DrTodd13

If someone is in a tourney and you leave them a mail, does that mail get delivered the next time they login or immediately after the tournament is finished? If the latter is currently not what is being done can you change the code for look for messages to deliver when someone exits a tourney. Thanks, Todd

Nor does Islam Its been 20 odd years since I last studied the Koran, however, back in the day, there was quite a lot of debate regarding how much of that book should be interpreted. The Koran was revealed to Muhammad over (roughly) two and half decades. During this time, the early Muslim community experienced a number of very formative events. One of the most significant was the conflict between the Muslims who were based in Medina and the non-believers who held the city of Mecca. DrTodd is referencing a number of themes that crop up in the Koran with respect to conquest, treatment of non-believers, etc. As far as I know, there is no consensus whether these are general principles, applicable to all non-believers scattered across the enter world, or, instead, referencing a very specific conflict that took place back in the 7th century. Islam is a religion that streaches across the globe, with hundreds of millions of adherents and multiple very distinct sects and schools. Trying to paint all these individuals with a single broad brush is incredibly ignorant. What is particular infuriating is DrTodd's original post, where he acts as if he has some esoteric knowledge that has been denied to the rest of humanity, when in fact he appears to been nothing more than another dittohead... If you think I'm a dittohead then you have no idea who I am. There is always debate about how scripture should be interpreted and there are verses in the Koran that talk about peace and verses that talk about killing the infidel so which one applies now? It's not my job to interpret the Koran. I leave that up to Islamic scholars. I've seen a couple of shows where people purported to be Islamic scholars claim that the generally recognized interpretation of the Koran is that later commands have precedence over earlier commands and that the verses about killing the infidels come later than the verses about peace. Were these people actually Islamic scholars? I don't know for sure. The context was not one that was obviously biased. Were they telling the truth about this being a widely held interpretation? Again, we have to get our information from somewhere and how do we know it is accurate? It isn't like we can take a survey ourselves of every Islamic cleric in the world. I repeat what I said before. If Indonesian Muslims don't accept this interpretation then fine and dandy but from all the information and actions that I've seen, there is every reason to believe that those in the middle east do and they'd wipe Israel off the map if they thought they could do it. Is their hatred of the state of Israel based on racism or religious hatred? Certainly some of both but in either case, I don't see that a negotiation could possibly change the underlying causes. Attitudes and religious doctrines will have to change before there can be lasting peace there.

We should start referring to this as the religion of the multiverse. According to the widely accepted definition of science, the multiverse cannot be a scientific theory because, more than likely, it is not falsifiable. Once scientists realized the degree to which the parameters of the universe appear to be fine-tuned to support life, they realized they had a problem. There are many seemingly valid universes that couldn't support even atoms let alone humans so how did we wind up here? This begged the question of a creator and people created hypotheses that again did away with the creator. The problem is that at this point in time, there is no evidence whatsoever to say that there exists anything outside our seemingly 4 dimensional universe. There is no proof of other dimensions nor proof of other universes. There is some slim hope that they'll be able to show that we truly live in a higher dimensional universe by showing that gravity is leaking between dimensions but as far as I know, no one has suggested that you'll ever be able to experimentally test a multiverse hypothesis. Without experimentation, what you have is a faith and not science.

There are areas that we just don't currently understand and there are other areas where there is some reason to believe that it is impossible to know the answer to a question. It is weird but sometimes science can prove that we can never prove an answer to a question, one way or the other. While not proven, the provability of the existence or non-existence of God is probably impossible. In such cases where something is provably unprovable, I think it is acceptable to have a position based on faith. So, faith should not conflict with science.

There are always fanatics that warp and twist the message. The difference is that Christian scriptures don't order followers to go and _forcibly_ convert everyone. Whether these beliefs are valid parts of these people's religion is pretty much irrelevant. The important thing is that these beliefs are held and it is pointless to try to talk peaceful coexistence at this point.

I laugh out loud every time I see some pundit or politician on TV talking about how we can talk and negotiate ourselves to peace in the middle east. They are just revealing their ignorance. It is my understanding that Islam has a doctrine that it is unacceptable for any land previously controlled by Islam to subsequently not be controlled by Islam. Any orthodox Muslim must then believe that the Israeli government should not exist...or Spain for that matter. Asking these people for peace is the same as asking them to renounce their religion. So, unless you can get these people to reject Islam or get Israel to leave then I don't think there's going to be peace.

I doth testify! :)

I think this is a very short sighted statement. To have the full benefit in using doping, you better start while you are a kid. So you basically say, that it is okay to try different dangerous medincines on kids who are not able to see all the advantages and disadvantages. And there are many disadvantages if you see how these drugs may ruin your life. I don't believe that it is true that you need to start these drugs in childhood. With regards to children, I would not advocate experimenting with children but it is up to each parent to decide what is best for their child. If a drug could make your kids smarter and the risks were negligible then I think you'd have parents lining up around the block.

North made a mistake. His bid did not match his partnerships agreement for what 2♣ meant. There is no penalty for forgetting or misbidding. If you can believe NS, every agreement was explained correctly. Getting unlucky like west did is just the "rub of the green." After 4N, south should probably say that it seems that north may have more than previously stated based on his subsequent aggresive bidding. I'm on the fence as to whether to remove the last X or not based on south's failure to indicate north may not have what he promised after 4N. In general though, I'm inclined to leave the result as is because west should know that people sometimes misbid and that evidently north has more than stated since he also saw the 4N bid.

There are any number of drugs that improve mental performance. I briefly tried to find the name of the newsgroup but I couldn't but I do remember a few years back sorta following a newsgroup where people were reporting the results of experimenting on themselves with a bunch of different drugs. They would give subjective impressions of how they felt along with timings of several tasks that measure mental alertness. These people were frankly pretty scary with what they were doing. Large quantities of herbs and chemicals and sometimes they would report bizarre side-effects. Here's a thought puzzle for you. It is not a huge effect but some still claim that ginkgo biloba will enhance mental performance. Could you get in trouble for having it in your blood stream? Does it make a difference if you take tablets with the active ingredient condensed or whether you chew on the leaves all day. Can or should they be able to regulate what you eat? Athletes watch their diets and probably take all kinds of "natural" vitamin supplements. I find the decision as to what they allow you to consume and don't allow you to consume to be pretty arbitrary. I say get rid of all doping regulations and let them all dope. I want to see what a human body can do when aided by the full power of mind and science.

Isn't there a "require permission to kib" feature? Admittedly this is only useful if you know who you don't like to start with. If someone is already a kib and you discover you don't like them then you're stuck.

Glad to see you haven't lost your sense of humor. :) It is a tricky area. Theoretically, one could program a computer to understand enough language to know when it's existence were threatened and then program it to respond to try to prevent that in certain ways. Externally, you couldn't know whether the defense mechanisms were pre-programmed or represented originality of thought. You could even program it to plead for its own life with something that a human might say so that is why a clever interrogator would be necessary to see if the machine really understands what it means to be self-aware.

What you are describing is called the Turing test. If a group of humans "talking" to a machine and a human via a computer terminal are incapable of saying which participant is human and which is computer then the machine can be said to possess intelligence. This will get vague very quickly. There are already machines in specific domains that can "learn" and remember things but only things for which they have been apriori programmed to be able to detect and learn. True intelligence could be defined as the ability to learn in any subject domain. For me, the interesting question is not one of intelligence but one of sentience. There will be robots who clean our homes and they will have to adapt to new furniture, etc. How about this as a test. If there is a general purpose learning machine that is capable of learning from any subject domain and I can spontaneously tell it that I am going to destroy it and that machine responds by pleading with me not to do it and can explain that it is self-aware and why it believes it shouldn't be destroyed then I'll say the thing is sentient.

Biological systems are physical systems just like mechanical systems are physical systems. There is nothing special about a biological system and as far as I'm concerned no reason to believe that biological systems are capable of something that mechanical systems are not. Having said that, I think that all attempts at deterministic consciousness will fail. Most strong AI people believe that consciousness is some form of emergent behavior. In other words, once a system gets sufficiently complex, it can start to exhibit behaviors that are essentially unpredictable even though every step along the way is a fundamentally deterministic one. On the flip side, there's a good book by Roger Penrose (sorry, I forget the name..maybe Shadows of the Mind?) that argues that since humans can perform mathmathetical feats that have been proven impossible to accomplish in a deterministic system that human thought must be inherently non-deterministic. He talks about how there are certain single-celled organisms that actually appear to learn and remember things. These organisms are covered in fine hair-like structures built out of molecules that can be in one of two states, either open or closed. Computer scientists among us will instantly recognize the fundamentals of a computing system as soon as you have something that can be in one of two states and that can change from one state to another in response to input. Moreover, the internals of these hairlike structures are sufficiently small as to allow non-deterministic quantum behavior to occur within them. Penrose argues that some combination of classical computation with non-classical quantum behavior is going on here. As it so happens, the neurons in our brain have the same fine hair-like structures! Not only do neurons reach out and touch each other with their axions and dendrites but these hair-like structures also extend away from the neuron and can interact with hairs from other neurons. To be fair, this is Penrose's second attempt at explaining how the brain can perform functions that Turing machines cannot. His first hypothesis was proven impossible and so he has tried again but the issue remains that even if this is not the mechanism of the brain's non-classical behavior that there must be some such mechanism. So, in summary, I believe that no attempt at artificial consciousness will succeed unless classical computation is merged with quantum effects. I'll go on record as saying that Turing machines are not capable of consciousness.

FD is better in the long run but I used a program called RemoteKeys for years before FD was available. It was pretty quick and easy.

Is "to play" the same thing as "I think this is the par contract for our side?" Is the latter an acceptable explanation? Is it my duty to tell opps what a par contract is...to explain the concept of even if I go down, I may still lose less points that if you made a cheaper game contract? If your agreement is that this bid is predicting the par contract, then should you have to be forced to provide a point range based on prior evidence of what kinds of hands your partner may think is the par contract?

Hand 1: I am going to try to bid ♣, ♦, ♠ in that order. If partner doesn't give me the chance by jumping to 3N then I settle for a 4♠ bid after that. Hand 2: ♥6 some kind of trump suit pref? Why wouldn't you play it this way? I doubt the 6 is his lowest card. Doesn't look like I'm beating this without the ♦ ruff so I'll lead the ♠9 at this point. Hand 3: All things being normal, I'd bid the normal 3N and quiver over the likely ♣ lead and continuation giving them 4♣ plus some major trick. If I really think I'm down and need a swing I'll bid 4♣. Hand 4: I still think I'm down eh? Slam seems marginal and you want to bid things that are marginal that you think the other guy may choose not to go for so I say just blast to 6♠ after 1♠. I never these right when I'm playing with Josh so I'm not hopeful of my results. :)

I haven't had a problem with your comments. On to your questions. Here's my theory anyway. If in ancient times, two groups of people both believed in a single benevolent creator God, realized their own inadequacies and placed their faith in God then they go to "Abraham's bosom" which is essentially the good half of Hades. ("Abraham believed and it was credited to him as righteousness.") This part of Hades was opened by Jesus during his time dead and then those people could be in God's presence. So, their sin kept them from God's presence until a time when Jesus' blood was available to hide their sins from God. It doesn't matter if these two groups called God by different names so long as he had the same characteristics. If one put faith in a malevolent God and the other in a benevolent God then I'd say they aren't putting their faith in the same God or if people placed faith in their own goodness to earn salvation then they won't get it. This is not a particular problem theologically. The real problem is can people be saved today the same way they were then. Can someone put their faith in a benevolent God with all of God's good characteristics but reject Jesus and still go to Heaven? If they haven't heard of Jesus then I think perhaps the answer is still yes. Here is part of the reason I came to believe. I gather most people that do not believe in the existence of God also do not believe in the immortality of the soul. I think that is a reasonable thing to believe. If you want to believe in pure naturalistic terms then the soul and immortality seem like silly concepts. So, given the choice between believing that my life will be short (80 years is short in cosmic terms), unimportant, fragile, and lacking a higher purpose versus believing that I am immortal (in terms of the soul) and having a higher purpose, I choose to believe the latter because personally I can't imagine a life that would make me happy if I had the former belief system. If I believed this was all that there was then load me up on the debauchery. Unfortunately, I can't imagine that any amount of debauchery would make me forget my ultimate and soon-to-come demise. The utter uselessness and insignificance of life according to naturalistic explanations lead me to be happier by believing there is immortality and higher purpose. I don't believe I am deluding myself but even if I am, I am happier this way than the opposite and I'm not hurting anyone so who is anyone to complain?

Is God rational or irrational? Are humans capable of being rational? If God is rational and humans have the capacity to be rational then I don't see why it is impossible to in part understand some of God's motivation and reasoning. Sure, many parts of the divine will be so complicated that they are unknowable to a being of limited mental capacity. God would not have given us a brain if he had not intended us to use it. There is a difference in trying to use reason to understand God better with respect to the plan of salvation and asking the question of whether people will poop in heaven (which is an issue that Aquinas tried to answer with "reason"). The first is useful and the second is quite futile. With Hrothgar's supreme intellect I'm sure the rest of us seem like cavemen trying to add 2+2 but hey, you have to start somewhere and whether you are a genius or not the exercise is worthwhile given the potential gravity of the topic.

At least according to Christian theology, the Jewish sacrifices were forerunners of Christ's sacrifice and pointed to it. The animal sacrifices were symbolic but quite ineffective. The animal sacrifices were oddly designed to illustrate that sacrifice was necessary for atonement of sin but at the same time, animal were an imperfect sacrifice and thus the idea was to get them to look forward to the perfect sacrifice. Anyway, my point here is that Christ's sacrifice was necessary and that the closest non-sinful symbolic sacrifice to foreshadow it was animal sacrifice. This still leaves the question of why was Christ's sacrifice necessary. This is a deeply mystical question for which I can't provide a rational explanation. Others might be able to but I'm not a theologian. Ultimately some things are a matter of faith.

Hi, Jimmy: This is the very point I am arguing. Why is the wages of sin death? Why can there be no remission without blood? If god is all powerful and makes all the rules, then these are his decisions and I say they suck. If god had no choice in the matter, and was stuck with a natural law even he couldn't change, then it makes sense - but then it would be back to actions/consequences and the shedding of christ's blood would have atoned for all, believers or not. It somewhat gets back to the problems I had with my father and others of closed-minded ilk, who when pressed to explain the logic would fall back on quoting scripture as if it were the holy grail and then say it is a matter of faith - faith, a belief in something without any basis for that belief. Don't atheists have just as much faith? They believe there is no god and they can no more prove that position than someone else can prove the existence of god. They take their stand based on faith. I happen to believe that the old testament is nothing more than a collection of Jewish mythology - a lot of war stories told at night around the campfire while the sheep were asleep. If you notice, in the end the Jews are always the heroes of these stories - is David slaying Goliath that much different from Jason and the argonauts? Isn't the story of Adam and Eve simply the Jewish version of Pandora and her box? My brother, who happens to be a Ph.D. in religion as well as an Army colonel, says that if you read the original old testatment text you will see that it is poetry and not meant to be literal - it is moral poetry. If adam and eve are just a fun story, then we are back to why is it necessary to sacrifice - to kill (let's use the real word) a life in order to save one? First off, God is not all powerful. He does not have the ability to act against his nature. Some things are a physical impossibility even for him. One could make an argument that one of the things that is impossible is for sin to exist in the presence of God. As such, given that sin exists (if right exists then doesn't wrong also have to exist?) then there must be a place outside God's presence where those with sin must go. These statements have a huge number of unstated axioms to which they refer...axioms like God exists, souls are eternal, etc. Everyone's belief system is ultimately based on a set of axioms. Most people don't pay them much thought but somehow something that is self-evident to one person is not self-evident to another. Since all rational argument is built from axioms and we can't prove axioms (otherwise they wouldn't be axioms if you could prove them) and people disagree over axioms, the conclusion is that nothing is provable in an absolute sense. (Of course, I used logic to derive that conclusion and that is also based on axioms so I can't absolutely prove it is right. :blink: ) Only people who agree on the axioms have any chance of proving things to each other. "God does not exist" is an axiom just like God does exist. There is no proof or disproof of the existence of God and that is how He likes it. Other questions like why can Christ's blood hide or erase one's sin so that you can stand in God's presence are more of a mystery revealed through scripture. The other example I gave was a pretty easy one. I could make a stretch and say that to cover sin you'd need something at least as powerful as God covering it so that God wouldn't be able to see it. What is there that is as powerful as God? Only God is as powerful as God but then you end up with how can God cover the sin to hide it from himself. Anyway, I can't come up with a rock solid derivative from God's nature that shows that Christ's sacrifice was necessary. Ultimately, this is probably a matter of faith.

Sheesh. These issues are not that difficult if people would only shed their authoritarian, I-know-what-is-best-for-you attitudes. The government should have nothing to do with religion or marriage. The government should not be in the business of trying to engineer society to fit some mold. If government is to exist at all, it should protect people's right, period. No wealth redistribution, no charity, no "common good." W.r.t. marriage, if two or more entities are capable of assenting to a contract and they want to enter into a contract and call it a marriage then so be it. They can establish whatever rules they want for their marriage. The only question then, is who or what is capable of assenting to a contract. Non-humans can't read so they can't possibly understand a contract so they are out. For humans, the decision is obviously murkier. A 9-year old can't really understand the full ramifications of what they are doing if they were to sign a contract. What is the right age? Who knows but we can have a debate. For once, I mainly agree with hrothgar. Even though I'm a Christian I don't want government to have anything to do with religion...of course, I don't want government to have anything to do with anything so in that way I'm consistent. The whole legal precedent is a mess regarding historicity of faith versus pronouncement of faith. Thanks supreme court. I find it mocking and offensive that the biggest bunch of crooks on the planet wrap themselves in a cloak of God and country. Hummers in the white house, church on Sunday, massive theft of the american people everyday...some great so-called Christian leaders are.

Policies should be judged by net impact, not on the vocabulary that is used to describe them. I see no different between subsidies and taxes. Equally significant, there are an swful lot of rights and privledges associated with a marriage contract that don't involve direct financial transactions between the individuals and the federal government. 1. Inheritance: There are numerous cases in the United States where members of a family have challenged legal wills in which one member of a homosexual couple left their property to a partner. In some cases, the family has successfully been able to over turn the will. 2. Visitation rights: Many states refuse to recognize that a homosexual couple has any rights to co-parent. For example, in the case of adoption or artifical insemination, parental rights are often assigned to one member of the couple. This can lead to some ugly issues if the couple breaks up or if the sole "parent" dies. 3. Medical treatment: Homosexuals are often barred from visting their partners in the hospital. They are unable to make medical decisions involving medical treatment or end of life decisions for their partners. Its should be noted that many States in the US are passing laws to permanently enshrine this type of discrimination. Policies should be based on right and wrong, not on "impact." The ends do not justify the means. I'm an anarchist so I don't believe government should exist but if it does exist then its only legitimate purpose should be to protect people's rights and provide an infrastructure for enforcement of contracts. Government has no business trying to engineer society. If everyone died the government shouldn't give a damn. The government should not care about marriage. There should be no such concept or reference to marriage in any law. Let individuals write their own marriage contracts.

I don't think you need to be an economist or a mathematician to understand this problem. Either the obligations are drastically cut, taxes are raised, or retirement age is raised or some combination of the three. 65 trillion is about in-line with numbers I've been hearing for some time. There is no good solution. It is going to be painful. We're now seeing the fruits of the a couple generations of people who have been raised to believe that government exists to take care of them and so they didn't fund their own retirement, health care and all. Printing money is a classic governmental solution that doesn't work. There is a lag between when money is printed and prices rise as a result so printing money will seem to work for a short while but it is a house of cards. Prices will keep rising as more money is printed. Then they will try price controls on health care and price controls always have the effect of limiting supply. So, it may be free but you'll have to wait years to get treated and probably die while you're waiting.

The Bible clearly states that the mark will be on the right hand or the forehead. So, when some fanatic starts screaming about barcodes then they can't be a very good Christian if they haven't read the text enough to know that barcodes in general could not be the mark (unless tattooed on one of those locations). There are lots of crazy theories about what it could be and many of them have nothing to do with one of these body parts. My point was that the argument that the prophecy must be wrong on the grounds that "it could never happen" is certainly not valid these days. I'd say most people can imagine a not too distant future in which governments mandate such things.