Lawrence Lessig has been pushing a bounty system for spammers for a long time. See this Interesting People post, for example. He was still pushing the same concept recently at his talk at the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (July 2004). I'm surprised that he isn't mentioned in TFA.
...I wonder how much MS invests in testing such complicated programs? It has to be way, WAY more than they invest in the development of the program.
I'd say the costs of testing complex programs are huge, but only a small portion of the total cost is borne by Microsoft. After all, where do you think most of their bug reports come from -- the testing department, or their users? Your testing department only needs to be big enough and thorough enough to make it run well enough for the users. The users then do the remainder of the testing as a matter of course in general use, and the bugs are dealt with using "service packs". There may also be the intermediate phase of "beta testers" who try the thing out in the real world, but prior to first official release.
I dislike Microsoft a great deal on a number of levels, but I don't actually see this pattern of behaviour as exceptional. After all, is Word any different to OpenOffice in this regard? If I were to snipe at Microsoft, I'd cast aspersions on their general attitude towards quality (especially security-related quality), but not their externalised testing, which seems pretty much par for the course. So although Microsoft's sins are many, this isn't an area where I'd single them out for criticism. That's not to say I like the status quo -- I think we're still pretty much in the dark ages of software engineering.
Has anyone (apart from Mr "Not Happy John", whose testimony I take with salt, as has an axe to grind) actually received this spam? I'm in John Howard's electorate, and I haven't received it. All I'm seeing so far is news about the event, not the event itself. I haven't even seen any comments here saying, "yeah, I got that spam". Am I missing something? I see the smoke, but where's the fire?
On the other hand, I keep getting spam from oic.org, an industry association who seem to have rather close ties with Labor senator Kate Lundy. (Evidence available on request.) I note that oic.org sends their spam through Pacific Internet, and I believe that's the same provider that John Howard's son is using, so he's in the right place if he wants to spam.
Opposition representative Kate Lundy has a few predictable words of opposition in that article, but Kate Lundy's name appears in dozens of spams that I've received (sent by oic.org -- Australia's Worst Current Spammers from my perspective -- to promote her as a speaker at seminars). As it happens, I have received a total of zero from John Howard (so far), despite living in his electorate. Nice to know that politicians are as sincere as ever, regardless of their party.
It deals with issues such as human evolution, human exploration, the role of artificial intelligence, man's attempt to "play god" gone terribly wrong, and man's place in the universe.
I'm struck by how much these comments also apply to Blade Runner. More so than 2001 in some respects.
...it still stands up as scientifically realistic in its portrayals of computer science...
Realistic computer science in 2001? Dude, one of the major characters was an AI the likes of which we've never seen. In what sense was that "realistic"? Maybe in the sense that the hobbits in Lord Of The Rings were realistic, but not in the sense of bearing a close resemblance to the real thing.
Notice that the major complaint being made here is lack of smooth integration with windows itself. The highest priority of most cross-platform projects (e.g Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. -- the ones at issue here) is to make the core functionality work well, not pander to specific platforms. Trim and polish associated with making the program mass-market-ready comes fairly late in the development process -- as it ought.
Also, so far as I'm aware, the major goal of most open source projects is not to diminish the market share of Windows, but to produce a useful piece of software. The eventual demise of Microsoft's monopoly will be a mere side-effect of that process.
What is it with OSS software? They want to get noticed on the Windows platform...
You're thinking about this the wrong way. Writers of open source software have their own agendas and sets of priorities, as does Bill Gates. In either case these agendas may or may not coincide with your particular wants and needs. The only way to be sure that your particular wants and needs are being met is to (a) code it yourself, (b) pay someone else to code it for you, or (c) suggest it as a feature and hope that someone else decides to code it because they like it. If you decide to go down this path, then Mozilla is your obvious choice (simply because IE is not an option).
If that kind of development work is not realistically possible for you (which it probably isn't -- not many have the required time and/or money), then you just have to make an informed choice between your available options: do you want the bundle of idiosyncrasies that is Mozilla, or the on-going security circus that is IE? It's entirely your call. Of course, if you have any complaints about your product, you should address them to Microsoft, since that's the product you're paying for. (Note: immediately prior suggestion exists purely to highlight the futility of said action.)
I did a critique on this article, entitled "A Bad Argument Analysed". Basically this article contributes nothing towards thinking on software licensing at all (one way or the other), but it does serve as a useful example of sloppy thinking and shoddy rhetoric.
if you let a piece fall out of print then you lose copyright to it
Personally, I tend to agree: a copyright holder should have some responsibilities. Alas, I don't believe it will fly in actual practice. A more realistic solution may be that of compulsory licensing: anyone can print the book, so long as they pay a licensing fee to do so. A similar situation exists with regards to musicians performing the works of other musicians. The compulsory license may be restricted to situations where it is not reasonably practical to obtain a book from the "official" publisher (where "reasonably practical" is intended to be argued in court, but would probably involve a litmus test like it costing more than twice as much to obtain the book through official channels).
In Cringely's latest "pulpit" column, he talks about a video compression technology which uses one aspect of human vision physiology -- namely losses in the path from retina to brain via optic nerve -- to compress video. Apparently the bandwidth of the optic nerve isn't all that high, and not all the data available at the retina is transmitted to the brain. The brain makes up for this by filling in the gaps. I'm rather interested in this from a philosophical standpoint, having touched upon philosophy of colour recently. Is it true that much of what we perceive visually is imagery generated by the brain rather than directly produced in us by external stimuli?
Game companies, as well as music companies, are obligated to replace media that becomes damaged (even if the owner is at fault) for the cost of replacement.
Under what law? I think there's a good chance I live in an area that doesn't have that law, although I should look into it.
I didn't know you had to 'agree' with a law before it was applicable to you.
Sure you do, in New York, at least. Only a little earlier I was reading how the well-known "email marketing mogul", Scott Richter, is "agreeing to abide by a new federal anti-spam law" as a part of a settlement with A.G. Spitzer. Nice to see he's making these naughty people promise to be good in future.
If morality would stem from something "beyond", it would be same for everyone, and unchanging.
Only if our moral perceptions were perfect. Otherwise we might live in a world like this, where people in all cultures agree that it's sometimes wrong to harm people, or lie to people, or steal from people, but can't ever agree on all the details.
...it's obviously not very good for survival of the species if we run around strangling each others and thus that kind of traits tend to be weeded out...
This is an explanation (in Darwinian terms) as to why homicide isn't a trait which would have a selective advantage. It bears no relationship to the moral value of homicide. There is no place for "morality" as an absolute concept in a purely biological model. Moral behaviour will have an impact, one way or another, on the population, but "rightness" and "wrongness" have no meaning in the scheme. Morality requires moral norms, and such norms cannot be found in biology.
There are valid questions to be raised as to whether theoretical entities like "neutrinos" are properly considered "real" on the basis of scientific evidence. I tend to think of them as elements of a model which may or may not conform to reality, but which has observably similar behaviour to reality. I'm embracing a form of "structural realism", if you like. Do neutrinos exist, you ask me? I say I don't know whether they exist, but it's certainly useful to behave as though they do.
With human interior psychological states, you are by no means using "deduction"! That's an abuse of the term if ever I saw one, unless there's some deductive argument for psychological states that is known only to specialists in the field. Even so, I'll grant you that there are useful psychological models, and that these maintain their utility whether or not "interior psychological states" so-called are real or not. It's not the state per se that I care about, but what the state is supposed to do.
When it comes to something like God or "the soul", we run into different problems. In the case of God, the problem is one of massive underdetermination. I have vast quantities of evidence for the existence of God, but none of it is irrefutable. A sceptic can say, "your evidence can be explained without resort to God". I can't demonstrate that the sceptic's claim is false, thus we are at a stalemate. "God has a massive effect," I claim; "he created the universe!" "No he didn't", replies the sceptic, and there we have an end to it, because we can't agree on the status of the evidence itself. How would we resolve the question of whether the universe is an effect of God?
"The soul" is a distinct but similar problem. On the testimony of scripture, I choose to believe that all will ultimately stand before God in judgement one day. The question of whether or not this is true will be quite satisfactorily resolved if it actually happens, but until it does, we have a problem. I have a model of human existence which includes a non-physical aspect called a "soul", because it's the aspect of your person that carries moral responsibility for what you do -- a role that could not reasonably be filled by any collection of matter. "Hogwash," the sceptic claims. "Show me this soul." What can I show this sceptic that he will accept as evidence for a soul? The soul plays a vital role in an important chain of events, but the sceptic implicitly rejects the entire world-view presupposed in that explanation. We have no common grounds on which to proceed, regardless of whether or not my "soul" exists.
I personally place much more value on facts/propositions that can be verified than on those that cannot.
I suspect that you place a great deal of value on certain propositions that cannot be verified at all. Sure, for claims about nature that can be tested in some way, you're better off with testing than without. But how do you test moral truths? After all, the fact that you experience moral outrage when someone loots your house doesn't demonstrate that the burglary was fundamentally wrong, yet moral beliefs are some of the most firmly held beliefs around. To me it seems like the value of a proposition is more likely to be inversely proportional to the ease with which it can be tested: easily tested propositions tend not to be very important, while important propositions tend not to be easily tested!
It also includes a principle of seperation of knowledge from ones belief system... This is as opposed to beliefs such as religion, which tend to be founded in faith, a system wherein knowledge is 100% certain because one feels that it is correct.
First up, I think you're attacking a popular caricature of religion there; equating religion with zealotry. Not all religion is zealotry, and not all folks who are religious are zealots. Some of them are downright insipid, and some of them are amongst the world's greatest philosophers, scientists, and so on. You paint with a broad brush, but I'll overlook that and move to the more important points.
It's not possible to distinguish "knowledge" and "belief" in the way that you suggest. The traditional formulation of "knowledge" in Epistemology (the branch of philosophy that ponders about knowledge and its limits) is "justified, true belief". (Personally, I have a real problem with the "true" part, but that's another story.) The distinction I think you're trying to make is one of justification, rather than belief. Exaggerating a little to make a point, you think that scientific claims are justified, and religious claims are unjustified. It's an interesting question as to what kind of evidence (if any) warrants belief in religious sorts of propositions, but science also runs into this difficulty in greater force than you might expect.
Again I want to make two points: first, that science can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists, secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and, secondly, that non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptions can also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so, if this is the wish of their representatives....there must be a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to reality.
-- Paul Feyerabend, "Against Method" (3rd ed.), 1993, p.viii
Provocative stuff for those scientific rationalists who are accustomed to thinking themselves in an intellectually superior position to the religious folks. Feyerabend wasn't afraid to push a few buttons with his polemic. On the other hand, he's all for your "different people have different sets [of values] by which they make judgements". Its a question of whether you're going to respect the judgements of others, or claim the intellectual high ground like Richard Dawkins, who declares that if science has nothing to say about a matter, then its certain nothing else does.
...seem to be aimed more at debunking the popular idea of what science is than what it really is.
Feyerabend's claim is more radical than that: he denies that "what science really is" can be formulated at all.
This book proposes a thesis and draws consequences from it. The thesis is: the events, procedures and results that constitute the sciences have no common structure; there are no elements that occur in every scientific investigation but are missing elsewhere... A theory of science that devises standards and structural elements for all scientific activities and authorizes them by reference to 'Reason' or 'Rationality' may impress outsiders - but it is much too crude an instrument for the people on the spot, that is, for scientists facing some concrete research problem.
-- Paul Feyerabend, "Against Method" (3rd ed.), 1993, p.1
The problem with calling science, "the latest and best refinement of the method by which we gain knowledge about the world around us", is that it falsely assumes that there is one single such method. It also begs the question as to how we determined that the method was the best in the first place. On the other hand, if what you are saying is, "'scicence' is simply those techniques which are currently popular with researchers in the broad field of 'nature'", then your argument won't be with Feyerabend, but with Popper or Lakatos.
There are various arguments for various positions with regards to morality, but I don't think any version of morality ever posited by any philosopher includes a "metric of morality" -- a real set of scales on which to weigh the moral value of any action; nor has any philosopher formulated a complete and consistent set of moral rules which one can follow to be a good person. The best we have are broad principles with problem cases. The "evidence" in a moral argument ultimately comes down to intuition; the argument is one of persuasion: I try to persuade you that such-and-such a moral principle is true because if X violates it by doing Y to Z, X would be a bad person, or if people generally did Y, that would be a bad thing.
You can grant this level of argument the status of "science" if you so desire. By doing so you remove the problem cases from a claim like, "only science can be considered knowledge", since it would allow knowledge of moral truths, but you encounter the opposite problem that a bunch of pseudo-scientific things become "science". You may not want to recognise the art of "water divining" as a science, whereas its practitioners will claim there is ample evidence that it works. It now becomes a question of what phenomena you are willing to recognise as "evidence", and you'll wind up having endless philosophical arguments over the appropriate qualities of "evidence".
Congratulations: you've shifted the debate from Metaphysics to Epistemology, but you're still camping in the philosophy department, not the science department.
By definition that which which has an effect must be measureable...
I think you'll find that's a bit of a hasty conclusion, based on implicit materialistic presuppositions. Sure, if physics is the ultimate reality, then I agree with you, although we'll have to make allowances for the known limitations on our ability to measure things (Heisenberg, and such like).
But if physics is the ultimate reality, you're going to have a hard time finding a proper basis for moral statements. Moral truths seem to be a great concern to a great many people (thus arguably "of some consequence"), yet we do not (and apparently can not) have a science of morality, because the issues defy scientific analysis. Scientific analysis will tell you how the world is, and good scientific theories predict how the world will be if certain actions take place, but no amount of scientific analysis will tell you whether the scientifically predicted outcome is morally appropriate.
So go right ahead and measure everything. Defy Heisenberg: learn the exact position and velocity of every particle in the universe, and the exact physical laws that govern them. You still won't be able to tell me (in terms of that knowledge) why it's a bad thing for me to strangle you, no matter how consequential it is to you, personally. You'll correctly predict your demise as a consequence of the action, but you'll have no grounds for claiming that either of "to be or not to be" is preferable.
I have serious doubts with regards to your claim, "there's no mystery that is beyond apprehension". Even mathematics seems to defy definition as a (finite) ordered set of rules.
I think the assumption is more along the line of 'Reason is the only process by which man can gain knowledge'. We ('scientismists')...
The term that you probably want to adopt is, "scientific rationalist". Consult the works of Paul Feyerabend for antagonistic views, such as the following.
First-world science is one science among many; by claiming to be more it ceases to be an instrument of research and turns into a (political) pressure group. More on these matters can be found in my book Farewell to Reason.
-- Paul Feyerabend, "Against Method" (3rd ed.), 1993, p.3 (emphasis in original)
If you haven't heard of Feyerabend before, don't assume he's just some political whacko: he started as a physicist and worked under Karl Popper. Along with Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos, Feyerabend was one of the most significant contributors to 20th century philosophy of science.
I'd say that the last 100 years of science makes it abundantly clear that what you can measure is all there is...
This is a tragically popular misconception, especially amongst that part of the nerd herd that hasn't studied enough philosophy. Science+technology has been a great success, sure, but it has in no way demonstrated that "what you can measure is all that there is". On the contrary: what you can measure is all that science can deal with. There may well be such a thing as a soul or a spirit, but unless we can measure it, we'll never have a science related to it.
When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of a science.
Attributed to Lord Kelvin
The idea, "all you can measure is all there is", is a metaphysical statement (a philosophical claim of the grandest sort, IMO) congruent with the position known as materialism. The assumption that "there's no mystery... that cannot be apprehended" (by science) is a tenet of scientism, not science. It's just a way of saying, "I don't believe that anything exists which transcends our ability to analyse scientifically". You can believe that if it pleases you to do so, but you're utterly deluded if you think science has demonstrated anything of the sort. Such demonstrations are beyond the power and scope of science; philosophers of metaphysics might get there eventually, but given progress in the field to date, I doubt it very much.
Slashdot Mirror
Lawrence Lessig has been pushing a bounty system for spammers for a long time. See this Interesting People post, for example. He was still pushing the same concept recently at his talk at the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (July 2004). I'm surprised that he isn't mentioned in TFA.
Both are currently available in Debian/testing.
I'd say the costs of testing complex programs are huge, but only a small portion of the total cost is borne by Microsoft. After all, where do you think most of their bug reports come from -- the testing department, or their users? Your testing department only needs to be big enough and thorough enough to make it run well enough for the users. The users then do the remainder of the testing as a matter of course in general use, and the bugs are dealt with using "service packs". There may also be the intermediate phase of "beta testers" who try the thing out in the real world, but prior to first official release.
I dislike Microsoft a great deal on a number of levels, but I don't actually see this pattern of behaviour as exceptional. After all, is Word any different to OpenOffice in this regard? If I were to snipe at Microsoft, I'd cast aspersions on their general attitude towards quality (especially security-related quality), but not their externalised testing, which seems pretty much par for the course. So although Microsoft's sins are many, this isn't an area where I'd single them out for criticism. That's not to say I like the status quo -- I think we're still pretty much in the dark ages of software engineering.
Has anyone (apart from Mr "Not Happy John", whose testimony I take with salt, as has an axe to grind) actually received this spam? I'm in John Howard's electorate, and I haven't received it. All I'm seeing so far is news about the event, not the event itself. I haven't even seen any comments here saying, "yeah, I got that spam". Am I missing something? I see the smoke, but where's the fire? On the other hand, I keep getting spam from oic.org, an industry association who seem to have rather close ties with Labor senator Kate Lundy. (Evidence available on request.) I note that oic.org sends their spam through Pacific Internet, and I believe that's the same provider that John Howard's son is using, so he's in the right place if he wants to spam.
Opposition representative Kate Lundy has a few predictable words of opposition in that article, but Kate Lundy's name appears in dozens of spams that I've received (sent by oic.org -- Australia's Worst Current Spammers from my perspective -- to promote her as a speaker at seminars). As it happens, I have received a total of zero from John Howard (so far), despite living in his electorate. Nice to know that politicians are as sincere as ever, regardless of their party.
The Spamhaus project disagrees with you.
I'm struck by how much these comments also apply to Blade Runner. More so than 2001 in some respects.
Realistic computer science in 2001? Dude, one of the major characters was an AI the likes of which we've never seen. In what sense was that "realistic"? Maybe in the sense that the hobbits in Lord Of The Rings were realistic, but not in the sense of bearing a close resemblance to the real thing.
Also, so far as I'm aware, the major goal of most open source projects is not to diminish the market share of Windows, but to produce a useful piece of software. The eventual demise of Microsoft's monopoly will be a mere side-effect of that process.
You're thinking about this the wrong way. Writers of open source software have their own agendas and sets of priorities, as does Bill Gates. In either case these agendas may or may not coincide with your particular wants and needs. The only way to be sure that your particular wants and needs are being met is to (a) code it yourself, (b) pay someone else to code it for you, or (c) suggest it as a feature and hope that someone else decides to code it because they like it. If you decide to go down this path, then Mozilla is your obvious choice (simply because IE is not an option).
If that kind of development work is not realistically possible for you (which it probably isn't -- not many have the required time and/or money), then you just have to make an informed choice between your available options: do you want the bundle of idiosyncrasies that is Mozilla, or the on-going security circus that is IE? It's entirely your call. Of course, if you have any complaints about your product, you should address them to Microsoft, since that's the product you're paying for. (Note: immediately prior suggestion exists purely to highlight the futility of said action.)
I did a critique on this article, entitled "A Bad Argument Analysed". Basically this article contributes nothing towards thinking on software licensing at all (one way or the other), but it does serve as a useful example of sloppy thinking and shoddy rhetoric.
Personally, I tend to agree: a copyright holder should have some responsibilities. Alas, I don't believe it will fly in actual practice. A more realistic solution may be that of compulsory licensing: anyone can print the book, so long as they pay a licensing fee to do so. A similar situation exists with regards to musicians performing the works of other musicians. The compulsory license may be restricted to situations where it is not reasonably practical to obtain a book from the "official" publisher (where "reasonably practical" is intended to be argued in court, but would probably involve a litmus test like it costing more than twice as much to obtain the book through official channels).
In Cringely's latest "pulpit" column, he talks about a video compression technology which uses one aspect of human vision physiology -- namely losses in the path from retina to brain via optic nerve -- to compress video. Apparently the bandwidth of the optic nerve isn't all that high, and not all the data available at the retina is transmitted to the brain. The brain makes up for this by filling in the gaps. I'm rather interested in this from a philosophical standpoint, having touched upon philosophy of colour recently. Is it true that much of what we perceive visually is imagery generated by the brain rather than directly produced in us by external stimuli?
One will do as well as the other, so far as they are concerned.
I wonder if Dr Irving Schlock from Sluggy Freelance is behind this proposal.
Under what law? I think there's a good chance I live in an area that doesn't have that law, although I should look into it.
Sure you do, in New York, at least. Only a little earlier I was reading how the well-known "email marketing mogul", Scott Richter, is "agreeing to abide by a new federal anti-spam law" as a part of a settlement with A.G. Spitzer. Nice to see he's making these naughty people promise to be good in future.
Only if our moral perceptions were perfect. Otherwise we might live in a world like this, where people in all cultures agree that it's sometimes wrong to harm people, or lie to people, or steal from people, but can't ever agree on all the details.
This is an explanation (in Darwinian terms) as to why homicide isn't a trait which would have a selective advantage. It bears no relationship to the moral value of homicide. There is no place for "morality" as an absolute concept in a purely biological model. Moral behaviour will have an impact, one way or another, on the population, but "rightness" and "wrongness" have no meaning in the scheme. Morality requires moral norms, and such norms cannot be found in biology.
With human interior psychological states, you are by no means using "deduction"! That's an abuse of the term if ever I saw one, unless there's some deductive argument for psychological states that is known only to specialists in the field. Even so, I'll grant you that there are useful psychological models, and that these maintain their utility whether or not "interior psychological states" so-called are real or not. It's not the state per se that I care about, but what the state is supposed to do.
When it comes to something like God or "the soul", we run into different problems. In the case of God, the problem is one of massive underdetermination. I have vast quantities of evidence for the existence of God, but none of it is irrefutable. A sceptic can say, "your evidence can be explained without resort to God". I can't demonstrate that the sceptic's claim is false, thus we are at a stalemate. "God has a massive effect," I claim; "he created the universe!" "No he didn't", replies the sceptic, and there we have an end to it, because we can't agree on the status of the evidence itself. How would we resolve the question of whether the universe is an effect of God?
"The soul" is a distinct but similar problem. On the testimony of scripture, I choose to believe that all will ultimately stand before God in judgement one day. The question of whether or not this is true will be quite satisfactorily resolved if it actually happens, but until it does, we have a problem. I have a model of human existence which includes a non-physical aspect called a "soul", because it's the aspect of your person that carries moral responsibility for what you do -- a role that could not reasonably be filled by any collection of matter. "Hogwash," the sceptic claims. "Show me this soul." What can I show this sceptic that he will accept as evidence for a soul? The soul plays a vital role in an important chain of events, but the sceptic implicitly rejects the entire world-view presupposed in that explanation. We have no common grounds on which to proceed, regardless of whether or not my "soul" exists.
I suspect that you place a great deal of value on certain propositions that cannot be verified at all. Sure, for claims about nature that can be tested in some way, you're better off with testing than without. But how do you test moral truths? After all, the fact that you experience moral outrage when someone loots your house doesn't demonstrate that the burglary was fundamentally wrong, yet moral beliefs are some of the most firmly held beliefs around. To me it seems like the value of a proposition is more likely to be inversely proportional to the ease with which it can be tested: easily tested propositions tend not to be very important, while important propositions tend not to be easily tested!
First up, I think you're attacking a popular caricature of religion there; equating religion with zealotry. Not all religion is zealotry, and not all folks who are religious are zealots. Some of them are downright insipid, and some of them are amongst the world's greatest philosophers, scientists, and so on. You paint with a broad brush, but I'll overlook that and move to the more important points.
It's not possible to distinguish "knowledge" and "belief" in the way that you suggest. The traditional formulation of "knowledge" in Epistemology (the branch of philosophy that ponders about knowledge and its limits) is "justified, true belief". (Personally, I have a real problem with the "true" part, but that's another story.) The distinction I think you're trying to make is one of justification, rather than belief. Exaggerating a little to make a point, you think that scientific claims are justified, and religious claims are unjustified. It's an interesting question as to what kind of evidence (if any) warrants belief in religious sorts of propositions, but science also runs into this difficulty in greater force than you might expect.
Provocative stuff for those scientific rationalists who are accustomed to thinking themselves in an intellectually superior position to the religious folks. Feyerabend wasn't afraid to push a few buttons with his polemic. On the other hand, he's all for your "different people have different sets [of values] by which they make judgements". Its a question of whether you're going to respect the judgements of others, or claim the intellectual high ground like Richard Dawkins, who declares that if science has nothing to say about a matter, then its certain nothing else does.
Feyerabend's claim is more radical than that: he denies that "what science really is" can be formulated at all.
The problem with calling science, "the latest and best refinement of the method by which we gain knowledge about the world around us", is that it falsely assumes that there is one single such method. It also begs the question as to how we determined that the method was the best in the first place. On the other hand, if what you are saying is, "'scicence' is simply those techniques which are currently popular with researchers in the broad field of 'nature'", then your argument won't be with Feyerabend, but with Popper or Lakatos.
You can grant this level of argument the status of "science" if you so desire. By doing so you remove the problem cases from a claim like, "only science can be considered knowledge", since it would allow knowledge of moral truths, but you encounter the opposite problem that a bunch of pseudo-scientific things become "science". You may not want to recognise the art of "water divining" as a science, whereas its practitioners will claim there is ample evidence that it works. It now becomes a question of what phenomena you are willing to recognise as "evidence", and you'll wind up having endless philosophical arguments over the appropriate qualities of "evidence".
Congratulations: you've shifted the debate from Metaphysics to Epistemology, but you're still camping in the philosophy department, not the science department.
I think you'll find that's a bit of a hasty conclusion, based on implicit materialistic presuppositions. Sure, if physics is the ultimate reality, then I agree with you, although we'll have to make allowances for the known limitations on our ability to measure things (Heisenberg, and such like).
But if physics is the ultimate reality, you're going to have a hard time finding a proper basis for moral statements. Moral truths seem to be a great concern to a great many people (thus arguably "of some consequence"), yet we do not (and apparently can not) have a science of morality, because the issues defy scientific analysis. Scientific analysis will tell you how the world is, and good scientific theories predict how the world will be if certain actions take place, but no amount of scientific analysis will tell you whether the scientifically predicted outcome is morally appropriate.
So go right ahead and measure everything. Defy Heisenberg: learn the exact position and velocity of every particle in the universe, and the exact physical laws that govern them. You still won't be able to tell me (in terms of that knowledge) why it's a bad thing for me to strangle you, no matter how consequential it is to you, personally. You'll correctly predict your demise as a consequence of the action, but you'll have no grounds for claiming that either of "to be or not to be" is preferable.
I have serious doubts with regards to your claim, "there's no mystery that is beyond apprehension". Even mathematics seems to defy definition as a (finite) ordered set of rules.
The term that you probably want to adopt is, "scientific rationalist". Consult the works of Paul Feyerabend for antagonistic views, such as the following.
If you haven't heard of Feyerabend before, don't assume he's just some political whacko: he started as a physicist and worked under Karl Popper. Along with Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos, Feyerabend was one of the most significant contributors to 20th century philosophy of science.
This is a tragically popular misconception, especially amongst that part of the nerd herd that hasn't studied enough philosophy. Science+technology has been a great success, sure, but it has in no way demonstrated that "what you can measure is all that there is". On the contrary: what you can measure is all that science can deal with. There may well be such a thing as a soul or a spirit, but unless we can measure it, we'll never have a science related to it.
The idea, "all you can measure is all there is", is a metaphysical statement (a philosophical claim of the grandest sort, IMO) congruent with the position known as materialism. The assumption that "there's no mystery... that cannot be apprehended" (by science) is a tenet of scientism, not science. It's just a way of saying, "I don't believe that anything exists which transcends our ability to analyse scientifically". You can believe that if it pleases you to do so, but you're utterly deluded if you think science has demonstrated anything of the sort. Such demonstrations are beyond the power and scope of science; philosophers of metaphysics might get there eventually, but given progress in the field to date, I doubt it very much.