the problem comes not necessarily from the font itself, although it doesn't help, but from the relative lack of contrast. Checking the contrast tells me that #666 on #f9f9f9 is technically WCAG 2 AA Compliant, but a contrast ratio of 5.45 is not much even with a better font. Changing it to #444 or #333 results in a pretty big improvement. You'd think it's pretty obvious you can't use guidelines aimed at normal fonts with very thin fonts.
Krauss is not my caricature, but of his own making. Or did you have something else in mind by straw men? What did I overlook? You keep accusing me randomly. I keep asking for examples, but none are forthcoming. I guess I will just disregard any such remarks from now on. Without proper examples, it's just hot air.
In the first link you speak of "the physicist" as a generality, while apparently you only mean your particular interpretation of one physicist. In the second you write a giant wall of text based on barely reading one paragraph. It reminds me of what Dawkins wrote about The Selfish Gene.
Quote from: Richard Dawkins
Let me begin with some second thoughts about the title. In 1975, through the mediation of my friend Desmond Morris I showed the partially completed book to Tom Maschler, doyen of London publishers, and we discussed it in his room at Jonathan Cape. He liked the book but not the title. ‘Selfish’, he said, was a ‘down word’. Why not call it The Immortal Gene? Immortal was an ‘up’ word, the immortality of genetic information was a central theme of the book, and ‘immortal gene’ had almost the same intriguing ring as ‘selfish gene’ (neither of us, I think, noticed the resonance with Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant). I now think Maschler may have been right. Many critics, especially vociferous ones learned in philosophy as I have discovered, prefer to read a book by title only. No doubt this works well {viii} enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that ‘The Selfish Gene’ on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents. Nowadays, an American publisher would in any case have insisted on a subtitle.
- How did you arrive at this conclusion? (i.e. show that both halves of the statement have evidential support) - What is a fact of nature? An example. - If reason is ruled out, how do you detect facts of nature?
Empiricism provides the anchor to reality and truth that unbounded reason does not. While contradictory is the wrong word, the fact that they restrain each other is precisely the point.
How does one arrive at such a conclusion? Seeing how you like to keep talking about physics, classical mechanics held out quite well, did it not? And Aristotelian physics held up quite well until Galileo. So if you really can't think of an example yourself, try on craters for size.
Which way is it? Simple or not? Make up your mind.
Is it simple or not to say that a particular color is red? If you said it unequivocally isn't, you'd be just as wrong as if you said it unequivocally is.
I have had my own phase of denialism, so I know somewhat what you mean here. Hopefully you understand me too: running away from answers won't make the answers non-existent.
Why is the sky blue? Apple pie. Oh, if only I could quit running so the answers would be all over me.
First, I have not detected any coherent philosophical system behind your statements. Ah, well, reading a bit about "enactivism" reveals why. In fact I shouldn't
If you say so. I find coherence with reality a tad more important than an alleged lack of internal coherence.
Second, your statement was "Simply put, the universe is not an object inside the universe". The concept of subject has everything to do with it, because, logically, inasmuch as the universe cannot be considered an object, it must be considered the subject.
I didn't say the universe can't be an object. The various parts that make up a plane can't fly, but you'd be wrong if you therefore concluded a plane can't fly. Ascribing the same properties to the universe as to an object inside the universe may very well be a category mistake. Wikipedia presents the somewhat cruder but perhaps clearer example of saying bananas are atheists.
Empirically, the object is that which is observed, and the subject is that which observes. The subject itself cannot be observed, but it cannot be denied either. Insofar as observation occurs, the subject is a logical necessity. Metaphysically it's at least half of reality. The problem with atheism is to deny or forget the subject. It's a serious thing to overlook a half of metaphysical reality.
The subject is a part of reality, not opposite from it. The subject is also an object.
I actually replaced most of my Links 2 use with Netsurf.