To be honest, I don't care whether people live in their own fantasy worlds or not, as long as they leave me alone and in particular don't try to kill me. And the atheists are not above wilful ignorance -- in "The End of Faith", Sam Harris insists that his own ethical position is based on assumptions about human nature that are so obvious that it "need not be validated by a controlled study" (p192) -- this in a chapter on "The Science of Good and Evil" (my emphasis), so the "science" on which Harris calls for our extermination -- yours and mine -- is a "science" that needn't bother with study when Harris already "knows" the answer.
Dear Religion,
You are a pain in the ass. Please go away soon.
Although religious nutjobs are an easy target, please try to remember that the problem is with the "nutjob", not the "religious", and the atheists can field a fair number of nutjobs too. Militant atheist Sam Harris, according to "The End of Faith" apparently wants to see humanity exterminated, religious and atheist alike, rather than allow religion to continue to exist, which comes over as "nutjob" to me. And "The End of Faith" comes with an endorsement from Richard Dawkins (although I don't know whether Dawkins endorses that particular bit). Basically, if somebody wants to kill me because my beliefs differ from theirs, or as collateral damage getting to somebody whose beliefs differ from theirs, I don't care whether they're religious or atheist, I'm opposed to them.
So how about: "Dear persecution in the name of ideology, you are a pain in the ass. Please go away soon."
I've just compared the listing for Brokeback Mountain on the US Amazon site with that on the UK Amazon site. I can't see a sales rank on the US version, but there's one on the UK version.
Precisely. We live in a society where 'corporate selection' fosters public companies who mindlessly take the action which most increases value for their shareholders.
Surely it deserves rewarding for the work it does? Even more evidence that IP laws need reform -- er, that it's Microsoft's fault -- er, that it's those damn lawyers (except for the ones on our side).
If you're on an industrial estate near Scunthorpe, why haven't your cheapskate employers leased, y'know, a proper business connection to the internet instead of trying to squeeze bandwidth out of a consumer product?
They have, but the proper business connection only became available last year; before that BT said it wasn't cost-effective to make any broadband -- business or domestic -- available in the area.
The categorical imperative is useful when in discussion with those who accept the categorical imperative. It's less useful when in discussion with the many people who don't, such as the many utilitarians. It's therefore just another moral relative which some accept and some don't, not a moral absolute.
Your observation that conscience is the result of evolution has a number of problems. It confuses "is" with "ought", I suspect it crosses the line of the naturalistic fallacy, and, most significantly, it fails to give the "moral absolutes" called for because it gives no way of resolving cases in which different people's consciences call for different actions in different cases. You have no absolute grounds for claiming that the prompting of your conscience is objectively better than the prompting of anybody else's conscience.
3G as an alternative to domestic fixed broadband in remote areas doesn't have to support many people. You're forgetting that the UK is a densely populated area. I live in what is considered a rural area - the Cotswolds (postcards of thatched cottages etc) - and I can get 2.5Mbit/s ADSL.
You in turn are forgetting that The Cotswolds are amongst Britain's most expensive and affluent areas (postcards of thatched cottages etc), and tend to get priority for such services due to the fact that the execs making the decisions live there. Try looking at a similarly rural area in a poorer part of the country, such as North Lincolnshire. My employer's head offices are on an industrial estate just outside Scunthorpe, and I've just checked the BT website for the location which says that not even 256k bps is available there. I'll say that again: an industrial estate in the commuter belt of a decent-sized town. Rather more than "You're talking about two or three households per tower, plus three hikers sending cameraphone pics, two businessmen on an expenses-paid grouse shoot checking their email and a bloke on a tractor arguing with his boss". "Digital divide" is right; the "haves" are not aware of the true extent of the "have nots".
My comment was not really supposed to contradict yours, just expand on the tangentially related (and totally on-topic of the overall slant of this whole thread) subject of language racism -- some languages are shunned on the technical merits, but some are shunned without even a second glance.
Well, my personal relationship with FORTRAN is that I did my final year university project in it in 1981 (a simulated annealing program), and was relieved that I'd never have to touch it again. I even refused a promotion a few years later because it would have involved maintenance of a major FORTRAN program. So although I have a huge respect for what FORTRAN accomplished in the early days of computing, I have looked at the language all I want to, thank you!
The whole scalability of languages thing is a bit of a semantic argument for me, as you could make a case both ways. On one hand you could say the implementation (compiler, interpreter, whatever) is responsible for handling issues with scaling, but on the other hand certain language constructs make it easier for compiler writers to do this and for programmers to "get" what is happening.
I am convinced that architectural features of languages can make a huge difference. Another example might be ISO Pascal, which had virtually no features that would allow communication between computers, so making distributed systems virtually impossible (of course, people did and possibly still do do that sort of thing in Pascal, but only by using non-standard language extensions).
First: Those books are no longer in print and WotC is not losing a dime if they get copied.
Yes they are, at least as they see it (which is what's going to drive their business decisions). If players can't get hold of the 3.5 material it forces them to buy the shiny new version 4 material -- and everyone who wants to join them in games, so it pushes people who already have 3.5 to buy 4. Or go play some other RPG, of course, but I expect WotC discount that possibility.
Re:Should have used PHP.
on
Twitter On Scala
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You know, technically there are more recent Fortran specs. Fortran gets hauled out in the form of FORTRAN77 every time someone wants to talk trash about an old language. However, just like C or C++ or Java, the language has evolved. Fortran 2003 has objects, a pretty cool module system and basic thread support.
So what you're saying is that language features do affect scalability? Well, that was precisely my point.
I don't follow your logic. I only suggested that encapsulation made an improvement to scalability, not that it is the only thing that makes an improvement.
Re:Should have used PHP.
on
Twitter On Scala
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Really? Try comparing the scalability of, say, FORTRAN or COBOL against any modern language with decent encapsulation.
I was going to give examples of how naive your concept of "skilled journalists" is
You will note that I said that the network of skilled journalists was their barrier to entry, not is. I am old enough to remember when they were commonplace.
One of the barriers to entry to something like the AP was getting news from where it happened to where people were. That used to be expensive. Now it is fairly cheap to connect to the Internet and send your information out from just about anywhere.
I think that barrier collapsed long before the internet. Sure, dictating over a telephone was more time-consuming than just clicking "send", but anybody could do it.
There might be a bigger demand for well written journalism if people were used to getting well written journalism.
My generation is. But I agree that it's getting harder to find. Again, though, if AP wants to throw away it's USP, the issue isn't one of barriers to entry, it's one of whether anybody wants their product.
So why again do we *need* 'skilled journalists'? Oh, right. The same reason we still need trains when we can now have cars.
Yeah, and you try to get from my home to my office in the morning. 45 minutes by train, about 2 hours by car. A bit less than £8 by train; £27 car parking, £8 congestion charge plus fuel by car. Read a book on the train, listen to some inane DJ in the car.
It's a good analogy (of course: it has cars in it). If you've got the resources to spare then you can do it all yourself. If you think the resources would be more effectively used elsewhere, use the prepackaged service.
Go ahead and live in your dream world where you read only about our guys being the bad guys, and those who think nothing of purposefully attacking civilians with suicide bombers are just victims.
And I'll live in mine.
One in which you don't bother to read the actual words you're responding to?
AP's barrier to entry wasn't distribution, it was a worldwide network of skilled journalists. The Internet hasn't removed that barrier to entry, because bloggers on the ground don't have the detachment and big-picture view of the skilled journalist, and rarely have the writing skills. If anything is damaging AP's business model, it's not the barriers to entry, it's whether the product (informed, well written journalism) is in demand nowadays.
Only if you don't understand the difference between insurgents and "insurgents". For all you know from those figures it could be 5 enemy, 100 of your guys and 1295 innocent bystanders. Although I grant that in that case you would have made enemies of quite a few of those innocent bystanders as they saw you massacre their loved ones.
So their solution? Turn into the bottom feeders of the economy, suing anything they lay eyes on. I personally hope this guy sues this company for everything they're worth, and maybe he'll rid the world of another copyright infringement shark.
Trouble is, if their business model has collapsed to that extent, "everything they're worth" isn't likely to cover his legal costs. After all, pretty much their only significant asset would probably be the IP in their artwork, and if it's not really their IP it isn't worth much.
This is nuts, every server in a data center? do they realize the cost that might incur to all these non infringing companies?
It's possible that they do, and want to "send a message". Those other companies, and the people who might lose their jobs because of the cost to their employers might not have cared about video piracy before, but I bet they do now.
Slashdot Mirror
To be honest, I don't care whether people live in their own fantasy worlds or not, as long as they leave me alone and in particular don't try to kill me. And the atheists are not above wilful ignorance -- in "The End of Faith", Sam Harris insists that his own ethical position is based on assumptions about human nature that are so obvious that it "need not be validated by a controlled study" (p192) -- this in a chapter on "The Science of Good and Evil" (my emphasis), so the "science" on which Harris calls for our extermination -- yours and mine -- is a "science" that needn't bother with study when Harris already "knows" the answer.
Sorry, but is there a car in this analogy anywhere?
Dear Religion, You are a pain in the ass. Please go away soon.
Although religious nutjobs are an easy target, please try to remember that the problem is with the "nutjob", not the "religious", and the atheists can field a fair number of nutjobs too. Militant atheist Sam Harris, according to "The End of Faith" apparently wants to see humanity exterminated, religious and atheist alike, rather than allow religion to continue to exist, which comes over as "nutjob" to me. And "The End of Faith" comes with an endorsement from Richard Dawkins (although I don't know whether Dawkins endorses that particular bit). Basically, if somebody wants to kill me because my beliefs differ from theirs, or as collateral damage getting to somebody whose beliefs differ from theirs, I don't care whether they're religious or atheist, I'm opposed to them.
So how about: "Dear persecution in the name of ideology, you are a pain in the ass. Please go away soon."
I've just compared the listing for Brokeback Mountain on the US Amazon site with that on the UK Amazon site. I can't see a sales rank on the US version, but there's one on the UK version.
Does your public library have a prominent gay porn section? Mine doesn't seem to, but maybe things are different where you are.
Precisely. We live in a society where 'corporate selection' fosters public companies who mindlessly take the action which most increases value for their shareholders.
Are they not legally obliged to do so?
We're not stealing the sun's energy.
Surely it deserves rewarding for the work it does? Even more evidence that IP laws need reform -- er, that it's Microsoft's fault -- er, that it's those damn lawyers (except for the ones on our side).
The problem is that the AP produce newspapers
That's a bit of news I'd missed. Since when? Which newspapers do AP produce?
If you're on an industrial estate near Scunthorpe, why haven't your cheapskate employers leased, y'know, a proper business connection to the internet instead of trying to squeeze bandwidth out of a consumer product?
They have, but the proper business connection only became available last year; before that BT said it wasn't cost-effective to make any broadband -- business or domestic -- available in the area.
The categorical imperative is useful when in discussion with those who accept the categorical imperative. It's less useful when in discussion with the many people who don't, such as the many utilitarians. It's therefore just another moral relative which some accept and some don't, not a moral absolute.
Your observation that conscience is the result of evolution has a number of problems. It confuses "is" with "ought", I suspect it crosses the line of the naturalistic fallacy, and, most significantly, it fails to give the "moral absolutes" called for because it gives no way of resolving cases in which different people's consciences call for different actions in different cases. You have no absolute grounds for claiming that the prompting of your conscience is objectively better than the prompting of anybody else's conscience.
3G as an alternative to domestic fixed broadband in remote areas doesn't have to support many people. You're forgetting that the UK is a densely populated area. I live in what is considered a rural area - the Cotswolds (postcards of thatched cottages etc) - and I can get 2.5Mbit/s ADSL.
You in turn are forgetting that The Cotswolds are amongst Britain's most expensive and affluent areas (postcards of thatched cottages etc), and tend to get priority for such services due to the fact that the execs making the decisions live there. Try looking at a similarly rural area in a poorer part of the country, such as North Lincolnshire. My employer's head offices are on an industrial estate just outside Scunthorpe, and I've just checked the BT website for the location which says that not even 256k bps is available there. I'll say that again: an industrial estate in the commuter belt of a decent-sized town. Rather more than "You're talking about two or three households per tower, plus three hikers sending cameraphone pics, two businessmen on an expenses-paid grouse shoot checking their email and a bloke on a tractor arguing with his boss". "Digital divide" is right; the "haves" are not aware of the true extent of the "have nots".
My comment was not really supposed to contradict yours, just expand on the tangentially related (and totally on-topic of the overall slant of this whole thread) subject of language racism -- some languages are shunned on the technical merits, but some are shunned without even a second glance.
Well, my personal relationship with FORTRAN is that I did my final year university project in it in 1981 (a simulated annealing program), and was relieved that I'd never have to touch it again. I even refused a promotion a few years later because it would have involved maintenance of a major FORTRAN program. So although I have a huge respect for what FORTRAN accomplished in the early days of computing, I have looked at the language all I want to, thank you!
The whole scalability of languages thing is a bit of a semantic argument for me, as you could make a case both ways. On one hand you could say the implementation (compiler, interpreter, whatever) is responsible for handling issues with scaling, but on the other hand certain language constructs make it easier for compiler writers to do this and for programmers to "get" what is happening.
I am convinced that architectural features of languages can make a huge difference. Another example might be ISO Pascal, which had virtually no features that would allow communication between computers, so making distributed systems virtually impossible (of course, people did and possibly still do do that sort of thing in Pascal, but only by using non-standard language extensions).
First: Those books are no longer in print and WotC is not losing a dime if they get copied.
Yes they are, at least as they see it (which is what's going to drive their business decisions). If players can't get hold of the 3.5 material it forces them to buy the shiny new version 4 material -- and everyone who wants to join them in games, so it pushes people who already have 3.5 to buy 4. Or go play some other RPG, of course, but I expect WotC discount that possibility.
You know, technically there are more recent Fortran specs. Fortran gets hauled out in the form of FORTRAN77 every time someone wants to talk trash about an old language. However, just like C or C++ or Java, the language has evolved. Fortran 2003 has objects, a pretty cool module system and basic thread support.
So what you're saying is that language features do affect scalability? Well, that was precisely my point.
I don't follow your logic. I only suggested that encapsulation made an improvement to scalability, not that it is the only thing that makes an improvement.
Really? Try comparing the scalability of, say, FORTRAN or COBOL against any modern language with decent encapsulation.
I was going to give examples of how naive your concept of "skilled journalists" is
You will note that I said that the network of skilled journalists was their barrier to entry, not is. I am old enough to remember when they were commonplace.
One of the barriers to entry to something like the AP was getting news from where it happened to where people were. That used to be expensive. Now it is fairly cheap to connect to the Internet and send your information out from just about anywhere.
I think that barrier collapsed long before the internet. Sure, dictating over a telephone was more time-consuming than just clicking "send", but anybody could do it.
somebody will figure out a business model for information gathering, because it will always be in demand.
Maybe establish a large information gathering network, and charge those who publish the information they have gathered? Oh, wait...
There might be a bigger demand for well written journalism if people were used to getting well written journalism.
My generation is. But I agree that it's getting harder to find. Again, though, if AP wants to throw away it's USP, the issue isn't one of barriers to entry, it's one of whether anybody wants their product.
So why again do we *need* 'skilled journalists'? Oh, right. The same reason we still need trains when we can now have cars.
Yeah, and you try to get from my home to my office in the morning. 45 minutes by train, about 2 hours by car. A bit less than £8 by train; £27 car parking, £8 congestion charge plus fuel by car. Read a book on the train, listen to some inane DJ in the car.
It's a good analogy (of course: it has cars in it). If you've got the resources to spare then you can do it all yourself. If you think the resources would be more effectively used elsewhere, use the prepackaged service.
Go ahead and live in your dream world where you read only about our guys being the bad guys, and those who think nothing of purposefully attacking civilians with suicide bombers are just victims. And I'll live in mine.
One in which you don't bother to read the actual words you're responding to?
AP's barrier to entry wasn't distribution, it was a worldwide network of skilled journalists. The Internet hasn't removed that barrier to entry, because bloggers on the ground don't have the detachment and big-picture view of the skilled journalist, and rarely have the writing skills. If anything is damaging AP's business model, it's not the barriers to entry, it's whether the product (informed, well written journalism) is in demand nowadays.
Only if you don't understand the difference between insurgents and "insurgents". For all you know from those figures it could be 5 enemy, 100 of your guys and 1295 innocent bystanders. Although I grant that in that case you would have made enemies of quite a few of those innocent bystanders as they saw you massacre their loved ones.
So their solution? Turn into the bottom feeders of the economy, suing anything they lay eyes on. I personally hope this guy sues this company for everything they're worth, and maybe he'll rid the world of another copyright infringement shark.
Trouble is, if their business model has collapsed to that extent, "everything they're worth" isn't likely to cover his legal costs. After all, pretty much their only significant asset would probably be the IP in their artwork, and if it's not really their IP it isn't worth much.
This is nuts, every server in a data center? do they realize the cost that might incur to all these non infringing companies?
It's possible that they do, and want to "send a message". Those other companies, and the people who might lose their jobs because of the cost to their employers might not have cared about video piracy before, but I bet they do now.