deadbeeves

From talking to people, I would say it exists on a spectrum. I can imagine an apple, the color and texture of its skin, how it feels to touch it, its weightiness, its smell, the sound it'll make when I bite into it, as well as its taste and texture. I can imagine it at different levels of ripeness too, although I don't have the same amount of information for all of them. For me it's so clear that it's almost as good as the real thing.

Some people I've talked to said they couldn't do most of that. They said they could think of an apple, but couldn't tell me much more about it, other than that it was an apple. Now, obviously I can't peer into their heads. Were they actually imagining more but were unable to put it into words? Were they underestimating the vividness of what they were imagining? Or were they accurately describing what was in their minds? Although I can't directly experience their minds, there were certainly differences between what each of us could describe.

I'm a strong advocate for front brakes, but to me it seems damn near impossible to drop a chain on a fixed gear transmission. Some foreign object would need to be overlapping the chain plane somehow, which sounds like you're already crashing anyway. I think it's far more likely for the chain to outright break.

That would disable certain mechanisms that are occasionally useful. For example, to implement user-mode context switches and function hooking.

He would be pretty lucky if he got to serve 1% of such a sentence.

A'ight. Good luck with that.

I'm unclear on what your point is. It sounds like we're more or less in agreement. Unless you're saying Nazis should be executed for being Nazis.

If they're not threatening then there's no point in punching them, beyond perhaps satisfying one's own violent urges.

Yet there are still Nazis.

Nazis are not monsters, they're people just like you. Their existence does not cause suffering per se, and punching a Nazi does not reduce suffering, it increases it. If you think a particular worldview is inherently evil you're not going to eradicate it by dehumanizing those who adhere to it and advocating for violence against them. The only way to achieve that is to get them to understand that they're wrong, and to do that you need to engage with them as human beings.

Needless to say, tolerating Nazis does not mean tolerating all actions inspired by Nazism.

No reason is given why being intolerant of trans people is bad, it's just asserted. If the reason why being intolerant of trans people is bad is because trans people are a subset of people, then it follows that it's bad to be intolerant of any subset of people. If this is not the case then it needs to be argued why only certain subsets of people are protected from intolerance but not others.

>And we use evidence to figure out who's right. I believe very firmly in objective reality and I think moral relativism is bad.

Are you saying morality is a physical magnitude that can be studied and/or measured? Because if we can't then I don't see how objective reality relates to morality. I would think morality exists only in the minds of people and is therefore not objective, even if it's possible to agree that some universals exist.

If the people designing the storage system get to decide what is and what isn't a file, then the database does store files, because the developers of the database system are telling you that it does. That those files have properties unlike the files on the file system you have worked on is entirely irrelevant.

See what appeal to authority gets you?

We're talking about hundreds of thousands across several countries, not in a single facility. If you have 50 prisoners per building, you only need 4000 buildings like that to get to 200k. This could be happening anywhere, even in large cities. You don't need huge infrastructure per location to do this, though it does take some logistics to keep it up. Running a clandestine prison in the middle of a city is not trivial, but certainly not impossible to keep under wraps. I'm surprised it's profitable, though.

Early operating systems did not support directory trees, and I'm sure some didn't even support timestamps and such. Would you say that those system do not store files at all? What even is the defining characteristic of a "file"?

Affirmative action does not eliminate discrimination, it enforces discrimination up to an arbitrarily defined standard.

Suppose you're applying to a company that's posted 10 openings and has already filled 7 of them, and that you belong to category A, and there's three more candidates who belong to category B. Suppose further that it can be objectively determined that you're a better fit for any of the openings than any of the other candidates, but the company has already filled its category A quota. You will be rejected because of your category, and the less capable candidates will be accepted also because of their category.

Note that it doesn't matter how the categories are defined in my example. Maybe you belong to a privileged (in the social justice sense) class, but it's equally possible that you belong to a disadvantaged class and the inept candidates belong to a privileged class.

Okay, but it's posted here, so the GP's reaction is not unwarranted. If it was not meant to be seen by anyone other than those people then it shouldn't have been posted.

I've been using urbackup for years. It does disk image-based backups and/or file-based backups. Disk image-based backups are incremental at the block level, and file-based backups are incremental at the file level (so if a single byte of the file has changed, the entire file gets backed up). It uses the Volume Shadow Copy mechanism that the sibling comment mentioned to get atomicity and avoid file locking issues.

Yes. However, the instrument being better just means the sound it makes will be better, not that the music the musician makes with it will be better.

EDIT: I should say the sound will likely better, not just better.

It sounds like you're saying that because one is more expensive than the other it is therefore better.

Even if there was white powder in the trash, there's an enormous number of substances and products that appear as white powders when desiccated.

I didn't think I needed to specify "that you can't do without a philosophy degree". You can get into law school without a philosophy degree, too.

The implicit argument is that I don't see what else one could possibly do with a degree in philosophy.

> Philosophy has one of the highest average incomes of degrees, because of the number of graduates that go into law and business.

And why do they need those degrees in order to do that? What are they employed to do?

> Again this is your viewpoint.

What is my viewpoint? Exactly what that I have presented as if it was an objective fact is subjective? Please enlighten me, because I have no idea what you're trying to say.

>Very naive of you to think that religion, scripture, or existence of God are unprovable problems.

When did I say that? What I said was that society provably exists, and I said that to emphasize that the subject matter of law is something real, not to imply by omission that the existence of god/a god/gods is unprovable.

>Many people don’t agree with you on the both sides. Many think there is definitively no God and many think there is.

Cool. I'm not talking about the existence of a god nor about what people think about the topic. I'm talking about theology and philosophy as fields of study.

Sure, but my question was about the purpose of studying philosophy in university. "It's easier than doing it by yourself" is not a purpose. There's still nothing you can do with what you've learned, other than become a professor.

It's not really an apt analogy. Law is not a field of inquiry like science, philosophy, mathematics, and theology are. Lawyers do not push the boundaries of understanding, they're clerks. That aside, laws are not divorced from reality, they're agreements that members of a society enter into regarding how the society is supposed to function. To study law is to study the way society works. Yes, society is an artificial construct, which why law is not a field of inquiry, but it still provably exists.

That might be the case for other disciplines, but it certainly isn't for philosophy. There are no special techniques, you just read what other people have said on the subject. What else is there?

No, I'm not talking about something as banal as whether a god exists. I'm saying theology doesn't study anything real. It doesn't have the tools to determine whether a god exists, because it doesn't study reality, it studies scripture. That's not a point of view, that's what theology is. Regardless of whether magic exists, I think we can both agree we can't find out by reading Harry Potter.

The same for philosophy. I like to half joke that modern philosophy is what's left after taking out all the useful parts of ancient natural philosophy and putting them into either mathematics or science.

>Many otherwise intelligent people think that religion/philosophy is purely subjective, merely a word game

Well, "subjective" is the wrong word, but I get what you mean. However, aren't they just word games? It's not like theology and philosophy study anything real. They just investigate what can be deduced from specific axiomatic systems that are entirely divorced from reality. Theologians aren't even consistent, since they have dogmas that they'll contort around in order to avoid contradicting, even if that involves contradicting other parts of scripture.

I'll never forget the time I asked a philosophy undergraduate why he decided to go to university for philosophy rather than just reading the bibliography by himself, and he told me that by doing so he could teach philosophy. An academic pyramid scheme.

>We cannot be sure that these advancements don't lead to anything significant in the future.

We also cannot be sure that this service won't cause huge damage. If we're going to assign value to it based on its unknown potential, we must consider both its possible benefits and its possible detriments.

We're not talking about dreaming, though, we're talking about expending actual resources and dumping actual contaminants into the actual atmosphere just to, as the sibling comment puts it, give rich people space rides. Scientific space missions are at least justifiable to some extent because we might learn something useful. This is just a method for money to change hands.