As far as I can tell, being in control is one ingredient of becoming a leader. Company which manages itself in maximally rational way has better chances to become leader, and thus they do so. In your case, they figured that with you having so much power, you could become an obstacle on their way to more and more money, by demanding them to waste more money on irrelevancies (ie. your recreation). If I were a manager, I might consider that course, not necessarily because I want power but because I want more money. So no, they're not control-freaks, they're just greedy. There's a difference... isn't there?
Not that I know anything, but his management reasoning sounds reasonable to me. If you're that irreplaceable (and keep getting less and less replaceable by time, don't you?), then what's to stop you from, say, extorting more wage? Better work hours? Anything? In a position like that you don't need an union, you have alone enough impact to back your demands. Of course, you might not have a real reason to do so, but even if there's a slim chance then you're a potential liability. I suppose they just assume everyone is out to grab as much as they can, which is just natural, considering they are the 'mind' of the corporations which are agents of greed.
Are you telling me that there
is not the slightest chance that creationism is the truth? Faith tells us that God is all knowing and all powerful.
You know, instead of repeating that "absence of proof" phrase again, I'll do the slightly rares version of the same idea. Here's a simple pseudo-perl code to see if your argument (usually one defending religion) is fallacious in one specific type:
$_="your_argument";
s/$entity_being_proved/$something_absurd/g; # for example, s/creationism/sporalogy/g
print;
Set appropriate values to variables and run the above code. Does the argument it outputs make sense?
Since the religious type is known to occasionally act in slightly irrational way, here's a simple example:
$_=<<EOT
Does it make you happy to crap on other people's faith? I love science and all the evidence in the world points to evolution, but I still believe in creationism. Are you telling me that there
is not the slightest chance that creationism is the truth? Faith tells us that God is all knowing and all powerful. He could have made the universe 5 minutes ago and created you in it with
all the memories you have. You think you can out think the Lord. How naive.
EOT
# [appropriate substitutions] print;
Does it make you happy to crap on other people's faith? I love science and all the evidence in the world points to astrology, but I still believe in sporalogy. Are you telling me that there
is not the slightest chance that sporalogy is the truth? Faith tells us that trains are all knowing and all powerful. Trains determiny our destiny.. You think you can out think the Trains. How naive.
My meager highschooler (surprise!) brain has also been pondering on the apparent randomness of some mathematical properties (I must admit, though, I found it curious that the pseudo-random generator inside geometrical constant turns out to be stronger than anything we could produce).
Digits of contants are nice and easy source of bits to test for randomness, but what about random orderings of a set of integers (1.. n)? I've found at least one source that might be interesting, but I can't figure out how to test it reliably; to do that, I'd need to convert the set to bitstream. How do I do that? I mean, it's obvious I can get a list of random numbers, first one in range [1,n], second in [1,n-1] and so on, but that's n numbers, each with different range.
P.S. I doubt anyone reads this. I just rant to myself, helps to clarify to myself what I'm thinking. This story is, like, couple of hours old already!
I propose we start giving applications random names. You can always./file # let's see if this application does what I want it to to every program you come across...
The whole point of a name is to let you to ignore it, for teufelssake.
...I won't sign it up in goatse.cx mailing list, but it'd be much more convenient platform for, mmm, discussions.
I said nothing of soul but please show your proof of it's absence or that it is "simpler." There is no reason to think you are equipped to explain the world or even to comprehensively
describe that which you can measure. This is very different from a soul.
You didn't say soul but I'll bet my ascii doughtnut you sure as hell meant it. Mechanistic model is simpler because so far everything else in world can be explained with mechanism. So, we have two otherwise equal explanations for consciousness, other relying on mechanism which is for other areas proven and working method, other is something mysterious which doesn't manifest itself in anything else and which even its proponents don't really know anything about. That's what my analogue was about; we have two models for gravity, other fits nicely with everything else we know, and other just conjures up something ridiculous (little men with green hats) and says "it could be this!".
Oh, really? Explain consciousness then.
What's the to explain? Person receives information through senses. Person processes that information with a complicated neural network. Person sends signals to muscles to interact with the world. The problem is? (and don't give me that "but where comes the I feeling then?!" crap... feelings are just internal feedback routines in our brain, and that I feeling is fundamentally no different from that dog is biting my leg, it hurts feeling.)
Fuck off, Mr. Science. If I wanted to listen to some moron spouting his faith, I'd go to church. Please learn a thing or two about the foundations of your beloved science.
Am learning all the time, while you rant about why mechanism is flawed without even bothering to tell us how it's flawed. And very convenient quote you picked; the "just shut up. Please" part had a fucking conditional. By picking up that part you basically say "no, I won't" to my request "please tell me what is wrong with the mechanistic consciousness".
There is nothing wrong with the assumption that matter (and thus simply a long row of "formal methods") can be used to reproduce 'intelligence' or 'consciousness'. It is simpler assumption than to assume some mystic "soul" for which there is no other proof.
To say that "since you can't be sure matter can be used to simulate consciousness, you must assume it can't be" (like you're saying) is a bit like saying "since you can't know gravity isn't caused by little men with green hats, you must assume it is so".
Until you tell me exactly what is wrong with the mechanistic consciousness assertion, when it fits everything else we know about world just fine, and why I should assert the existence of some "soul", just shut up. Please.
Ay, I wonder, how do they 'know' this algorithm is correct? Do they ever make mistakes?
Unless being able to multiply large numbers fast et cetera carries some sort of evolutionary usefulness, I really fail to see how such algorithm has evolved, but there it is. If the feat was random effect, wouldn't there be vastly greater number of savants who made this calculation but all wrong? This, imho, implies either that
1. We have all the components necessary for such calculations in our head, these savants only managed to connect them. These components are all necessary somewhere else, and therefore produce correct results (trajectory calculations, anyone?)
2. The trait didn't evolve in such sense that it's not induced by genes but by something that happened in the brain after the birth, in a sense, "was developed". We seem able to perform basic calculations intuitively; I suppose it's possible these people could have put a part of their neural network in the process of "teaching" their NN to do inhuman calculations by verifying the results through normal methods. Why, beats me.
Instead of _possibly_ gaining X, not gaining X for sure (from that one pirate)
makes it a strawman argument...
I still maintain that a violation of contract is the only justification for the illegality of copying software.
Did I misread something? The first quote seemed to make you agree with me that piracy is theft is the pirate was going to buy the software and pirating made him decide otherwise. By the third quote, must we now conclude that all pirates only pirate software they wouldn't buy?
My argument never was that all pirates are thieves. I'm simply saying that those who would otherwise have bought the software are. Is there an agreement on this or not?
he lottery money (you won it) already belonged to you before it was stolen. For the software, the sales have not happened, and there is no guarantee that they will occur even if the pirates^H^H^H^H^H^H^H potential buyers have lots of money to spend.
If the pirates wouldn't have bought the software, I agree with you. However, if they would have, I maintain: what's the difference? The lottery money belonged? How is this belonging different from my software sales money belonging to me?
The lottery money "belongs" to me in the sense that the former owner of the money (lottery company) promised this money would be delivered to me to be used in any way that I wish. This software sales money belongs to me in the same sense that the software buyers promise to deliver me the money upon buying. Whether this delivery happens now or in the future is irrelevant; to understate this, I said "but the lottery money is not yet delivered".
If my analogues are too weak for you (I hate analogues anyways, they're for religious people) and if you're still there, just tell me this: why is (to not gain any money INSTEAD OF gaining X money) different from (to lose X money INSTEAD of not gaining any money)? The former being piracy, the latter theft, in both cases 1) the end sum difference is the same (-X), 2) both were justified means of gaining money.
Or do you dispute the 'justified'? Why is it less justified to gain money by zero-copy-cost mechanisms? Do you quibble about material items with extremely low production costs sold for high prices too? As I see it, in free market the point is not how expensive the product was to make (the production cost for producer is IRRELEVANT as far as the customer is concerned) but what customers are ready to pay for it.
A potential loss is not an actual loss, hence it is not theft--no one is losing what they have _now_.
I still don't see the difference between the so-called "potential" and "actual" in this case. Both cause you to have less money. The difference?
I used the steal-lottery-money example because it had a similar properties; that you didn't lose anything you already had. As for the property, well, some would argue that property in itself isn't a universal law, but I'd argue...
The lottery money is bound to come to you if I won't steal it, and likewise, software sales money is bound to come to you unless someone pirates your software. What is the difference? Some 'moral' value? That stealing lottery money is wrong because this money "belongs" to you, whereas pirating your software is wrong because the money that would have come from sales... what? Doesn't belong to you?
Yes, you're right. Which is why we need a better incentive than money to motivate coding. I wonder why nobody has ever managed to create a non-authoritarian socialism (www.politicalcampass.org)...
[And mediocre repetitive comments continue... yet when I read this article, no comment mentioned this]
When I give you a copy of free software that I've written, I lost nothing. Nobody takes anything from me, and parasites do not damage or weaken the host in any way.
Event A causes loss of value iff total value is lower in the world where A happened compared to world that is otherwise identical except that A didn't happen. And so pirating is loss, and so BSD parasites do cause loss through inhibition of growth. Saying that "since you didn't *absolutely* lose, you didn't lose at all when someone parasited your code" is like saying "software pirates don't hurt the industry" is like saying "you won in lottery, a bus full of money was driving to give them to you but I raided the bus before you even know you won".
Don't human brains do that as well to create art? How is it different?
Arguably, human brain usually processes information (emotions, intent) usually in such a way that the in the produced art, significant is the message encoded in the image. Aaron does not encode such message, it's comparable to a random string of characters. Whether computer of human made it is irrelevant, if I drew random drawings or wrote random strings, it wouldn't be art either.
Where is the evidence of nature becoming more and more complex?
If you accept that the laws of physics as we currently estimate them to be even remotely correct, would you like to take a look at very simple computer programs which produce complexity from seemingly nowhere? I think it's called evolutionary computing, and I've yet to hear a sensible argument from creationists against it. No, "it's computers not real life" is not really that good, I think, as the parallels are evident.
I didn't say I'm against diverse features. I'm against diverse/projects/. Microsoft was a problem because it was one project with one goal; I don't see linux, for example, as such problem because it's one project with many goals. Likewise, rather than two projects (cDc vs. freenet for example), I'd prefer seeing one with plug-ins/mods/forks/whatever for different purposes. Because, if you do different projects, you're bound to do some reinventing if the projects have anything at all to do with each other (P2P...).
Amh. How come? Another project will always create duplication of effort, meaning that if the coders had worked on one project instead of many, that one project would be better than any of those many projects. What are the benefits of additional projects? And don't say "diverse features" or something like that, that's bullshit, I see no reason why all the features couldn't be in one client, provided the architechture is versatile enough. And it should be.
So that way you don't get gaps where you have to say "thousand-something"
In Finland (and we use Germans' number system, see post up and backward) thousand million (or 10^9) is "miljardi", which I used to translate "milliard". I found it much more logical; billion is (2 times 6) powers of ten, billiard (hehe;]) is (2.5 times 6) powers of ten.
So... if microsoft uses GPL'd code snippet and refuses to make the entire program GPL, you'll sue them and make then remove it.
What if microsoft says the code is free speech and refers to DeCSS case you will win? There are differences, obviously, like microsoft's code not being open, but they are already giving out their code to some parties. That their "speech", or code, is under microsoft's license, not GPL, should make no difference.
...I have this sneaking suspicion that the amount of work required is so high that none of them will ever be completed.
Competition good: motivation to do better (exploiting the human competitive instinct), forced to optimize, blabla
Competition bad: reinventing the wheel, wasting effort on doing the same thing over and over again, and so on
Depending on how high is the project's objective, it will require more and more resources (developers) to ever complete - otherwise it will be progressing so slowly that it will be obsolete by the time it completes, or the developers will just give up. Doing an 'echo' program is simple enough for one man, doing a MMORPG isn't. If these projects are really staggering this much, there's too much competition; merge a few and try again.
majik3D was my favourite for-the-skies MMORPG but they went out of GPL, I'm not too familiar with details but apparently a company, shall we say, intimately collaborates with them and wanted Majik proprietary. There was some hassle with some proprietary libraries too, but that's the essence, and I also got the impression from their lead developer that they weren't too impressed with one lousy patch they received for being GPL.
That probably doesn't have anything to do with this and likely is inaccurate anyways, but I thought you'd like another pointless comment to waste your space.
Slashdot Mirror
I've lost a couple of illusions about our society in past few weeks. I think that one, conveniently posted as AC, removed another one.
-Kaatunut
You know, instead of repeating that "absence of proof" phrase again, I'll do the slightly rares version of the same idea. Here's a simple pseudo-perl code to see if your argument (usually one defending religion) is fallacious in one specific type:
Set appropriate values to variables and run the above code. Does the argument it outputs make sense?
Since the religious type is known to occasionally act in slightly irrational way, here's a simple example:
$_=<<EOT
# [appropriate substitutions]
print;
That's how you probably sound to non-believers. See also Invisible Pink Unicorn.
Digits of contants are nice and easy source of bits to test for randomness, but what about random orderings of a set of integers (1 .. n)? I've found at least one source that might be interesting, but I can't figure out how to test it reliably; to do that, I'd need to convert the set to bitstream. How do I do that? I mean, it's obvious I can get a list of random numbers, first one in range [1,n], second in [1,n-1] and so on, but that's n numbers, each with different range.
P.S. I doubt anyone reads this. I just rant to myself, helps to clarify to myself what I'm thinking. This story is, like, couple of hours old already!
The whole point of a name is to let you to ignore it, for teufelssake.
I said nothing of soul but please show your proof of it's absence or that it is "simpler." There is no reason to think you are equipped to explain the world or even to comprehensively describe that which you can measure. This is very different from a soul.
You didn't say soul but I'll bet my ascii doughtnut you sure as hell meant it. Mechanistic model is simpler because so far everything else in world can be explained with mechanism. So, we have two otherwise equal explanations for consciousness, other relying on mechanism which is for other areas proven and working method, other is something mysterious which doesn't manifest itself in anything else and which even its proponents don't really know anything about. That's what my analogue was about; we have two models for gravity, other fits nicely with everything else we know, and other just conjures up something ridiculous (little men with green hats) and says "it could be this!".
Oh, really? Explain consciousness then.
What's the to explain? Person receives information through senses. Person processes that information with a complicated neural network. Person sends signals to muscles to interact with the world. The problem is? (and don't give me that "but where comes the I feeling then?!" crap... feelings are just internal feedback routines in our brain, and that I feeling is fundamentally no different from that dog is biting my leg, it hurts feeling.)
Fuck off, Mr. Science. If I wanted to listen to some moron spouting his faith, I'd go to church. Please learn a thing or two about the foundations of your beloved science.
Am learning all the time, while you rant about why mechanism is flawed without even bothering to tell us how it's flawed. And very convenient quote you picked; the "just shut up. Please" part had a fucking conditional. By picking up that part you basically say "no, I won't" to my request "please tell me what is wrong with the mechanistic consciousness".
To say that "since you can't be sure matter can be used to simulate consciousness, you must assume it can't be" (like you're saying) is a bit like saying "since you can't know gravity isn't caused by little men with green hats, you must assume it is so".
Until you tell me exactly what is wrong with the mechanistic consciousness assertion, when it fits everything else we know about world just fine, and why I should assert the existence of some "soul", just shut up. Please.
Unless being able to multiply large numbers fast et cetera carries some sort of evolutionary usefulness, I really fail to see how such algorithm has evolved, but there it is. If the feat was random effect, wouldn't there be vastly greater number of savants who made this calculation but all wrong? This, imho, implies either that
1. We have all the components necessary for such calculations in our head, these savants only managed to connect them. These components are all necessary somewhere else, and therefore produce correct results (trajectory calculations, anyone?)
2. The trait didn't evolve in such sense that it's not induced by genes but by something that happened in the brain after the birth, in a sense, "was developed". We seem able to perform basic calculations intuitively; I suppose it's possible these people could have put a part of their neural network in the process of "teaching" their NN to do inhuman calculations by verifying the results through normal methods. Why, beats me.
Does anyone know if they ever make mistakes?
Did I misread something? The first quote seemed to make you agree with me that piracy is theft is the pirate was going to buy the software and pirating made him decide otherwise. By the third quote, must we now conclude that all pirates only pirate software they wouldn't buy?
My argument never was that all pirates are thieves. I'm simply saying that those who would otherwise have bought the software are. Is there an agreement on this or not?
If the pirates wouldn't have bought the software, I agree with you. However, if they would have, I maintain: what's the difference? The lottery money belonged? How is this belonging different from my software sales money belonging to me?
The lottery money "belongs" to me in the sense that the former owner of the money (lottery company) promised this money would be delivered to me to be used in any way that I wish. This software sales money belongs to me in the same sense that the software buyers promise to deliver me the money upon buying. Whether this delivery happens now or in the future is irrelevant; to understate this, I said "but the lottery money is not yet delivered".
If my analogues are too weak for you (I hate analogues anyways, they're for religious people) and if you're still there, just tell me this: why is (to not gain any money INSTEAD OF gaining X money) different from (to lose X money INSTEAD of not gaining any money)? The former being piracy, the latter theft, in both cases 1) the end sum difference is the same (-X), 2) both were justified means of gaining money.
Or do you dispute the 'justified'? Why is it less justified to gain money by zero-copy-cost mechanisms? Do you quibble about material items with extremely low production costs sold for high prices too? As I see it, in free market the point is not how expensive the product was to make (the production cost for producer is IRRELEVANT as far as the customer is concerned) but what customers are ready to pay for it.
I still don't see the difference between the so-called "potential" and "actual" in this case. Both cause you to have less money. The difference?
I used the steal-lottery-money example because it had a similar properties; that you didn't lose anything you already had. As for the property, well, some would argue that property in itself isn't a universal law, but I'd argue...
The lottery money is bound to come to you if I won't steal it, and likewise, software sales money is bound to come to you unless someone pirates your software. What is the difference? Some 'moral' value? That stealing lottery money is wrong because this money "belongs" to you, whereas pirating your software is wrong because the money that would have come from sales... what? Doesn't belong to you?
Event A causes loss of value iff total value is lower in the world where A happened compared to world that is otherwise identical except that A didn't happen. And so pirating is loss, and so BSD parasites do cause loss through inhibition of growth. Saying that "since you didn't *absolutely* lose, you didn't lose at all when someone parasited your code" is like saying "software pirates don't hurt the industry" is like saying "you won in lottery, a bus full of money was driving to give them to you but I raided the bus before you even know you won".
OK, so my analogues are weird. Whatever.
Arguably, human brain usually processes information (emotions, intent) usually in such a way that the in the produced art, significant is the message encoded in the image. Aaron does not encode such message, it's comparable to a random string of characters. Whether computer of human made it is irrelevant, if I drew random drawings or wrote random strings, it wouldn't be art either.
And that would be?...
If you accept that the laws of physics as we currently estimate them to be even remotely correct, would you like to take a look at very simple computer programs which produce complexity from seemingly nowhere? I think it's called evolutionary computing, and I've yet to hear a sensible argument from creationists against it. No, "it's computers not real life" is not really that good, I think, as the parallels are evident.
-Kaatunut
I didn't say I'm against diverse features. I'm against diverse /projects/. Microsoft was a problem because it was one project with one goal; I don't see linux, for example, as such problem because it's one project with many goals. Likewise, rather than two projects (cDc vs. freenet for example), I'd prefer seeing one with plug-ins/mods/forks/whatever for different purposes. Because, if you do different projects, you're bound to do some reinventing if the projects have anything at all to do with each other (P2P...).
Amh. How come? Another project will always create duplication of effort, meaning that if the coders had worked on one project instead of many, that one project would be better than any of those many projects. What are the benefits of additional projects? And don't say "diverse features" or something like that, that's bullshit, I see no reason why all the features couldn't be in one client, provided the architechture is versatile enough. And it should be.
-Kaatunut
In Finland (and we use Germans' number system, see post up and backward) thousand million (or 10^9) is "miljardi", which I used to translate "milliard". I found it much more logical; billion is (2 times 6) powers of ten, billiard (hehe ;]) is (2.5 times 6) powers of ten.
I never understood the logic in that.
Million: 10^6
American Billion: 10^9
Real Billion: 10^12
American Trillion (?): 10^12 (is it?)
Real Trillion: 10^18
Did I get that right? And if I did, look at the progression and tell me which is more logical, 6k or 3+3k.
What if microsoft says the code is free speech and refers to DeCSS case you will win? There are differences, obviously, like microsoft's code not being open, but they are already giving out their code to some parties. That their "speech", or code, is under microsoft's license, not GPL, should make no difference.
Competition good: motivation to do better (exploiting the human competitive instinct), forced to optimize, blabla
Competition bad: reinventing the wheel, wasting effort on doing the same thing over and over again, and so on
Depending on how high is the project's objective, it will require more and more resources (developers) to ever complete - otherwise it will be progressing so slowly that it will be obsolete by the time it completes, or the developers will just give up. Doing an 'echo' program is simple enough for one man, doing a MMORPG isn't. If these projects are really staggering this much, there's too much competition; merge a few and try again.
majik3D was my favourite for-the-skies MMORPG but they went out of GPL, I'm not too familiar with details but apparently a company, shall we say, intimately collaborates with them and wanted Majik proprietary. There was some hassle with some proprietary libraries too, but that's the essence, and I also got the impression from their lead developer that they weren't too impressed with one lousy patch they received for being GPL.
That probably doesn't have anything to do with this and likely is inaccurate anyways, but I thought you'd like another pointless comment to waste your space.