But using that as your basis to ignore the question is ignoring the can.
Religion tries to answer the questions on existence, meaning and morality (this is not meant to be defimitively comprehensive). An atheist who calls the religious person a fool for asking a question and finding an answer that still leaves some questions is himself the fool.
Asking the question is fine. Saying "God did it" is just a cop-out though. It's not a real answer. It's basically equivalent to saying "I don't know". Except it's worse, because it means you stop looking for the actual answer.
Ha. That second sentence is exactly what I said as a teenager; I've since found out how ignorant I was.
It's only equivalent to saying "I don't know" if you follow a line like Pascal's Wager, with any sort of faith or conviction you're saying you have established an answer.
The Big Bang is widely accepted yet is by normal definition impossible (you need time in order for something to change, the Big Bang requires a change before time existed). It's a cop out that allows people to curtail metaphysical enquiry at the bounds of known physics ...
People will challenge a theist "who created god" but don't challenge "who/what created the Big Bang". For some reason ex nihilo is fine for the Universe but preposterous for a creator? (The reason is usually a religious reliance on certain assumptions.)
>you stop looking for the actual answer. //
Your petitio principii is showing.
If I find "I get wet standing outside when it rains" I don't need to find a contradictory reason why I'm getting wetted by rain unless the original theory fails. Of course you stop looking and only consider then opposing answers if they present themselves.
When you wake in the morning do you enquire as to the nature of your reality afresh or do you assume it has the same realism as when you went to bed? (Until that realism is challenged?)
> People will challenge a theist "who created god" but don't challenge "who/what created the Big Bang". For some reason ex nihilo is fine for the Universe but preposterous for a creator?
The big bang and what (if anything) cause it does get challenged and is challenged by serious scientists too. The current answer is we have absolutely no idea.
On the other hand, it's rare to see religous people acknowledge that gods (there is no logical reason for a single god) require a creator at all, it's a thought terminating proposition.
Assuming a god like figure can exist, why would you assume only one can exist? 10 or 50 or a billion sounds just as Logical as one. God knows our universe would make more sense if it was designed by committee.
Aside from that, given what we know about human evolution and how not unique we are, it stands to reason that a creator was subject to similar limitations.
The Big Bang is not the equivalent of "God did it". It's not a cop-out, it's a description of what our current understanding says happened. And yes, there's a lot we still don't know, and a lot we can never know. And that's ok! We don't just pretend that we have an explanation for everything (which is what "God did it" is), we say what we do know and what we don't, and then we try to reduce the amount we don't know.
You're declaring the Big Bang to be impossible due to what appears to be a simple semantic trick. But I don't believe you're even remotely qualified to determine whether the Big Bang is impossible or not, and the fact that it's widely accepted as a good explanation should be a big clue that maybe it's not so impossible.
> If I find "I get wet standing outside when it rains" I don't need to find a contradictory reason why I'm getting wetted by rain unless the original theory fails.
"God did it" is not a theory. It is the absence of a theory. It's what you say because you don't know the actual reason. For example, a thousand years ago, "God did it" was probably a well-accepted explanation for why it rains. But today we have a very detailed understanding of the physics involved and can explain rain without any supernatural explanation. You can't say that somehow in the last 1000 years, God stopped managing rain and physics started handling it instead. No, it was physics all along.
A big problem with "God did it" is it literally stops all progress. If you say "I don't know", you can go looking for the answer. If you have an actual hypothesis, you can test it, try to determine if it's true or not, and make progress towards finding the truth. But once you say "God did it" there's no where left to go, and you have no hope of ever finding out the real reason.
I've never seen any religious person who was seriously interested in the question of the origin of the universe stop at "God did it". It's unfair to imply that this is all that theologians have ever had to say on the topic.
I have not met the person saying it as a cop-out. In my experience they say God did it and tell us about him.
It's only a cop-out if they say it to avoid looking into reasons for the explanation. The religious people I know, myself included, have well established and agreed upon reasons.
Just because you disagree with their conclusions and reasons for them, it's ridiculous to call it a cop-out.
Showing that people are willing to pay a price does not make it equitable. You have to account for power dynamics and market conditions. I believe the original question was whether there was a relatively even or fair split of 'profits' from the current setup. One could make a case for this being even, and also for it being somehow relational to investment (blood from the giver, r&d + logistics from the receiver). Your 'answer' glosses over all that.
You're welcome to "make the case" for whatever you want, but this comment suggesting it's something in anyone's control belies what's really going on. The price system and "profit" splits aren't something any one entity (plasma doner nor company) sets down and decides. It (like most prices) is an emergent phenomenon. You might as well "make the case" the morning commute from downtown Chicago up to Evanston should be less than 35 minutes, it's pretty much irrelevant as to how it turns out.
In that case I agree, it's certainly possible to analyze it, and market forces (number of firms collecting donatations etc) probably has a lot to do with the price, along with laws, alternative opportunities for doners, technology, how much it hurts, etc.
Thanks for the rant, was great. Used to play Eve a lot. In the end I got pretty deep into suicide ganking (destroying ships in 'secure' space at the cost of your own ship(s) for the loot).
At best it was like 400m/ hour but didn't exactly scale easily. I had 7 windows open. Scanner dramiel remote sensor boosted by someone two jumps from target, three battleships with artillery cannons, one destroyer with artillery cannons and a scrambler, someone sensor boosting these ships, and a hauler ready to warp to can. Sometimes I would scan the other direction and be ready to switch gank gates but it depends on system. Goal was to be able to catch almost anything with 1bil+ in cargo. Cruisers, t2 haulers, t3 cruisers, etc. It felt really distopian. Some hits were upwards of 5bil.
Wow... Either 1) you really enjoyed suicide ganking and did it a lot (just like I enjoy writing tools and spreadsheets so my activities aren't "working to plex" but "playing the game"), or 2) this was a few years ago and plex were sub-600m. Leaning towards the second one because I've never heard of arty battleships for suicide ganking. Seems expensive. Did your ships look like this?:
because Nado battlecruisers have been the large arty ganking platform of choice (they fit battleship guns) since I started around 2013-14.
I guess your destroyer was to volley any shuttles/frigs that came through? Clever.
What routes did you work? Jita/Amarr pipe? Hub undocks? Did you move around to keep from getting a reputation?
I'm always curious to know what players who were active years ago think of newer developments in the body of player knowledge involving their main activites. Early on Eve was like the wild west where people didn't know as much and tried things that seem ludicrous given what we've learned since then. Since you're an instalocking ganker, what do you think of these? Were they something you were aware of / thought about?
[0]: Given: Eve runs in 1 second ticks. Reasoning: it takes one tick for the target to show up on the ganker's screen and another tick for the ganker's scram to apply to the target. Conclusion: ships that align and enter warp in less than 2 seconds are uncatchable without a bubble.
[1]: Infographic for how to make sub-2sec-align interceptors (which are immune to bubbles): http://i.imgur.com/7rYYJpY.png
[2]: Infographic going deeper into the 2sec "common knowledge" rule and showing that 2sec align ships can be caught in edge cases (which has been proven experimentally by now): http://eve.501gu.de/misc/travelceptor_vs_instalocker.png
[3]: Tool written this year using publicly available kill data to determine whether a planned route is likely to include gankers/campers and displaying qualifying info like "Were the kills specifically near gates?" (kills not on gates are likely not a camp) "Were heavy interdictors involved?" (No amount of stabs can counter a HIC infinipoint) etc.: http://eve-gatecheck.space/eve/#Jita:Rens:shortest
I share your skepticism of the (inherent) potential of the internet. It's not a popular belief and I haven't seen a good solution... But in the mean time I watch as everyone heralds the dawn of the information age, awaiting the death of ignorance and bigotry... and I suspect we will find ourselves in a dark place in ten years wishing we had realized how much work we should have done because this gigantic confounding tool is just a tool and like all tools is not a neutral force. A tool's effects in history are those that its use/existence tends to promote.
I'm not sure discussions of a free and equal internet approach something that will be a net good.
I think there's ample evidence that the internet is really most similar to TV.
All lives matter is a direct response to black lives matter and is trying to nullify the claims of the latter. It is functionally abusive because it actively fights increased awareness of the racism that BLM was(is) working towards.
The statement 'All Lives Matter' not as response to BLM would have been fine, but come on. No one here is blind to the current discussion to that extent.
Why are you belittling it as a knee-jerk reaction and sad?
A group of people is experiencing horrible and unjust treatment. The implication of the situation is they don't matter, and the correct reformist statement is that they do matter.
Black lives matter also is not the correct statement. It is the correct understanding of the while situation but you need to keep in mind the nuance of language.
I think it's a great slogan. If everyone (society at large) aleady believed all lives matter then it would be a dumb slogan. It's a great slogan because currently black lives don't matter in many people's eyes. In my experience the only people who don't like the slogan either don't think black lives matter or are absurdly blind to the reality of racism in this country.
The controversy isn't because it's a bad slogan. The controversy is evidence of it being the correct slogan.
Lightsail (which uses regular physics) is doing that, launching a breadbox sail and a second proximity measuring cubesat along with it.
So there's the challenge of building the space-rated devices, with all the testing. It's got to have independent power, have a set of tests defining "it goes" and not, and you've got to consider that LEO isn't really space, it's freefall in a gravity well and magnetic field with tenuous atmosphere. And it's expensive!
That will all take a lot of bench testing. So the project needs access to shielded, vacuum rated facilities, and so on. Testing satellite engine concepts with a 2D model (effectively a huge air hockey table) is also common. This would all be done to both build the satellite and to prove the concept. So they need to do the bench work first.
Bit of a nitpick, but this is true of any object in "space", at least on sub-galactic scales. If it wasn't in freefall around Earth, it would be in freefall around the Sun, and if not that, the Milky Way.
You are correct about the magnetic field and magnetosphere however.
There is a venture, Cannae, that is attempting to launch a Cubesat with an incarnation of this device.
I'm not sure if they're funded, but the cost for a mission of this type can be only a few hundred thousand US$, so it's not an unreachable quantity by any means.
They actually seem like pretty good fits. Gear boxes and lots of car parts is basically precision manufacturing. I'm sure there's a lot of overlap in engineering and probably lots of knowledge that can go in both directions.
Not sure why there is so much doom and gloom in this thread.
Religion tries to answer the questions on existence, meaning and morality (this is not meant to be defimitively comprehensive). An atheist who calls the religious person a fool for asking a question and finding an answer that still leaves some questions is himself the fool.