The Macintosh Quadra/Centris 610 power button is located on the front of the unit below the floppy disk drive, where a non-Mac user would expect to find the eject button. To add insult to injury, it was a hard power button, which shut down the computer abruptly when pressed.
See Bastiat's Petition, by which the makers of candles, lanterns, street lamps, tallow, oil, etc. ask the members of the Chamber of Deputies to block out the sun.
For you Tiger users out there, there's no need to click on the "Environs" link. Point to any word on the page and press command-ctrl-D, and the definition of the word will appear. And if you keep command-ctrl held down, and you can roam over all the words on the page.
One of the great new features of Tiger that remain undiscovered by most OS X users.
If you receive an email from your bank regarding your recent registration to access your home mortgage online, which folder do you file it in? Home? Finances? Registrations? Smart Folders solve the problem. That email can appear in multiple folders at once.
Aliases don't solve the problem because you have to decide which folder to store the original file in. If you delete a folder containing the alias, you're fine. But if you delete the folder containing the original, you're screwed.
Use iPhoto keywords for a while, and you'll understand why smart folders are superior to traditional folders.
You may be right about the setup/maintenance of high volumes of server-class machines. But the comment I was responding to referred to the cost of Macs vs. PCs in general.
If I flip a coin, it doesn't *always* land on heads or tails. Sometimes it will land edgewise. This is the same "sometimes" that applies to Apple hardware being cheaper than PC hardware.
You make it sound like Macs and PCs are equal in setup & maintenance costs. If they were, then your comparison might hold water. Don't underestimate the advantage Apple has in setup & maintenance due to the fact that it builds the hardware AND the software together.
Those of you who think that "electricity is too important to leave to the private sector" should look into the work of last year's Nobel prize winner in Economics, Vernon Smith. One of his pet topics is electricity deregulation. He's the pioneer in experimental economics, and he advocates deregulation (the real kind, not the fake kind as in California).
Those of you who think that "electricity is too important to leave to the private sector" should look into the work of last year's Nobel prize winner in Economics, Vernon Smith. One of his pet topics is electricity deregulation.
The car does 0-60 in a short amount of time because it has a fixed torque. There is no power peak - the motor has a full 200hp output at *any* speed (then presumably a rev limiter kicks in when it gets to 100mph). Usually you have to get a gasoline car engine up to 5000 to 6000 rpm before you get anything close to full power.
Your point is good, but you're confusing torque and power. The torque curve is indeed very flat (non-peaky) all the way from 0 RPM to redline, which means the power curve is linear and increasing all the way up to redline. Thus the power curve has a peak: at (or very near) the redline.
Power = Torque x RPM / 5250
Note that this means power at low speeds is low. It's also low with an ICE, but with an ICE you can rev the engine toward the peak power and pop the clutch, which means you can probably beat the electric car off the line if you don't spin the wheels.
Bottom line: An electric car can win races with a moderate amount of torque because the torque curve is flat, the RPM redline (and thus the peak power) is very high, and there's no shifting needed.
(I own a couple of rotary-powered cars, which exhibit similar characteristics, but unfortunately not so wonderfully extreme as the electric motor.)
This idea would show the terrorists a bit of the reality that they're working so hard against. It's the nature of people to want to be free and prosperous, and despots and dictators are working against that nature. The useful information we could get from anonymous "squealers" and the terror instilled in the terrorists' hearts would be two very potent weapons.
There's no need for the US to limit itself to expensive, marginally effective military technology. There are probably more solutions like this one that take advantage of the cheap technology our free market has produced.
----------- (Excerpt from the web site) -----------
Freedom Phones and PINs--How to Find Osama bin Laden and Other Terrorists with Methods that Guarantee Anonymity for Informants
Immediately after the WTC attack on September 11, many top scientists and Middle East experts in the U.S. suggested and recommended the anonymous reward scheme described below to encourage those with information on the identity and whereabouts of terrorists to provide this information to U.S authorities such as the FBI.
Dr. Bill Wattenburg gave the first public descripton of this clever scheme on his talk show over KGO Radio AM810, San Francisco, on September 25, 2001, from 7pm to 10pm. The response from listeners on the west coast was overwhelming understanding and approval.
Terrorists Leaders Will Know the Fear That They Can be Betrayed at Any Time by Captive Citizens Who Formally had no Secure Communication--or by Their Own Henchmen Who Can Safely Collect Large Rewards Here on Earth Instead of Only in Suicide Heaven.
The Lambda Calculus is certainly the path to parallel programming, as well as programmer productivity and reliable software. Too bad many (most?) programmers have never heard of it.
I'd like to hear Mr. Moore make a similarly succinct statement of how Forth programs can be parallelized.
Has the Pythagorean Theorem ever been useful to you or anyone else? I thought so. It's a math equation that, when solved for one variable, is a math function and is therefore side-effect-less. And it definitely DOES something -- it calculates the distance between two points on a grid -- but somehow without imperatives.
Furthermore, many of the C/C++/Java functions you write are side-effect-less, and yet are still useful to you.
Don't be fooled by the widespread belief (at least in the software world) that a language must contain imperative statements in order for it to "do something."
Everything can be expressed functionally. You just have to realize that everything has inputs and outputs. The computer science world just hasn't brought a pure functional language to the mainstream yet. But they're making progress. See Haskell (http://www.haskell.org) and Clean (http://www.cs.kun.nl/~clean/) for the two best examples I'm aware of. The Clean team has even built an IDE for Clean, in Clean itself. Now that's what I call "doing something."
As for the Lambda Calculus being sequential, I don't understand why you'd say that, or how you'd come to that conclusion from your previous statements. The LC is as sequential as the functions that are composed out of it, which is to say, highly parallelizable. It's up to the implementer to decide how much parallelization to do.
Been there, done that. I see more of the big picture than most people, and it's ugly. I'm not bashing OO here, just C++. I worked on what was probably the largest C++ project of the early-to-mid nineties. I saw the worst mess ever produced by a bunch of otherwise smart programmers. A slow, bloated system due largely to C++'s interface model. I decided to subvert the C++ model and do it my own way for a few months, and I produced something small, tight, and very fast. But it was tremendously tedious to implement in C++.
I could explain why C++'s interface model results in bloat, but it's not possible in one or two sentences. The short story: You can't implement an arbitrary subset of an interface like you can in many other OO languages.
In case you feel the urge to respond with a trite answer like "You didn't think about it the right way", don't. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's finding the root cause of a problem.
Nested classes aside, the problem with C++ is that Bjarne didn't throw enough theory at the language.
I've use C++ for almost a decade, and I've seen firsthand the results of a hundred other programmers using it. It's an utterly terrible language for modeling things. Sure, it's fast (on current hardware), but so is C (and assembly language). It makes a few slight improvements over C (such as references, which partially addresses the . vs. -> issue), but for the most part it's a confused jumble of features, many of which were invented to plug holes left by other features. Its interface model results in code bloat, it has no runtime compatibility, it has such complex syntax that no two compilers ever agree on everything, it has almost no meta-info, etc.
Programming doesn't have to be arcane. With a few good theoretical underpinnings and a hell of a lot of good low-level implementation, it's possible to have a much simpler language (no pointers, no memory allocation/deallocation, flexible interface model, parallelism, etc.) that runs nearly as fast on current hardware (for most tasks) and much faster on hardware most people haven't even hear of yet because the prevalent languages don't run well on them.
I don't expect you to believe me. Just take a look around in another ten or twenty years. If I'm wrong, I'll have figured out why by then.:-)
I too am often tempted to use obscene language to describe an obscene computer language.
C++ may not be the worst computer language ever invented, but it ranks near the bottom. I cringe when I think of the harm that is being done to the computer industry by programmers who think it is a good language.
But please... buying govt handouts with campaign contributions has been going on since before the transistor. The technology changes, the players change, but the game remains the same: buying taxdollars or other regulations cheaply.
Please, don't accept this as a given! The only way to avoid getting pulled into the game is to challenge the premise of a centralized regulator. We geeks/nerds, more than anyone, should recognize that it doesn't scale, and therefore kills efficiency (not to mention a few million property rights).
-> For the ellipse, you can generate it using sines and cosines with a parameterized equation. The resolution on the parameter will determine how choppy the outside looks; even a resolution of 1 degree took a while on my TI-85 back in high school:)
Try a Bresenham. For an ellipse (even a rotated one), it requires only a couple of multiplies/divides during setup, and only adds/subtracts in the main loop. QuickDraw on the Mac has been using it since day one. It's very fast and very beautiful.
Bresenhams can probably be used to draw anything that is expressed as an equation. The existence of the Bresenham is evidence that there are more efficient ways to draw things than the slow, ugly brute-force method.
Huh? Talk about a false premise! Jeez. "There was this communist who disagreed with me, and now this guy disagrees with me too -- therefore he's a communist!"
That's not what I meant.
I think he's got a very good point, actually. Find me a pure anarchy with a cash economy. The thing is, whenever you get more than two families in the same valley, they create a government of some kind. People seem to be like that. It may well be sheer idiocy (though I don't personally think so), but short of brain surgery, it looks to me like we're stuck with it.
I can't show you an anarchy with a cash economy, but what does that prove? The fact is that money arises independently of government. It requires organization, but not government per se (gov't being defined as the only legal initiator of force).
It works fine in Lancaster Co., PA, just as it worked when we were settling the plains. In a cash-poor agrarian economy, people either help each other out they all starve. In those conditions it's just not possible to store enough surplus value to replace your barn by yourself when it burns down -- especially since a big chunk of your wealth just drifted away on the breeze. Hence barn-raisings. In small, economically strapped communities, "share and share alike" has been a necessity for survival throughout history. On that scale, it works.
That's not communism. Communism doesn't work at ANY scale. It's just easier to avoid it at a small scale.
Communism involves the establishment of a commons, where income isn't tied to production. (It fails because: Why be productive when your income rises only infinitesimally as a result?) In a small group, it may look like communism, but in fact the people are constantly exchanging valuables with each other. Fair trades are still happening. If someone becomes parasitical, he'd likely be thrown out, or at least reprimanded.
Furthermore, the notion that "'working for the good of their fellow man' is a good thing" may or may not be the communist ideal (it certainly isn't the whole of the communist ideal), but it's the Christian ideal as well. It also turns up elsewhere. Just because Hitler liked dogs and children doesn't mean that everybody who likes dogs and children is a maniac. You can't judge ideas by the people who latch onto them. You can't judge them by pure theorizing, either; the fact is, I live in the US and pay taxes not only to the federal government, but also to the state of Massachussetts, where state taxes are pretty high. I am, in part, working for the good of my fellow man right now. And you know what? We're doing okay.
I'm target "working for the good of their fellow man" quite intentionally because I believe it IS the root of bad (theoretically AND practically) ethical systems, not because someone like Hitler may have believed it. Collectivism is the downfall of probably all civilizations that were once great. The short reason is that it destroys wealth instead of creating it. Individualism (self-interest) is the only way to create wealth, and therefore the only means to achieve a sustainable civilization. And unlike most people, I see no reason to mix the two. I prefer not to mix ANY poison with my food.
If you want to be treated like a child by others, you're free to do so. But please limit it to yourself. Giving someone else the power to control you is a tenuous position. The situation degrades until you're confined to a little box, wishing you were free again.
As long as we're citing statistics from other countries, how about Switzerland, where gun ownership is relatively high and the crime rate is low? My point is that there are many relevant factors in determining the crime rate, so be carefule not to oversimplify it.
Society can't be made safe through legislation -- there are just too many people to control. It's like herding cats. The only way to achieve safety is through the slow process of becoming a reasonable society. People ARE capable of it. You just have to be careful not to treat them like children, else they will start acting as unreasonable as children.
It was meant to be an Irishism, played for laughs, as well as a play on something Joe McCarthy (IIRC) said. Whatever serious intent I had (which probably wasn't all that apparent in what I wrote, for which I apologize) had to do with my personal conviction that extremism is mostly a matter of reducing morality to a simple algorithm, and then applying it robotically. Most extremism, in my humble opinion, is reductionism on crack. Of course, as the man said, "All those reductionists are the same".:)
I'll agree with that. There are plenty of oversimplified philosophies floating around. I'm definitely a reductionist, but not a "greedy reductionist", as Daniel C. Dennett puts it.
How can you say that being 100% consistent isn't extreme? It's extreme consistency.
If you think you can get by without them, I think you may have spent too much time programming and not enough meeting girls and/or raising cats. This theory of mine is based on personal experience of both options, by the way:) Anyhow, I'm not willing to concede that consistently rejecting extremism is necessarily an extreme position. Extremists may tend to be consistent, but that doesn't mean that anybody who's consistent must be an extremist.
I'm doing quite well avoiding contradictions. Without contradiction avoidance (a.k.a, logic), there's nothing to guide a mind in an orderly universe. The universe itself wouldn't be orderly without it. If there ARE bits of the universe that are illogical, then how are we to discover them? There's no way, so we might as well not waste our time.
I grew up with several cats, and I have a very successful relationship that is built on reason (it's so refreshing, I wouldn't have it any other way). As for programming, the software industry is so young and chaotic -- I don't know that many programmers who are logical.:-)
Rejecting logic brings up lots of questions that you might want to think about. If you can reject logic in one particular situation, what keeps you from rejecting it in other/all situations? (You certainly can't use logic to decide to reject logic.) You could "justify" anything on these grounds. Now that's scary. Fortunately, most people who do so only do it when things get complicated. Complexity does not equal illogic.
He also implies that "working for the good of their fellow man" is a good thing. It's the communist ideal, and it didn't work. For reasons within the grasp of philosophy, if you're willing look hard enough.
He also said "Money requires government to be of any value at all." This is false as well. Just because it LOOKS LIKE it's the only way it works doesn't make it so. I emphasized "looks like" because there are many different kinds of monies in the world, not just the government-sponsored kind. The establishment of money is a brilliant idea that solves the barter problem, and it simply requires an agreement among those involved. (And if you want to call that government, then you'll also have to call ANY organization government.)
Basically, there are so many false premises in his argument that I wasn't too surprised that he might be the type of person who thinks getting paid to do a job is immoral, as opposed to doing it for altruistic purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
The Macintosh Quadra/Centris 610 power button is located on the front of the unit below the floppy disk drive, where a non-Mac user would expect to find the eject button. To add insult to injury, it was a hard power button, which shut down the computer abruptly when pressed.
Picture of Quadra 610
See Bastiat's Petition, by which the makers of candles, lanterns, street lamps, tallow, oil, etc. ask the members of the Chamber of Deputies to block out the sun.
Google Earth 3.0 on the PC has been out of beta for several months.
For you Tiger users out there, there's no need to click on the "Environs" link. Point to any word on the page and press command-ctrl-D, and the definition of the word will appear. And if you keep command-ctrl held down, and you can roam over all the words on the page.
One of the great new features of Tiger that remain undiscovered by most OS X users.
If you receive an email from your bank regarding your recent registration to access your home mortgage online, which folder do you file it in? Home? Finances? Registrations? Smart Folders solve the problem. That email can appear in multiple folders at once.
Aliases don't solve the problem because you have to decide which folder to store the original file in. If you delete a folder containing the alias, you're fine. But if you delete the folder containing the original, you're screwed.
Use iPhoto keywords for a while, and you'll understand why smart folders are superior to traditional folders.
You may be right about the setup/maintenance of high volumes of server-class machines. But the comment I was responding to referred to the cost of Macs vs. PCs in general.
If I flip a coin, it doesn't *always* land on heads or tails. Sometimes it will land edgewise. This is the same "sometimes" that applies to Apple hardware being cheaper than PC hardware.
You make it sound like Macs and PCs are equal in setup & maintenance costs. If they were, then your comparison might hold water. Don't underestimate the advantage Apple has in setup & maintenance due to the fact that it builds the hardware AND the software together.
Those of you who think that "electricity is too important to leave to the private sector" should look into the work of last year's Nobel prize winner in Economics, Vernon Smith. One of his pet topics is electricity deregulation. He's the pioneer in experimental economics, and he advocates deregulation (the real kind, not the fake kind as in California).
Vernon Smith Economics
Those of you who think that "electricity is too important to leave to the private sector" should look into the work of last year's Nobel prize winner in Economics, Vernon Smith. One of his pet topics is electricity deregulation.
Vernon Smith Economics
The car does 0-60 in a short amount of time because it has a fixed torque. There is no power peak - the motor has a full 200hp output at *any* speed (then presumably a rev limiter kicks in when it gets to 100mph). Usually you have to get a gasoline car engine up to 5000 to 6000 rpm before you get anything close to full power.
Your point is good, but you're confusing torque and power. The torque curve is indeed very flat (non-peaky) all the way from 0 RPM to redline, which means the power curve is linear and increasing all the way up to redline. Thus the power curve has a peak: at (or very near) the redline.
Power = Torque x RPM / 5250
Note that this means power at low speeds is low. It's also low with an ICE, but with an ICE you can rev the engine toward the peak power and pop the clutch, which means you can probably beat the electric car off the line if you don't spin the wheels.
Bottom line: An electric car can win races with a moderate amount of torque because the torque curve is flat, the RPM redline (and thus the peak power) is very high, and there's no shifting needed.
(I own a couple of rotary-powered cars, which exhibit similar characteristics, but unfortunately not so wonderfully extreme as the electric motor.)
There is no single person who knows how to build even something as simple as a pencil.
l
http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.htm
http://www.pushback.com/terror/DroppingPhones.html
...
This idea would show the terrorists a bit of the reality that they're working so hard against. It's the nature of people to want to be free and prosperous, and despots and dictators are working against that nature. The useful information we could get from anonymous "squealers" and the terror instilled in the terrorists' hearts would be two very potent weapons.
There's no need for the US to limit itself to expensive, marginally effective military technology. There are probably more solutions like this one that take advantage of the cheap technology our free market has produced.
----------- (Excerpt from the web site) -----------
Freedom Phones and PINs--How to Find Osama bin Laden and Other Terrorists with Methods that Guarantee Anonymity for Informants
Immediately after the WTC attack on September 11, many top scientists and Middle East experts in the U.S. suggested and recommended the anonymous reward scheme described below to encourage those with information on the identity and whereabouts of terrorists to provide this information to U.S authorities such as the FBI.
Dr. Bill Wattenburg gave the first public descripton of this clever scheme on his talk show over KGO Radio AM810, San Francisco, on September 25, 2001, from 7pm to 10pm. The response from listeners on the west coast was overwhelming understanding and approval.
Terrorists Leaders Will Know the Fear That They Can be Betrayed at Any Time by Captive Citizens Who Formally had no Secure Communication--or by Their Own Henchmen Who Can Safely Collect Large Rewards Here on Earth Instead of Only in Suicide Heaven.
The Lambda Calculus is certainly the path to parallel programming, as well as programmer productivity and reliable software. Too bad many (most?) programmers have never heard of it.
I'd like to hear Mr. Moore make a similarly succinct statement of how Forth programs can be parallelized.
Has the Pythagorean Theorem ever been useful to you or anyone else? I thought so. It's a math equation that, when solved for one variable, is a math function and is therefore side-effect-less. And it definitely DOES something -- it calculates the distance between two points on a grid -- but somehow without imperatives.
Furthermore, many of the C/C++/Java functions you write are side-effect-less, and yet are still useful to you.
Don't be fooled by the widespread belief (at least in the software world) that a language must contain imperative statements in order for it to "do something."
Everything can be expressed functionally. You just have to realize that everything has inputs and outputs. The computer science world just hasn't brought a pure functional language to the mainstream yet. But they're making progress. See Haskell (http://www.haskell.org) and Clean (http://www.cs.kun.nl/~clean/) for the two best examples I'm aware of. The Clean team has even built an IDE for Clean, in Clean itself. Now that's what I call "doing something."
As for the Lambda Calculus being sequential, I don't understand why you'd say that, or how you'd come to that conclusion from your previous statements. The LC is as sequential as the functions that are composed out of it, which is to say, highly parallelizable. It's up to the implementer to decide how much parallelization to do.
Been there, done that. I see more of the big picture than most people, and it's ugly. I'm not bashing OO here, just C++. I worked on what was probably the largest C++ project of the early-to-mid nineties. I saw the worst mess ever produced by a bunch of otherwise smart programmers. A slow, bloated system due largely to C++'s interface model. I decided to subvert the C++ model and do it my own way for a few months, and I produced something small, tight, and very fast. But it was tremendously tedious to implement in C++.
I could explain why C++'s interface model results in bloat, but it's not possible in one or two sentences. The short story: You can't implement an arbitrary subset of an interface like you can in many other OO languages.
In case you feel the urge to respond with a trite answer like "You didn't think about it the right way", don't. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's finding the root cause of a problem.
Nested classes aside, the problem with C++ is that Bjarne didn't throw enough theory at the language.
:-)
I've use C++ for almost a decade, and I've seen firsthand the results of a hundred other programmers using it. It's an utterly terrible language for modeling things. Sure, it's fast (on current hardware), but so is C (and assembly language). It makes a few slight improvements over C (such as references, which partially addresses the . vs. -> issue), but for the most part it's a confused jumble of features, many of which were invented to plug holes left by other features. Its interface model results in code bloat, it has no runtime compatibility, it has such complex syntax that no two compilers ever agree on everything, it has almost no meta-info, etc.
Programming doesn't have to be arcane. With a few good theoretical underpinnings and a hell of a lot of good low-level implementation, it's possible to have a much simpler language (no pointers, no memory allocation/deallocation, flexible interface model, parallelism, etc.) that runs nearly as fast on current hardware (for most tasks) and much faster on hardware most people haven't even hear of yet because the prevalent languages don't run well on them.
I don't expect you to believe me. Just take a look around in another ten or twenty years. If I'm wrong, I'll have figured out why by then.
I too am often tempted to use obscene language to describe an obscene computer language.
C++ may not be the worst computer language ever invented, but it ranks near the bottom. I cringe when I think of the harm that is being done to the computer industry by programmers who think it is a good language.
See http://www.elj.com/cppcv3/ for an in-depth critique of C++.
Hear, hear.
But please ... buying govt handouts with campaign contributions has been going on since before the transistor. The technology changes, the players change, but the game remains the same: buying taxdollars or other regulations cheaply.
Please, don't accept this as a given! The only way to avoid getting pulled into the game is to challenge the premise of a centralized regulator. We geeks/nerds, more than anyone, should recognize that it doesn't scale, and therefore kills efficiency (not to mention a few million property rights).
You left out the only reasonable option:
Oppose them.
Don't accept their parasitic system. Don't let Silicon Valley get sucked into the self-destructive system of political lobbying.
The internet community has the most effective tool for opposing the system: The internet. Let's use it.
-> For the ellipse, you can generate it using sines and cosines with a parameterized equation. The resolution on the parameter will determine how choppy the outside looks; even a resolution of 1 degree took a while on my TI-85 back in high school :)
Try a Bresenham. For an ellipse (even a rotated one), it requires only a couple of multiplies/divides during setup, and only adds/subtracts in the main loop. QuickDraw on the Mac has been using it since day one. It's very fast and very beautiful.
Bresenhams can probably be used to draw anything that is expressed as an equation. The existence of the Bresenham is evidence that there are more efficient ways to draw things than the slow, ugly brute-force method.
Huh? Talk about a false premise! Jeez. "There was this communist who disagreed with me, and now this guy disagrees with me too -- therefore he's a communist!"
That's not what I meant.
I think he's got a very good point, actually. Find me a pure anarchy with a cash economy. The thing is, whenever you get more than two families in the same valley, they create a government of some kind. People seem to be like that. It may well be sheer idiocy (though I don't personally think so), but short of brain surgery, it looks to me like we're stuck with it.
I can't show you an anarchy with a cash economy, but what does that prove? The fact is that money arises independently of government. It requires organization, but not government per se (gov't being defined as the only legal initiator of force).
It works fine in Lancaster Co., PA, just as it worked when we were settling the plains. In a cash-poor agrarian economy, people either help each other out they all starve. In those conditions it's just not possible to store enough surplus value to replace your barn by yourself when it burns down -- especially since a big chunk of your wealth just drifted away on the breeze. Hence barn-raisings. In small, economically strapped communities, "share and share alike" has been a necessity for survival throughout history. On that scale, it works.
That's not communism. Communism doesn't work at ANY scale. It's just easier to avoid it at a small scale.
Communism involves the establishment of a commons, where income isn't tied to production. (It fails because: Why be productive when your income rises only infinitesimally as a result?) In a small group, it may look like communism, but in fact the people are constantly exchanging valuables with each other. Fair trades are still happening. If someone becomes parasitical, he'd likely be thrown out, or at least reprimanded.
Furthermore, the notion that "'working for the good of their fellow man' is a good thing" may or may not be the communist ideal (it certainly isn't the whole of the communist ideal), but it's the Christian ideal as well. It also turns up elsewhere. Just because Hitler liked dogs and children doesn't mean that everybody who likes dogs and children is a maniac. You can't judge ideas by the people who latch onto them. You can't judge them by pure theorizing, either; the fact is, I live in the US and pay taxes not only to the federal government, but also to the state of Massachussetts, where state taxes are pretty high. I am, in part, working for the good of my fellow man right now. And you know what? We're doing okay.
I'm target "working for the good of their fellow man" quite intentionally because I believe it IS the root of bad (theoretically AND practically) ethical systems, not because someone like Hitler may have believed it. Collectivism is the downfall of probably all civilizations that were once great. The short reason is that it destroys wealth instead of creating it. Individualism (self-interest) is the only way to create wealth, and therefore the only means to achieve a sustainable civilization. And unlike most people, I see no reason to mix the two. I prefer not to mix ANY poison with my food.
If you want to be treated like a child by others, you're free to do so. But please limit it to yourself. Giving someone else the power to control you is a tenuous position. The situation degrades until you're confined to a little box, wishing you were free again.
As long as we're citing statistics from other countries, how about Switzerland, where gun ownership is relatively high and the crime rate is low? My point is that there are many relevant factors in determining the crime rate, so be carefule not to oversimplify it.
Society can't be made safe through legislation -- there are just too many people to control. It's like herding cats. The only way to achieve safety is through the slow process of becoming a reasonable society. People ARE capable of it. You just have to be careful not to treat them like children, else they will start acting as unreasonable as children.
It was meant to be an Irishism, played for laughs, as well as a play on something Joe McCarthy (IIRC) said. Whatever serious intent I had (which probably wasn't all that apparent in what I wrote, for which I apologize) had to do with my personal conviction that extremism is mostly a matter of reducing morality to a simple algorithm, and then applying it robotically. Most extremism, in my humble opinion, is reductionism on crack. Of course, as the man said, "All those reductionists are the same". :)
:) Anyhow, I'm not willing to concede that consistently rejecting extremism is necessarily an extreme position. Extremists may tend to be consistent, but that doesn't mean that anybody who's consistent must be an extremist.
:-)
I'll agree with that. There are plenty of oversimplified philosophies floating around. I'm definitely a reductionist, but not a "greedy reductionist", as Daniel C. Dennett puts it.
How can you say that being 100% consistent isn't extreme? It's extreme consistency.
If you think you can get by without them, I think you may have spent too much time programming and not enough meeting girls and/or raising cats. This theory of mine is based on personal experience of both options, by the way
I'm doing quite well avoiding contradictions. Without contradiction avoidance (a.k.a, logic), there's nothing to guide a mind in an orderly universe. The universe itself wouldn't be orderly without it. If there ARE bits of the universe that are illogical, then how are we to discover them? There's no way, so we might as well not waste our time.
I grew up with several cats, and I have a very successful relationship that is built on reason (it's so refreshing, I wouldn't have it any other way). As for programming, the software industry is so young and chaotic -- I don't know that many programmers who are logical.
Rejecting logic brings up lots of questions that you might want to think about. If you can reject logic in one particular situation, what keeps you from rejecting it in other/all situations? (You certainly can't use logic to decide to reject logic.) You could "justify" anything on these grounds. Now that's scary. Fortunately, most people who do so only do it when things get complicated. Complexity does not equal illogic.
More fallacies:
He also implies that "working for the good of their fellow man" is a good thing. It's the communist ideal, and it didn't work. For reasons within the grasp of philosophy, if you're willing look hard enough.
He also said "Money requires government to be of any value at all." This is false as well. Just because it LOOKS LIKE it's the only way it works doesn't make it so. I emphasized "looks like" because there are many different kinds of monies in the world, not just the government-sponsored kind. The establishment of money is a brilliant idea that solves the barter problem, and it simply requires an agreement among those involved. (And if you want to call that government, then you'll also have to call ANY organization government.)
Basically, there are so many false premises in his argument that I wasn't too surprised that he might be the type of person who thinks getting paid to do a job is immoral, as opposed to doing it for altruistic purposes.