Now, I'm a very big company who makes developer tools for my platform, and developer toolkit is the most used. I give out a free C compiler with my developer kit which everyone uses.
Except for one small problem - my compiler expects all ints to be floats, and all floats to be ints.
The developers get around this problem - how? By writing code that works on both other compilers and on my compilers. But wait, there are some lazy ones out there who just do not care about the minority of other compilers out there, and write C code which works only in my compiler.
So what have I done? I've essentially _changed_ the way C is being programmed - because there is now a section of developers who follow MY version of C to cater to folks on my platform, and those that code in good old C.
Microsoft has done EXACTLY this - except that it is HTML instead of C, a web-browser instead of a compiler. Get it now?
Well, in all fairness, standards are useless if nobody follows them.
If Microsoft can design standards that the rest of the industry would follow, I'd like to see them do it.
Really, it's quite irritating when you have a standard that the big guys don't follow - you usually design systems which work for others, and which works for the big guys - almost two or more standards.
If MS says they are going to design standards, I suggest we tell them they can - but on the condition that they should adhere to what they design, and not go around breaking it all the place. Maybe tie it up with fair-trade practices and stuff, just to make sure.
That way, we could atleast -know- what the hell is it that they are breaking, and design our systems to accomodate that.
But I don't see that happening because unlike most other big businesses, Microsoft tends to be very -petty- and -cheap- when it comes to following standards. Which is what sucks.
It's one thing not to follow standards for business sense, like I mentioned elsewhere. It's another to do so just because you're a powerful behemoth.
Take even the simple case of support for PNG - why the hell can't they go ahead and do it? Oh wait, it's not because of business or the market. It's because we're fucking big and don't care two hoots about you or your petty little problems. It's that kinda attitude that _really_ pisses me off.
Well, they do what makes business sense to them. That cannot be helped.
Back in the days, companies like Bell Labs set the standards because they were largely monopolistic. That is not true these days, however you do have a lot of businesses that have vested interests in implementing a standard.
Microsoft does not need not adhere to a standard unless the market wants them to, and which is exactly what they do. It is one thing to draft standards in the drawing room, another to get these to work in the board room.
Both are very, very different environments. Microsoft strikes a balance that is sensible from their perspective, unfair and painful from the perspective of most others.
6. Consumer investments are never to be undone by a standard.
I think this is the most important one - simply because if it does not make business and market sense, a standard is useless. Being an academic in the industry, I very often come across this - people in the academia want to implement standards without realizing how it would affect the market, and the impacts that it would have on existing businesses. And then they wonder why the standards failed.
Why? Because unless it is beneficial to the businesses at large, and makes technical _and_ business sense, standards are not going to be implemented. Not only that, changing or implementing a standard is going to break a lot of existing stuff, and companies often need to see some kind of adoption before they jump in.
And often, if a few big businesses decided not to jump in, it is going to fail because they would control a large chunk of the market. This is not always true, but sometimes it affects how things work - classic example being that of IE. IE does not follow standards, yet it is popular. Webdesigners design to make things work in the real world (tm) browsers, and not in compliance to XHTML standards. Why? Because it makes practical sense.
Ofcourse, sad part is that business often do not respect standards, and those setting standards do not sufficiently respect business practices. Classic Catch 22.
Hmm, I'll agree with you partially, but with reservations.
Slashdotters are smart yes, but not the intellectual elite.
The real intellectual elites are out there doing hardsciences like physics or math or biology. They're the kind who're responsible for genuine progress, but the kind you don't really hear about except for in obscure journals. And the kind who would not know or care about an online forum:)
And to be fair, there is a lot of good science out there that is non-English. I noticed that you seem to be a mathematician - surely you must know that a lot of good stuff out there is done by people in places like Russia and Israel, and it's not in English.
A large section of Slashdotters would like to pretend that they are the intellectual elite, while they are not - the noise to signal ratio is too high. Agreed, there is a _very_ small chunk of smart people here, but that's a very very small percentage.
And lately, Slashdot is beginning to have a very corporate-ish slant rather than an intellectual one. That means that it also draws in more of the MBA types, which is a bad thing, IMHO.
If I write a software for Windows that uses a particular feature that also has the potential be exploited, do not blame the guy who wrote the software.
Blame the guy who exploits it and blame Windows.
Google has used a feature in Windows that has potential for exploit, but neither did Google write that feature nor did Google take advantage of that expoloit - Google merely used a natural feature in the OS. If someone exploits that feature of the OS, it's not Google's fault.
However, the problem is that Google actually tries to portray a benign image. Although I must admit that so far they have kept that up.
However, as an AC has pointed out in this thread, that is the problem of being a public company.
Although your motives may be benign, you're under the control of your share-holders. At which point all bets are off and you will be scrutinised very closely.
No, I meant that as a rebuttal to the original poster's point -
Google's tool could be a danger if someone figures out a way to launch it remotely, by getting a user to click a link, or through some Windows exploit.
That was the exploit that I was talking about, I highlighted my other point clearly as a bug/feature depending on how you configure it and whom you ask.
Worse, all that this does is use a feature of the OS - nothing more.
It's almost National Enquirer-esque, sensationalist.
Whether or not Google intended this, I take great pause at knowing any e-mail I write or read on a PC with Google Desktop Search could be called up and read by a complete stranger.
If a complete stranger has physical access to your single user system, you have more problems than you realize. Don't blame Google for that. Duh.
While your passport may not be linked directly to your XBL account, we would not know if MS has other way of keeping a tab on you. It's Microsoft we're talking about here, you know?
For all you know, they may have their IP on you. That would be good enough for them to contact your ISP and come after you.
One of my research labs uses Mac OSX exlusively. I've nothing against it, except that personally I find the UI non-intuitive.
The quirky features just gets in the way of getting my work done. Btw, am not too fond of Windows either, but sometimes a clean basic Windows Install is not as bad as it's made out to be.
I guess it's just a question of what you are used to.
I really don't think they have any "industrial espionage" grade folks - merely glorified script kiddies. Usually, you do these things and keep quiet, if you're bragging about it you can be pretty sure you're a script kiddie.
First off, great post. If only all the religious people were equally scientifically minded as you are, we would not be having this argument.
Yes, the Catholic Church professes to have the truth, but on what topics?
Well, apparently, they claimed to have the truth on how we were all created. And how the Earth is the center of the Universe. And a lot of other things. True, they've changed their stance - but at what expense? At the expense of burning all those people at the stake and killing all those people for speaking out against the Church?
If he had merely claimed "Look, I have a neat scientific result that explains matters that have nothing to do with religion," he would have had many fewer problems.
Galileo was a man of his times. He was raised a Christian, and he felt his beliefs challenged - and raised that point to the Church. It is the pursuit of truth that matters, if people should be scared of telling the truth out, you've already violated the fundamental sanctity of science.
Second, the Church is made up of men, and men make mistakes.
When my advisor proves me to be wrong, he does not burn me at a stake or sentence me to life imprisonment. There are mistakes and there's stupidity. Surely you cannot discount the fact that the way the Church treated science back then was quite wrong. I agree that the Church's stance has changed today, but I feel that's mostly because they do not have a choice, rather than because they want to make a conscious shift in their way of thinking - but this is a very personal opinion and I could be wrong, and I hope I'm wrong.
So far, I've countered all your examples, showing that the Catholic Church has no problem with science, although it occaisionally makes mistakes, and that it usually raises objections only when scientists start trying to claim that their science disproves religion, when their results say nothing to that end.
Such as killing them, imprisoning them, screwing their happiness and in general discouraging them from the pursuit of the truth, because it would go against their professed beliefs. Yes, apart from that, the Church was quite friendly towards science. Am sure they were on cool-ez-bro terms, too and smoked a joint or two together.
We have also established that a human being is created at conception.
Yes, what offends me is that while the Church takes such a moral stance against the embryos of Man, it discounts ALL other life. Why, even plants have life. Animals have life. Is it not wrong for us to kill them? The attitude that somehow because man is on top of the foodchain, he is above all other life is something I will not buy.
You have used moral arguments to prove that according to Christian beliefs, but there are several other religions out that there that place truth above all else - even life. Some Eastern religions have a view that every life is equal, therefore you either abstain from all killings to the extent possible (live like an ascetic eating only dead plants and minimal water), or do not have a conscience in what you kill since everything goes back to the Karmic cycle. In their perspective, any research of any kind is not wrong. It is encouraged, even.
Because you believe that it is only life when it is human, and advocate not killing even a few cells, while I say that all life is equal - if you are having that attitude, have it towards all life or do not have it at all.
So, even if we did not have to all agree that embryonic stem cell research is just wrong, why would we want to waste money on an inferior method anyway?
Because it is science. Because those embryos will anyway be killed (they are embryos from fertility clinics that will be destroyed if nobody uses them).
Why not?
PS - I have not gotten into the ethical and moral issues of the Church, especially since it's a very personal topic, and beliefs are largely a function of what value-system you were raised in. I was raised in a predominantly eastern value system, therefore I do not agree with a lot of what you had to say. I just felt that I was not informed enough nor qualified enough to counter your points.
See, the problem is that people like that will go ahead and fund research on their own in some lab in North Korea or Pakistan. They would not really care.
That's the problem - whether or not we do it first, the bad guys are going to do it for themselves anyway, if it's going to benefit them. So why not us, and at the very least reap the benefits for our people?
That's not the way science works. You need to substantiate proof for a theory, else the theory is invalidated.
You asked him to prove that it does _not_ have a soul - that's assumed. Nothing has a soul - define a soul? Unless you can prove to me what a soul is in black and white and recreate it, there is no soul.
When the Aether theory was made, people had to prove that there was Aether, and that could not be shown - in fact the experiments proved otherwise. Hence the theory was thrown out. In this case, show me that there is a soul, else the theory is baseless.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's take a programming language, say C.
Now, I'm a very big company who makes developer tools for my platform, and developer toolkit is the most used. I give out a free C compiler with my developer kit which everyone uses.
Except for one small problem - my compiler expects all ints to be floats, and all floats to be ints.
The developers get around this problem - how? By writing code that works on both other compilers and on my compilers. But wait, there are some lazy ones out there who just do not care about the minority of other compilers out there, and write C code which works only in my compiler.
So what have I done? I've essentially _changed_ the way C is being programmed - because there is now a section of developers who follow MY version of C to cater to folks on my platform, and those that code in good old C.
Microsoft has done EXACTLY this - except that it is HTML instead of C, a web-browser instead of a compiler. Get it now?
Maybe because he belongs to the One.
;)
Cooperation is not a prerequisite for comprehension. Or something like that
Well, in all fairness, standards are useless if nobody follows them.
If Microsoft can design standards that the rest of the industry would follow, I'd like to see them do it.
Really, it's quite irritating when you have a standard that the big guys don't follow - you usually design systems which work for others, and which works for the big guys - almost two or more standards.
If MS says they are going to design standards, I suggest we tell them they can - but on the condition that they should adhere to what they design, and not go around breaking it all the place. Maybe tie it up with fair-trade practices and stuff, just to make sure.
That way, we could atleast -know- what the hell is it that they are breaking, and design our systems to accomodate that.
But I don't see that happening because unlike most other big businesses, Microsoft tends to be very -petty- and -cheap- when it comes to following standards. Which is what sucks.
It's one thing not to follow standards for business sense, like I mentioned elsewhere. It's another to do so just because you're a powerful behemoth.
Take even the simple case of support for PNG - why the hell can't they go ahead and do it? Oh wait, it's not because of business or the market. It's because we're fucking big and don't care two hoots about you or your petty little problems. It's that kinda attitude that _really_ pisses me off.
Well, they do what makes business sense to them. That cannot be helped.
Back in the days, companies like Bell Labs set the standards because they were largely monopolistic. That is not true these days, however you do have a lot of businesses that have vested interests in implementing a standard.
Microsoft does not need not adhere to a standard unless the market wants them to, and which is exactly what they do. It is one thing to draft standards in the drawing room, another to get these to work in the board room.
Both are very, very different environments. Microsoft strikes a balance that is sensible from their perspective, unfair and painful from the perspective of most others.
6. Consumer investments are never to be undone by a standard.
I think this is the most important one - simply because if it does not make business and market sense, a standard is useless. Being an academic in the industry, I very often come across this - people in the academia want to implement standards without realizing how it would affect the market, and the impacts that it would have on existing businesses. And then they wonder why the standards failed.
Why? Because unless it is beneficial to the businesses at large, and makes technical _and_ business sense, standards are not going to be implemented. Not only that, changing or implementing a standard is going to break a lot of existing stuff, and companies often need to see some kind of adoption before they jump in.
And often, if a few big businesses decided not to jump in, it is going to fail because they would control a large chunk of the market. This is not always true, but sometimes it affects how things work - classic example being that of IE. IE does not follow standards, yet it is popular. Webdesigners design to make things work in the real world (tm) browsers, and not in compliance to XHTML standards. Why? Because it makes practical sense.
Ofcourse, sad part is that business often do not respect standards, and those setting standards do not sufficiently respect business practices. Classic Catch 22.
Neither.
:-/
I'm commenting in the middle of a Friday night.
I need a life to begin with
Hmm, I'll agree with you partially, but with reservations.
:)
Slashdotters are smart yes, but not the intellectual elite.
The real intellectual elites are out there doing hardsciences like physics or math or biology. They're the kind who're responsible for genuine progress, but the kind you don't really hear about except for in obscure journals. And the kind who would not know or care about an online forum
And to be fair, there is a lot of good science out there that is non-English. I noticed that you seem to be a mathematician - surely you must know that a lot of good stuff out there is done by people in places like Russia and Israel, and it's not in English.
A large section of Slashdotters would like to pretend that they are the intellectual elite, while they are not - the noise to signal ratio is too high. Agreed, there is a _very_ small chunk of smart people here, but that's a very very small percentage.
And lately, Slashdot is beginning to have a very corporate-ish slant rather than an intellectual one. That means that it also draws in more of the MBA types, which is a bad thing, IMHO.
Young Paduwan, I was about to point that out when I saw your own response.
:)
Good enlightenment is, yes!
Horribly wrong analogy.
If I write a software for Windows that uses a particular feature that also has the potential be exploited, do not blame the guy who wrote the software.
Blame the guy who exploits it and blame Windows.
Google has used a feature in Windows that has potential for exploit, but neither did Google write that feature nor did Google take advantage of that expoloit - Google merely used a natural feature in the OS. If someone exploits that feature of the OS, it's not Google's fault.
Get that?
Well said.
However, the problem is that Google actually tries to portray a benign image. Although I must admit that so far they have kept that up.
However, as an AC has pointed out in this thread, that is the problem of being a public company.
Although your motives may be benign, you're under the control of your share-holders. At which point all bets are off and you will be scrutinised very closely.
No, I meant that as a rebuttal to the original poster's point -
Google's tool could be a danger if someone figures out a way to launch it remotely, by getting a user to click a link, or through some Windows exploit.
That was the exploit that I was talking about, I highlighted my other point clearly as a bug/feature depending on how you configure it and whom you ask.
Worse, all that this does is use a feature of the OS - nothing more.
It's almost National Enquirer-esque, sensationalist.
Whether or not Google intended this, I take great pause at knowing any e-mail I write or read on a PC with Google Desktop Search could be called up and read by a complete stranger.
If a complete stranger has physical access to your single user system, you have more problems than you realize. Don't blame Google for that. Duh.
Well, there you go - Windows Exploit.
The problem in that case becomes Microsoft's, not Google's. It's just using a feature (or a bug, depends on the perspective) that exists in Windows.
It's easy to blame third parties whose software can be exploited because of inherent problems in the OS, but you're passing the buck.
Maybe if the OS were more secure, the possibilities for such exploits wouldn't exist in the first place.
Exactly.
While your passport may not be linked directly to your XBL account, we would not know if MS has other way of keeping a tab on you. It's Microsoft we're talking about here, you know?
For all you know, they may have their IP on you. That would be good enough for them to contact your ISP and come after you.
You could try. For starters, register to vote :)
You, sir, seem to have a knack for making euphemisms.
Very bad, indeed!
Well, I've used it for extended periods of time.
One of my research labs uses Mac OSX exlusively. I've nothing against it, except that personally I find the UI non-intuitive.
The quirky features just gets in the way of getting my work done. Btw, am not too fond of Windows either, but sometimes a clean basic Windows Install is not as bad as it's made out to be.
I guess it's just a question of what you are used to.
No. If I wanted a Mac, I'll buy a Mac.
Apple's business is primarily hardware, why would they want to do something like this?
Besides, I do not quite like the UI of the MacOS. I think it really sucks.
It's North Korea we're talking about ;)
I really don't think they have any "industrial espionage" grade folks - merely glorified script kiddies. Usually, you do these things and keep quiet, if you're bragging about it you can be pretty sure you're a script kiddie.
Read the whole thread - I was _supporting_ the research not putting it down.
I'm all for science, and FYI agnostic. I care two fucks for any and all kinds of beliefs, except for science.
Hmm, this is almost entirely what my graduate Introduction to HCI class covered.
:)
Quite cool, though. Maybe my HCI prof would find it interesting
First off, great post. If only all the religious people were equally scientifically minded as you are, we would not be having this argument.
Yes, the Catholic Church professes to have the truth, but on what topics?
Well, apparently, they claimed to have the truth on how we were all created. And how the Earth is the center of the Universe. And a lot of other things. True, they've changed their stance - but at what expense? At the expense of burning all those people at the stake and killing all those people for speaking out against the Church?
If he had merely claimed "Look, I have a neat scientific result that explains matters that have nothing to do with religion," he would have had many fewer problems.
Galileo was a man of his times. He was raised a Christian, and he felt his beliefs challenged - and raised that point to the Church. It is the pursuit of truth that matters, if people should be scared of telling the truth out, you've already violated the fundamental sanctity of science.
Second, the Church is made up of men, and men make mistakes.
When my advisor proves me to be wrong, he does not burn me at a stake or sentence me to life imprisonment. There are mistakes and there's stupidity. Surely you cannot discount the fact that the way the Church treated science back then was quite wrong. I agree that the Church's stance has changed today, but I feel that's mostly because they do not have a choice, rather than because they want to make a conscious shift in their way of thinking - but this is a very personal opinion and I could be wrong, and I hope I'm wrong.
So far, I've countered all your examples, showing that the Catholic Church has no problem with science, although it occaisionally makes mistakes, and that it usually raises objections only when scientists start trying to claim that their science disproves religion, when their results say nothing to that end.
Such as killing them, imprisoning them, screwing their happiness and in general discouraging them from the pursuit of the truth, because it would go against their professed beliefs. Yes, apart from that, the Church was quite friendly towards science. Am sure they were on cool-ez-bro terms, too and smoked a joint or two together.
We have also established that a human being is created at conception.
Yes, what offends me is that while the Church takes such a moral stance against the embryos of Man, it discounts ALL other life. Why, even plants have life. Animals have life. Is it not wrong for us to kill them? The attitude that somehow because man is on top of the foodchain, he is above all other life is something I will not buy.
You have used moral arguments to prove that according to Christian beliefs, but there are several other religions out that there that place truth above all else - even life. Some Eastern religions have a view that every life is equal, therefore you either abstain from all killings to the extent possible (live like an ascetic eating only dead plants and minimal water), or do not have a conscience in what you kill since everything goes back to the Karmic cycle. In their perspective, any research of any kind is not wrong. It is encouraged, even.
Because you believe that it is only life when it is human, and advocate not killing even a few cells, while I say that all life is equal - if you are having that attitude, have it towards all life or do not have it at all.
So, even if we did not have to all agree that embryonic stem cell research is just wrong, why would we want to waste money on an inferior method anyway?
Because it is science. Because those embryos will anyway be killed (they are embryos from fertility clinics that will be destroyed if nobody uses them).
Why not?
PS - I have not gotten into the ethical and moral issues of the Church, especially since it's a very personal topic, and beliefs are largely a function of what value-system you were raised in. I was raised in a predominantly eastern value system, therefore I do not agree with a lot of what you had to say. I just felt that I was not informed enough nor qualified enough to counter your points.
See, the problem is that people like that will go ahead and fund research on their own in some lab in North Korea or Pakistan. They would not really care.
That's the problem - whether or not we do it first, the bad guys are going to do it for themselves anyway, if it's going to benefit them. So why not us, and at the very least reap the benefits for our people?
That's not the way science works. You need to substantiate proof for a theory, else the theory is invalidated.
You asked him to prove that it does _not_ have a soul - that's assumed. Nothing has a soul - define a soul? Unless you can prove to me what a soul is in black and white and recreate it, there is no soul.
When the Aether theory was made, people had to prove that there was Aether, and that could not be shown - in fact the experiments proved otherwise. Hence the theory was thrown out. In this case, show me that there is a soul, else the theory is baseless.
Ah, didn't notice the executed part. Gotcha :)