Bak

bernie sanders is a self-declared socialist... how did vermont ever get a republican governor?

Ahh you're right SeVeR, I misread what you wrote. However, the point still stands, why do logic and observation result in probable truths?

enough for what? I mean, there may be true things that logic can't prove, but those things may not be important, or inconsequential. It may be functionally enough to only believe provable things, and better than the alternative of believing false things.

I don't think the claim is that SeVeR believes everything that is true, but rather, everything that is believed is true and based on logic. but that brings up the question regarding the truth of logic

SeVeR said something interesting in the religion topic, figured I'd split rather than get off topic. This statement implies the belief that observation and logic lead to provable truths. Is that belief also based on observation and logic? If so, it is a circular argument as logic is used to prove the truth of logic. If not, then the original statement is false, and we wonder why observation and logic result in truth statements. As a side note, observation doesn't necessarily result in truths, since we may be hallucinating. The question is really about logic.

by defining religion, you used another contentious word, faith. In my interpretation, having faith in something is equivalent to having confidence in it. I suspect that you have confidence in your beliefs. Therefore, your definition is faith is likely different from mine. We also seem to define atheist a bit differently. In my definitions you would qualify as an atheist (you don't have a belief that gods exist) and an agnostic (you don't know if a god exists). Most people that I label atheists fall into this category. I challenge you to find someone who claims to know, in the absolute sense, that gods don't exist (I believe this is what you would label as an atheist).

This seems more to be an argument over definitions than anything else. What is your definition of a religion? For me it's a set of beliefs with a dogma and associated rituals. Given that definition, people can exist without having a religion. If you disagree with my definition, I encourage you to find a counterexample (a religion that does not fit the definition, or a nonreligion that fits the definition). Alternatively, propose your own definition and I can look for counterexamples.

lacking a belief is not the same as believing in the opposite of it. before you read this post, did you believe I had an apple on my desk? You did not. did you believe I didn't have an apple on my desk? You did not. you didn't have a belief one way or the other. Atheism by itself does not make any belief claims, only a non-belief claim about gods. Agnosticism deals with knowledge, Atheism deals with beliefs; they're independent of each other.

Just uploaded 0.32 to the discretion sourceforge download page. Updates should be working correctly now. If you had trouble updating before, get Discretion 0.32 and try again. cygwin decided it had path precedence to minGW, leading to the rsa key checking program to be compiled dependent upon cygwin. That meant you couldn't update without cygwin, which most people don't have installed. I also took the opportunity to make two changes, moving most settings to conf/modules so that they can be upgraded using the update mechanism, and using a crc32 of the updates.txt file so that, if everything is up to date, only an 8 byte crc32 file is downloaded instead of a ~20KB update file. I figure that will reduce webserver bandwidth. Also, I got rid of all "offline" modules except SettingsHandler, which is used by the front end. I can't use the upgradable SettingsHandler module because it is write protected if it's being used and so can't be upgraded (and I didn't want to spend 3 extra hours coding the workaround). The side effect of this is that the practice offline zone actually checks for updates online, in the future i'll make it so if the update checking fails it still tries to enter the game, rather than not letting you play. Or maybe I could rename "practice offline" to "play with yourself" . Let me know if you have any problems. Once again, we should have a permanent discretion server up now so you can come in and say hello.

Try running it from an administrator terminal. Also, what are your system specs (operating system)?

good news. religion losing the power to oppress another minority

Hm, weird. Open cmd.exe and run the .bat from there to see if there's any output. What are your system specs?

The first non-temporary Discretion zone is up! You can look for "Discretion Wars" using Continuum, or press Zones on the Discretion front end for it to refresh zone list (you may need to scroll down to find Discretion Wars). Everyone ?message freakmonger to thank him for hosting our zone!

what do you mean prove infinity? You can't prove a noun.

hoho, SDL already supports PNG alpha transparency. Here's a picture of a semi-transparent ship overlapping with a bomb. Feel free to use alpha Sass, just don't mix black transparency with the PNG Alpha transparency: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v622/bak2007/disc_blend.jpg

http://www.ssforum.net/index.php?showtopic=13145 Sass, if the entire frame has a constant transparency I can handle that using the current blend% function, although we'd probably need to input it through the settings. I wonder if SDL supports PNG alpha channel...

why is the world ending in 2300 again?

that's illegal

love it, you're work is always great Sass. For the time being we could start with some prebuilt variants of the original ships, and add customization later. I love the alpha channel on the exhaust, it really brings subspace into the 21st century, although that said I need to think of the best way to get it into Discretion. I think currently images can have a blend % which is the percent of alpha for the whole image, is there a standard format for images with a variable alpha channel (i don't think bitmap formats support it).

Honestly, would the world be any different if God didn't exist? He doesn't do ANYTHING. Is the time you invest going to church or reading the Bible really worth the (nothing) you get out?

it's not the government's role to tell me what I can and can't put in my body, unless it somehow affects other people.

I think I had way too much coffee for a weekend in spring break, but Discretion 0.3 is now complete and available for Windows at https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.p...lease_id=672062 !! The newest feature that you'll notice is that it's playable, meaning you can connect to discretion-enabled zones and kill and be killed. Although that said, you need a server to play on so you probably won't notice this for another week. The newest feature that you won't immediately notice is that there's an update manager built in, meaning that I can do incremental updates that Discretion clients will download and run, instead of large releases that you have to manage manually. This may be the last version you need to download from sourceforge . This was a bit tricky since I think most self-updating programs use a hard-coded update website (I assume that's how DCME does it). However, since we want to avoid centralized control, I had to use public key cryptography to allow arbitrary websites to act as update sites, but only code signed by a trusted author (my public key is included by default) to be actually run. Also, you can receive updates by source or by windows binary, which means that I haven't forgotten about linux compatibility (and maybe mac too). Next weekend I will work on getting a permanent Discretion server up, which Sass will help run. Then, I hope to get feedback from you guys as well as Sass on the most important updates Discretion needs, and then do weekly (or at least more often than now) updates which will get distributed through the in-game update mechanism.

Source? Also why hate programming?

but doc, what you believe has an effect on your actions, which in turn affects other people

You misunderstood the equation, it was "lim x->0 |1/x| = infinity", which you interpreted as meaning "for all x, 1/x = infinity", which as you pointed out is clearly wrong. Is there a problem with the limit version in terms of defining infinity? Because I haven't seen any evidence showing that the principals expressed in the Bible are false.For you, what would be "sufficient evidence showing that the principals expressed in the Bible are false"? What sort of evidence should I try to find in order for you to conclude the Bible isn't entirely true? Additionally, this form of reasoning leads to problems, in that it would appear that you believe anything that isn't proven false. If I asked you if a teapot was orbiting Saturn, and you applied the same reasoning, you would believe it's true (assuming you don't have a powerful telescope and the time to disprove it). The other point is that the larger the claim I'm making, the more evidence you should demand before you believe it. If I tell you I have $10 on my desk, you might take my word for it and believe it. If I said I have $1000 on my desk you'll probably be skeptical although if I show you a webcam feed of my desk with $1000 on it, and Vegita comes over and confirms that it's $1000 you may come to believe it. If I say that I have $1,000,000 on my desk, you'll likely require even more significant evidence before you believe it. Along the same lines, an all-knowing, all-powerful being is quite a miraculous claim, and you should demand very significant evidence before adding it to your belief set.