You obviously haven't been reading/. for very long. The unofficial motto of/. is "Linux news for Linux nerds, stuff that matters for Linux users." About every third story is tied in one way or another to Linux.
The point is that more and more employers are requiring employees to work from home.
Again, this has nothing to do with it. A job is a private transaction, and either party is free to walk away from it. If you are being required to work in an ergonomically unsafe environment, you have a numbher of options. You can ask the employer for the chair. If he refuses, you can quit. You can pay for the chair yourself.
I object to the idea that I'm too helpless to look out for my own health. If I accept a job that requires me to work in poor conditions, that is every bit as much my fault as if I accept a job that is boring, underpaid, requires me to work excessive hours, or has any number of other downsides. This is particularly silly because we're talking about programmers, as they are some of the best-paid and most sought-after employees in the market. Most telecommuters could quit their jobs and find a new one in a week. I suspect that most of them could go to their bosses and demand a new chair and they'd get it on the spot. And if they didn't, my guess is that most of them could afford to buy their own. We don't need OSHA beaurocrats to take care of us.
The answer here is that people need to take responsibility for their own health. The idea that the government should make home ergonomics a legal issue is absurd. It's very simple: if you don't have ergonomically correct equipment at home, then buy it yourself. It's not that expensive, and telecommuters aren't generally very poor.
I don't understand why this has to be a seperate "benefit." After all, if the employer has to pay for lots of on-the-job benefits, he can just reduce the amount of your next raise to cover it. Money does not grow on trees.
That's not to say that employer-funded ergonomics is a bad thing, but I don't understand why it needs to become politicized by OSHA. A job is a private transaction between an employer and an employee, so the government should butt out.
I didn't mean NT. NT is indeed more stable than Mac OS, but it is not a consumer product. It's too pricey, and is still too complex for Joe Sixpack to set up and use.
I would say even Windows 9x is more stable than the MAC OS, granted I haven't used it since 8.0 but damn was the MAC OS BUGGY as hell.
7.6 and earlier was buggy as hell, and if you're running wacky programs Windows might handle it better. But I'm currently running Mac OS 9, and it only crashes about every two weeks. I think it depends a lot on system configuration. A well configured system on any platform will be more stable than a poorly configured one. But OS 9 is extremely stable if you don't abuse it much.
One advantage that increases Mac OS stability is the smaller number of machine types and more tightly integrated hardware and software. It might be that once you install all the right pieces Windows is as reliable, but getting it there is a pain. And Windows isn't very helpful. Apple has worked hard to ensure that every version of their OS support every recent machine. Their latest (OS 9) supports any machine with a PPC, which will take you back 6 years.
Anyhow, system stability has improved dramatically since system 7, and at this point system configuration is more important than OS features. And it looks like Mac OS X will be out long before Microsoft's NT consumer arrives, so that'll widen Apple's lead in this area.
Well, ok, in most areas Linux beats Mac OS in the reliability department. But both beat Windows, and Linux is so far behind in the other two categories that it's not even an option for most users.
Maybe this so called 'competition' does play as an incentive not to drop 'support' for the existing technologies(the x86 architecture), as in not making chips that 'support' the old instruction set. There would be no software to run on it.
This is the point of the original post--the support could be provided in software, saving space on the silicon and allowing native apps to run faster and cooler. Many apps don't need the kind of horsepower that modern chips have, and the few that do can be released as "fat" apps like was done on the Mac. The whole point is that there *were* apps to run on the Power Macs-- in fact almost every 68k app ran on the new Macs, just not as fast as they otherwise would.
The only reason they are competing is because they have pretty computers. I really don't see how they got as far as they have, as they sell over-priced, under-powered machines.
Yes, they make "pretty computers," and yes, it is kind of silly. But that is far from the only reason. Linux/Solaris/*BSD is simply not an option for most users. And although Windoze is improving, it is still uglier, more bloated, less intuitive, and less integrated with the hardware than the MacOS. Style matters. Ease-of-use matters. Reliability matters. And MacOS is still the best choice in all three areas.
You're probably a Linux geek, and that's fine. But let me point out that the Mac is not designed for you. The fact that you are not impressed with it does not make it an inferiour product. This engineer's myopia of judging a product based solely on raw performance and price is not helpful. There's more to a computer than it's MHz rating and its hard drive size.
Their systems are so proprietery that whatever they say goes.
It's true Apple's systems are proprietary, but so what? There is no reason that AMD could not do the same thing. Suppose that AMD and Microsoft co-developed a new ISA, then developed a software emulator for the old x86 architecture, and Microsoft began writing Windows to run on both architectures. I see no reason that this could not happen, except that Microsoft may not have the ability or desire to do it. (remember NT on Alpha?) But that's a failing on the part of Microsoft, not a limitation of non-proprietary hardware.
In fact, if Microsoft had stuck to its original plan to develop NT for multiple platforms, then this could have been done quite easily once they started selling NT as a consumer product. I don't see what proprietary hardware has to do with it. Apple just has more guts than the Wintel world does.
Well, OK, how about the Mac OS 7.6 case? To my knowledge, you cannot get a legal copy without considerable effort, since Apple no longer really sells it. The alternatives you have are either make a copy from someone else's CD without paying, or don't use it at all. How is it bad to do the former rather than the latter.
I think the test should be whether you are depriving the author of revenue by bootlegging. If it is a product that is no longer on the market, or if you only intend to use it for a small job and there is no chance that you'd be willing to buy the full version, then I say go for it. But if it is still on the market and you are going to use it more than a couple of times, then you should pay for it.
Ok, let's say I pick up an old SGI 4D/440. I get it, it has no OS. I am just a hobbyist wanting to just learn Irix. Would it be wrong for me to just pirate Irix 5.3 or should I lay down the $1500 or so it would take to buy it properly licensed from SGI?
No, probably not. The reason being that you are not one of their target customers, and if forced to pay for it, you would simply choose not to use it. Thus you are not recieving much of an unearned benefit.
I do the same sort of thing with old versions of Mac OS. I've borrowed copies of 7.6 to install on old Macs. I figure that I probably couldn't buy a copy of 7.6 without more trouble than the price tag anyway.
I don't see IP as a hard-and-fast moral rule, where it is intrinsically evil to copy any copyrighted software. I just think it's appropriate to compensate a programmer for the benefit a software package gives you.
So no, I don't think you're a "big time criminal." I'll agree there's a problem in that it is all but impossible to enforce the law as it stands, so perhaps there needs to be some changes, but I think there is something wrong with making unauthorized copies of someone else's work without his consent.
With a few exceptions (you may have one or two at work who are well known for it), most geeks don't have an issue with copying software or other information (audio) for personal use.
OK, well maybe I'm in a tiny minority, but I'm one of those geeks. I don't approve of software piracy for the simple reason that I may be the one selling a software product some day. Creating a piece of software is a lot of work, and I think its authors deserve to be paid for their work. Even if you are not "stealing" in the conventional sense, I think you are recieving an unearned benefit from the author of the software, and you have an obligation to pay for it out of respect for the efforts of whoever made the software in the first place.
If everyone made unauthorized copies of software, there would be no commercial software at all, and that's certainly not in anyone's interest.
If I want to write a piece of code, and someone wants to pay me to do it, what business is that of yours? You are free not to buy my software, and if the existing offerings are all third-rate, you are free to help write a new one. The fact that you don't like the way I code doesn't give you a right to force me to jump through hoops.
It is true that some applications (say medical equipment) needs to be held to a higher standard than most software. But that fact does not justify forcing the entire software industry to spend millions of dollars so that some beaurocrat can give you a liscence that says you're a good programmer. Engineering is about tradeoffs. While you may like your software to have fewer features and fewer bugs, others might be willing to accept more bugs in exchange for faster turnaround and more features.
By the way, the same is true of all other professions. Government liscenses are a bad idea, and their requirement should be repealed.
Why can't people buy their own keyboards? Employers are going to take more expensive keyboards into account when deciding salaries anyway, so in the long run it's going to work out the same.
But there are many well known illusions, optical illusions being the most obvious, which show our senses to be self contradictory.
Not true. Our interpretation of our senses might be self-contradictory, but our senses are not. Sensations have no interpretations attached to them. They are simply a stream of electrical stimuli. It is our minds that interpret those signals and give them meaning.
Thus when we see an optical illusion, our brains are simply mis-interpreting what we see. Our sight is still accurrate. I must also point out that the way that you determine that something is an illusion is with observation. If you do an illusion in which things look different lengths but are really the same, you have discovered this by whipping out a ruler and observing the lengths of the lines. Thus, you rely on yours senses to disprove your senses, which is a contradiction.
Then our senses tell us that we can induce inconsistent sensations by activating certain parts of the human brain with electrical signals.
But then your senses are indicating to you that your brain is being electrically stimulated. This is again a faithful (if not terribly useful) representation of reality. If you see things that are not really there, that is because you are incorrectly interpreting the erratic signals your brain is giving you.
But suppose that you had electrodes in your brain all your life, and so everything you saw was merely a reflection of your brain chemistry. In that case, there would be no possibility of ever discovering the real nature of the universe. But in this case, there is nothing you could have done about it. From your perspective, the universe is a chaotic jumble of random images. It is unlikely you will ever progress beyond the stage of an infant, and so you will never have the opportunity to observe the world.
The point is that we have to assume that our senses give us valid information about reality, because it is all we have. There is no "outside perspective" that allows us to cross-check our perceptions. If we reject the validity of our senses, then we must reject with it all of our knowledge, and return to the state of infants. No rational person is willing to do that.
I hate it when people make posts like this, because they have the right conclusion for the wrong reason.
I don't think our government should be giving out loans, and it certainly shouldn't be forcing other countries to do damage to their economies to get those loans. In general, the economic politicies of the IMF have done more harm than good, and countries would be better off without IMF "help."
But with that said, I am bewildered why you would be opposed to countries that "deregulate markets, privatize state run industries." This is precisely what these countries need to do if they are to develop economically. History and economics have shown us over and over that state-run industries and regulations are detrimental to the economy.
Furthermore, the idea that corporations are "exploiting" workers in countries with "lax" labor laws is nonsense. You don't want these people to work at those jobs. What alternative woould you suggest. The whole point is that these countries and their people are dirt-poor. How do we help them by denying them the only jobs they can get? If we were to impose US-style labor laws on third world countries, the result would be that it would cripple those countries' economies permanently. The fact is that those countries don't have the resources to provide jobs at US-level wages and in US-level conditions. The reason that these people choose to take these jobs is that they are the best they can get. How would you be helping them if you "protect" them by forcing them back onto the unemployment lists?
"Corporations" are not the problem. The US government is. Certainly, corporations sometimes lobby for some of these actions, but the government is still the ones with the power. What is needed is for our government to stop sticking its nose into every world conflict, to stop propping up dictators and assasinating leaders they dislike, and to stop using IMF loans to impose stupid Keynesian policies on third world economies.
You're obscuring the meaning of "reality." Reality is the set of all things that can be observed. If we will never be able to observe something--even in theory, then it does not exist.
One need not prove that one exists, because this fact is axiomatic. By axiomatic, I mean that any attempt to refute it involves using it. Every statement you make assumes your own existence. To say "I don't exist" is a contradiction, because obviously you do exist or you would not have made that statement.
You are also misusing the concept of "proof." When I say "prove X," I mean "show me the physical evidence that demonstrates the truth of X." Therefore you cannot by definition "prove" the validity of the process of proof.
But the validity of the senses is axiomatic. Any attempt to argue that one cannot trust one's senses is self-contradictory, since all of our knowledge comes from our senses, and so without them, you know nothing and nothing you say can be trusted.
To put this a different way: our "conscious world" is all that exists. The reason is that the burden of proof for the existence of other worlds rests on the person making the claim. If you believe that there is another reality independent of this one, the burden of proof is on you. If you can't come up with any evidence for it (and you can't) then we reject the claim out of hand, as unsubstantiated.
So to demand that we prove the laws of physics in every imaginary world you dream up, is an error. You must first demonstrate that those worlds exist. Until then, the rational assumption is that this is the only reality there is.
For example, I could just as easily say "prove to me there is no Santa Claus. You can't, since there are an infinite number of places to look and since he would have magical powers anyway and so could be eluding your search by flying off on his reindeer just before you got there. But that does not mean that I should take an agnostic position and agree that there is a good chance that Santa Claus exists. The burden of proof rests on him who makes a positive claim, not the person who disputes it. If I say "Santa Claus exists," the proper response is "prove it," and if no evidence is forthcoming, one should reject the claim.
...that anyone would seriously suggest such an idea. What would happen if all these companies simply refused to approve any of Microsoft's choices? Or what if they forced them to make bad decisions, or to steer clear of markets that their competitors were going after?
The point is that even if you accept the premises of antitrust law and the FoF, the punishment should still be proportional to the crime. This proposal would literally cripple Microsoft, and might end up destroying it. To impose that kind of punishment for a set of vague "anticompetitive practices" is absurd.
It sounds to me like this poster is more interested in bringing Microsoft down than in punishing them for specific crimes. Even under antitrust law, the crime is abuse of a monopoly, not having one. Forcing Microsoft into a permanent competitive disadvantage is wrong by any standards.
As I recall, the quote was something like "while I was in Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet."
It's probably true that he did not literally mean that he invented the internet from scratch, but I think the fact that he sees his limited role in appropriating money for the 'net as "creating the internet" says something about his state of mind (and that of most politicians for that matter.) Politicians see themselves as the center of the universe, and they don't grasp the fact that all the truly innovative ideas are discovered and developed in Universities and private companies, largely independent of the choices politicians make. It's true that the government funds much of that research, but that is simply because they spend lots of money on research. If you throw money in all directions, some of it is going to land on a good idea. But the idea that the internet (in some form) would not exist today had Gore not pushed to fund it in the 80s is ludicrous.
In the olden days before Macs did multitasking, there were things called desk accessories. They were located in the Apple menu and could be run in the memory space of other applications-- a sort of poor man's multitasking. As you might imagine, this became kludgy and unneccesary once we got full-fledged multitasking in system 7, (yeah, I know, we still don't have "real" multitasking.) so DA's are not used much now. People will still sometimes refer to any small app that resides in the Apple menu as a DA, even though you can put anything you like there now.
I never said that all measurements were pointless. What he had said was that in theory you could learn about everything in the universe by observing thier interactions with a small object here on the Earth. My point is that although you can certainly gain some information using this kind of technique, there are severe limits for the reasons I indicated. For example, you are never going to produce a detailed map of the surface of a planet in a galaxy a million light-years away by looking at an insect here on Earth. In principle it might be possible, but the limits I pointed out makes that an impossibility in practice.
Nowadays, you see 5 day forecasts. I certainly remember the times you got only 3 days, and the forecast for the third day was much less detailed than you get nowadays for 5 days.
OK, to take this example, the idea that was originally proposed would seem to say that some day we'll have 10-year forecasts with absolute precision. My point is that this could never happen, no matter how much we learn about weather patterns and how much data we collect. There are simply too many variables that affect the result in too many unpredictable ways.
So, to be clear on this, I did not say "knowledge is impossible and all measurements are pointless." My point was simply that the nature of the universe limits the degree to which we can deduce the properties of distant objects based soley on the gravimetric or other interactions with local objects.
Dunno why, but there is some reason this won't work.
Three things:
One, lack of information. This includes both lack of knowledge about the laws of physics, and the inability to gather the necessary physical data, both because there is so much of it and because it would require observation at the sub-atomic level.
Two, as others have pointed out, you run into problems with the fact that the process of measurement affects the measurement. This encompasses both Heisenburg uncertainty, and it also includes the fact that the computer that holds this information would have to be included as part of the universe. Since it is not possible to make a computer that is "outside" the universe, you cannot model the whole universe without encountering a problem of infinite recursion, sort of like telling a computer to back up the contents of an entire hard drive onto that hard drive. Once it gets to the backup file, it will go into an infinite loop.
Third, you run into problems of chaos theory and spontaneous order. The problem is that a small error in measurement can lead to an enourmous change in the outcome. This is one reason why there is a limit to the accuracy of weather forecasting, for example. No matter how accurate the measurements we make, there will still be a small error, and that error will become larger as you try to predict farther out into the future. So if you make a small error in one measurement, that small error can cause all of your predictions to be off.
Even if the above is true, so what? The question is whether they abused their Win95 monopoly to bully Netscape, not whether they were a Netscape competitor. Simply getting Apple to make IE the default browser has nothing to do with being monopolistic. And besides, Apple still bundled Netscape with OS 9, so consumers have an even easier choice than on Windows where they'd have to download it. Surely it's not too much of a hassle for consumers to double-click on the Netscape icon instead of the IE icon?
Besides, you are overlooking patent suits. Apple and Microsoft were in the midst of a long-running dispute over various patent infringement problems. Although the details were not released, it is quite likely that part of the deal was that Apple would drop these suits in exchange for the continued development of Office.
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You obviously haven't been reading /. for very long. The unofficial motto of /. is "Linux news for Linux nerds, stuff that matters for Linux users." About every third story is tied in one way or another to Linux.
The point is that more and more employers are requiring employees to work from home.
Again, this has nothing to do with it. A job is a private transaction, and either party is free to walk away from it. If you are being required to work in an ergonomically unsafe environment, you have a numbher of options. You can ask the employer for the chair. If he refuses, you can quit. You can pay for the chair yourself.
I object to the idea that I'm too helpless to look out for my own health. If I accept a job that requires me to work in poor conditions, that is every bit as much my fault as if I accept a job that is boring, underpaid, requires me to work excessive hours, or has any number of other downsides. This is particularly silly because we're talking about programmers, as they are some of the best-paid and most sought-after employees in the market. Most telecommuters could quit their jobs and find a new one in a week. I suspect that most of them could go to their bosses and demand a new chair and they'd get it on the spot. And if they didn't, my guess is that most of them could afford to buy their own. We don't need OSHA beaurocrats to take care of us.
The answer here is that people need to take responsibility for their own health. The idea that the government should make home ergonomics a legal issue is absurd. It's very simple: if you don't have ergonomically correct equipment at home, then buy it yourself. It's not that expensive, and telecommuters aren't generally very poor.
I don't understand why this has to be a seperate "benefit." After all, if the employer has to pay for lots of on-the-job benefits, he can just reduce the amount of your next raise to cover it. Money does not grow on trees.
That's not to say that employer-funded ergonomics is a bad thing, but I don't understand why it needs to become politicized by OSHA. A job is a private transaction between an employer and an employee, so the government should butt out.
I didn't mean NT. NT is indeed more stable than Mac OS, but it is not a consumer product. It's too pricey, and is still too complex for Joe Sixpack to set up and use.
I would say even Windows 9x is more stable than the MAC OS, granted I haven't used it since 8.0 but damn was the MAC OS BUGGY as hell.
7.6 and earlier was buggy as hell, and if you're running wacky programs Windows might handle it better. But I'm currently running Mac OS 9, and it only crashes about every two weeks. I think it depends a lot on system configuration. A well configured system on any platform will be more stable than a poorly configured one. But OS 9 is extremely stable if you don't abuse it much.
One advantage that increases Mac OS stability is the smaller number of machine types and more tightly integrated hardware and software. It might be that once you install all the right pieces Windows is as reliable, but getting it there is a pain. And Windows isn't very helpful. Apple has worked hard to ensure that every version of their OS support every recent machine. Their latest (OS 9) supports any machine with a PPC, which will take you back 6 years.
Anyhow, system stability has improved dramatically since system 7, and at this point system configuration is more important than OS features. And it looks like Mac OS X will be out long before Microsoft's NT consumer arrives, so that'll widen Apple's lead in this area.
Well, ok, in most areas Linux beats Mac OS in the reliability department. But both beat Windows, and Linux is so far behind in the other two categories that it's not even an option for most users.
Maybe this so called 'competition' does play as an incentive not to drop 'support' for the existing technologies(the x86 architecture), as in not making chips that 'support' the old instruction set. There would be no software to run on it.
This is the point of the original post--the support could be provided in software, saving space on the silicon and allowing native apps to run faster and cooler. Many apps don't need the kind of horsepower that modern chips have, and the few that do can be released as "fat" apps like was done on the Mac. The whole point is that there *were* apps to run on the Power Macs-- in fact almost every 68k app ran on the new Macs, just not as fast as they otherwise would.
The only reason they are competing is because they have pretty computers. I really don't see how they got as far as they have, as they sell over-priced, under-powered machines.
Yes, they make "pretty computers," and yes, it is kind of silly. But that is far from the only reason. Linux/Solaris/*BSD is simply not an option for most users. And although Windoze is improving, it is still uglier, more bloated, less intuitive, and less integrated with the hardware than the MacOS. Style matters. Ease-of-use matters. Reliability matters. And MacOS is still the best choice in all three areas.
You're probably a Linux geek, and that's fine. But let me point out that the Mac is not designed for you. The fact that you are not impressed with it does not make it an inferiour product. This engineer's myopia of judging a product based solely on raw performance and price is not helpful. There's more to a computer than it's MHz rating and its hard drive size.
Their systems are so proprietery that whatever they say goes.
It's true Apple's systems are proprietary, but so what? There is no reason that AMD could not do the same thing. Suppose that AMD and Microsoft co-developed a new ISA, then developed a software emulator for the old x86 architecture, and Microsoft began writing Windows to run on both architectures. I see no reason that this could not happen, except that Microsoft may not have the ability or desire to do it. (remember NT on Alpha?) But that's a failing on the part of Microsoft, not a limitation of non-proprietary hardware.
In fact, if Microsoft had stuck to its original plan to develop NT for multiple platforms, then this could have been done quite easily once they started selling NT as a consumer product. I don't see what proprietary hardware has to do with it. Apple just has more guts than the Wintel world does.
Well, OK, how about the Mac OS 7.6 case? To my knowledge, you cannot get a legal copy without considerable effort, since Apple no longer really sells it. The alternatives you have are either make a copy from someone else's CD without paying, or don't use it at all. How is it bad to do the former rather than the latter.
I think the test should be whether you are depriving the author of revenue by bootlegging. If it is a product that is no longer on the market, or if you only intend to use it for a small job and there is no chance that you'd be willing to buy the full version, then I say go for it. But if it is still on the market and you are going to use it more than a couple of times, then you should pay for it.
Ok, let's say I pick up an old SGI 4D/440. I get it, it has no OS. I am just a hobbyist wanting to just learn Irix. Would it be wrong for me to just pirate Irix 5.3 or should I lay down the $1500 or so it would take to buy it properly licensed from SGI?
No, probably not. The reason being that you are not one of their target customers, and if forced to pay for it, you would simply choose not to use it. Thus you are not recieving much of an unearned benefit.
I do the same sort of thing with old versions of Mac OS. I've borrowed copies of 7.6 to install on old Macs. I figure that I probably couldn't buy a copy of 7.6 without more trouble than the price tag anyway.
I don't see IP as a hard-and-fast moral rule, where it is intrinsically evil to copy any copyrighted software. I just think it's appropriate to compensate a programmer for the benefit a software package gives you.
So no, I don't think you're a "big time criminal." I'll agree there's a problem in that it is all but impossible to enforce the law as it stands, so perhaps there needs to be some changes, but I think there is something wrong with making unauthorized copies of someone else's work without his consent.
With a few exceptions (you may have one or two at work who are well known for it), most geeks don't have an issue with copying software or other information (audio) for personal use.
OK, well maybe I'm in a tiny minority, but I'm one of those geeks. I don't approve of software piracy for the simple reason that I may be the one selling a software product some day. Creating a piece of software is a lot of work, and I think its authors deserve to be paid for their work. Even if you are not "stealing" in the conventional sense, I think you are recieving an unearned benefit from the author of the software, and you have an obligation to pay for it out of respect for the efforts of whoever made the software in the first place.
If everyone made unauthorized copies of software, there would be no commercial software at all, and that's certainly not in anyone's interest.
If I want to write a piece of code, and someone wants to pay me to do it, what business is that of yours? You are free not to buy my software, and if the existing offerings are all third-rate, you are free to help write a new one. The fact that you don't like the way I code doesn't give you a right to force me to jump through hoops.
It is true that some applications (say medical equipment) needs to be held to a higher standard than most software. But that fact does not justify forcing the entire software industry to spend millions of dollars so that some beaurocrat can give you a liscence that says you're a good programmer. Engineering is about tradeoffs. While you may like your software to have fewer features and fewer bugs, others might be willing to accept more bugs in exchange for faster turnaround and more features.
By the way, the same is true of all other professions. Government liscenses are a bad idea, and their requirement should be repealed.
Why can't people buy their own keyboards? Employers are going to take more expensive keyboards into account when deciding salaries anyway, so in the long run it's going to work out the same.
But there are many well known illusions, optical illusions being the most obvious, which show our senses to be self contradictory.
Not true. Our interpretation of our senses might be self-contradictory, but our senses are not. Sensations have no interpretations attached to them. They are simply a stream of electrical stimuli. It is our minds that interpret those signals and give them meaning.
Thus when we see an optical illusion, our brains are simply mis-interpreting what we see. Our sight is still accurrate. I must also point out that the way that you determine that something is an illusion is with observation. If you do an illusion in which things look different lengths but are really the same, you have discovered this by whipping out a ruler and observing the lengths of the lines. Thus, you rely on yours senses to disprove your senses, which is a contradiction.
Then our senses tell us that we can induce inconsistent sensations by activating certain parts of the human brain with electrical signals.
But then your senses are indicating to you that your brain is being electrically stimulated. This is again a faithful (if not terribly useful) representation of reality. If you see things that are not really there, that is because you are incorrectly interpreting the erratic signals your brain is giving you.
But suppose that you had electrodes in your brain all your life, and so everything you saw was merely a reflection of your brain chemistry. In that case, there would be no possibility of ever discovering the real nature of the universe. But in this case, there is nothing you could have done about it. From your perspective, the universe is a chaotic jumble of random images. It is unlikely you will ever progress beyond the stage of an infant, and so you will never have the opportunity to observe the world.
The point is that we have to assume that our senses give us valid information about reality, because it is all we have. There is no "outside perspective" that allows us to cross-check our perceptions. If we reject the validity of our senses, then we must reject with it all of our knowledge, and return to the state of infants. No rational person is willing to do that.
I hate it when people make posts like this, because they have the right conclusion for the wrong reason.
I don't think our government should be giving out loans, and it certainly shouldn't be forcing other countries to do damage to their economies to get those loans. In general, the economic politicies of the IMF have done more harm than good, and countries would be better off without IMF "help."
But with that said, I am bewildered why you would be opposed to countries that "deregulate markets, privatize state run industries." This is precisely what these countries need to do if they are to develop economically. History and economics have shown us over and over that state-run industries and regulations are detrimental to the economy.
Furthermore, the idea that corporations are "exploiting" workers in countries with "lax" labor laws is nonsense. You don't want these people to work at those jobs. What alternative woould you suggest. The whole point is that these countries and their people are dirt-poor. How do we help them by denying them the only jobs they can get? If we were to impose US-style labor laws on third world countries, the result would be that it would cripple those countries' economies permanently. The fact is that those countries don't have the resources to provide jobs at US-level wages and in US-level conditions. The reason that these people choose to take these jobs is that they are the best they can get. How would you be helping them if you "protect" them by forcing them back onto the unemployment lists?
"Corporations" are not the problem. The US government is. Certainly, corporations sometimes lobby for some of these actions, but the government is still the ones with the power. What is needed is for our government to stop sticking its nose into every world conflict, to stop propping up dictators and assasinating leaders they dislike, and to stop using IMF loans to impose stupid Keynesian policies on third world economies.
You're obscuring the meaning of "reality." Reality is the set of all things that can be observed. If we will never be able to observe something--even in theory, then it does not exist.
One need not prove that one exists, because this fact is axiomatic. By axiomatic, I mean that any attempt to refute it involves using it. Every statement you make assumes your own existence. To say "I don't exist" is a contradiction, because obviously you do exist or you would not have made that statement.
You are also misusing the concept of "proof." When I say "prove X," I mean "show me the physical evidence that demonstrates the truth of X." Therefore you cannot by definition "prove" the validity of the process of proof.
But the validity of the senses is axiomatic. Any attempt to argue that one cannot trust one's senses is self-contradictory, since all of our knowledge comes from our senses, and so without them, you know nothing and nothing you say can be trusted.
To put this a different way: our "conscious world" is all that exists. The reason is that the burden of proof for the existence of other worlds rests on the person making the claim. If you believe that there is another reality independent of this one, the burden of proof is on you. If you can't come up with any evidence for it (and you can't) then we reject the claim out of hand, as unsubstantiated.
So to demand that we prove the laws of physics in every imaginary world you dream up, is an error. You must first demonstrate that those worlds exist. Until then, the rational assumption is that this is the only reality there is.
For example, I could just as easily say "prove to me there is no Santa Claus. You can't, since there are an infinite number of places to look and since he would have magical powers anyway and so could be eluding your search by flying off on his reindeer just before you got there. But that does not mean that I should take an agnostic position and agree that there is a good chance that Santa Claus exists. The burden of proof rests on him who makes a positive claim, not the person who disputes it. If I say "Santa Claus exists," the proper response is "prove it," and if no evidence is forthcoming, one should reject the claim.
...that anyone would seriously suggest such an idea. What would happen if all these companies simply refused to approve any of Microsoft's choices? Or what if they forced them to make bad decisions, or to steer clear of markets that their competitors were going after?
The point is that even if you accept the premises of antitrust law and the FoF, the punishment should still be proportional to the crime. This proposal would literally cripple Microsoft, and might end up destroying it. To impose that kind of punishment for a set of vague "anticompetitive practices" is absurd.
It sounds to me like this poster is more interested in bringing Microsoft down than in punishing them for specific crimes. Even under antitrust law, the crime is abuse of a monopoly, not having one. Forcing Microsoft into a permanent competitive disadvantage is wrong by any standards.
As I recall, the quote was something like "while I was in Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet."
It's probably true that he did not literally mean that he invented the internet from scratch, but I think the fact that he sees his limited role in appropriating money for the 'net as "creating the internet" says something about his state of mind (and that of most politicians for that matter.) Politicians see themselves as the center of the universe, and they don't grasp the fact that all the truly innovative ideas are discovered and developed in Universities and private companies, largely independent of the choices politicians make. It's true that the government funds much of that research, but that is simply because they spend lots of money on research. If you throw money in all directions, some of it is going to land on a good idea. But the idea that the internet (in some form) would not exist today had Gore not pushed to fund it in the 80s is ludicrous.
In the olden days before Macs did multitasking, there were things called desk accessories. They were located in the Apple menu and could be run in the memory space of other applications-- a sort of poor man's multitasking. As you might imagine, this became kludgy and unneccesary once we got full-fledged multitasking in system 7, (yeah, I know, we still don't have "real" multitasking.) so DA's are not used much now. People will still sometimes refer to any small app that resides in the Apple menu as a DA, even though you can put anything you like there now.
I never said that all measurements were pointless. What he had said was that in theory you could learn about everything in the universe by observing thier interactions with a small object here on the Earth. My point is that although you can certainly gain some information using this kind of technique, there are severe limits for the reasons I indicated. For example, you are never going to produce a detailed map of the surface of a planet in a galaxy a million light-years away by looking at an insect here on Earth. In principle it might be possible, but the limits I pointed out makes that an impossibility in practice.
Nowadays, you see 5 day forecasts. I certainly remember the times you got only 3 days, and the forecast for the third day was much less detailed than you get nowadays for 5 days.
OK, to take this example, the idea that was originally proposed would seem to say that some day we'll have 10-year forecasts with absolute precision. My point is that this could never happen, no matter how much we learn about weather patterns and how much data we collect. There are simply too many variables that affect the result in too many unpredictable ways.
So, to be clear on this, I did not say "knowledge is impossible and all measurements are pointless." My point was simply that the nature of the universe limits the degree to which we can deduce the properties of distant objects based soley on the gravimetric or other interactions with local objects.
Dunno why, but there is some reason this won't work.
Three things:
One, lack of information. This includes both lack of knowledge about the laws of physics, and the inability to gather the necessary physical data, both because there is so much of it and because it would require observation at the sub-atomic level.
Two, as others have pointed out, you run into problems with the fact that the process of measurement affects the measurement. This encompasses both Heisenburg uncertainty, and it also includes the fact that the computer that holds this information would have to be included as part of the universe. Since it is not possible to make a computer that is "outside" the universe, you cannot model the whole universe without encountering a problem of infinite recursion, sort of like telling a computer to back up the contents of an entire hard drive onto that hard drive. Once it gets to the backup file, it will go into an infinite loop.
Third, you run into problems of chaos theory and spontaneous order. The problem is that a small error in measurement can lead to an enourmous change in the outcome. This is one reason why there is a limit to the accuracy of weather forecasting, for example. No matter how accurate the measurements we make, there will still be a small error, and that error will become larger as you try to predict farther out into the future. So if you make a small error in one measurement, that small error can cause all of your predictions to be off.
analyzing gravity waves would be a very fun thing to have my computer doing!
:P
Where else will you find "computer, "analysing gravity waves," and "fun" in the same sentence?
Not that that's a bad thing.
So you concede that they have not committed any other crimes?
Even if the above is true, so what? The question is whether they abused their Win95 monopoly to bully Netscape, not whether they were a Netscape competitor. Simply getting Apple to make IE the default browser has nothing to do with being monopolistic. And besides, Apple still bundled Netscape with OS 9, so consumers have an even easier choice than on Windows where they'd have to download it. Surely it's not too much of a hassle for consumers to double-click on the Netscape icon instead of the IE icon?
Besides, you are overlooking patent suits. Apple and Microsoft were in the midst of a long-running dispute over various patent infringement problems. Although the details were not released, it is quite likely that part of the deal was that Apple would drop these suits in exchange for the continued development of Office.