Yep. This is how the Chinese have been doing their technology transfer without needing to pay billions in R&D themselves.
They go to a company and tell them that they'd like to build some nuclear reactors or high speed trains or something. The deal they make always goes like: 1) We'll buy the first two nuclear plants. 2) The next two you build using our people. 3) The ones thereafter you give us the plans to build, and we'll do it all ourselves, and pay you a royalty.
Now China has the plans to the AP1000, one of the most modern nuclear plants being built today, as well as a trained workforce in building it, all without having to do any of the R&D work themselves, or pay much more than just the cost of a couple plants (which they get to use anyway).
It's a very clever idea, and companies are all falling over themselves to give away their best technologies to China, since they're so eager for short-term profits, they don't realize they're shooting themselves in the foot, long term.
>>And that's a linear calculation anyway (x = v*t), not a parabolic one.
If your car doesn't have pedals for acceleration or braking, I wouldn't recommend driving it.
>>Your brain isn't calculating anything. It's making an estimate based on past understanding of the timing.
An estimate is a calculation, there's no way around it. And it does a very good job. The only time I got it wrong is when the City of San Diego started shortening the yellow lights to the legal minimum, so that they could get more income from red-light cameras and tickets. Took a few days to learn the reduced time period, and then I was fine again.
But you can feel that uncertainty too when you encounter yellow lights you've never seen before, since it means your brain doesn't know exactly what the target is.
>>There are a couple of things suggesting that "parabolic instinct" is hogwash.
Have you ever been driving your car at a green light, that's been a green light for a while, and it's still kind of a ways away? You can feel the point at which it is better to stop and brake if it turns yellow, versus accelerating and making it through (assuming you're not someone who drives through reds). In other words, your brain is calculating two second order equations in real time, and measuring it against an estimate of distance that's probably more accurate than if you actually asked people how many feet away the light was.
Indcidentally, I once drove an old car that had very little acceleration and braking, so there were stretches on the road where there was no solution to the problem. Made me very nervous every time I approached a long green, and eager to get rid of it. The only nice thing about this 80s Caprice Classic was that when it underwent unintended acceleration (way before Toyotas made it cool), it took it a long while to get up to speed.
>>Weird, I'm also in California, and I just got a new cell phone for free with 2 year contract from T-Mobile. The MSRP for that phone is around $500 (T-Mobile G2 aka HTC Vision), but I didn't pay a dime of sales tax. My guess is Verizon is just making things up in order to screw you, and then trying to pass the blame onto the CA govt.
I doubt they'd be charging sales tax and not passing it on to the CA govt. That sort of thing is rather frowned upon.
I just did some research on the issue -
According to (www.boe.ca.gov/pdf/pub120.pdf), the State of California demands its cut when a cell phone is sold as part of a bundled service, even if the cell phone is free. There's also currently several lawsuits going on about this.
Verizon charges you the same price whether or not you have a full price phone, or if you've had your phone long after the payoff period. Why would they want to make less money off you?
The point isn't that the plan doesn't pay for the phone, but rather that the tax basis is an absurdly high number that nobody in their right mind actually pays.
>>California has figured out the scam... why can't you?
Because the MSRP is an imaginary number, and so paying sales tax on it is ridiculous - that's the point. Verizon didn't pay full MSRP, Blackberries don't sell online (even unlocked, without a service plan) for full MSRP. Amazon sells unlocked phones with no contract for hundreds of dollars less than the "list price", for example. They'll list something at $700 and sell it at $400.
Quick back of the envelope calculation: The radiative forcing since 1750 is around 2.26 W/M^2. With a climate sensitivity of 0.8C/(W/M^2) that should mean an increase of +1.8C, but we've had an increase of +0.8C, which means the oceans have absorbed roughly (1-(0.8/1.8)) = 55% of the heat imbalance.
That's a gross simplification and assumes that the numbers are right, but I think it's a reasonable ballpark figure. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
>>It'll be interesting to see how this plays in different countries - for instance the UK has no great respect for recommended prices and insists that items on sale are actually sold at full price for some (small, admittedly) proportion of the time. I imagine the rules vary by country,
By contrast, here in California, we apparently get to pay full sales tax on the imaginary MSRP dreamed up by some marketing guy smoking crack. Even if you get it for free, or with a discount, or whatever. I was mildly interested in taking up Verizon on a 2-for-1 Blackberry sale, before they told me I'd have to pay $70 in tax for the "free" phone, since the MSRP on a free phone was apparently around 700 dollars. I don't know if that's just cell phones or what, but it's just ridiculous.
>>Amazon will then have it almost permanently on sale at $2.85, "70% off!" - which is coincidentally the 70% return mark.
Which, all things considered, isn't too bad a situation. Customers get cheap-ish apps, developers get 70% of the sale, and Amazon gets lots of people buying because they're constantly on "sale".
>>Tabs allow me to have 4 Firefox windows in my task bar instead of 105.
I think this is the place where I link something to a funny image with "You're Doing it Wrong" attached. =)
I can't possibly imagine what sort of usage situation that you have that requires 105 open windows/tabs. You do know that Firefox allows these "bookmark" things, right? That allows you to close a window and yet still find it later?
I'm fairly OCD about keeping a minimal amount of clutter inside my UI. I do only have four Firefox windows open, too, and 0 tabs. But the point is, like with the status bar decision, it's really something that ought to just be a right-click checkbox option. You like tabs? Cool. I don't like tabs? Or want a status bar? The developers take a shit on your head.
Fortunately the stupid and pointless "Tabs on Top" and equally stupid and useless big orange Firefox button in place of the normal menu bar are both optional. However, I have a bad feeling about this, given all the other stupid changes they've made, and I wonder how long it be be until they are forced on us and we will have to rely on yet more extensions in order to have a decent browser.
While the devs always fall back on the old "you can always use an extension" excuse, the fact of the matter is, every time a new version of Firefox comes out, some of your extensions are going to break. I hate the unified forward/back dropdown menu, so I have an extension that restores it to seperate dropdowns for back and forward. Guess what? The 3.6.13 update killed that extension - and left me without back and forward buttons entirely. Awesome. Thanks, Firefox.
And don't get me started on tabs. Tabkiller wasn't even ported to Firefox 4 when I was testing it out, and it doesn't matter how much you tell the developers that you already have one taskbar and don't need a second one, they won't bake in a no-tab option to Firefox. They're in love with the damn things.
I can agree with that. However, a scientist, when wrong, will either go back and change his hypothesis to correct it OR realize that there's really no way to fix it and throw it out.
Watts maintains that he is still right in the face of evidence that shows he is wrong. And like any good (bad) blogger trying to generate site hits spins every single weather story into an attack against climate science or additional "proof" of some massive world-wide conspiracy.
If he wants to be skeptic and provide legitimate research (like the weather stations) that's great. It only makes for better science. But making claims of a giant conspiracy and refusing to acknowledge when he's been proven wrong really doesn't help constructive discussion on the subject. In fact, it really just makes him one more loud asshole on the net.
I don't really disagree with anything you say, except both Watts and the Mc's have occasionally made actual contributions and been cited in the literature.
If Climategate taught us anything, it's that the whole conspiracy theory about AGW is wrong. Except for the parts where Phil Jones was conspiring to hide the data from the skeptics, I suppose.
>>In addition to that, it is the oceans that are supposed to keep all the accumulated heat. But according to the best available measurements (the ARGO probes), it is just not showing up
They don't keep all the accumulated heat. The heat inertia effect is closer to 50%.
>>Their collective postulations about weather stations was thoroughly debunked
Postulations are just a theory.;)
But seriously, the temperature station project was worthwhile, and various (real) papers have credited Watts for his work. He *guessed* that fixing problems with the weather stations would disprove global warming, and was wrong, but that doesn't mean that the work that he and a bunch of volunteers did was meaningless. It's always better to have empirical data on things than trying to heuristically guess 'em from looking at data.
In other words, he both contributed something of value, and his hypothesis was wrong. Not uncommon in science.
>>I've avoided it but A few of my friends are desperate to get their break. I guess they got unlucky and happened upon crappy companies.
I had a friend that was a sysadmin at EA, and he said their programmers were treated like utter crap, so I won't pretend the game industry is good everywhere, but it's not bad everywhere either.
My manager was pretty good, and I had amazingly brilliant co-workers, which made it quite fun. There's nothing quite like working with talented software engineers that really know what they're doing. It's wonderful. I'd just created a map format for our levels, and code generated some simple test patterns to test it, but my co-worker (and head programmer) whipped up in the span of an hour or so an application that he could click on the screen, and it would simulate terrain erosion effects starting from water sources at those points, and in another hour had a whole canyon world generated procedurally and output in the format that my code could read in. It was actually quite fun. =)
I know or knew people at Valve, Midway San Diego, Obsidian, Sony and SOE, EA, and independent studios, and I think their range of experiences is fairly similar to software engineers elsewhere, except with perhaps more drinking whenever E3 or release parties come around. I wouldn't say it is as bad as trying to become a rock star, though there's certainly a lot of competition, especially if you're an indy studio.
>>or better yet move people into a 4/10 schedule. When I program and get into a groove I'm very productive until I'm taken out of that groove. A longer work day would extend that groove, but compensate with a 4/10 so you do not become overworked
This.
The single most important thing for programmer productivity is the ability to promote things that get them into the groove (headphones + music) and eliminating things that get them out of the groove (meetings, distractions). I've worked 4x10s (and on a swing shift too, to match my sleep cycle), and that was my most productive time when I worked in an office.
>>The game industry is horrible because it's one of those jobs kids grow up wanting.
Have you ever worked in it?
It's not that bad if you find a decent company to work for. I've worked in it, and still have many friends that work in it, and I don't think they have it any better or worse off than, say, my friends at Microsoft. Same corporate BS to deal with, and they often get stuck doing jobs they don't want to do. But, hey. Seeing your name on Fallout New Vegas or some ATV game or whatever is kinda neat.
Why leave? I'd love to work for a company that worked 10 hour days four days a week. (The summary doesn't talk about how many days, just how many hours per day are worked.) Especially when you have to spend 1.5+ hours a day commuting.
Well, scratch that. I'd love to work for such a company if I worked 9-to-5 currently. Being self-employed means that I get to work 100 hour weeks followed by 0 hour weeks, as my workload demands it.
>>...I'd say that a lot of what they loved about philosophy, while it may still be there as philosophy, much of it is better known by other names -- Logic, Mathematics, Sociology, etc.
Which kind of gets at why philosophy is so important. It's often called "the study of first principles", because on these big questions about what is right, what is the greatest good, etc., you end up with (far down the road) the study of peoples in groups, and analyzing what makes societies work well.
Likewise, while the Philosophy of Science is easy to mock (see for example TFA), I do think that studying it makes one a better scientist, and if one is not a scientist, then at least more resistant to pseudo-science.
>>Of course, what we're talking about now is yet another branch of philosophy which, while it still exists as philosophy, has also split off into another field: Politics.
The same statement applies here. There's a reason why some political science and philosophy classes were the same at my university. (In other words, you could take Poly Sci 23 or Philosophy 23, but it was the same class, taught by the same professor, with the same students). Political science people study Plato, Machiavelli, Herodotus, Locke, Thucydides, Rousseau, Marx, and so forth, because they need to know the philosophical foundations of the political edifice they are building (or tearing down).
These discussions have taken place over thousands of years, and there's a lot of really interesting thought that have gone into them.
I understand, from what you're saying, that you think modern philosophy isn't much like this. This isn't entirely true - my department still taught metaphysics even though they thought it was nonsense (except maybe the guy teaching it, but he was a nut anyway), and Intro to Philosophy classes still teach Descartes and all that. My school also hosted a big conference on Kant when I was there, and invited people from all over to come and present their papers on him. So it's not all that dry, uninteresting positivism crap.
You can still find people interested in the big questions... I've enjoyed reading Colin McGinn's stuff. Since he spent years teaching introductory philosophy classes as a TA, he can explain what sounds like esoteric problems (like the Gauthier Paradox) in an easy to understand manner. I've read three of his books, and they're all quite interesting, though if you would prefer a sort of Intro to Philosophy thing, you can get his audiobook, which is out of print, here - http://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Questions-Timeless-Approaches-McGinn/dp/B000LHPIOK
I spend a lot of time in my car, so it was fun to listen to him present a philosophical problem and then ruminate on it for a half hour or so before listening to him start talking about the various answers people have developed over the years.
>>Not eating pork is, when you get right down to it, a food preference. I don't particularly like duck or avocado.
True, but I have a couple Muslim friends that love pepperoni, but avoid eating it... except when they get drunk. So religion, yeah, definitely makes a difference, more than just a food preference.
>>Ah, now we're getting somewhere. But isn't this necessarily subjective? Whether I lived a good life is entirely determined by what I accept as the definition of a good life, and I don't particularly care what anyone else thinks is a good life. In particular, what I might see as a good life, others might see as a terrible life, and vice versa.
It's more encompassing than that. Living the Good Life doesn't just mean what we'd call La Dolce Vita, but to the Greeks meant living with as high ethical standards as possible, and to learn as much as possible, since the only evil is ignorance, and only the ignorant can be evil, and all that.
This philosophy impacted all aspects of their life; for example, if you'd been caught doing something unethical, it would prove not just that you were of low character, but also that you couldn't be trusted with public office, getting married, and so forth. (This is a broad generalization, naturally.) The elites in Athens were kinda required, in a policy called Euergetism, to donate more money to the masses the higher up they were in government. It's interesting to think about what government would be like if we 1) only limited it to the rich (bad, but then again, look at the US Senate), 2) required people to spend heaps of their own money (would it be considered bribery or charity?).
Another interesting thing to think about is what the role of government is. From your posts, I'd guess you're of the school of thought that the government should leave well enough alone, and that in practice, the government's main interest is in acquiring and distributing power. But this is a fairly modern notion - the Greeks thought that the role of government should be to make people better. Which is laughable the first time you hear about it, but when you start thinking about the role of government in education, and of course all the progressive nonsense we've dealt with in the last hundred years, you can still see that idea has a lot of cachet. So again, it's interesting to think about and debate what the role and purpose of a government should be, and again, this has powerful impact on real life.
And so on and so forth. The notion that philosophy has little to do with real life is basically an ugly side effect of the positivists that took over in the early 20th Century, that sort of said that all that kind of stuff was uninteresting, as if they could declare what is interesting, by fiat! And that, I think, killed a lot of the love for philosophy. I doubt we'll have many stories like William James or Alexander the Great any more, whose lives were profoundly impacted by philosophy.
And when you wonder the next time about if philosophy can impact the world, just think about all the blue-eyed people in India, and how they got there. =)
>>I think we're talking about different definitions of "philosophy." I'm talking about the discipline as taught in modern philosophy departments
Well, that's your problem right there. Modern philosophy has moved away from what made philosophy so interesting. 'Linguistic janitors' is not at all what the field used to be.
>>I couldn't agree more, but the fact that you mentioned religion means we probably wouldn't agree on what those fundamental questions are
Existence of God is one of the Big Questions. Religion contains a whole complex of them. The Greeks' Big Questions involved a number of things, most importantly perhaps, "What does it take to live a Good Life?"
>>You're probably thinking of philosophical questions like, "What happens when you die?" >>While this can be a profound motivating influence, it actually doesn't have too much impact on the way most people live their lives.
Utterly untrue. If you profoundly believe that not eating pork / not porking your neighbor / etc is mandated by your code of ethics or religion, whatever it is, then you will (tend to) not do those things. Christianity motivates its followers to be more charitable, as charity is a core tenet of the Christian faith. And even on the death front, while you're right that all people worry about dying, religious people have been found to stress about it a lot less.
There's few things in life that matter more than one's religion or code of ethics, and even atheist blowhards like Dan Dennett talk about its profound impact on humans.
>>but there are a few things that will be common to everyone
The Big Questions are common to everyone, as they are all questions that have to be answered by everyone, even if it is in the negative. How should I balance my needs against those of the group? What is the summum bonum? How do I set myself in right relation to God, and with other people? How should I treat other people, and expect to be treated? These are all Questions that have profound influence on our daily lives. My life was changed, not from meeting a Christian, as I've been a Christian all my life, but by meeting a saintly (and I don't use the word lightly) Carmelite nun, and resolved to act towards others more as she did. I used to be more of a jackass to people in real life, now I'm only a jackass occasionally to people online. I consider that an improvement. =)
>>Now, in what way does most philosophy expand our minds?
If you'd sat outside a theatre, like I did, after a showing of The Matrix and saw how peoples' minds got blown by the tired brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, you'd see how much people love thinking about those things, and how thinking about those things expands their minds. It literally feels like your brain is getting stretched the first time you encounter these puzzles, and there's a lot of them.
>>Most of us tech-types are still operating on the assumption that the oil peak is a glitch and fusion is going to save all our asses. But what if it doesn't? Are we psychologically prepared to cope for the "we split the atom and went to the moon and now we can't even run tractors anymore???"
Laissez-faire is a license to defraud. Human lives are finite, and the ability of a laissez-faire system to return one's evils back to oneself in time for them to overwhelm one's ill-gotten wealth is, evidently, minimal. If the system had a shorter feedback loop, or we lived long enough to be brought low by the results from this system, then laissez-faire would result in a competitive balance (albeit a tense one).
You're confusing laissez-faire with anarchy.
In a laissez-faire economy, the government will punish "evildoers" who break their contracts and/or impinge on the freedoms of others. It's in an anarchist society that corporations and individuals can act with impunity.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you meant to say Artillery. =)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game
Yep. This is how the Chinese have been doing their technology transfer without needing to pay billions in R&D themselves.
They go to a company and tell them that they'd like to build some nuclear reactors or high speed trains or something. The deal they make always goes like:
1) We'll buy the first two nuclear plants.
2) The next two you build using our people.
3) The ones thereafter you give us the plans to build, and we'll do it all ourselves, and pay you a royalty.
Now China has the plans to the AP1000, one of the most modern nuclear plants being built today, as well as a trained workforce in building it, all without having to do any of the R&D work themselves, or pay much more than just the cost of a couple plants (which they get to use anyway).
It's a very clever idea, and companies are all falling over themselves to give away their best technologies to China, since they're so eager for short-term profits, they don't realize they're shooting themselves in the foot, long term.
>>And that's a linear calculation anyway (x = v*t), not a parabolic one.
If your car doesn't have pedals for acceleration or braking, I wouldn't recommend driving it.
>>Your brain isn't calculating anything. It's making an estimate based on past understanding of the timing.
An estimate is a calculation, there's no way around it. And it does a very good job. The only time I got it wrong is when the City of San Diego started shortening the yellow lights to the legal minimum, so that they could get more income from red-light cameras and tickets. Took a few days to learn the reduced time period, and then I was fine again.
But you can feel that uncertainty too when you encounter yellow lights you've never seen before, since it means your brain doesn't know exactly what the target is.
>>There are a couple of things suggesting that "parabolic instinct" is hogwash.
Have you ever been driving your car at a green light, that's been a green light for a while, and it's still kind of a ways away? You can feel the point at which it is better to stop and brake if it turns yellow, versus accelerating and making it through (assuming you're not someone who drives through reds). In other words, your brain is calculating two second order equations in real time, and measuring it against an estimate of distance that's probably more accurate than if you actually asked people how many feet away the light was.
Indcidentally, I once drove an old car that had very little acceleration and braking, so there were stretches on the road where there was no solution to the problem. Made me very nervous every time I approached a long green, and eager to get rid of it. The only nice thing about this 80s Caprice Classic was that when it underwent unintended acceleration (way before Toyotas made it cool), it took it a long while to get up to speed.
>>Weird, I'm also in California, and I just got a new cell phone for free with 2 year contract from T-Mobile. The MSRP for that phone is around $500 (T-Mobile G2 aka HTC Vision), but I didn't pay a dime of sales tax. My guess is Verizon is just making things up in order to screw you, and then trying to pass the blame onto the CA govt.
I doubt they'd be charging sales tax and not passing it on to the CA govt. That sort of thing is rather frowned upon.
I just did some research on the issue -
According to (www.boe.ca.gov/pdf/pub120.pdf), the State of California demands its cut when a cell phone is sold as part of a bundled service, even if the cell phone is free. There's also currently several lawsuits going on about this.
Verizon charges you the same price whether or not you have a full price phone, or if you've had your phone long after the payoff period. Why would they want to make less money off you?
The point isn't that the plan doesn't pay for the phone, but rather that the tax basis is an absurdly high number that nobody in their right mind actually pays.
>>California has figured out the scam... why can't you?
Because the MSRP is an imaginary number, and so paying sales tax on it is ridiculous - that's the point. Verizon didn't pay full MSRP, Blackberries don't sell online (even unlocked, without a service plan) for full MSRP. Amazon sells unlocked phones with no contract for hundreds of dollars less than the "list price", for example. They'll list something at $700 and sell it at $400.
For example, see:
http://www.amazon.com/Blackberry-9550-Smartphone-stabilization-Touchscreen/dp/B003YHOXFY/ref=sr_1_3?s=wireless&ie=UTF8&qid=1295139856&sr=1-3
The only scam is the one California is running. I could see paying sales tax on $400, but not on $700.
Quick back of the envelope calculation:
The radiative forcing since 1750 is around 2.26 W/M^2. With a climate sensitivity of 0.8C/(W/M^2) that should mean an increase of +1.8C, but we've had an increase of +0.8C, which means the oceans have absorbed roughly (1-(0.8/1.8)) = 55% of the heat imbalance.
That's a gross simplification and assumes that the numbers are right, but I think it's a reasonable ballpark figure. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
>>It'll be interesting to see how this plays in different countries - for instance the UK has no great respect for recommended prices and insists that items on sale are actually sold at full price for some (small, admittedly) proportion of the time. I imagine the rules vary by country,
By contrast, here in California, we apparently get to pay full sales tax on the imaginary MSRP dreamed up by some marketing guy smoking crack. Even if you get it for free, or with a discount, or whatever. I was mildly interested in taking up Verizon on a 2-for-1 Blackberry sale, before they told me I'd have to pay $70 in tax for the "free" phone, since the MSRP on a free phone was apparently around 700 dollars. I don't know if that's just cell phones or what, but it's just ridiculous.
>>Amazon will then have it almost permanently on sale at $2.85, "70% off!" - which is coincidentally the 70% return mark.
Which, all things considered, isn't too bad a situation. Customers get cheap-ish apps, developers get 70% of the sale, and Amazon gets lots of people buying because they're constantly on "sale".
>>Tabs allow me to have 4 Firefox windows in my task bar instead of 105.
I think this is the place where I link something to a funny image with "You're Doing it Wrong" attached. =)
I can't possibly imagine what sort of usage situation that you have that requires 105 open windows/tabs. You do know that Firefox allows these "bookmark" things, right? That allows you to close a window and yet still find it later?
I'm fairly OCD about keeping a minimal amount of clutter inside my UI. I do only have four Firefox windows open, too, and 0 tabs. But the point is, like with the status bar decision, it's really something that ought to just be a right-click checkbox option. You like tabs? Cool. I don't like tabs? Or want a status bar? The developers take a shit on your head.
While the devs always fall back on the old "you can always use an extension" excuse, the fact of the matter is, every time a new version of Firefox comes out, some of your extensions are going to break. I hate the unified forward/back dropdown menu, so I have an extension that restores it to seperate dropdowns for back and forward. Guess what? The 3.6.13 update killed that extension - and left me without back and forward buttons entirely. Awesome. Thanks, Firefox.
And don't get me started on tabs. Tabkiller wasn't even ported to Firefox 4 when I was testing it out, and it doesn't matter how much you tell the developers that you already have one taskbar and don't need a second one, they won't bake in a no-tab option to Firefox. They're in love with the damn things.
>>After their amazing rescue the bacteria were interviewed by Anderson Cooper.
If it was Anderson Cooper, he'd probably immerse himself in the bacterial soup and talk about how it was eating him alive.
And then a dog would walk up and lick him in the face.
I don't really disagree with anything you say, except both Watts and the Mc's have occasionally made actual contributions and been cited in the literature.
If Climategate taught us anything, it's that the whole conspiracy theory about AGW is wrong. Except for the parts where Phil Jones was conspiring to hide the data from the skeptics, I suppose.
>>They're saddened that they could lose sales because of bad publicity as a consequence.
I thought all publicity was good publicity? =)
>>In addition to that, it is the oceans that are supposed to keep all the accumulated heat. But according to the best available measurements (the ARGO probes), it is just not showing up
They don't keep all the accumulated heat. The heat inertia effect is closer to 50%.
But I'm not sure why you're saying that oceans aren't warming -
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100121_globalstats.html
>>Their collective postulations about weather stations was thoroughly debunked
Postulations are just a theory. ;)
But seriously, the temperature station project was worthwhile, and various (real) papers have credited Watts for his work. He *guessed* that fixing problems with the weather stations would disprove global warming, and was wrong, but that doesn't mean that the work that he and a bunch of volunteers did was meaningless. It's always better to have empirical data on things than trying to heuristically guess 'em from looking at data.
In other words, he both contributed something of value, and his hypothesis was wrong. Not uncommon in science.
>>I've avoided it but A few of my friends are desperate to get their break. I guess they got unlucky and happened upon crappy companies.
I had a friend that was a sysadmin at EA, and he said their programmers were treated like utter crap, so I won't pretend the game industry is good everywhere, but it's not bad everywhere either.
My manager was pretty good, and I had amazingly brilliant co-workers, which made it quite fun. There's nothing quite like working with talented software engineers that really know what they're doing. It's wonderful. I'd just created a map format for our levels, and code generated some simple test patterns to test it, but my co-worker (and head programmer) whipped up in the span of an hour or so an application that he could click on the screen, and it would simulate terrain erosion effects starting from water sources at those points, and in another hour had a whole canyon world generated procedurally and output in the format that my code could read in. It was actually quite fun. =)
I know or knew people at Valve, Midway San Diego, Obsidian, Sony and SOE, EA, and independent studios, and I think their range of experiences is fairly similar to software engineers elsewhere, except with perhaps more drinking whenever E3 or release parties come around. I wouldn't say it is as bad as trying to become a rock star, though there's certainly a lot of competition, especially if you're an indy studio.
>>or better yet move people into a 4/10 schedule. When I program and get into a groove I'm very productive until I'm taken out of that groove. A longer work day would extend that groove, but compensate with a 4/10 so you do not become overworked
This.
The single most important thing for programmer productivity is the ability to promote things that get them into the groove (headphones + music) and eliminating things that get them out of the groove (meetings, distractions). I've worked 4x10s (and on a swing shift too, to match my sleep cycle), and that was my most productive time when I worked in an office.
>>The game industry is horrible because it's one of those jobs kids grow up wanting.
Have you ever worked in it?
It's not that bad if you find a decent company to work for. I've worked in it, and still have many friends that work in it, and I don't think they have it any better or worse off than, say, my friends at Microsoft. Same corporate BS to deal with, and they often get stuck doing jobs they don't want to do. But, hey. Seeing your name on Fallout New Vegas or some ATV game or whatever is kinda neat.
Why leave? I'd love to work for a company that worked 10 hour days four days a week. (The summary doesn't talk about how many days, just how many hours per day are worked.) Especially when you have to spend 1.5+ hours a day commuting.
Well, scratch that. I'd love to work for such a company if I worked 9-to-5 currently. Being self-employed means that I get to work 100 hour weeks followed by 0 hour weeks, as my workload demands it.
>>...I'd say that a lot of what they loved about philosophy, while it may still be there as philosophy, much of it is better known by other names -- Logic, Mathematics, Sociology, etc.
Which kind of gets at why philosophy is so important. It's often called "the study of first principles", because on these big questions about what is right, what is the greatest good, etc., you end up with (far down the road) the study of peoples in groups, and analyzing what makes societies work well.
Likewise, while the Philosophy of Science is easy to mock (see for example TFA), I do think that studying it makes one a better scientist, and if one is not a scientist, then at least more resistant to pseudo-science.
>>Of course, what we're talking about now is yet another branch of philosophy which, while it still exists as philosophy, has also split off into another field: Politics.
The same statement applies here. There's a reason why some political science and philosophy classes were the same at my university. (In other words, you could take Poly Sci 23 or Philosophy 23, but it was the same class, taught by the same professor, with the same students). Political science people study Plato, Machiavelli, Herodotus, Locke, Thucydides, Rousseau, Marx, and so forth, because they need to know the philosophical foundations of the political edifice they are building (or tearing down).
These discussions have taken place over thousands of years, and there's a lot of really interesting thought that have gone into them.
I understand, from what you're saying, that you think modern philosophy isn't much like this. This isn't entirely true - my department still taught metaphysics even though they thought it was nonsense (except maybe the guy teaching it, but he was a nut anyway), and Intro to Philosophy classes still teach Descartes and all that. My school also hosted a big conference on Kant when I was there, and invited people from all over to come and present their papers on him. So it's not all that dry, uninteresting positivism crap.
You can still find people interested in the big questions... I've enjoyed reading Colin McGinn's stuff. Since he spent years teaching introductory philosophy classes as a TA, he can explain what sounds like esoteric problems (like the Gauthier Paradox) in an easy to understand manner. I've read three of his books, and they're all quite interesting, though if you would prefer a sort of Intro to Philosophy thing, you can get his audiobook, which is out of print, here - http://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Questions-Timeless-Approaches-McGinn/dp/B000LHPIOK
I spend a lot of time in my car, so it was fun to listen to him present a philosophical problem and then ruminate on it for a half hour or so before listening to him start talking about the various answers people have developed over the years.
>>Not eating pork is, when you get right down to it, a food preference. I don't particularly like duck or avocado.
True, but I have a couple Muslim friends that love pepperoni, but avoid eating it... except when they get drunk. So religion, yeah, definitely makes a difference, more than just a food preference.
>>Ah, now we're getting somewhere. But isn't this necessarily subjective? Whether I lived a good life is entirely determined by what I accept as the definition of a good life, and I don't particularly care what anyone else thinks is a good life. In particular, what I might see as a good life, others might see as a terrible life, and vice versa.
It's more encompassing than that. Living the Good Life doesn't just mean what we'd call La Dolce Vita, but to the Greeks meant living with as high ethical standards as possible, and to learn as much as possible, since the only evil is ignorance, and only the ignorant can be evil, and all that.
This philosophy impacted all aspects of their life; for example, if you'd been caught doing something unethical, it would prove not just that you were of low character, but also that you couldn't be trusted with public office, getting married, and so forth. (This is a broad generalization, naturally.) The elites in Athens were kinda required, in a policy called Euergetism, to donate more money to the masses the higher up they were in government. It's interesting to think about what government would be like if we 1) only limited it to the rich (bad, but then again, look at the US Senate), 2) required people to spend heaps of their own money (would it be considered bribery or charity?).
Another interesting thing to think about is what the role of government is. From your posts, I'd guess you're of the school of thought that the government should leave well enough alone, and that in practice, the government's main interest is in acquiring and distributing power. But this is a fairly modern notion - the Greeks thought that the role of government should be to make people better. Which is laughable the first time you hear about it, but when you start thinking about the role of government in education, and of course all the progressive nonsense we've dealt with in the last hundred years, you can still see that idea has a lot of cachet. So again, it's interesting to think about and debate what the role and purpose of a government should be, and again, this has powerful impact on real life.
And so on and so forth. The notion that philosophy has little to do with real life is basically an ugly side effect of the positivists that took over in the early 20th Century, that sort of said that all that kind of stuff was uninteresting, as if they could declare what is interesting, by fiat! And that, I think, killed a lot of the love for philosophy. I doubt we'll have many stories like William James or Alexander the Great any more, whose lives were profoundly impacted by philosophy.
And when you wonder the next time about if philosophy can impact the world, just think about all the blue-eyed people in India, and how they got there. =)
>>I think we're talking about different definitions of "philosophy." I'm talking about the discipline as taught in modern philosophy departments
Well, that's your problem right there. Modern philosophy has moved away from what made philosophy so interesting. 'Linguistic janitors' is not at all what the field used to be.
>>I couldn't agree more, but the fact that you mentioned religion means we probably wouldn't agree on what those fundamental questions are
Existence of God is one of the Big Questions. Religion contains a whole complex of them. The Greeks' Big Questions involved a number of things, most importantly perhaps, "What does it take to live a Good Life?"
>>You're probably thinking of philosophical questions like, "What happens when you die?"
>>While this can be a profound motivating influence, it actually doesn't have too much impact on the way most people live their lives.
Utterly untrue. If you profoundly believe that not eating pork / not porking your neighbor / etc is mandated by your code of ethics or religion, whatever it is, then you will (tend to) not do those things. Christianity motivates its followers to be more charitable, as charity is a core tenet of the Christian faith. And even on the death front, while you're right that all people worry about dying, religious people have been found to stress about it a lot less.
There's few things in life that matter more than one's religion or code of ethics, and even atheist blowhards like Dan Dennett talk about its profound impact on humans.
>>but there are a few things that will be common to everyone
The Big Questions are common to everyone, as they are all questions that have to be answered by everyone, even if it is in the negative. How should I balance my needs against those of the group? What is the summum bonum? How do I set myself in right relation to God, and with other people? How should I treat other people, and expect to be treated? These are all Questions that have profound influence on our daily lives. My life was changed, not from meeting a Christian, as I've been a Christian all my life, but by meeting a saintly (and I don't use the word lightly) Carmelite nun, and resolved to act towards others more as she did. I used to be more of a jackass to people in real life, now I'm only a jackass occasionally to people online. I consider that an improvement. =)
>>Now, in what way does most philosophy expand our minds?
If you'd sat outside a theatre, like I did, after a showing of The Matrix and saw how peoples' minds got blown by the tired brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, you'd see how much people love thinking about those things, and how thinking about those things expands their minds. It literally feels like your brain is getting stretched the first time you encounter these puzzles, and there's a lot of them.
>>Most of us tech-types are still operating on the assumption that the oil peak is a glitch and fusion is going to save all our asses. But what if it doesn't? Are we psychologically prepared to cope for the "we split the atom and went to the moon and now we can't even run tractors anymore???"
Not going to happen. We have coal reserves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process
You're confusing laissez-faire with anarchy.
In a laissez-faire economy, the government will punish "evildoers" who break their contracts and/or impinge on the freedoms of others. It's in an anarchist society that corporations and individuals can act with impunity.