Lessee...
* AS Club is almost an oval. Might be great for close racing and drafting duels, but boring for hotlapping. I left it out on purpose.
* Is the FXO at home at AS North? Never done the track, but it seems a bit too fast for the FXO (or the car is under-powered for the track).
* FOX on FE Green?? Noooo! Put a saloon car there! FE Green means skipping & jumping over the kerbs. For saloon cars that's already hardly realistic, but for single-seaters it's a travesty of racing. (Suggestion: swap tracks with FXO.)
XFG - FE club
XRG - SO sprint1
XRT - BL gp
RB4 - SO long rev
FXO - FE green
LX4 - FE gold
LX6 - FE black rev
MRT - AS cadet
UF1 - SO sprint 2
RAC - KY national
FZ5 - BL gp rev
FOX - WE international rev
XFR - SO town
UFR - SO classic
FO8 - WE international
FXR - AS historic
XRR - AS national
FZR - AS north
BF1 - KY gp long
What I changed:
- added BF1; put all GTRs on AS; moved FZ5 to BL gp rev
- threw out KY oval; moved LX4 to FE gold, MRT to AS cadet, UF1 to SO sprint 2
- moved UFR to SO classic
What could be improved:
- take a reverse config for some of the SO tracks
- same for AS
That count is likely to be biased towards the current MHR combos...
An oval seems a weird place to do hotlapping. A rallycross rank would be nice, though. How about this:
XFG - BL rallyx
XRG - FE rallyx gn rev
RB4 - FE rallyx
LX4 - BL rallyx rev
UF1 - FE rallyx gn
FZ5 - FE rallyx rev
The videos don't work here (Firefox, VirtualDub installed). The WDG validator throws errrors on the format for the EMBED tags ("Error: element EMBED not defined in this HTML version").
Seems like IE is more forgiving in this respect than Firefox.
Check this link. It's a collection of sick things that Americans have said in the name of their faith. And not all quoted persons are extreme right-wing evangelists: some are/were U.S. president. With nuts like these, it's understandable that an atheist living in the USA becomes angry and frustrated.
Renku, the question of the OP was about the STCC license system, not about the way the STCC admins do their job. You are mis-using this thread to pick up an old fight with the admins -- and you're not even the first in this thread to do so.
Another area where LFS could facilitate STCC and similar systems is the administration of licenses. A "licensed" server would send its scoring (points + promotions) to LFSW. At the output side, LFSW would provide a webpage to show the status of someone's license(s), and a query service where servers can retrieve the license status. For the end-user, this would look as if licenses were integrated into LFS.
On the server side, the situation would remain as it is with STCC: a third-party add-on manages the races on the server, and LFS only provides the "hooks". Server admins would still be free to choose: whether to work with licenses or not, the scoring method, limitations on car & track choice, penalties, etc.
I don't think it's an explanation of an explanation. I read it as an explanation of a definition. First they define the concepts of "data" and "information". You might think you already know what they mean, but the textbook gives then a new meaning. Then, they need to explain how these definitions differ from your common-sense understanding.
Nevertheless, the definition strikes me as silly. It would mean that the randomly scrambled memory bits that you get when you turn on the computer are "data". But a list of carefully calculated numbers on a sheet of paper is not "data" (because a computer can't operate on it), so it can't be "information" either.
Well, it's not exactly about the denominations. I've met a nun who was 100% tolerant of other world views (and a great person, too). I've met a once-in-a-year-to-mass Catholic who was denigrating about atheists without ever having thought about it. The bigotry is not part of my argument against the existence of god. It's part of my reason to become vocal about it, and to re-label myself.
Yeah. Who knows, some day I might become a true atheist and embrace agnosticism again. I was born free of sin, um, I mean religion. I only need to get back to that blessed state.
The big question is, of course: Did god just evolve by pure chance, or is he the product of some Intelligent Designer?
I'll be your exception, then, because I have taken the reverse route. I've been non-religious all my life. Wasn't brought up to believe, and never felt any need to. In my twenties I used to call myself an agnostic: existence of god is undecidable, so it's no use to fuss&fight. Let each have his own view, live in peace, and not bother his fellow men.
I'm in my forties now, and in recent years I've drifted towards atheism. One reason is the growing realisation that accepted scientific theories, most notably evolution, are fundamentally incompatible with religion. (I know there are escape routes, but I see them as uneasy compromises.)
Another reason is my growing anger about the imbalance between religious and non-religious people. Many Christians demand respect for their faith and traditions, but are not willing to respect the views of the non-religious. Too many times I've heard a Christian say that if you lose your faith then you lose all moral grounding. Too many times I have heard the Pope, or some other spiritual leader, make claims and verdicts for all of humanity instead of just his own flock. I can no longer be indifferent.
You may say so, but there is absolutely no way you can know it's the same, as you've just declared all ways to exchange thoughts as not applicable to your god.
Ah yes, his diagonal argument to prove that the cardinality of the real numbers is higher than that of the natural numbers. Elegant, and not that hard to grasp. If you really want something that boggles the mind you should take a look at string theory with its 27 dimensions. Still, it's the daily work for hundreds of theoretical physicists.
That's a ... peculiar way to reason. In the same vein you could state that you can't "completely comprehend" a drop of water, because it contains gazillions of atoms tumbling around -- far too much for any human mind to understand.
Yes, I meant the "weak" versus "strong" agnosticism (at least, as described in Wikipedia).
Agreed. Proving that a piece of wood from Mt. Ararat is just an oaken plank of 1000 years old does not disprove the existence of god. I only mentioned those as easy-to-recognise examples. But IMO also the most central aspects of religion - most notably, that god(s) created the universe and mankind - have been falsified.
No, Dawkins aims his arrows at the core of religion.
When we want to convince other people of our views, we have only a couple of valid ways to do so: hard physical evidence, logical reasoning, and the scientific method. You're brushing them aside: you say that none of these apply to your definition of god. If you do, then all discussion stops. You may have some notion of god, but it's your own personal experience. For others it can in no way be distinguished from a hallucination or a fantasy. It's equally valid to talk about pink unicorns or the spaghetti monsters.
Quite to the contrary. Infinity can be expressed in five simple postulates from a guy named Peano. No mathematician has ever gone insane by looking at the definition of the natural numbers.
No, I'm saying that god, as commonly defined, is not consistent with the facts.
I think there are two types of agnostics. The first says that he has seen as much proof that support the existence of a god as proof that support its non-existence. The second type says that it is impossible to prove either the existence or the non-existence. Where one is undecided on the matter, the other is sure that it's undecidable.
The atheist view (and mine) is that the matter is decidable. Theism makes a number of claims, and many of them have been falsified. Mankind and the universe are older than 6000 years; a worldwide flood is physically impossible; praying does not work; it's logically impossible for any being to be both omniscient and omnipotent. Etcetera. In effect, the claim of existence of god is handled as a scientific hypothesis, and this hypothesis has been refuted.
Well, then read The God delusion by Richard Dawkins. He makes a pretty good case.
I see a number of misrepresentations here:
- The matter didn't "come from nothing". The Big Bang hypothesis only talks about the rapid expansion after the bang. There's no telling what there was prior to that, because the current physics theories are not valid for those circumstances.
- If you consider the gigantic number of stars and planets in the universe, then it's not surprising that there is a planet with "precise conditions". (See also: anthropic principle.)
- Evolution theory doesn't assume that "100 billion atoms came together" to form the first cell. That's preposterous. Before the first organisms, there must have been chemical compounds capable of simple self-replication. (Unfortunately, they didn't fossilise.)
- The first organisms did not "happen to just decide to evolve". Evolution is the inevitable consequence of a few properties: variation, self-replication and environmental pressures.
That's plain wrong. Even simple simulations show that cooperation between individuals is in many cases advantageous and evolutionary stable. In the human mind, the tendency for cooperative behaviour is experienced as love, compassion and parental care.
If you call that humanism, then you'd better read up on the subject. To worship means that you value yourself as having less worth than some other entity, individual, or deity. That's something that is completely alien to humanism. And worshiping yourself is a contradiction in itself. (Unless you're referring to egoism, which is also contrary to humanism.)
I'm only half kidding here. The number of abortions seems to have a negative correlation with the availability of contraceptives. The countries where condoms are hard to get, and where sex education is frowned upon tend to have high numbers of abortions (be it legal or illegal).
I'm an atheist, so I'd say "never". Hardcore pro-lifers will say that it's at conception. But then there'd be lots of lost souls, because only one third of all conceptions lead to pregnancy.
I'd be surprised if it was. In the Netherlands, abortions after 25 weeks of pregnancy are illegal. The limit is at 25 weeks because from that moment on the fetus has a chance to survive, if it would be born.
At the age of about 2 years, IIRC.
If you want to base the distinction (legal or illegal) on some sort of measure of "being sentient", then you're in dangerous waters! By all biological standards, an adult chimp is much more sentient than a fetus, or even a baby or toddler. So if it would be forbidden to abort a fetus past a certain stage of development, then it should also be illegal to kill apes, monkeys, and possibly even pigs and cattle.