Vapymid

Yes. Provided he is operating in a free market environment. However, colluding with others or using his monopoly market power to block competition should NOT be his right. When you are talking specifically about inventors (so involving the "intellectual property") and the apparent natural monopoly applicable to them, an attempt to reconcile that monopoly with the need to preserve markets has been made in the form of patents. They recognised the temporary monopoly of the inventor (and so his right to commercially benefit from his invention) but also ensured open access to anyone who wanted to exploit the invention (for a fee). Unfortunately, even this system seems to be badly broken now... This is at once terribly idealistic, naive and opportunistic statement. Firstly, by intervening in other people's affairs the interloper, like the US, acts a dictator - dictating its will to others. The issue of governance is a complex one and can only be dealt with by people who are directly affected. If you intervene from outside in 99% of the cases your timing will be wrong and the result will be worse than it would otherwise have been. Case in point Iraq - the iraqi people should have been left alone to deal with their internal affairs. If not for the sanctions Saddam would not probably have lasted as long as he did anyway. Yet, now all you have done is handed the country to Iran on a plate and at a cost of hundreds of thousands of people. This is not easily forgotten - you will not be welcome there for generations. Secondly, if one is against dictatorship on principle - he must act consistently, against any dictatorships that are out there. I don't see that happening. So it looks as if the US is not against dictatorial powers as such but is simply using it as an excuse to further its own geopolitical interests. This is not a surprise and pretty much everyone in the world now sees it for what it is (largely because of the Iraq war debacle with Gitmo and all other things). I am not judging your country for trying to get as much of what it thinks it needs by force (if you do have force available you are compelled to use it to your perceived benefit) but - it is equally reasonable for the objects on one country's ambitions to resist force with force (and when single country is unable to resist on its own it will form alliances with others) or deception or bribery, if force is not available. And also, sometimes you have to ask yourself - "are these people who direct the policy of my country really pursuing the country's interests or their own?" And thirdly, the approach of "I don't care why they did it but they did the right thing by me" is a slippery slope. Some old sayings about selling one's soul to the devil come to mind when I here this... I have nothing but respect for Jewish people by I often say to my Jewish friends - when a Jew steps on the Israeli soil he leaves his brain at the immigration desk and puts his balls where the brain used to be. I cannot see Israel as a success at all for the time being. For decades they cannot establish relationship with neighbours - this is not statesmanship. Freedom? Very questionable in a country which is officially based on religious and racial discrimination. What is happening with the Palestinians bears very troubling resemblance to the Final Solution in the Nazy-occupied Europe (with some sensitivities taken into account - so no gas chambers or extermination camps - but with ghettos and a similar ultimate goal). Is the US support good or bad thing? Clearly, without it Israel in its present form would not be here today. It would have had to adapt and make peace with those around it or disappear. Also, reliance on the US support is a dangerous game. One day that support will vanish in thin air and Israel will have to face all its enemies on its own, all of a sudden. A country so reliant on a Big Daddy's helping hand will be very, very vulnerable when that happens. Oh, every country in the world actually claims that right by virtue of their sovereignty. Regards

JHuyZArFiIk Pity the video is not showing his hands more... Regards

I am absolutely unclear about why it should be? You don't need to take an ancient book as the ultimate literal truth even if you subscribe to and believe in the correctness of the moral message it carries. The Book is a symbol and its message does not change regardless of its provenance but only if you don't intend to use it to justify imposition of your own prejudices on others. Only in that case a divine (or not) origin of the text has any relevance for when an argument is being lost on merits the only solution is to appeal to a higher power. Regards

Ross, what I'm trying to say is with enough energy we can *make* oil. As much as we would want. This is not a rocket science, Germans developed gas-to-liquids process before WWII and used synthetic oil extensively during the war. The South Africans used coal-to-liquids fuel for decades because of the anti-apartheid sanctions. Huge reserves of both the natural gas and coal will still be available for ages but, again, with enough energy you can even use CO2 and water to make saturated hydrocarbons. Regards

A bit of an energiser for Friday morning... MiatYS2W1gA Regards

Well, as you say, to date that was a philosophical issue as it deals with subjective qualities of good and evil as perceived by human mind. As and when we come up with an objective unit of measurement and a method to conduct the measurements this will move from philosophical real to scientific. If we have not yet developed these measures and methods I'm sure it will happen soon. In fact, I have no idea, but maybe research is already being done in this direction. I we are talking about this here there must be minds immeasurably superior to ours regarding this Earth with... sorry! Wrong forum. As we understand more about how brain works, we will find ways of quantifying, measuring and comparing subjective qualities (such as emotions) in physical or informational terms. Regards

Corruption assumes things going not according to the original plan, which would be quite unGodly. Also, if God originally planned to only have goodness in the world (which prevents any life from coming into existence) and someone else comes in and subverts the original plan by corrupting the good, creating evil and thereby causing life to appear, then the corruptor (Satan?) is actually good? You broke my brainz... Isn't the following a much simpler and likelier scenario? - God creates the world with a state A and a sate B in it. Stuff from B flows into A. The flow allows matter to organise itself and causes life to evolve. Life thrives on B and dies in A, so terms A as "evil" and B as "good". Consequences: - B flows into A until all B is gone and only A remains. Life must find a way to continue itself beyond that point while there is still enough B left to do that. It's a race. Life wins and turns into something bigger or loses and dies forever. End of experiment. Regards

In that case the deciding factor is additional information brought into the system. Without it, in a closed system of you, him and the road the disorder (entropy) has increased and would have increased further as you would have punched him and he fought back until you both died from exhaustion and your orderly organised bodies begun decomposing into ever more primitive compounds and elements But, the extra information was consumed to quell the conflict and you both went your own way and the integrity of the civilisation has been preserved. Imagine next time the same man trips you again on the same place and provides the same excuse. This time, though, the information will have less value as clearly the guy was taking the piss. The entropy increase would have been inevitable but for the timely intervention of the nearby plod. But what is moral? Morality is the most abused concept in the world, mostly used quite immorally for achievement of personal ends by those who use it. People often resort to morality argument but when asked to define morality itself they cannot. The way I see it there is fundamental morality - the one determined by objective natural laws, there is expedient or transient morality - the one that is determined by our interpretation of certain existing circumstances, then there is false morality - the one that exists primarily as a tool for, as I said, achievement of personal goals. The fundamental morality must be fundamental - i.e. it will not change because of our understanding or not of the underlying laws. We feel it instinctively and this relates to the states of "good" and "evil" which I wrote about here To kill another person without a good reason would probably be an example of a breach of fundamental morality. The expedient morality is something that is needed for a while to maintain the structure of society. Like not having sex before marriage when there exist no effective ways of contraception or protection or cure from STDs. The relevance of such moral rule disappears as the underlying reasons for its introduction cease to exist. Persistence in applying such outlived morality may in itself become immoral. The latter case is obvious - if I am placed in a position of power I can declare that any attempt to lessen my power is immoral. That would be false but quite helpful to me as it will safeguard my position. So what is the actual criteria of "morality"? I don't know but over the years I came to define morality as expectation of integrity of trusted persons. This is a simplification but "Trusted" here is any person whose action or inaction will have consequences, which will unreasonably compromise the other person's position. So, two soldiers on opposite sides of no-man's land trying to shoot each other are not acting immorally as there is no expectation that one must trust another. In fact, the trust is that each will try to kill the other and therefore provide the reason for the other one to do the same. But consider a defector on any side - he is clearly breaching the trust put in him by his comrades, officers, generals and the whole bloody country. Regards

God who creates qualities which can be corrupted is not a true God, is he? Why do we have to assume that evil is a corruption of good rather than that both are fundamental properties of the Universe in which we live? For life to exist it must feed on free energy from the environment outside. When that energy is spent to perform useful work, what's left is entropy, which is useless. So, free energy is good for life (for any life) and entropy is bad - when the life gets complicated enough to correlate information with physical entities, what's bad for life is tagged as "evil" and what's good as "good", religion or no religion. Now, to survive and continue as life forms we must be able to understand that the "evil" state is undesirable and to want to move as far from it and as close to the opposite state of "good" as possible. And that is what is driving everything, from our cellular biochemistry to our daily lives to the progress of human civilisation. Without this difference in "desirability" of outcomes we and life itself would not have existed. That actually implies that life would equally not have existed is there was only one state (even if it was "pure goodness") possible because there would be no dynamic process which would allow for parts of "goodness" to be moved from one state to another and extract any work from it. So, life is impossible without death and therefore death is not intrinsically "evil". Notice that this gradient in "desirability" between the states of "good" and "evil" only needs a set of very low-level fundamental laws defined just so at the time of creation of the Universe for the process to unfold itself without any further intervention from outside. So the Universe with laws like that does not need any active God in order to function. The only remaining question is whether the initial setting of rules happened by design (i.e. by God) or by pure chance. Regards P.S. There are two threads - this one and Theism/Atheism, which are becoming closely intertwined. I am posting this here but it can also be considered as an answer to this one.

This is an interesting coincidence: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/15/orbiting_solar_stations/ As they say - great minds think alike Regards

If Freeman were to choose the fight, the grants in that hall would have looked at him for a moment then dropped on their knees and chanted "Oh, the free man, we're not worthy!". After all, by then he will have killed the Nihilant already. Regards

Games: Half-Life 2, clearly. Films: not sure, maybe Star Wars, but probably better BSG 2003 Books: Eon or Fire Upon the Deep/A Deepness In The Sky Regards

As I wrote in a post elsewhere, I think that any god existing within the constraints of this Universe cannot be omnipotent, which in turn means he is not God. The true question of Theism/Atheism therefore becomes - is there a God behind creation of the Universe or has it appeared spontaneously and upon itself? In essence it then becomes the question of what came first - mind or matter and the Theism/Atheism becomes the Idealism/Materialism debate. All other aspects of religion then become secondary and totally anthropocentric - we have created these ourselves, partly based on our earliest attempts to understand the environment around us, partly on our collective memories of the advent of human society as a self-aware, time-aware entity, and partly to formulate the rules which we believe are beneficial to that entity. So, even if God exists, the religions (books, legends, customs, paraphernalia) are not God-given but created by man, of course, by man who is a part of the God-created universe and therefore subject to God-set fundamental laws but, nevertheless, interpretations and speculations, rather than directly obtained truth. In this respect atheist ideologies of various flavours are themselves nothing else but different varieties of religion. What else? The question of good and evil - it appears to be a fundamental and objective property of the Universe. Evil is what's bad for life, good is what's good for it. Life strives to escape evil and attain goodness. It appears that thermodynamic entropy relates to evil and so, life is trying to use available resources to reduce entropy within and around itself. Fundamentally, humans are not evil, we are simply searching for ways to follow that drive. When we deviate too far from the optimal path - the entropy bites (there breaks a war, famine or a financial crisis) and we have to change our course. Free will? Is there a free will (I really love song on the subject )? There is certainly an illusion of it. But step on the edge of a cliff - is your mind free to decide to jump? Of course not. All sort of blocks, rules, protections, warning will go off in your brain and you won't be able to do it (unless there is a greater evil perceived, which in itself will not be a manifestation of free will but merely an overwhelming imperative to act in a certain way). Our minds operate in our brains, which are made from matter, which is bound by the laws of the Universe. The interaction of these laws of the Universe is therefore what makes our decisions for us. Sorry for this rant. I am not preaching, just suggesting some concepts and ideas for further consideration. Regards

Shhh!!! Quiet! Don't tell anyone, otherwise some green lobby will demand for it to be immediately shut down... But, seriously, I think there are problems with using solar on any great scale: - conversion technologies are inefficient and/or expensive - no Sun at night (needs massive storage or it's lights out after sunset) - the sunniest places on Earth are far away from the busiest places (needs long-distance transmission lines) - are-based (needs extensive area directly exposed to sunlight = competes with agricultural land) While the first obstacle can be overcome, the others will remain. Of course, even with these limitations solar is better than windmills but I don't know if *terrestrial* solar can cover any substantial part of our energy needs. Perhaps orbital solar (with power being microwaved or lased down) has got more potential... The holy grail is definitely fusion but it requires investment and - even more important - the will to succeed. What I resent the greenies for is for undermining that will by constantly suggesting some delusional but seductive (to some) solutions. Regards

m_VfhKfCpDI 3ajAvDJSGqc Regards

Interesting, I have not considered cymbals - I don't know if high frequency sounds are perceived as tones (and therefore falling into a tonality or a key) or not. This is not the point though. The point is that while each particular combination of sounds may fall into either a major or a minor key, the overall piece of music may be a mixture of both and the overall emotion is not binary. I don't think you and I differ in that respect. I still think we have different interpretations of the definition of climax, though. I enjoyed your Argument, which I found using a lot of minor intervals (which is what I like), and in particular the climax at 2:20 Regards

What we need is energy. With enough energy supply we can produce all the oil we need for the use as fuel and chemical raw materials (or switch to other chemical that do not need petroleum as the starting point). The question is where to get the reliable, sustained, powerful enough energy source, which does not itself depend on oil. Regards

You preempted me, I was going to say exactly same thing. We are talking a bit cross-purpose with ProHypster here as we ascribe different meaning to the same word... What ProHypster seems to mean is amelodic or nearly amelodic music. Whether it does or doesn't climax is a separate issue. I would say, it is a matter of personal taste - I like very wide range of music, depending on my mood and particular circumstances. Even with complex music I normally prefer structured compositions but sometimes amelodic, stochastic pieces also work for me. Like this or Regarding happy or sad - there is not much we can do about it. We perceive combinations of sounds in binary way, either in major or minor key. But under emotional involvement I (and, as I see, you also) meant the whole range of emotions. Again, when you are talking about music for the heart we are talking about the same thing. Our difference lies in two points - one, as said above, is the definition of "climax" and two, that you seem to prefer amelodic music, while I just occasionally enjoy it, hence is a matter of taste. Regards

Not sure I understand the question... Regards

I don't think you can extrapolate like that. Removing climax completely will make music emotionally flat and uninvolving. Regards

Progressive-rock, art-rock, I guess there are many names for it but it is a very loose category with very different acts performing very different music, from Yes to Traffic to Jethro Tull to Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator etc. Regards

I think there is a distinct difference between a melody getting stuck in your head and the issue of musical climax. For example, that "Piano Phase" piece is really stuck in my head now - tabadabtab-tabadabadab, tabadabtab-tabadabadab, tabadabtab-tabadabadab, ad nauseam... On the other hand, a composition like this - even though it has many climaxes (try starting from 19:00 if you can't listen to the whole thing - it's not for casual consumption), it will take you listening to it many times before anything will stick, if at all. Regards tabadabtab-tabadabadab tabadabtab-tabadabadab tabadabtab-tabadabadab

It is indeed! Here is another epic piece: SD5engyVXe0 Regards

A great instrumental by KC. From "Islands" PNSIQ2Ej2Kc Here is another one of the greatest, in contrast... S0yoKP7jfzY The Youtube page for this one has surprisingly good notes on the background of the number, historical references, influences etc. Regards

kdMkIAttahU Regards