Flanian Pobble Beads... can only be exchanged for Flanian Pobble Beads. So, I suppose that choice is just an improbable wish. Fire up the Heart of Gold, and maybe...

"He's a straight shooter with upper management written all over him."

"How badly BB got shafted by that loan is determined by how desperate they were when they took it."

On a level of desperation going from 1 - 10, I'm going to go with "Vlad the Impaler" as far as shafting is concerned.

âoeWe had military contracts. Who cares whether it worked or not?!?!â â" Dick Jones

" And so far, we've seen no evidence whatsoever there's any contrition or accepting that what they did was going to piss off everyone else."

Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond sentenced to ten years in jail

I'd say sneering contempt rather than contrition.

But there's no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
And the Science gets done.
And you make a neat gun.
For the people who are still alive.

And I can't get a Nexus 4 or 5 thanks to being stuck on Verizon... Thanks Google.

Or rather, thanks Verizon!

Or rather... man I hate the cell phone ecosystem, I don't know who to hate more.

Awhile back one of my mom's friends said this when I was looking for a place to dumb left-over stuff from moving, so I did a bit of research. This is true, sometimes. Each region is run seperately and independently, so this might be true where you live, but not where I live. Some regions are horribly corrupt, with the executives basically getting rich off of the the mentally disabled and the court systems... While some regions are actually trying to help people.

I personally prefer the Mormon run Deseret Industries... Their stores are very clean, everything is washed, and they don't try to sell all the actually good items at online auctions, meaning you can still discover some good items. Once the one near me had a ton of awesome vintage camera gear, cheap; where Goodwill sells absolute crap since all the good stuff has been long-since syphoned off by staff, or stuck on their circa 1995 auction website.

I grew up on TNG, though I watched a ton of TOS thanks to reruns as a kid.

Recently, when Netflix made them all streaming I rewatched both of them again in pretty much a marathon. TNG didn't age well, and get bit boring in the end. TOS was fun to watch. Even my girlfriend (not a nerd, no experience with ST) had a blast with TOS. TNG was a better show, and better written, but TOS is just plain fun. TNG didn't age well thanks to its special effects and long form plots. TOS has Kirk kirking things with his fist, awesome music, cool rubber costumes, and green chicks in go-go boots...

TOS goes with beer and chips better than TNG or anything subsequent.

I didn't couldn't really stomach rewatching DS9 or Voyager, I didn't like them when they were on the air, and like them a bit less now. DS9 would have been okay, except it starts so damn slow, and has far to much Warfling and Ciscoling to really be watchable. At least Wesley Crusher was so bad he was kind of amusing (at least 20 years later). And Voyager is just pants, and killed Trek for me for good.

I don't see away to carve out the possibility of individual choice from this though. No matter how many layers or systems you have, or how chaotic they are, allows for something "outside" out their own base rules. Even in a probabilistic system, like QM, there isn't room to get outside of its own base elements, you might obfuscate it, and make first causes irreducible from complexity, chaos, and random events, but it still wouldn't be "free". I phrased that very badly, but language gets annoying with concepts like this.

I might be missing your point (not enough coffee this morning)... If I did, I apologize. I always view these things as "abstraction layers", with them being increasingly removed from the innate human perception frame as we go "down" or "up", there really isn't a difference between quantum mechanics and humans, but we can't see it because of our evolutionary context shaping our perceptions.

I don't see why this would be strictly necessary. If free-will was a emergent process it would exist in the act of thinking, and not necessarily prior to the action of thinking. The transitory act of thinking itself is being. Further, requiring the act of "pre-thinking" would be a bit odd, since it would imply that we must be psychic to have agency. The whole idea is set up to create a reductio, so someone can say "well, obviously".

That said, I rather doubt that free-will exists, as such. But I also don't think that it matters either way; there is no way to "act as if you had no free will" (the very statement is meaningless, as it implies a decision, which implies agency), making the whole argument a bit moot. A lack of agency would also be meaningless to society, because the mere knowledge of this lack doesn't lead to knowledge of why actions are taken. Prisons would exist, punishment would exist, there really isn't a reason they shouldn't since we can never actually trace the action back to first principles... Human behavior probably results from a hugely complex, and almost completely irreducible, chaotic systems. A murder might be the result of millions of factors, from genetics and upbringing, to global history and sociology, to quantum fluctuations at a cellular level and the current weather... Things are no less mysterious if we remove free-will from the equation... Or rather, things are generally as meaningless.

Its been awhile since I was in school (for philosophy), or reading up on the current discussion, but as far as I know this is still a massive debate, with very little, if any, agreement between philosophers (or psychologists, or neurologists, or cognitive scientists, or programmers, or physicists, or whoever else's feild this topic touches).

That said, there is a large debate on whether there is a difference between agency as a thing, and the perception of agency. Go read up on Searle's Chinese Room, and the debate it has sparked (especially Dennett). Also read up on the whole thought-experiment of "p-zombies", which explores this very concept.

AFAICT there isn't a consensus on this topic at all.

I take a more existential stance on it; where it doesn't really matter since one can't live as if one doesn't have agency, so on a human level the debate doesn't matter either way, since agency is a necessary trait to existence.

    Ontically, though, I'm pretty sure agency is a dead horse unless we find something wrong with modern science. You can stretch things a bit (ala Dennett, again) by tying agency into the quantum realm, but you really just push the debate back a bit; is random, yet probabilistic, much better than classically deterministic? Neither leave room for an actual "you" driving you, barring theology and a Cartesian bag of worms. If humans are purely matter, and that matter follows the same laws as all other matter then agency is impossible. If we have something immune from the normal laws of physics, then how are we to ever prove this fact, and further how does this "spiritual matter" (or whatever) influence "actual matter"?

And now for a rebuttal to this inane garbage, McGarnagle:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjbl9QBrM50

Never talk to the police!

Seriously, that video was actually better than all three of the prequels combined.

Especially the Yoda bit.

I wish I was kidding.

AND previously, don't forget.

Windows XP was awesome because it was better than pretty much everything before it (from MS, at least). XP, better than ME or 98 or 95, or 3.11.