Recent content by Bill_McEnaney

Does the "open" procedure's "status" argument tell the computer whether to open the file for reading, for writing or for both? For now, the value of status is "unknown." So maybe the computer doesn't know that you want it to write to the file. Are you sure you need x_acc and y_acc? After you...

That's comforting. The older I get, the more I need to question what I believe. I'm something like Socrates. He thought long and hard about why anyone would believe that he was wise. "Well," he said to himself, "maybe it's because I know that I'm ignorant." As you know, in the Early...

Everyone, I'm sorry I may not know how to answer your questions now when I've just listened to the Stanford Encyclopedia's article about causal determinism. Unfortunately, the physics is too, too hard for me because I'm too ignorant about the mathematics that it uses. After my computer...

Aristotelian metaphysics to the rescue. Yay! http://helsinki.academia.edu/TuomasTahko/Papers/98117/The_Law_of_Non-Contradiction_as_a_Metaphysical_Principle

Travis, is determinism true or isn't it? You seem to be contradicting yourself. First, you say that determinism untrue. Then you tell us that "Just because it is true . . ." Consistency is a necessary condition for truth, not a sufficient condition for it. A proposition or a set of...

But how do you know that determinism will allow scientists to know that those results are accurate? Even if they're inaccurate, determinism may guarantee that scientists will believe that those results are accurate. If Pyhronian skepticism is true, we can know only how things seem to us, not...

A post ago, I should have told you that I wrote that post partly because I wanted to undermine scientism. Scientism fans believe that science is our only source of genuine knowledge. But if I've argued soundly a post ago, it's hard to see how we can know whether we know anything that we think...

To see why I doubt that any scientific argument can prove that hard determinism is true, suppose that it is true. Then it'll guarantee that scientists will draw the conclusions that they do draw, even when those conclusions are false. So I suggest that if hard determinism is true, scientists...

Everyone, Maybe I made a mistake. I told Leroy that "list[50]" meant "the fiftieth element of the list." But if the array can hold 50 or more elements, a fiftieth one would belong in list[49] because in C++, array indexing begins at zero. Bill

Leroy, I just found a bug that you may have discovered by now. In case 4 of of your switch statement, where you need to sort your array's elements, "list[50]" means "the 50th element of the list." It does not mean "This list as 50 elements." Fifty may not be the list length. Depending on...

Guys, have you ever wondered whether determinism would undermine the knowledge(?) we at least seem to get from the natural sciences? Say circumstances, biology, laws of physics and so forth guarantee that I'll always draw the same conclusions when I'm under some set of condition or other. Then...

PlayingMonk, what do you mean by "objective?" A truth can be objective in more than one way at the same time. In your post, "true to" seems to mean what many relativists about truth seem to mean "true for" when they say, "That may be true for you, but it's not true for me." Well, their...

Oh, good. I can still write C. Pascal is the language I know best. Why not use the bsearch() and qsort() functions? I didn't read the code carefully earlier. I just added the switch statement, changed the while condition, and threw in a default clause.

I see one now, Mark. We need to replace the "=" with "==" or to write: case 3: if (sorted) search_sorted_array(); else search_unsorted_array(); break;

Did you see the post where I suggested filling the array before the "while" loop. I'd write the function to ensure that the while loop would run only after you filled the array. Oops! That's no good because then you'd need to rerun the program to refill the array.