Literally that's what it means, yes. However, it is used to mean a fear of homosexuality. For some people, it's clearly social conditioning: "let's bash those fags". That's just plain wrong, and should be fought as a social ill, in my opinion.
For some people, it's more like irrational fear of spiders or snakes: "*retch* that's disgusting". The details of irrational fear vary: some people are bothered by seeing other people engaged in anything homosexual, while others are bothered by the possibility that it might involve them, i.e. getting too close to someone of the same sex, or even being looked at by someone they suspect may be homosexual. It tends to be more men who have this phobia, but far from exclusively. It's as much a debilitating condition as other phobias: imagine how constraining it must be for a man to be continually afraid of being touched by another man... all those vital health benefits, all that emotional grounding, all that non-verbal communication.
I only got as far as the NY Times article, and it says the men were shown erotic films; some containing only men, some containing only women. What about films containing men and women together? I know that I would be more aroused by (decent) films containing only men compared with those containing women - but not due to my orientation - due simply to the fact that I have someone to identify with in the former!
Maybe it's true then, that to be truly a heterosexual man, you have to be turned on by images of lesbians... </puzzled>
If homophobia is really killing latent attraction to the same sex in some people (not such a new idea!)... and if incidence of homophobia decreases over the next 50 years, as it may well do due to social acceptance... then that may cause more people to experience homosexual and bisexual attraction, and more people to engage in the behaviour - simply because of the "why not?" factor.
I don't know for sure, but have a gut feeling that a lot of homophobic reaction is due to social taboos programmed from a _very_ early age, and the tender touch isolation that male children experience from each other due to those social taboos. (Boys are allowed to hit each other; they are strongly discouraged from touching each other gently, unlike girls).
I guess that is likely to change, slowly, at the same time as male homosexuality becomes more widely acknowledged as real, and accepted as good when it makes people happy. That trend seems to me inevitable as we learn to respect and support each other over the generations. But it is also a slow trend, taking generations, and long, drawn out battles to refine the details.
Dr. Drew's observation that bi people settle into one or the other group (i.e. homo or hetero) may well be correct. I am inclined to agree that it's often helped along by traumatic lifestyle or childhood problems, for some years. But: who doesn't have traumas? I suggest virtually everyone has childhood "issues" which reverberate through their years of sexual identity discovery (whether that's orientation, or other aspects of sexual identity such as religious taboos, fetishes, shame about perceived unusual fantasies, lack of knowledge, etc.).
But that doesn't tell us whether the bi-curious settle because society treats them better for doing that... or if they settle because they finally discover their "innate" sexual orientation...
Certainly, I have met a relatively large proportion of people who identify as bi, who complain that both the hetero world, and the homo world (i.e. gay friendly environments), often reject or dismiss bisexuals as somehow fence-sitters, or undecided, or likely to change and therefore dump their partner, or are traitors, or something.
Unfortunately, those compaints are consistent with the theory that people who settle into one of the homo/hetero orientations may be doing it because that's more socially comfortable. It doesn't prove the theory, but it supports it's plausibility.
I wonder what people would do, in a society where they are encouraged to be sexual in whatever way they enjoy each day... rather than trying to please other people or stay out of trouble.
Perhaps the next 50 years will gives us some clue.
However, I think it is very unhelpful to declare that "bisexuality" (using that label) is a "questionable minority" among men. It might be more helpful to say that "neural bisexuality" or some other technical term is rare.
This is because "bisexual" (like "homosexual") is an important term with socio-political ramifications: people want to be free to be sexual in whatever way brings them happiness; _very_ large numbers of people engage, or fantasise about engaging in sexual activity with both genders. Telling a lot of people who _feel_ bisexual that they aren't really, doesn't help the cause of happiness. It is effectively denying that they exist, or telling them that they aren't yet being true to themselves. That causes despair, pain, violence, self-hate, suicide, hiding in the closet, and all manner of unpleasant things that I hope fade away over the next 50 years.
The fact is: a _lot_ of people engage in bisexual desire and behaviour. Regardless of whether there is a neurological or hormonal basis, a lot of people feel it in their burning heart and soul, so to speak. It is a real, and important subjective experience.
Saying that it's not "true" bisexuality causes harm. It's something that people who feel themselves to be bisexual - that's to say, quite a lot of people - have to battle against. They are accussed of being on the fence, undecided, dishonest with themselves. So, many wonder if those accusations are valid. And many have trouble finding social acceptance: not welcome in straight community, not welcome in gay community either... because bisexuality is widely seen as pretending, or indecisive. Which, for many, it is _not_.
Technical: what do you mean by "genuine sexual desire"? fMRI and other techniques indicate only variations in neural activity. But that is not the same as desire, which is a subjective experience.
That is probably why some people say that nearly everyone is bisexual, and others, such as yourself, say that very few men are, if any. It is down to differences assigned to the meaning of "bisexual", which is another reason why labels can obscure the facts.
You are probably not disagreeing at all with me on the _observable_ facts. Yet, disagreeing on the what to call what.
You refer to "true" attraction. It is unhelpful to tell someone who feels an attraction that it is not "true", even if you have neurological, hormonal and genetic data. Their subjective feelings are not that data alone, and neither are their observable sexual reactions: those are determined by many other factors too.
I consider myself a bisexual male. I have had, and enjoyed, sex with men and women. I will probably do so again. Yet, I would not be surprised if I failed most tests for "genuine sexual desire" that you came up with.
I am much more often interested in women, and it never even occurred to me to find any man sexually interesting until I was quite old. I tend to like the smell of women more often. That is all indicative of a neurology which is essentially heterosexual. But I have been hotly in love with a man - to a degree that overwhelmed me - and really wanted gay sex at times.
I attribute that mostly to psychology, rather than genetic programming. But who's to say what part of my experience is due to what? There is no absolute distinction.
However many of _my_ biological sexual or attraction reactions, I recognise as quite adjustable by changes to my intention and willingness to get used to different things. I cannot speak for others, but that is my experience. I am very lucky: I have the power to reprogram myself.
Just like trying different kinds of food that I may not like at first. And at other times, I have felt those sorts of feelings but they felt like they has some political or social motivations, which _become_ biological, rather than purely biological from birth. Perhaps this is because I can reprogram my reactions to a degree, so my ideals end up trick
If it takes you to a place where you hold the belief that "there is no god" - that is different from a lack of belief. I think of the former as "atheist", and the latter as "agnostic", but I realise many treat this as two categories of atheism: strong and weak atheism. Let's not get bogged down in that minor bit of terminology.
There remains quite a spectrum, though. You say "shred of belief, then you're a theist". There is a lot of ambiguity about what constitues a shred of belief. Is faith belief? As in: if I choose to allow god to do something good for me, instead of trying to do it myself, even though I don't actually believe god exists to do that good thing, simply because I decide it's better to make that choice... that's a kind of faith, without the belief, at least as we would describe intellectual, conscious belief. Is that a "shred of belief"? I think we can split hairs further; the point is that there is a spectrum of belief, what it means to believe, what it means to have faith or put faith in, and nuances of all that, so that it's not _obviously_ a boolean, true-or-false thing to "believe even slightly".
This has some personal meaning for me: I think I am on that edge, somewhere between "do not have a belief in god" and "put my faith in god anyway". It seems to have practical, life-enhancing benefits to think that way (borne out by scientific studies!), and it's quite hard to determine if it is contradictory, self-delusional, or even if picking a side to eliminate the paradox would in any way be less of a delusion. I actually feel a lot healthier, better, and all round good and self-consistent, compared with how I imagine I'd feel if I tried to think like an "I believe in god" or "I have zero faith in god" person.
And that's just looking at nuances in the meaning of "belief". We haven't touched on the huge variation of what people mean by "god", which means that one person says "I believe in god", and another says "I don't believe in god", and even another says "I believe there is no god", they could all actually have the same beliefs about the world, due to their different concept of what they mean by "god". And when you really ask people, they do have quite a bit of variation in what they mean, especially if you ask them in a deep way, which goes beyond the surface rote-repeating of doctrines, to people's core, driving beliefs that really animate them.
I'm saying it is not a boolean "does not believe in god" versus "has any belief in god". You cannot assign a true or false value to that question for every person, in a way that is correct for every person. The law of the Excluded Middle does not apply. Yet that, my last statement, is itself an unjustifiable statement! You can postulate that there exists _some_ definition of "believe" and "god" for which that boolean distinction is always true or false for any given person. As you have. And I can postulate that there does not. But I think despite that, neither of us can produce a satisfactory justification that proves the other wrong!
So I've merely tried to do a far more useful thing: explaining how I see those things in terms of variation and nuance... for you to see why I say there is something between theism and atheism, even if you choose to disagree, you _might_ find you don't disagree with the substance of my idea, but only with the way I summarise it as that short statement which superficially differs from yours.
Indeed, the idea of soul as an emergent property of a human system is quite enough, even in a teleporter which just "copies the bits", and treating people as machines which process bits.
However, quantum physics provides additional support to the idea of teleportation, if it transports the quantum state, being fundamentally physically indistinguishable from simply moving the object in the ordinary way, no matter what is going on with the object. Philosophically, this allows for (but does not require) the idea of a soul which is attached to a specific human system, and which is properly transported by quantum teleportation.
Certain aspects of physical systems cannot be duplicated, due to fundamental principles of quantum physics. They can't be turned into ordinary binary information and back, either. They can't be copied, and they can't be analysed. It's simply physically impossible. Reality simply doesn't do that. That could mean there is no mechanism available, but it could equally mean that there is no difference between teleportation and ordinary motion, other than what other people watching see.
It is like the teleportation version of relativity: those outside the teleporter see an object that appears to move from one place to another. Those inside the teleporter see the outside world appear to move from one place to another. And neither is more valid than the other, in the same way that no reference frame is more valid than another in relativity.
A teleporter which transports quantum state cannot dissect, record, or recreate the quantum state of the physical object being teleported. It can only transform the state of the object to something which travels over space, and transform it back to material form at the other end.
From the perspective of the object being teleported, those transformations cannot violate the object's integrity at any time. So, for the object, the experience is no different, to being stretched, squashed, irradiated, accelerated, etc. Generally, mangled about a bit, but from the reference frame of the object being teleported, at no point is the object's structural integrity violated.
From the object's perspective, this is no different than ordinary physical motion in a field. This is fundamental, assuming the principle of quantum identity is upheld(*). It's not "as if", in the way that we might say that duplicating a computer to run elsewhere gives the computer the experience of being transported. It's more basic than that: as a result of quantum identity of physical systems, from the object's reference frame there is no difference between teleportation, and ordinary motion in a field. The field may of course be damaging - experienced from the object's reference frame as excessive acceleration, radiation, or other shocks. But not entirely damaging the object's physical integrity at any time, otherwise the quantum state is not transported.(*)
And so, quantum teleportation, provided the quantum state is transported sufficiently purely(*) will tell us nothing about whether the physical system transported has a soul or not. Because if a soul exists and moves when the object moves normally, well, there is really no difference when it's teleported like this.
(*) - All that said, we really don't know much about the quantum structure of large, complex systems like a human being. We don't know much about the myriad nuances of it's structure, nor it's relationship with the environment which would not be teleported. We don't know with what kind fidelity we can transport such a large quantum state. We know there will be some aspects of the state not transported, or modified in the process, and we don't know how those would manifest physically in the reference frame of the object being transported. For example, the equivalent of "data corruption" when transmitting a dematerialised quantum state might be experienced by the object itself as random, destructive radiation, or other weirder forces.
When the word was coined, the original meaning of "agnostic" was that one admits to not _knowing_, and being intellectually honest about that, instead of saying that one knows there is (a) god, or knows there isn't. Some people of conscience cannot do otherwise than declare that they don't know, no matter what they still put their faith in.
It is right there in the word: "a-gnostic", where gnostic refers to knowledge, and agnostic refers to the lack of it.
Nowadays, "agnosticism" is often taken to mean declaring a lack of _belief_ either way - and here "belief" refers to "have faith in", not "known to be true beyond doubt". (The word "belief" is itself confusing, because different people take it to mean different things, or even the same people in different contexts, without making those differences plain).
My guess is that this change in the word "agnostic" over time makes sense as more and more people, including devout religious people and atheists, analyse their beliefs to the degree that they accept their knowledge is not absolute, but they have faith or commit to following the implications of their beliefs anyway. In a sense, the original idea "agnostic" has become more widespread, so the word isn't used for that so much now.
The upshot is that "agnostic" does _not_ mean "atheist" in another guise. Because an atheist puts his/her belief (as in motivation/faith) in "there is no god". That is different from the agnostic's belief (as in motivation/faith): "I don't know if there is god" - the latter being more intellectually honest for many people. Some agnostics put their faith in god while acknowledging they don't know if god exists. That is intellectually honest for some meanings of the word "faith", but not others. A genuine atheist would not do that.
I admit the above explanation is a little messy, because I don't define the terms very well, and it's been a while since I thought about the topic. Sorry; I'm tired. The points are valid, but not so well explained in the above. Study theories of knowledge - epistemology - to gain clearer insights into the range of meanings assigned to the terms like "belief" and "know".
I had a Canon Powershot A40, and the colours were significantly more washed out and the image noisy compared with the Fuji Finepix I had before it. Just one data point, but it's enough to make me want to look elsewhere than Canon for my next one.
Why would someone intelligent believe in an invisible and all-powerful being for whom no evidence exists, and whose existence is so incredibly unlikely? How could someone intelligent, who would would presumably be well-read and therefore be aware of the incredible range of (blatantly silly) things people have professed belief in throughout history, not simply place modern religion in the same category?
It's a very good question. Now, if you really believe in someone's intelligence, and you see that they are behaving in this way... that they are holding beliefs which you believe are irrational, and superstitious, and clearly wishful thinking in order to deny mortality... doesn't that make you, at least a little bit, wonder if your assumptions are really 100% valid? If your own reasoning, and the limited evidence you have about the world (because your beliefs are informed by what you have observed and been taught too), is really enough to validate your viewpoint about those people?
You write:
Religion... it is very hard to see how someone smart could fall for it.
Yes, it is very hard to see. And yet, there are many smart people who hold such beliefs.
That's what confuses us.
Then you do not understand why smart people hold these beliefs. Good questions, these are. Well worth asking, in my opinion. Fruitful.
Related: having found similar code sections, follow trends in them over time. Find where two programs copied the same code, but one has failed to implement what might be a bug fix or improvement in another, by looking at changes to the code over time.
Several people have jokingly suggested you find another fiance. At least, I hope they are joking!:)
But let's look at the situation: you're choosing to stay in a relationship with someone who supports the RIAA's business. You know that she's doing business with them, and choose to stay with her in a supportive role as her partner. Does that mean you are supporting the RIAA's business too?
Another thing. You say she didn't care that she didn't fully own the CD. Does it matter? She gets to listen to the music - which is all she or anyone else wants from a CD. Why should she care about an irrelevant abstraction which in her experience doesn't affect her, such as "owning"? Even here on Slashdot there are plenty of people who'd like the very idea of owning music to be abandoned, while listening continues.
My take on it is that I care, because of how it affects other people, limiting some peoples' freedoms to enjoy music the way they want to; and moreso because it propagates the unpleasant memes which takes away our freedom to do other things, such as freedom to share our own creative works composed of all we learn in life. I couldn't care less about "owning" a CD, though.
I'm involved in a.NET application written in C#, and Windows is the only target OS. It's a nice bonus if it runs on Linux, but that's not a requirement; running well in Windows is.
Until recently, we've been using Microsoft's own C#/.NET widget library, which is called Windows.Forms. GTK/GNOME on Windows was considered and dismissed for the obvious reason: that it would be relatively crappy on Windows, and offer no advantages.
But after several months with Microsoft Windows.Forms, we found two significant limitations, and had another look at GTK#:
Imagine you've got a scrolling list of little control boxes, each one with a few buttons and labels. In our application, there's one for each remote-controlled device.
We found that Windows.Forms crashes as soon as the number of widgets system-wide reaches 10000(*), which is easily reached as soon as we had about 500 of those boxes. This is due to each Windows.Forms widget requiring an OS handle. No good!
The code to workaround that took weeks to write and is much more complex than we'd like. It needs to dynamically create and destroy widgets during scrolling, and requires extra layer of "virtual widget" indirection which complicates much of the program.
GTK# has no such limitation; only memory limits the number of widgets. So the GTK# version of our application is much simpler.
(*) That's Windows 2000. The limit is larger on Windows XP, but still present.
Layout. For most of our application, we need widgets to be laid out automatically, flowing and resizing sensibly according to the size of text, and doing the right thing with different combinations of widgets displayed.
Windows.Forms inherits the crappy hardly-existent layout of native Windows widgets. If you want widgets to lay out according to some algorithm, you have to write the algorithm yourself, or grab some 3rd party code to do it.(**)
GTK# is miles ahead in automatic layout. It's layout model is based on logical boxes within boxes, with padding and stretchy things - like HTML and TeX - which makes it look better and also is more of a joy to program. You don't feel like you're spending your time doing things the computer should be doing.
(**).NET 2.0 Beta provides some big improvements in the layout department, but it's still far behind GTK#.
The result is that we've moved our application from using Microsoft's Windows.Forms, to using GTK# on Windows. (We're still using C#/.NET). As a side benefit, the same application now runs on Linux using Mono.
Although it's not consistent with the Windows look, GTK looks a lot nicer in many ways. In particular, the way boxes automatically size to fit the text in them, the way buttons highlight as the mouse moves over them, and the good-looking themes (they're not all garish; some of them are functionally helpful).
So, based in my experience so far, I'd heartily recommend considering GTK# instead of Windows.Forms on.NET, even if you're writing a Windows-only application.
The file browser being quite different is surely one of the weakest points, so if that's important you'll want to stick with native Windows widgets. Same goes if you want exactly the native look. But if you don't mind those things, for applications that don't use a lot of native Windows features, GTK# on.NET works surprisingly well, looks good, and has a number of technical advantages.
Many social activists are actively ANTI-production (anti-globalization groups...
I can't let that mis-representation pass. Many "anti-globalists" are in favour of greater productivity. It's injustice which is largely objected to. That comes largely from movement of capital to organisers of enslaving situations, without free movement of people away from those.
Hence ideas like "Free Movement of People, not Free Movement of Capital", "Fair Trade not Free Trade", and "No Borders". The last of those is often used by people you would call "anti-globalists", and thus a huge clue that "anti-globalist" does not mean what it sounds like.
The term anti-globalist is really a misnomer; so, often, is anti-capitalist. The trouble is that many who call themselves pro-globalist aren't really in favour of global opportunity, many who say they're in favour of free trade aren't really in favour of freedom, and many who say they're in favour of capitalism aren't really in favour of free flow of capital. Thus the terms anti-globalist and anti-capitalist occur in opposition to that. The terms are very confusing. Don't be confused by them; they're just words, and inaccurate ones at that.
I've done quite a bit of benchmarking various Perl constructs, to improve performance of my own Perl scripts. (More web stuff, so it's the relevant sort of Perl).
I've been very disappointed with it speed-wise. Approximately 1100 CPU cycles on my 366MHz x86 for a trivial subroutine call; approx. 290 for an integer local ("my") variable assignment (260 for globals). That's hot cache (tiny benchmarking loops). That's slow even for a byte-code interpreter. And strings copy a lot more than necessary, in ways which are difficult to avoid without making code very messy; surprising for a language with a reputation for string handling.
It's great if you want to pattern-match a little bit of text. But even working with text, sometimes you need to split things into token streams and do logical things.
Perl is full of great things. I use it a lot, and write all sorts of fancy code in it. But one thing it isn't, is fast.
...how do you set yourself to show as "Busy" on other people's clients, without going through each individual account (I have 7) to set the away message?
is "Tools -> Away -> Set All Away"(*) not what you are looking for?
Unfortunately, regardless of which away message is picked under Set All Away, all my MSN contacts will see is "Away From Computer". If I'm at the computer but busy, that is very misleading.
There is an option to set the away message for a single account, and that does work with MSN. So, if I want to appear as "Busy", I have to go through each of my MSN accounts individually and set them to be away in that state.
Obviously, Gaim should have a facility for setting which protocol-specific status is associated with a Set All Away message, or even simpler, if you Set All Away to a message like "Busy" which exactly matches a status supported by each protocol, it should use that.
I use Gaim with MSN (and Yahoo and...) too, on Linux. My colleage uses Gaim on Windows, a lot, so it must be quite acceptable there.
Before this article, I've noticed a number of UI deficiences, and things that obviously don't work right with Gaim on MSN (like how do you set yourself to show as "Busy" on other people's clients, without going through each individual account (I have 7) to set the away message? how do you move a buddy _out_ of a subtree in the contacts list, without breaking and re-adding the buddy?)
The article mentions whiteboarding... presumably where you can write and draw on a shared surface.
I've never used whiteboarding software, but I've imagined it would be very useful in some of the business conversations I've had. That, and collaborative text editing. There have been times when I wish Gaim had the former feature especially.
Just to point out that the rant wasn't _just_ about non-business features, even though it was written that way.
A surprising number of those DRM'd HDTV players do actually run some form of Linux. Unfortunately for you and I, there's no login and they're not easy to modify - sometimes using good encryption and key signing on the firmware to make sure you can't read or change it.
In my opinion it would be nice if GPLv3 made it a requirement that you can modify the firmware on such devices, for those that want to - but I don't think that's coming.
Curiously, I don't give a shit about Beagle and Tomboy. But your and my personal application interests aren't relevant.
The point stands: Because Mono is (currently) a useful but incomplete implementation of.NET - because it's missing a widely used component - it's perfectly sensible to compare it with open source implementations of Java which are also useful but missing some components.
Now, a better comparision would be mono vs. jikes+sablevm, fastjar, sablevm and classpath-tools--but these tools are not capable of running most Java software.
That's ok: Mono isn't capable of running most.NET software either (i.e. every.NET program with a GUI using Windows.Forms).
The value society puts on children is mostly a "me, but younger" one.
Perhaps. But the value children put on themselves is quite the opposite - and both tendancies are expressed by genes. Evolution is much more subtle than individuals striving to pass on their personal traits to their own children.
However I think there are plenty of counter-examples of people who never stop learning and who would only get more productive if they lived another 50 years.
Indeed there are. I'd like to think I'm among them:-) What I'm saying is that the balance between people like that, and people who block social evolution when there are pressures to socially evolve (which there are) - that balance affects the evolutionary likelihoods of expressing longevity-giving and health-giving genes.
Basically, more people engaged in lifelong learning and evolving themselves during a single lifetime will likely result in greater expression of genes which support longevity and long term health. Because then death and suffering is not necessary for change. More people being stuck in their ways and powerful to the detriment to others will likely result in less expression of those genes, and greater expression of genes which break that behaviour. Because then death and suffering is necessary for change.
Seek to change this balance of behaviours, and I believe we'll change the balance of gene expression. Both due to hereditary evolution from mutation and splicing (slowly!), and also due to the poorly understood processes by which gene expression is governed within a single individual during a single lifetime (mechanism: because we already have much diversity in how people change or don't, as you point out, and a long history of evolution of the gene expression mechanics, and a vast store of unexpressed but evolved genes from our ancestor creatures; those three together are likely to result in the processes which govern gene expression adapting to short term changes in a way which is similar to hereditary evolution but faster).
Where do you think we'd be if older people who are stuck in their ways and have power and authority stuck around for longer, and retained their powerful positions?
There are advantages in replacing old minds with fresh young ones who challenge the old perspectives. We love children for a reason.
That is facilitated by death, and also by crippling injuries both physical and mental.
These advantages are particularly obvious in our human social structures - for the time being, anyway. As an example, in the recent article about computers automatically learning language grammars, there was an interesting comment that linguistics won't move on until Chomsky dies... There's some truth to that in all of science, politics, etc.
Complex social evolution does not necessarily favour health for all individuals.
An interesting corollary to that hypothesis is that there exist changes to the structures of society, and changes to the structures in which we propagate knowledge and learning and questioning, and changes to the way we collectively think, which would adjust evolutionary pressures to favour greater individual health, particularly including the expression of long-evolved genes which we're carrying already but not using, like those involved in tissue regeneration and dare I say it, longevity.
Slashdot Mirror
Literally that's what it means, yes. However, it is used to mean a fear of homosexuality. For some people, it's clearly social conditioning: "let's bash those fags". That's just plain wrong, and should be fought as a social ill, in my opinion.
For some people, it's more like irrational fear of spiders or snakes: "*retch* that's disgusting". The details of irrational fear vary: some people are bothered by seeing other people engaged in anything homosexual, while others are bothered by the possibility that it might involve them, i.e. getting too close to someone of the same sex, or even being looked at by someone they suspect may be homosexual. It tends to be more men who have this phobia, but far from exclusively. It's as much a debilitating condition as other phobias: imagine how constraining it must be for a man to be continually afraid of being touched by another man... all those vital health benefits, all that emotional grounding, all that non-verbal communication.
-- Jamie
Thanks. I see what you mean.
I only got as far as the NY Times article, and it says the men were shown erotic films; some containing only men, some containing only women. What about films containing men and women together? I know that I would be more aroused by (decent) films containing only men compared with those containing women - but not due to my orientation - due simply to the fact that I have someone to identify with in the former!
Maybe it's true then, that to be truly a heterosexual man, you have to be turned on by images of lesbians... </puzzled>
-- Jamie
If homophobia is really killing latent attraction to the same sex in some people (not such a new idea!)... and if incidence of homophobia decreases over the next 50 years, as it may well do due to social acceptance... then that may cause more people to experience homosexual and bisexual attraction, and more people to engage in the behaviour - simply because of the "why not?" factor.
I don't know for sure, but have a gut feeling that a lot of homophobic reaction is due to social taboos programmed from a _very_ early age, and the tender touch isolation that male children experience from each other due to those social taboos. (Boys are allowed to hit each other; they are strongly discouraged from touching each other gently, unlike girls).
I guess that is likely to change, slowly, at the same time as male homosexuality becomes more widely acknowledged as real, and accepted as good when it makes people happy. That trend seems to me inevitable as we learn to respect and support each other over the generations. But it is also a slow trend, taking generations, and long, drawn out battles to refine the details.
-- Jamie
Dr. Drew's observation that bi people settle into one or the other group (i.e. homo or hetero) may well be correct. I am inclined to agree that it's often helped along by traumatic lifestyle or childhood problems, for some years. But: who doesn't have traumas? I suggest virtually everyone has childhood "issues" which reverberate through their years of sexual identity discovery (whether that's orientation, or other aspects of sexual identity such as religious taboos, fetishes, shame about perceived unusual fantasies, lack of knowledge, etc.).
But that doesn't tell us whether the bi-curious settle because society treats them better for doing that... or if they settle because they finally discover their "innate" sexual orientation...
Certainly, I have met a relatively large proportion of people who identify as bi, who complain that both the hetero world, and the homo world (i.e. gay friendly environments), often reject or dismiss bisexuals as somehow fence-sitters, or undecided, or likely to change and therefore dump their partner, or are traitors, or something.
Unfortunately, those compaints are consistent with the theory that people who settle into one of the homo/hetero orientations may be doing it because that's more socially comfortable. It doesn't prove the theory, but it supports it's plausibility.
I wonder what people would do, in a society where they are encouraged to be sexual in whatever way they enjoy each day... rather than trying to please other people or stay out of trouble.
Perhaps the next 50 years will gives us some clue.
-- Jamie
I agree with some of that research.
However, I think it is very unhelpful to declare that "bisexuality" (using that label) is a "questionable minority" among men. It might be more helpful to say that "neural bisexuality" or some other technical term is rare.
This is because "bisexual" (like "homosexual") is an important term with socio-political ramifications: people want to be free to be sexual in whatever way brings them happiness; _very_ large numbers of people engage, or fantasise about engaging in sexual activity with both genders. Telling a lot of people who _feel_ bisexual that they aren't really, doesn't help the cause of happiness. It is effectively denying that they exist, or telling them that they aren't yet being true to themselves. That causes despair, pain, violence, self-hate, suicide, hiding in the closet, and all manner of unpleasant things that I hope fade away over the next 50 years.
The fact is: a _lot_ of people engage in bisexual desire and behaviour. Regardless of whether there is a neurological or hormonal basis, a lot of people feel it in their burning heart and soul, so to speak. It is a real, and important subjective experience.
Saying that it's not "true" bisexuality causes harm. It's something that people who feel themselves to be bisexual - that's to say, quite a lot of people - have to battle against. They are accussed of being on the fence, undecided, dishonest with themselves. So, many wonder if those accusations are valid. And many have trouble finding social acceptance: not welcome in straight community, not welcome in gay community either... because bisexuality is widely seen as pretending, or indecisive. Which, for many, it is _not_.
Technical: what do you mean by "genuine sexual desire"? fMRI and other techniques indicate only variations in neural activity. But that is not the same as desire, which is a subjective experience.
That is probably why some people say that nearly everyone is bisexual, and others, such as yourself, say that very few men are, if any. It is down to differences assigned to the meaning of "bisexual", which is another reason why labels can obscure the facts.
You are probably not disagreeing at all with me on the _observable_ facts. Yet, disagreeing on the what to call what.
You refer to "true" attraction. It is unhelpful to tell someone who feels an attraction that it is not "true", even if you have neurological, hormonal and genetic data. Their subjective feelings are not that data alone, and neither are their observable sexual reactions: those are determined by many other factors too.
I consider myself a bisexual male. I have had, and enjoyed, sex with men and women. I will probably do so again. Yet, I would not be surprised if I failed most tests for "genuine sexual desire" that you came up with.
I am much more often interested in women, and it never even occurred to me to find any man sexually interesting until I was quite old. I tend to like the smell of women more often. That is all indicative of a neurology which is essentially heterosexual. But I have been hotly in love with a man - to a degree that overwhelmed me - and really wanted gay sex at times.
I attribute that mostly to psychology, rather than genetic programming. But who's to say what part of my experience is due to what? There is no absolute distinction.
However many of _my_ biological sexual or attraction reactions, I recognise as quite adjustable by changes to my intention and willingness to get used to different things. I cannot speak for others, but that is my experience. I am very lucky: I have the power to reprogram myself.
Just like trying different kinds of food that I may not like at first. And at other times, I have felt those sorts of feelings but they felt like they has some political or social motivations, which _become_ biological, rather than purely biological from birth. Perhaps this is because I can reprogram my reactions to a degree, so my ideals end up trick
If it takes you to a place where you hold the belief that "there is no god" - that is different from a lack of belief. I think of the former as "atheist", and the latter as "agnostic", but I realise many treat this as two categories of atheism: strong and weak atheism. Let's not get bogged down in that minor bit of terminology.
:) ,
There remains quite a spectrum, though. You say "shred of belief, then you're a theist". There is a lot of ambiguity about what constitues a shred of belief. Is faith belief? As in: if I choose to allow god to do something good for me, instead of trying to do it myself, even though I don't actually believe god exists to do that good thing, simply because I decide it's better to make that choice... that's a kind of faith, without the belief, at least as we would describe intellectual, conscious belief. Is that a "shred of belief"? I think we can split hairs further; the point is that there is a spectrum of belief, what it means to believe, what it means to have faith or put faith in, and nuances of all that, so that it's not _obviously_ a boolean, true-or-false thing to "believe even slightly".
This has some personal meaning for me: I think I am on that edge, somewhere between "do not have a belief in god" and "put my faith in god anyway". It seems to have practical, life-enhancing benefits to think that way (borne out by scientific studies!), and it's quite hard to determine if it is contradictory, self-delusional, or even if picking a side to eliminate the paradox would in any way be less of a delusion. I actually feel a lot healthier, better, and all round good and self-consistent, compared with how I imagine I'd feel if I tried to think like an "I believe in god" or "I have zero faith in god" person.
And that's just looking at nuances in the meaning of "belief". We haven't touched on the huge variation of what people mean by "god", which means that one person says "I believe in god", and another says "I don't believe in god", and even another says "I believe there is no god", they could all actually have the same beliefs about the world, due to their different concept of what they mean by "god". And when you really ask people, they do have quite a bit of variation in what they mean, especially if you ask them in a deep way, which goes beyond the surface rote-repeating of doctrines, to people's core, driving beliefs that really animate them.
I'm saying it is not a boolean "does not believe in god" versus "has any belief in god". You cannot assign a true or false value to that question for every person, in a way that is correct for every person. The law of the Excluded Middle does not apply. Yet that, my last statement, is itself an unjustifiable statement! You can postulate that there exists _some_ definition of "believe" and "god" for which that boolean distinction is always true or false for any given person. As you have. And I can postulate that there does not. But I think despite that, neither of us can produce a satisfactory justification that proves the other wrong!
So I've merely tried to do a far more useful thing: explaining how I see those things in terms of variation and nuance... for you to see why I say there is something between theism and atheism, even if you choose to disagree, you _might_ find you don't disagree with the substance of my idea, but only with the way I summarise it as that short statement which superficially differs from yours.
Hair-splitting Peace
-- Jamie
Indeed, the idea of soul as an emergent property of a human system is quite enough, even in a teleporter which just "copies the bits", and treating people as machines which process bits.
However, quantum physics provides additional support to the idea of teleportation, if it transports the quantum state, being fundamentally physically indistinguishable from simply moving the object in the ordinary way, no matter what is going on with the object. Philosophically, this allows for (but does not require) the idea of a soul which is attached to a specific human system, and which is properly transported by quantum teleportation.
Certain aspects of physical systems cannot be duplicated, due to fundamental principles of quantum physics. They can't be turned into ordinary binary information and back, either. They can't be copied, and they can't be analysed. It's simply physically impossible. Reality simply doesn't do that. That could mean there is no mechanism available, but it could equally mean that there is no difference between teleportation and ordinary motion, other than what other people watching see.
It is like the teleportation version of relativity: those outside the teleporter see an object that appears to move from one place to another. Those inside the teleporter see the outside world appear to move from one place to another. And neither is more valid than the other, in the same way that no reference frame is more valid than another in relativity.
A teleporter which transports quantum state cannot dissect, record, or recreate the quantum state of the physical object being teleported. It can only transform the state of the object to something which travels over space, and transform it back to material form at the other end.
From the perspective of the object being teleported, those transformations cannot violate the object's integrity at any time. So, for the object, the experience is no different, to being stretched, squashed, irradiated, accelerated, etc. Generally, mangled about a bit, but from the reference frame of the object being teleported, at no point is the object's structural integrity violated.
From the object's perspective, this is no different than ordinary physical motion in a field. This is fundamental, assuming the principle of quantum identity is upheld(*). It's not "as if", in the way that we might say that duplicating a computer to run elsewhere gives the computer the experience of being transported. It's more basic than that: as a result of quantum identity of physical systems, from the object's reference frame there is no difference between teleportation, and ordinary motion in a field. The field may of course be damaging - experienced from the object's reference frame as excessive acceleration, radiation, or other shocks. But not entirely damaging the object's physical integrity at any time, otherwise the quantum state is not transported.(*)
And so, quantum teleportation, provided the quantum state is transported sufficiently purely(*) will tell us nothing about whether the physical system transported has a soul or not. Because if a soul exists and moves when the object moves normally, well, there is really no difference when it's teleported like this.
(*) - All that said, we really don't know much about the quantum structure of large, complex systems like a human being. We don't know much about the myriad nuances of it's structure, nor it's relationship with the environment which would not be teleported. We don't know with what kind fidelity we can transport such a large quantum state. We know there will be some aspects of the state not transported, or modified in the process, and we don't know how those would manifest physically in the reference frame of the object being transported. For example, the equivalent of "data corruption" when transmitting a dematerialised quantum state might be experienced by the object itself as random, destructive radiation, or other weirder forces.
-- Jamie
When the word was coined, the original meaning of "agnostic" was that one admits to not _knowing_, and being intellectually honest about that, instead of saying that one knows there is (a) god, or knows there isn't. Some people of conscience cannot do otherwise than declare that they don't know, no matter what they still put their faith in.
It is right there in the word: "a-gnostic", where gnostic refers to knowledge, and agnostic refers to the lack of it.
Nowadays, "agnosticism" is often taken to mean declaring a lack of _belief_ either way - and here "belief" refers to "have faith in", not "known to be true beyond doubt". (The word "belief" is itself confusing, because different people take it to mean different things, or even the same people in different contexts, without making those differences plain).
My guess is that this change in the word "agnostic" over time makes sense as more and more people, including devout religious people and atheists, analyse their beliefs to the degree that they accept their knowledge is not absolute, but they have faith or commit to following the implications of their beliefs anyway. In a sense, the original idea "agnostic" has become more widespread, so the word isn't used for that so much now.
The upshot is that "agnostic" does _not_ mean "atheist" in another guise. Because an atheist puts his/her belief (as in motivation/faith) in "there is no god". That is different from the agnostic's belief (as in motivation/faith): "I don't know if there is god" - the latter being more intellectually honest for many people. Some agnostics put their faith in god while acknowledging they don't know if god exists. That is intellectually honest for some meanings of the word "faith", but not others. A genuine atheist would not do that.
I admit the above explanation is a little messy, because I don't define the terms very well, and it's been a while since I thought about the topic. Sorry; I'm tired. The points are valid, but not so well explained in the above. Study theories of knowledge - epistemology - to gain clearer insights into the range of meanings assigned to the terms like "belief" and "know".
-- Jamie
I had a Canon Powershot A40, and the colours were significantly more washed out and the image noisy compared with the Fuji Finepix I had before it. Just one data point, but it's enough to make me want to look elsewhere than Canon for my next one.
-- Jamie
You write:
It's a very good question. Now, if you really believe in someone's intelligence, and you see that they are behaving in this way... that they are holding beliefs which you believe are irrational, and superstitious, and clearly wishful thinking in order to deny mortality... doesn't that make you, at least a little bit, wonder if your assumptions are really 100% valid? If your own reasoning, and the limited evidence you have about the world (because your beliefs are informed by what you have observed and been taught too), is really enough to validate your viewpoint about those people?
You write:
Yes, it is very hard to see. And yet, there are many smart people who hold such beliefs.Then you do not understand why smart people hold these beliefs. Good questions, these are. Well worth asking, in my opinion. Fruitful.
-- Jamie
Including those with incompatible licenses.
Related: having found similar code sections, follow trends in them over time. Find where two programs copied the same code, but one has failed to implement what might be a bug fix or improvement in another, by looking at changes to the code over time.
Several people have jokingly suggested you find another fiance. At least, I hope they are joking! :)
But let's look at the situation: you're choosing to stay in a relationship with someone who supports the RIAA's business. You know that she's doing business with them, and choose to stay with her in a supportive role as her partner. Does that mean you are supporting the RIAA's business too?
Another thing. You say she didn't care that she didn't fully own the CD. Does it matter? She gets to listen to the music - which is all she or anyone else wants from a CD. Why should she care about an irrelevant abstraction which in her experience doesn't affect her, such as "owning"? Even here on Slashdot there are plenty of people who'd like the very idea of owning music to be abandoned, while listening continues.
My take on it is that I care, because of how it affects other people, limiting some peoples' freedoms to enjoy music the way they want to; and moreso because it propagates the unpleasant memes which takes away our freedom to do other things, such as freedom to share our own creative works composed of all we learn in life. I couldn't care less about "owning" a CD, though.
-- JamieOccasionally, people who major in art or humanities care about social justice issues too, would you believe...
-- Jamie
I'm involved in a .NET application written in C#, and Windows is the only target OS. It's a nice bonus if it runs on Linux, but that's not a requirement; running well in Windows is.
Until recently, we've been using Microsoft's own C#/.NET widget library, which is called Windows.Forms. GTK/GNOME on Windows was considered and dismissed for the obvious reason: that it would be relatively crappy on Windows, and offer no advantages.
But after several months with Microsoft Windows.Forms, we found two significant limitations, and had another look at GTK#:
Imagine you've got a scrolling list of little control boxes, each one with a few buttons and labels. In our application, there's one for each remote-controlled device.
We found that Windows.Forms crashes as soon as the number of widgets system-wide reaches 10000(*), which is easily reached as soon as we had about 500 of those boxes. This is due to each Windows.Forms widget requiring an OS handle. No good!
The code to workaround that took weeks to write and is much more complex than we'd like. It needs to dynamically create and destroy widgets during scrolling, and requires extra layer of "virtual widget" indirection which complicates much of the program.
GTK# has no such limitation; only memory limits the number of widgets. So the GTK# version of our application is much simpler.
(*) That's Windows 2000. The limit is larger on Windows XP, but still present.
Layout. For most of our application, we need widgets to be laid out automatically, flowing and resizing sensibly according to the size of text, and doing the right thing with different combinations of widgets displayed.
Windows.Forms inherits the crappy hardly-existent layout of native Windows widgets. If you want widgets to lay out according to some algorithm, you have to write the algorithm yourself, or grab some 3rd party code to do it.(**)
GTK# is miles ahead in automatic layout. It's layout model is based on logical boxes within boxes, with padding and stretchy things - like HTML and TeX - which makes it look better and also is more of a joy to program. You don't feel like you're spending your time doing things the computer should be doing.
(**) .NET 2.0 Beta provides some big improvements in the layout department, but it's still far behind GTK#.
The result is that we've moved our application from using Microsoft's Windows.Forms, to using GTK# on Windows. (We're still using C#/.NET). As a side benefit, the same application now runs on Linux using Mono.
Although it's not consistent with the Windows look, GTK looks a lot nicer in many ways. In particular, the way boxes automatically size to fit the text in them, the way buttons highlight as the mouse moves over them, and the good-looking themes (they're not all garish; some of them are functionally helpful).
So, based in my experience so far, I'd heartily recommend considering GTK# instead of Windows.Forms on .NET, even if you're writing a Windows-only application.
The file browser being quite different is surely one of the weakest points, so if that's important you'll want to stick with native Windows widgets. Same goes if you want exactly the native look. But if you don't mind those things, for applications that don't use a lot of native Windows features, GTK# on .NET works surprisingly well, looks good, and has a number of technical advantages.
-- Jamie
I can't let that mis-representation pass. Many "anti-globalists" are in favour of greater productivity. It's injustice which is largely objected to. That comes largely from movement of capital to organisers of enslaving situations, without free movement of people away from those.
Hence ideas like "Free Movement of People, not Free Movement of Capital", "Fair Trade not Free Trade", and "No Borders". The last of those is often used by people you would call "anti-globalists", and thus a huge clue that "anti-globalist" does not mean what it sounds like.
The term anti-globalist is really a misnomer; so, often, is anti-capitalist. The trouble is that many who call themselves pro-globalist aren't really in favour of global opportunity, many who say they're in favour of free trade aren't really in favour of freedom, and many who say they're in favour of capitalism aren't really in favour of free flow of capital. Thus the terms anti-globalist and anti-capitalist occur in opposition to that. The terms are very confusing. Don't be confused by them; they're just words, and inaccurate ones at that.
I've done quite a bit of benchmarking various Perl constructs, to improve performance of my own Perl scripts. (More web stuff, so it's the relevant sort of Perl).
I've been very disappointed with it speed-wise. Approximately 1100 CPU cycles on my 366MHz x86 for a trivial subroutine call; approx. 290 for an integer local ("my") variable assignment (260 for globals). That's hot cache (tiny benchmarking loops). That's slow even for a byte-code interpreter. And strings copy a lot more than necessary, in ways which are difficult to avoid without making code very messy; surprising for a language with a reputation for string handling.
It's great if you want to pattern-match a little bit of text. But even working with text, sometimes you need to split things into token streams and do logical things.
Perl is full of great things. I use it a lot, and write all sorts of fancy code in it. But one thing it isn't, is fast.
-- Jamie
Alas, your suggestion doesn't work.
Unfortunately, regardless of which away message is picked under Set All Away, all my MSN contacts will see is "Away From Computer". If I'm at the computer but busy, that is very misleading.
There is an option to set the away message for a single account, and that does work with MSN. So, if I want to appear as "Busy", I have to go through each of my MSN accounts individually and set them to be away in that state.
Obviously, Gaim should have a facility for setting which protocol-specific status is associated with a Set All Away message, or even simpler, if you Set All Away to a message like "Busy" which exactly matches a status supported by each protocol, it should use that.
But it doesn't, and I'm using the latest version.
Don't know anything about the Summer Of Code project, but you might find Gobby interesting.
-- Jamie
I use Gaim with MSN (and Yahoo and...) too, on Linux.
My colleage uses Gaim on Windows, a lot, so it must be quite acceptable there.
Before this article, I've noticed a number of UI deficiences, and things that obviously don't work right with Gaim on MSN (like how do you set yourself to show as "Busy" on other people's clients, without going through each individual account (I have 7) to set the away message? how do you move a buddy _out_ of a subtree in the contacts list, without breaking and re-adding the buddy?)
The article mentions whiteboarding... presumably where you can write and draw on a shared surface.
I've never used whiteboarding software, but I've imagined it would be very useful in some of the business conversations I've had. That, and collaborative text editing. There have been times when I wish Gaim had the former feature especially.
Just to point out that the rant wasn't _just_ about non-business features, even though it was written that way.
-- Jamie
A surprising number of those DRM'd HDTV players do actually run some form of Linux. Unfortunately for you and I, there's no login and they're not easy to modify - sometimes using good encryption and key signing on the firmware to make sure you can't read or change it.
In my opinion it would be nice if GPLv3 made it a requirement that you can modify the firmware on such devices, for those that want to - but I don't think that's coming.
-- Jamie
Curiously, I don't give a shit about Beagle and Tomboy. But your and my personal application interests aren't relevant. The point stands: Because Mono is (currently) a useful but incomplete implementation of .NET - because it's missing a widely used component - it's perfectly sensible to compare it with open source implementations of Java which are also useful but missing some components.
That's ok: Mono isn't capable of running most .NET software either (i.e. every .NET program with a GUI using Windows.Forms).
-- Jamie
Perhaps. But the value children put on themselves is quite the opposite - and both tendancies are expressed by genes. Evolution is much more subtle than individuals striving to pass on their personal traits to their own children.
-- Jamie
Indeed there are. I'd like to think I'm among them :-) What I'm saying is that the balance between people like that, and people who block social evolution when there are pressures to socially evolve (which there are) - that balance affects the evolutionary likelihoods of expressing longevity-giving and health-giving genes.
Basically, more people engaged in lifelong learning and evolving themselves during a single lifetime will likely result in greater expression of genes which support longevity and long term health. Because then death and suffering is not necessary for change. More people being stuck in their ways and powerful to the detriment to others will likely result in less expression of those genes, and greater expression of genes which break that behaviour. Because then death and suffering is necessary for change.
Seek to change this balance of behaviours, and I believe we'll change the balance of gene expression. Both due to hereditary evolution from mutation and splicing (slowly!), and also due to the poorly understood processes by which gene expression is governed within a single individual during a single lifetime (mechanism: because we already have much diversity in how people change or don't, as you point out, and a long history of evolution of the gene expression mechanics, and a vast store of unexpressed but evolved genes from our ancestor creatures; those three together are likely to result in the processes which govern gene expression adapting to short term changes in a way which is similar to hereditary evolution but faster).
-- Jamie
Where do you think we'd be if older people who are stuck in their ways and have power and authority stuck around for longer, and retained their powerful positions?
There are advantages in replacing old minds with fresh young ones who challenge the old perspectives. We love children for a reason.
That is facilitated by death, and also by crippling injuries both physical and mental.
These advantages are particularly obvious in our human social structures - for the time being, anyway. As an example, in the recent article about computers automatically learning language grammars, there was an interesting comment that linguistics won't move on until Chomsky dies... There's some truth to that in all of science, politics, etc.
Complex social evolution does not necessarily favour health for all individuals.
An interesting corollary to that hypothesis is that there exist changes to the structures of society, and changes to the structures in which we propagate knowledge and learning and questioning, and changes to the way we collectively think, which would adjust evolutionary pressures to favour greater individual health, particularly including the expression of long-evolved genes which we're carrying already but not using, like those involved in tissue regeneration and dare I say it, longevity.
-- Jamie