Is there a difference between knowledge and belief

Yes. Always.

Knowledge is based, either directly or through a proxy, upon known facts that are some combination of repeatable, consensually experiential, and testable. Sound travels at a particular speed in our atmosphere. This is knowledge.

Beliefs are based upon faith, and cannot be proven, although they can be described and so passed along. Animals cross the rainbow bridge when they die. This is belief.

Either one can be mischaracterized as the other, but examining the issue at hand for the required elements of knowledge will very quickly determine just what it is you're dealing with. Likewise, conviction isn't the issue.

The thing to remember is that just because you have an idea in your head, that doesn't qualify it as knowledge.

My palm TX sees your blackberry and drops the bar several inches all at once. :)

Did they enable nested folders yet? The current single level folders are limiting and create unnecessary clutter.

For instance, it'd be nice to have one games folder, inside which might be a folder for board games, one for shooters, one for tower defense, etc.

One that would be of interest to me would be arranged around photography. One main folder, then one for editors, one for astrophoto conditions and apps, one for auroral conditions and apps, one for IR work, one for special effects, etc., one for a DB of my lenses and cameras, one with my portfolio, one with links to photography websites, etc.

Folders within folders is a very natural way to arrange things in a hierarchy; I have never understood Apple's resistance to giving its customers tools they can use to make using IOS easier. In the case of nested folders, you don't *have* to use the feature if you don't want to, anyway... but if you need it, you probably *really* need it.

So here's hoping.

What you're describing is a random number generator with a key to initialize it. Some of the good ones might be good enough (or might not). Anything you can keep in your head is going to be crap and fairly easily breakable. Either way, you're still better off to just exchange regular secret keys at your meeting, which can be concealed in a variety of ways. Even real one time pads can be fairly easily concealed - a "blank" USB key, for example.

You didn't say so, but I'm assuming you're encrypting your message using the book page as a one time pad, then obscuring it using steganography. If someone sufficiently motivated were after your criminals, they could break that. Steganography isn't much protection when someone knows there might be hidden messages. And your one time pad, while one time, isn't random. Book pages have quite a bit of structure.

Any structure in a one time pad makes it vulnerable. To the point where people have gone to great lengths to construct them using the best random numbers obtainable, from devices ranging from antennae monitoring the ionosphere to quantum devices.

One time pads have been, and probably are, used extensively. You send a bunch of random data to someone via some secure method, which is usually very slow (like hopping on an airplane with a DVD full of random numbers on your person). You can then exchange messages securely using a convenient and fast channel, such as e-mail. See the utility there?

Yup, and the solution available to any rational being is the same: since by hypothesis the two choices are indistinguishable, flip a coin to create a new situation in which one of them has a trivial weight on its side.

Starving to death (or letting everyone die) is obviously inferior to this to any rational being (which the donkey and the robot are both presumed to be) and adding randomness is a perfectly general solution to the problem.

Buridan's donkey is not in fact an example of a rational being, but rather a passive, uncreative being, who must for some unspecified reason decide without acting on the situation, as if it was living in some bizarrely unrealistic world like Plato's Cave, where it could only know the world via shadows on the wall which it cannot act on in any way.

Why anyone thinks thought-experiments about such limited beings, which are completely unlike humans in their inability to act on the world to change their situation, is beyond me.

Companies have been paying the post office to shove stuff in my mailbox for years. That actually causes physical annoyance, as I have to shovel it into the recycle bin and then toss it. Then there are those crazy people who hand out free samples on the street. I don't have to take it, but I still have to see them.

Whoever tagged this "first world problems" was dead on.

...that the Earth is flat.

"It stands to reason", "it just makes sense", "it's common sense"... these are not just not arguments, they are anti-arguments: anyone using them is saying loudly and clearly "I have nothing to contribute to this discussion but here's some noise to dilute the signal."

Any time you find yourself offering an opinion based only on your imagination, please don't. Get some data, learn some modelling, do some statistics before you speak.

Philosophers attempted to understand the world for thousands of years based on what "just makes sense" and failed completely and utterly. After three hundred years of scientists showing us a better way--and showing that what "stands to reason" has absolutely nothing at all to do with the way the world actually is--there is really very little excuse for continuing to promulgate this erroneous and basically useless way of knowing.

Then turn off automatic downloads. You can't hit a switch that says "download everything!" and then call it "jammed down your throat" when your phone does what you told it to and downloads the free song someone gave you.

I saw the fuss on Facebook and went to check. No U2 song. It was listed as something I could download if I wanted to. Whoopty doo.

They can put them in the room that used to hold all of Hotmail's servers. Plenty of space there.

Agnostics that hold no belief are atheists.

Agnostics that entertain any measure of belief are theists.

Agnosticism is a position taken with regard to knowledge.

Theism and atheism are positions based upon belief, faith. The one does not replace the other.

Agnosticism is about knowledge. the Theism / Atheism poles are diametric opposites: belief and non-belief. There's no middle ground definable by knowledge, or lack thereof.

Agnosticism is not a third position. You're either a theist -- that is, you hold some measure of belief in a god or gods -- or you're not, and you don't. From there, you can, if you like, assert a state of knowledge to bolster your choice, or a lack of a state of knowledge to do the same thing. But your position is still either you believe, or you don't.

The whole point about belief, or not, is that it is contingent upon faith. Knowledge is not.

Hope that helped some.

All true, in some strict sense. But...

Science lacks something that gives religion a ridiculous amount of power: narrative. (shameless plug) I wrote a book exploring this subject: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...

The gist of my argument is--in the terms of TFA--is that "Spockism" lacks narrative hooks, while "Kirkism" is full of them. "Science fiction" is an attempt to give science narrative power, and sometimes it really works, but it needs to be continually renewed because unlike religion science moves and changes and grows, so each generation needs its new Asimov or Heinlein or Clarke.

...is a little monitor that hangs over your lips, showing a silent movie of your lips saying (in a loop) "I suspect I'm under surveillance" while underneath, you can be saying anything you like. :)