The only reason people believe in free will is that much of religion makes no sense without it.
I don't know what precisely you mean when you refer to "much of religion", but it can't be the Christian faith as described in the Bible, which makes very clear that belief in "free will" is not part of the Christian faith, see e.g.
Exodus 9:16 and
Romans 9:17ff.
However moral responsibility for one's actions is an essential part of what the Bible teaches. You can be morally responsible for what you do even if your will isn't totally, entirely free. Such moral responsibility requires only the ability to consciously veto proposed actions that the unconscious part of the mind is proposing, and this veto ability has in fact been experimentally observed, See Benjamin Libet: "Do We Have Free Will?", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 8--9, 1999, pp. 47--57.
Therefore, free will and moral responsibilty are not the same thing. It is true that some people have been preaching a version of Chrstian religion which is based more on philosophical assertions like "free will" than on what the Bible actually says, but that is not a valid argument against religion. It only demonstrates the foolishness of listening to people who try to base religion on human philosophy instead of focusing on what the Bible says.
Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision.
"We can't rule out that there's a free will that kicks in at this late point," said Haynes, who intends to study this phenomenon next. "But I don't think it's plausible."
Actually the experiments of Benjamin Libet suggest that whatever
precisely is the reality that the philosophical model of "free
will" approximates, it kicks in at that late moment which Haynes
considers so implausible.
I think of my subconscious mind as a kind of computer which tries to
compute useful answers to the various challenges of life in the form
of proposed actions. Our moral responsibility is in the areas of
training our subconsciousness to produce proposed actions which are
morally acceptable, and in the area of exercising what Libet describes
with the words that the "conscious function... can veto the act".
I won't argue that point -- but I would suggest that even that makes very little difference, as every government office I've ever been in already uses Microsoft Office exclusively.
The point is that with ODF being an international standard, governments were coming under increasing pressure to use that. The ISO/IEC standardization push for OOXML is Microsoft's defensive maneuver to avoid losing too many government organizations as customers.
After having RTFA (sorry), I don't see where anybody is appealing the decision, yet. The main problem with appealing is that at the ISO/IEC JTC1 level you cannot really file an appeal about the decision-making processes in the national standardization bodies. The reason for this is that the national standardization organizations are not branches of ISO. The power structure is the other way round: ISO is an international cartel of national standardization bodies.
What I suppose could be done with some chance of success is to file an antitrust lawsuit as well as an appeal and demand in the appeal that ISO/IEC shall defer to the result of the antitrust lawsuit. (Trying to get the standardization organization officials to decide the antitrust concerns themselves would not be a good idea IMO, since standardization organizations are really not equipped for resolving legal conflicts).
Sure, there was highly-intense lobbying, and I personally think that anti-trust laws were probably violated in all the countries were so many Microsoft gold partner companies participated in the decision-making process that their sheer number had a significant influence on the outcome. That's not illegal, unless you're saying that any party that has any interest whatsoever in the topic at hand should not be allowed to vote. That'd be akin to saying that the President of the USA should be elected by Britain, and so forth around the world. Check your anti-trust law. In most countries, "exploitation of a dominant market position" is illegal, regardless of the precise manner and mechanism in which the dominant market position is exploitet.
Apparantly I was wrong - I now have (as I am a technical committee member) received a copy of this through the official standardization organization channel with a genuine-looking cover letter from ISO/CS.
isn't it normally the process that you Fix your format before making it a written in stone standard? I agree that that's what the process *should* be. However ISO/IEC JTC1 really doesn't have a good track record with regard to insisting on this.
MS wanted ISO standardization so they could use it as a marketing tool. Sure. And the same can be said about the backers of ODF, about the backers of quality management standards etc etc. This is an essential aspect of how currently standardization processes function economically.
I don't think that this situation is good or healthy, and I definitely want to try changing the situation so that the influence of the public interest (that standards should be high-quality and genuinely open) is significantly increased, but this is a set of problems that really cannot be blamed on Microsoft.
Once it's a standard, they have no reason to pour resources into fixing it, if that means they have to do all this over again. It doesn't mean that.
I would like you to tell me what is collaborative about vote buying I haven't heard of any actual vote-buying having happened. Sure, there was highly-intense lobbying, and I personally think that anti-trust laws were probably violated in all the countries were so many Microsoft gold partner companies participated in the decision-making process that their sheer number had a significant influence on the outcome.
None of this however invalidates my point that it is in Microsoft's own interest to cooperate with people like me who care about the public interest (I'm representing the Swiss Internet User Group) on fixing shortcomings of the OOXML specification. I agree that significant conflicts of interest between the public interest and Microsoft's corporate interest exist, but it's not a zero-sum game, and I do believe that what I'm talking about is an area where cooperation is possible and makes economic sense.
they won the ISO process then they lost as it forced a deep examination of the standard, and raised critical questions and caused them more problems then it solved.
Microsoft has a legitimate business interest to be seen as the leader in office document formats, and this interest is best served by participating in the ISO/IEC processes for refining and improving OOXML in good faith and with an active desire to resolve the issues that are raised.
While I am highly critical of all national standardization organization officials who have contributed to allowing Microsoft push OOXML through via the "fast track" which IMO has proved to be clearly inappropriate, I'm really getting the impression that there is a tendency of seeing Microsoft primarily as an enemy which is getting in the way of our abvility to see reality as it is. I can personally testify that at the BRM and since then, Microsoft has shown every indication of willingness for the known technical shortcomings of OOXML to be corrected, and since I believe that it is in Microsoft's best interest to continue in this direction, I currently see no reason not to believe the Microsoft people that I have been communicating with when they indicate that it is Microsoft's intention to continue with this bona-fide cooperative stance regarding OOXML.
Do they not know their own rules?
on
ISO Approves OOXML
·
· Score: 5, Informative
While I still have some doubts regarding the genuineness of this
document (for example, why does it purport to come from the ISO
Central Secretariat rather than from the ISO/IEC "Information
Technology Task Force" (ITTF) which has been managing the voting
process?), the document seems to accurately reflect the previously
available information regarding the voting decisions of the
national standardization bodies.
The claimed results of the ballot on dis29500
document looks like a blatant forgery to me. For example, the implied
claim about the process having been managed by ISO/CS ("Central
Secretariat") ist wrong; the process is managed by ISO/IEC ITTF
("Information Technology Task Force"). Also, there is no defined
"Voting stage" of "enquiry" in the JTC1 directives, etc etc.
If there has been or even if there is just established process for doing so, perhaps that should be the next move.
There is the appeals process in ISO/IEC JTC1 which will certainly be attempted by one or more national bodies if the outcome of the vote is "approval". Valid grounds for such an appeal is provided for example by theh fact that at the Ballot Resolution Meeting, O-members (national bodies who only have "observer" status) were allowed to vote, although according to the rules they shouldn't have allowed to do that.
More promising IMO would be to file an appeal on the grounds of the WTO GPA (Government Procurement Agreement) and/or antitrust considerations, and at the same time file a lawsuit seeking a court order against ISO and IEC that the appeal shall be granted.
In all situations where those who have power (regardless of whether it is primarily economic power or political power or whatever) abuse it to deny others a fair chance, it is easy for those who are thereby suppressed to understand what is going on. In this case, this means that for Microsoft's competitors, for free software businesses in general and for freedom-minded geeks like you and me it is easy to understand what is going on. It's much more difficult to understand the real underlying issues from the outside. In particular, understanding the severeness of the problem does not come easily to standardization organization officials (who typically do not have a background in IT, economics or antitrust law). At the same time, Microsoft partner companies are complaining to the standardization organization officials about their critics in ways which are easy for the standardization organization officials to understand and accept.
The decision-making process appears to be highly irregular in many
countries, including
Poland
as well as
Germany,
Croatia and Norway
I hope that the EU
antitrust investigation will somehow be successful in addressing
this mess and punish Microsoft severely enough to dissuade them from
trying such tactics ever again.
IBM's representative accused the committee's chairman of intentionally manipulating the process.
The problem with this kind of accusations is the lack of clearly-defined norms regarding how the process is supposed to be run.
Unbiased observers exist only as a theoretical approximation, not in practice, anyway. The next problem is that it is quite natural for any chairperson to see one side as the aggressior and the other side as the victim, based upon which it is quite natural for just about every decent-minded person to want to help the victim. The problem in this conflict is that both sides are making arguments to show themselves as the victim, while very few people are have the skills and knowledge to determine on the basis of objective moral criteria (which are relevant in this complex situation involving technology as well as economics), so that for most people it will again depends on their bias whom they will see as the aggressor and whom they will see as the victim.
The only way out is to have more formalized, standardized processes for dealing with conflict situations so that the chairpersons don't have vast amounts of power to interpret the rules to favor the outcome which they personally think is right.
Exactly, it is all about another round for fixing the bugs.
From the practical perspective, the "PAS transposition process" provides the same amount of opportunity for fixing bugs in the spec as the "fast-track process" does.
No. "OASIS submitted the ODF specification to ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) on November 16, 2005, under Publicly Available Specification (PAS) rules."
Ok, you have a valid nit here, what I wrote was not exact. However, with regard to the speed of the ballot process and how much fixing of shortcomings of the specification are realistically possible during the review process, the "fast track process" and the "PAS transposition process" are practically identical. The difference is essentially just that the "fast-track process" is rediculously convenient for Ecma. The "PAS transposition process" is not at all like the normal ISO/IEC JTC1 process through which OOXML can be reintrocued if it fails in the vote now.
While many of the issues pointed out specifically used Excel 2007 as an example, doesn't ISO require an existing reference implementation for a standard like this to be approved? No, ISO/IEC does not have such a requirement.
This is a great example of concrete unsolved problems with OOXML both in documentation and design. In an earlier comment in the thread you asked someone to name one unaddressed issue, there are 15 or so there. If you really are involved in the standards body for your country/region, I really hope you know about glaring issues like these and disapprove on grounds more substantial than just the fast track request. Well, some of the points raised in that blog post are primarily issues with Microsoft's "Excel 2007" software, not with the OOXML specification; bringing them up as a reason for voting against OOXML would have been considered off-topic. However I agree that the article raises a number of valid concerns showing that OOXML is not well-designed. It is a mess. The justification for demanding that the vote should be changed to "DISAPPROVE" is precisely that many such legitimate technical design concerns which BRM participants would have desired to discuss have not been appropriately addressed because the "fast track" process did not allow that to happen.
I do not deny that there are plenty of design issues with OOXML. The statement which I have been challenging was that Microsoft "refused to address" them. Quite on the contrary, from first-hand observations I can tell you that Microsoft and Ecma have (since the original vote on OOXML failed) been extraordinarily willing to address concerns, even to the extent of addressing IMO unjustified complaints in ways that actually make the specification worse.
Just like they were "willing to support Java", and "willing to support OS/2", and the like? The big difference is that unlike "support for Java" and "support for OS/2" etc, getting the technical problems with OOXML fixed is actually in Microsoft's best interest, and they are (at least now) aware of that, and actually listening when people like me point out problems.
Re:One link. There are many out there. Just look.
on
India Votes Against OOXML
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080302-xml-spec-editor-ooxml-iso-process-is-unadulterated-bs.html That's a good article, yes. And I completely agree with the statements in that article that the fast-track process and the BRM have not been sufficient to adequately discuss the technical concerns regarding OOXML, and that consequently national bodies should change their vote to "DISAPPROVE" or keep it at that. In fact, as I'm a member of the responsible technical committee in my country, I've filed a formal motion that our country's vote shall be changed to "DISAPPROVE" for precisely this reason.
But that doesn't change the fact that many of the people who are arguing against OOXML do so with invalid arguments. Here is an example right from this current discussion. Note that I got modded "Troll" for challenging that claim while the invalid example got modded "insightful".
Re:autoSpaceLikeWord95 and useWord97LineBreakRules
on
India Votes Against OOXML
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Proprietary crap like that does not belong in a global standard. Sure, it's crap. It's specific information about some bugs in "Word95" and "Word97", by means of which now non-Microsoft vendors can implement some kind of compatibility mode that duplicates those bugs.
As soon as the revised spec is published by Ecma, the information will be in the public domain. It's crap all right, but it's not "proprietary crap" any longer. And it's certainly no longer an example of missing information in the OOXML spec.
I agree that it is debatable at least whether this kind of information really belongs into a standard. But what would you suggest that should be done with this information?
So why do you think they started creating their own format in the first place? They migrated from their binary formats to an XML based format because they're convinced that XML is the way of the future. Documentation of this format is what they submitted as the starting point for creating the OOXML "standard".
Why should you create another format if there already is an open one? Because Microsoft has a strong enough market position that they thought that could get away with doing their own thing and essentially forcing the whole world to go along with them.
Even if they're forced now to make OOXML a genuinely open and technically acceptable standard (that isn't the case yet but might happen eventually), it's a huge win for Microsoft if the free world has to play catch-up-if-you-can to OOXML as opposed to Microsoft having to struggle to create a reasonably bug-free implementation of ODF. Remember: Microsoft is good at lobbying and at strategic marketing, but not necessarily so good at software development.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what precisely you mean when you refer to "much of religion", but it can't be the Christian faith as described in the Bible, which makes very clear that belief in "free will" is not part of the Christian faith, see e.g. Exodus 9:16 and Romans 9:17ff.
However moral responsibility for one's actions is an essential part of what the Bible teaches. You can be morally responsible for what you do even if your will isn't totally, entirely free. Such moral responsibility requires only the ability to consciously veto proposed actions that the unconscious part of the mind is proposing, and this veto ability has in fact been experimentally observed, See Benjamin Libet: "Do We Have Free Will?", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 8--9, 1999, pp. 47--57.
Therefore, free will and moral responsibilty are not the same thing. It is true that some people have been preaching a version of Chrstian religion which is based more on philosophical assertions like "free will" than on what the Bible actually says, but that is not a valid argument against religion. It only demonstrates the foolishness of listening to people who try to base religion on human philosophy instead of focusing on what the Bible says.
"We can't rule out that there's a free will that kicks in at this late point," said Haynes, who intends to study this phenomenon next. "But I don't think it's plausible."
Actually the experiments of Benjamin Libet suggest that whatever precisely is the reality that the philosophical model of "free will" approximates, it kicks in at that late moment which Haynes considers so implausible.
See Benjamin Libet: "Do We Have Free Will?", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 8--9, 1999, pp. 47--57
I think of my subconscious mind as a kind of computer which tries to compute useful answers to the various challenges of life in the form of proposed actions. Our moral responsibility is in the areas of training our subconsciousness to produce proposed actions which are morally acceptable, and in the area of exercising what Libet describes with the words that the "conscious function ... can veto the act".
The point is that with ODF being an international standard, governments were coming under increasing pressure to use that. The ISO/IEC standardization push for OOXML is Microsoft's defensive maneuver to avoid losing too many government organizations as customers.
You could try to appeal at the ISO/IEC JTC1 level based on the differences between what the ISO/IEC JTC1 directives say and how things were actually done. I have written up an analysis in which I come to the conclusion that an appeal which is based only on this kind of discrepancies will not be successful.
What I suppose could be done with some chance of success is to file an antitrust lawsuit as well as an appeal and demand in the appeal that ISO/IEC shall defer to the result of the antitrust lawsuit. (Trying to get the standardization organization officials to decide the antitrust concerns themselves would not be a good idea IMO, since standardization organizations are really not equipped for resolving legal conflicts).
Apparantly I was wrong - I now have (as I am a technical committee member) received a copy of this through the official standardization organization channel with a genuine-looking cover letter from ISO/CS.
I don't think that this situation is good or healthy, and I definitely want to try changing the situation so that the influence of the public interest (that standards should be high-quality and genuinely open) is significantly increased, but this is a set of problems that really cannot be blamed on Microsoft.
Once it's a standard, they have no reason to pour resources into fixing it, if that means they have to do all this over again. It doesn't mean that.None of this however invalidates my point that it is in Microsoft's own interest to cooperate with people like me who care about the public interest (I'm representing the Swiss Internet User Group) on fixing shortcomings of the OOXML specification. I agree that significant conflicts of interest between the public interest and Microsoft's corporate interest exist, but it's not a zero-sum game, and I do believe that what I'm talking about is an area where cooperation is possible and makes economic sense.
Microsoft has a legitimate business interest to be seen as the leader in office document formats, and this interest is best served by participating in the ISO/IEC processes for refining and improving OOXML in good faith and with an active desire to resolve the issues that are raised.
While I am highly critical of all national standardization organization officials who have contributed to allowing Microsoft push OOXML through via the "fast track" which IMO has proved to be clearly inappropriate, I'm really getting the impression that there is a tendency of seeing Microsoft primarily as an enemy which is getting in the way of our abvility to see reality as it is. I can personally testify that at the BRM and since then, Microsoft has shown every indication of willingness for the known technical shortcomings of OOXML to be corrected, and since I believe that it is in Microsoft's best interest to continue in this direction, I currently see no reason not to believe the Microsoft people that I have been communicating with when they indicate that it is Microsoft's intention to continue with this bona-fide cooperative stance regarding OOXML.
However, how valid are those votes? For example, the ISO/IEC JTC1 directives seem to pretty explicitly forbid changing the vote from "disapprove" to "abstain" like AFNOR (the French standardization organization) did (under the influence of heavy lobbying from Microsoft and HP).
The claimed results of the ballot on dis29500 document looks like a blatant forgery to me. For example, the implied claim about the process having been managed by ISO/CS ("Central Secretariat") ist wrong; the process is managed by ISO/IEC ITTF ("Information Technology Task Force"). Also, there is no defined "Voting stage" of "enquiry" in the JTC1 directives, etc etc.
There is the appeals process in ISO/IEC JTC1 which will certainly be attempted by one or more national bodies if the outcome of the vote is "approval". Valid grounds for such an appeal is provided for example by theh fact that at the Ballot Resolution Meeting, O-members (national bodies who only have "observer" status) were allowed to vote, although according to the rules they shouldn't have allowed to do that.
More promising IMO would be to file an appeal on the grounds of the WTO GPA (Government Procurement Agreement) and/or antitrust considerations, and at the same time file a lawsuit seeking a court order against ISO and IEC that the appeal shall be granted.
In all situations where those who have power (regardless of whether it is primarily economic power or political power or whatever) abuse it to deny others a fair chance, it is easy for those who are thereby suppressed to understand what is going on. In this case, this means that for Microsoft's competitors, for free software businesses in general and for freedom-minded geeks like you and me it is easy to understand what is going on. It's much more difficult to understand the real underlying issues from the outside. In particular, understanding the severeness of the problem does not come easily to standardization organization officials (who typically do not have a background in IT, economics or antitrust law). At the same time, Microsoft partner companies are complaining to the standardization organization officials about their critics in ways which are easy for the standardization organization officials to understand and accept.
I hope that the EU antitrust investigation will somehow be successful in addressing this mess and punish Microsoft severely enough to dissuade them from trying such tactics ever again.
I like the voting overview and discussion on OpenMalaysia blog better.
The problem with this kind of accusations is the lack of clearly-defined norms regarding how the process is supposed to be run.
Unbiased observers exist only as a theoretical approximation, not in practice, anyway. The next problem is that it is quite natural for any chairperson to see one side as the aggressior and the other side as the victim, based upon which it is quite natural for just about every decent-minded person to want to help the victim. The problem in this conflict is that both sides are making arguments to show themselves as the victim, while very few people are have the skills and knowledge to determine on the basis of objective moral criteria (which are relevant in this complex situation involving technology as well as economics), so that for most people it will again depends on their bias whom they will see as the aggressor and whom they will see as the victim.
The only way out is to have more formalized, standardized processes for dealing with conflict situations so that the chairpersons don't have vast amounts of power to interpret the rules to favor the outcome which they personally think is right.
From the practical perspective, the "PAS transposition process" provides the same amount of opportunity for fixing bugs in the spec as the "fast-track process" does.
No. "OASIS submitted the ODF specification to ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) on November 16, 2005, under Publicly Available Specification (PAS) rules."
Ok, you have a valid nit here, what I wrote was not exact. However, with regard to the speed of the ballot process and how much fixing of shortcomings of the specification are realistically possible during the review process, the "fast track process" and the "PAS transposition process" are practically identical. The difference is essentially just that the "fast-track process" is rediculously convenient for Ecma. The "PAS transposition process" is not at all like the normal ISO/IEC JTC1 process through which OOXML can be reintrocued if it fails in the vote now.The differences are that the ODF is much smaller, much less messy, and not an anticompetitive attack on a previous ISO standard.
I do not deny that there are plenty of design issues with OOXML. The statement which I have been challenging was that Microsoft "refused to address" them. Quite on the contrary, from first-hand observations I can tell you that Microsoft and Ecma have (since the original vote on OOXML failed) been extraordinarily willing to address concerns, even to the extent of addressing IMO unjustified complaints in ways that actually make the specification worse.
But that doesn't change the fact that many of the people who are arguing against OOXML do so with invalid arguments. Here is an example right from this current discussion. Note that I got modded "Troll" for challenging that claim while the invalid example got modded "insightful".
As soon as the revised spec is published by Ecma, the information will be in the public domain. It's crap all right, but it's not "proprietary crap" any longer. And it's certainly no longer an example of missing information in the OOXML spec.
I agree that it is debatable at least whether this kind of information really belongs into a standard. But what would you suggest that should be done with this information?
Even if they're forced now to make OOXML a genuinely open and technically acceptable standard (that isn't the case yet but might happen eventually), it's a huge win for Microsoft if the free world has to play catch-up-if-you-can to OOXML as opposed to Microsoft having to struggle to create a reasonably bug-free implementation of ODF. Remember: Microsoft is good at lobbying and at strategic marketing, but not necessarily so good at software development.