There is actually a very simple argument to be made for 'moral absolutism' on the basis of freedom and harm: People should be free to do whatever they want, provided that what they do doesn't (a) impinge on the freedoms of others and/or (b) harm others. This doesn't require a God, it's a common sense "do unto others" philosophy. You don't need a God to 'explain' or 'figure out' why violence or female circumcision are wrong/immoral.
You do realise that the majority of the world's population (over 70%) has access to electricity, even in the third world, and the remaining percentage that doesn't is shrinking fairly quickly (e.g. a few decades) due to rapid growth?
Funny, it wasn't that long ago (5 or 6 years?) that I used to often say the same thing about 100Mbits/s when that had become the norm, and the PCs / hard disks of the time couldn't saturate the connection. Within just a few years most new PCs and hard disks could easily saturate a 100Mb connection... I fully expect the same will become true of 1Gbit/s within perhaps a few years or so, so I don't make comments like that so quickly anymore:)
(Yeah I'm humourless...) not to mention the time required to load the DVDs on the truck, unload them again, and put them into the PC to read them... whatever is on the other end of that 160km link is receiving all that data directly.
Trying to track down a reference... I think I might be thinking of QEMM, but MS didn't buy that... I might be mixing this memory up with some other one of MS buying something (e.g. maybe doublespace/stacker). In any case, prior to memmaker one did need a [pirated] commercial app for this.
Memmaker was only introduced very late, from DOS 6 onwards... most of us go back long before that... IIRC, prior to DOS 6, what became memmaker used to have another name and was sold as part of a commercial product, Microsoft just purchased the app, and renamed and rebranded it (like they've done with... oh, just about everything they ever sold). It's likely the GP is thinking of the original app, not memmaker per se. (My memory is a little fuzzy though on all this so I may be mistaken but this is how I remember it.)
It's also worth noting that this year marks ten solid years (and counting) of Internet Explorer being insecure... arguably it's Microsoft that makes itself look bad, they don't need anyone's help.
The practice is quite a bit older than the Celeron even in the CPU industry, e.g. the 486SX was basically a 486DX with the math coprocessor disabled (sometimes they were really flawed math cos, but many times they were just disabled).
They do it simply because they maximise profits that way. The general reason they can do it is that the higher end markets are smaller and less price elastic (e.g. if you really need a fast CPU or GPU for what you do, you kinda have to accept the market's prices), while the lower end markets are more price elastic but also larger and benefit from greater economies of scale.
Or you could stop pretending and implying that the average slashdotter derives their opinions on file format standardisation issues from 'emotions' based on bias and ideology, and rather derive a stance based on a well-thought out, rational analysis on the pros and cons of truly open file formats vs proprietary patent-protected formats.
I also recall this recent thread where he keeps making comments like this: "I'm also an engineer. A real engineer, not a "software engineer".".
In that thread he generally behaves abusively and continually attacks 'software "engineers"' (always in quotes) for not building in some kind of fallback when the bootloader fails. In spite of his abrasive insults, several people anyway patiently post calm, detailed responses explaining why his suggestion is literally impossible due to the actual design of PC hardware ('there is nothing to fall back to'), yet he continually ignores these responses and repeats his claim that it's all just bad design on the part of the programmers that wrote the bootloader code, all the while taking sideshots at software "engineers".
In the last two millenia I don't know of any country that waged war with Australia and attempted to invade them
... 'therefore' noone will ever attack them? "Nobody has ever invaded them before. Therefore nobody ever will." --- that is called a logical fallacy.
Points 2 and 3 - if you study history one thing you'll notice is that the (geographic or population) size of a nation has extremely little to do with their chances of success in a conflict. And fighter jets have many other uses than flying around randomly defending a large area.
Point 3: Saying "they will win anyway so why bother even trying to defend ourselves" is also a lame argument, human conflict is a lot more complex than that (again if you study history you'll see plenty of examples why... e.g. Austria was too small to defend themselves against Germany but yet they are still here today and were on the winning side... nothing is cut and dry and outcomes of conflicts are basically never predetermined or predictable).
Your new enemies (the muslims thanks to howard) are going to attack you from the inside.
Finally you have a valid point regarding at least one kind of enemy, but you make the mistake of generalising this to all enemies... just because some of your new enemies will attack you from the inside, doesn't mean all of them will. Again, a logical fallacy.
Nations have yearned for and tried to colonise the planet for millenia; invading other lands is one of the "constants" of human history... what makes you think that this aspect of human behaviour has suddenly changed? There is nothing special about this point in history. Why is it so hard to imagine? Because we live in "modern times" (whatever that means)? Any sensible nation should attempt to build a solid defence system.
Wasn't it the question how many "ordinary" search queries return sex pages?
Hmm... that implies that the idea is to prevent children from accidentally stumbling across porn, but if children actively search for porn then that's OK?
(I tend to think that kids are going to find porn anyway. I know we always did when I was a kid, and we never even had any of this "Internet" stuff.)
YES!!!! At least if they really cared about their "Do no evil" policy.
Yeah, that way a bunch of companies that are even more friendly to China can take off and be successful! How does that help the world stamp out evil? You can't fight evil if you're an insignificant nobody with no resources anyway, and having a system where "companies that care about rights withdraw from the market" while "evil companies that don't succeed in the market" is a surefire way to maximize the amount of "evil" going on - in Darwinian-speak, you're selecting for evil!
Read history and you will find that those concepts are all pretty synonymous over and over again
No they are not synonymous (= "means the same"); they are correlated, certainly, but they are most definitely not synonymous. I think what you are trying to say is that it is generally well accepted that freedom and political stability almost always lead to money and opportunity. The fact that these go together does not (as you are implying) suggest that people are necessarily running away from the lack of freedom rather than the poverty; they could be running away from either.
So you've demonstrated that XP can be secured in an environment with someone who is clued up. Well done, but you missed the point: XP is hard to secure for the man on the street, to whom it is marketed.
I've never seen anyone claim that he discovered the Earth was round
Some quick Googlesearches reveal that at least a few people have claimed just that. (Our education system also certainly gives that impression even if it isn't claimed outright.)
I have been wondering if how well socialism vs capitalism would work may depend on some aspects of the mainstream culture... e.g. I think that European-style leftyness probably 'wouldn't work on Americans' (or vice versa). Maybe different motivations work better with different mindsets. But I haven't thought about it too much.
"slippery slope" is not usually offered as proof of something but rather as an analogy (in the form of a metaphor, and usually as a 'warning' of what 'could' happen), so why would it be a logical fallacy?
So there's nothing wrong with, say, loan sharks then?
There's nothing wrong with micro-lenders per se - in a free society why shouldn't anyone be able to lend money to/from anyone else? However there is something wrong with practices like breaking of kneecaps for non-payment. Yet we do have laws against breaking peoples kneecaps. These are not problems with loan sharks as such - these are problems with, well, the type of people who break other peoples kneecaps. Nobody is ever 'forced' to use a loan shark. And those who do, generally do so with some knowledge of the consequences should they be unable to pay. So what is wrong with loan sharks then?
(You might argue that people who use loan sharks tend to be those in desperate situations and who struggle to get loans from more legitimate financial institutions --- but those problems exist for those people regardless of whether or not loan sharks exist - the existence of the loan sharks only adds options for the desperate individual, it doesn't remove any options. Taking away the loan sharks wouldn't somehow cause desperate situations to disappear and wouldn't make financial institutions more willing to lend money to high-risk groups.)
> you speak as though marketing itself is some form of evil.
You waste the time of others in order to gain something for yourself.
Marketing is (supposed to be) about simply informing people about your products. I certainly don't like marketing that interrupts and intrudes ("I'll look for info when I want the product, dammit") or that is deceptive, but that is not a problem with marketing per se, just a problem with how most modern marketing happens to be implemented. But believe me, when I need information about some product I want to buy, I appreciate having information available, and oftentimes that information comes from the company itself (e.g. if I buy a printer, I want to know how many pages per minute it can print and at what resolution, what the price is, and the only way to really find out such info is marketing (that's what the printer company's website is). How could we possibly ever make purchasing decisions if there was no marketing? We couldn't even buy a simple printer.
You don't know shit about how much I earn, how much I work on free software, and what standards I have for what I'll do for money.
True, my apologies... I was more just making a general comment there about what appears to be a viewpoint shared by many on the forum, it wasn't intended to be a directed attack on you.
Just a question, do you think that all private companies should be required to publicly disclose their financials, like publicly traded companies are, in the interests of "ethical behaviour"?
If you owned a private business would you think it's best to keep your finances public? (One problem with this line of thinking is that the smaller the business, the more blurry the line between the individual and the company --- at some point one would inevitably have to also then argue that the financials of an individual should be public information, and then hence, every individual's. It isn't really my business what my neighbour is spending his money on so long as his actions aren't harming me or others - and if they are, it's usually possible to tell regardless of transparency due to the consequences.)
I'm not convinced that transparency is vital to maintain ethical behaviour within an organisation. If it was, private companies would be havens of illegal behaviour, yet we already have enough checks and safeguards against actual illegal activities that transparency isn't really necessary to keep the system working... there are millions of private companies that are run quite ethically. For example I own a private business and of course do not release my financials... but there is little opportunity for me to behave unethically or illegally (even if I wanted to, which I don't), because my financials are still audited and because it wouldn't be possible for me to charge others without delivering the product - I'd get sued.
I don't see mention of Mozilla's "business model" anywhere on their site, and that disappoints me
I start to agree with you somewhat here: The Mozilla Foundation tends to "parade itself" almost as a kind of charity / non-profit organisation. But clearly there is a "business model" of sorts. This seems deceptive. Without transparency, the executives could be (for example) paying themselves millions. This isn't necessarily illegal but would be unethical. This is the real issue here and what "nags", not the mere fact that they make money or that they market.
Slashdot Mirror
There is actually a very simple argument to be made for 'moral absolutism' on the basis of freedom and harm: People should be free to do whatever they want, provided that what they do doesn't (a) impinge on the freedoms of others and/or (b) harm others. This doesn't require a God, it's a common sense "do unto others" philosophy. You don't need a God to 'explain' or 'figure out' why violence or female circumcision are wrong/immoral.
You do realise that the majority of the world's population (over 70%) has access to electricity, even in the third world, and the remaining percentage that doesn't is shrinking fairly quickly (e.g. a few decades) due to rapid growth?
Funny, it wasn't that long ago (5 or 6 years?) that I used to often say the same thing about 100Mbits/s when that had become the norm, and the PCs / hard disks of the time couldn't saturate the connection. Within just a few years most new PCs and hard disks could easily saturate a 100Mb connection ... I fully expect the same will become true of 1Gbit/s within perhaps a few years or so, so I don't make comments like that so quickly anymore :)
(Yeah I'm humourless ...) not to mention the time required to load the DVDs on the truck, unload them again, and put them into the PC to read them ... whatever is on the other end of that 160km link is receiving all that data directly.
Trying to track down a reference ... I think I might be thinking of QEMM, but MS didn't buy that ... I might be mixing this memory up with some other one of MS buying something (e.g. maybe doublespace/stacker). In any case, prior to memmaker one did need a [pirated] commercial app for this.
Memmaker was only introduced very late, from DOS 6 onwards ... most of us go back long before that ... IIRC, prior to DOS 6, what became memmaker used to have another name and was sold as part of a commercial product, Microsoft just purchased the app, and renamed and rebranded it (like they've done with ... oh, just about everything they ever sold). It's likely the GP is thinking of the original app, not memmaker per se. (My memory is a little fuzzy though on all this so I may be mistaken but this is how I remember it.)
It's also worth noting that this year marks ten solid years (and counting) of Internet Explorer being insecure ... arguably it's Microsoft that makes itself look bad, they don't need anyone's help.
Market segmentation.
The practice is quite a bit older than the Celeron even in the CPU industry, e.g. the 486SX was basically a 486DX with the math coprocessor disabled (sometimes they were really flawed math cos, but many times they were just disabled).
They do it simply because they maximise profits that way. The general reason they can do it is that the higher end markets are smaller and less price elastic (e.g. if you really need a fast CPU or GPU for what you do, you kinda have to accept the market's prices), while the lower end markets are more price elastic but also larger and benefit from greater economies of scale.
Or you could stop pretending and implying that the average slashdotter derives their opinions on file format standardisation issues from 'emotions' based on bias and ideology, and rather derive a stance based on a well-thought out, rational analysis on the pros and cons of truly open file formats vs proprietary patent-protected formats.
Using this known quirk, we can safely assume, that if all of these Operating Systems were a meat, Macintosh would be CHICKEN!
After reading your post I was convinced it must have been posted by BadAnalogyGuy.
I also recall this recent thread where he keeps making comments like this: "I'm also an engineer. A real engineer, not a "software engineer".".
In that thread he generally behaves abusively and continually attacks 'software "engineers"' (always in quotes) for not building in some kind of fallback when the bootloader fails. In spite of his abrasive insults, several people anyway patiently post calm, detailed responses explaining why his suggestion is literally impossible due to the actual design of PC hardware ('there is nothing to fall back to'), yet he continually ignores these responses and repeats his claim that it's all just bad design on the part of the programmers that wrote the bootloader code, all the while taking sideshots at software "engineers".
In the last two millenia I don't know of any country that waged war with Australia and attempted to invade them
... 'therefore' noone will ever attack them? "Nobody has ever invaded them before. Therefore nobody ever will." --- that is called a logical fallacy.
Points 2 and 3 - if you study history one thing you'll notice is that the (geographic or population) size of a nation has extremely little to do with their chances of success in a conflict. And fighter jets have many other uses than flying around randomly defending a large area.
Point 3: Saying "they will win anyway so why bother even trying to defend ourselves" is also a lame argument, human conflict is a lot more complex than that (again if you study history you'll see plenty of examples why ... e.g. Austria was too small to defend themselves against Germany but yet they are still here today and were on the winning side ... nothing is cut and dry and outcomes of conflicts are basically never predetermined or predictable).
Your new enemies (the muslims thanks to howard) are going to attack you from the inside.
Finally you have a valid point regarding at least one kind of enemy, but you make the mistake of generalising this to all enemies ... just because some of your new enemies will attack you from the inside, doesn't mean all of them will. Again, a logical fallacy.
Nations have yearned for and tried to colonise the planet for millenia; invading other lands is one of the "constants" of human history ... what makes you think that this aspect of human behaviour has suddenly changed? There is nothing special about this point in history. Why is it so hard to imagine? Because we live in "modern times" (whatever that means)? Any sensible nation should attempt to build a solid defence system.
Wasn't it the question how many "ordinary" search queries return sex pages?
Hmm ... that implies that the idea is to prevent children from accidentally stumbling across porn, but if children actively search for porn then that's OK?
(I tend to think that kids are going to find porn anyway. I know we always did when I was a kid, and we never even had any of this "Internet" stuff.)
YES!!!! At least if they really cared about their "Do no evil" policy.
Yeah, that way a bunch of companies that are even more friendly to China can take off and be successful! How does that help the world stamp out evil? You can't fight evil if you're an insignificant nobody with no resources anyway, and having a system where "companies that care about rights withdraw from the market" while "evil companies that don't succeed in the market" is a surefire way to maximize the amount of "evil" going on - in Darwinian-speak, you're selecting for evil!
Read history and you will find that those concepts are all pretty synonymous over and over again
No they are not synonymous (= "means the same"); they are correlated, certainly, but they are most definitely not synonymous. I think what you are trying to say is that it is generally well accepted that freedom and political stability almost always lead to money and opportunity. The fact that these go together does not (as you are implying) suggest that people are necessarily running away from the lack of freedom rather than the poverty; they could be running away from either.
So you've demonstrated that XP can be secured in an environment with someone who is clued up. Well done, but you missed the point: XP is hard to secure for the man on the street, to whom it is marketed.
Sure, but he was implying that XP is easy to secure.
One more.
I've never seen anyone claim that he discovered the Earth was round
Some quick Google searches reveal that at least a few people have claimed just that. (Our education system also certainly gives that impression even if it isn't claimed outright.)
I have been wondering if how well socialism vs capitalism would work may depend on some aspects of the mainstream culture ... e.g. I think that European-style leftyness probably 'wouldn't work on Americans' (or vice versa). Maybe different motivations work better with different mindsets. But I haven't thought about it too much.
Canada has its own laws, legal and social traditions.
Cultural relativism offered as a defence of limiting freedom of expression?
I think certain basic human rights and freedoms really are absolute.
slippery slope is a logical fallacy
"slippery slope" is not usually offered as proof of something but rather as an analogy (in the form of a metaphor, and usually as a 'warning' of what 'could' happen), so why would it be a logical fallacy?
So there's nothing wrong with, say, loan sharks then?
There's nothing wrong with micro-lenders per se - in a free society why shouldn't anyone be able to lend money to/from anyone else? However there is something wrong with practices like breaking of kneecaps for non-payment. Yet we do have laws against breaking peoples kneecaps. These are not problems with loan sharks as such - these are problems with, well, the type of people who break other peoples kneecaps. Nobody is ever 'forced' to use a loan shark. And those who do, generally do so with some knowledge of the consequences should they be unable to pay. So what is wrong with loan sharks then?
(You might argue that people who use loan sharks tend to be those in desperate situations and who struggle to get loans from more legitimate financial institutions --- but those problems exist for those people regardless of whether or not loan sharks exist - the existence of the loan sharks only adds options for the desperate individual, it doesn't remove any options. Taking away the loan sharks wouldn't somehow cause desperate situations to disappear and wouldn't make financial institutions more willing to lend money to high-risk groups.)
> you speak as though marketing itself is some form of evil.
You waste the time of others in order to gain something for yourself.
Marketing is (supposed to be) about simply informing people about your products. I certainly don't like marketing that interrupts and intrudes ("I'll look for info when I want the product, dammit") or that is deceptive, but that is not a problem with marketing per se, just a problem with how most modern marketing happens to be implemented. But believe me, when I need information about some product I want to buy, I appreciate having information available, and oftentimes that information comes from the company itself (e.g. if I buy a printer, I want to know how many pages per minute it can print and at what resolution, what the price is, and the only way to really find out such info is marketing (that's what the printer company's website is). How could we possibly ever make purchasing decisions if there was no marketing? We couldn't even buy a simple printer.
You don't know shit about how much I earn, how much I work on free software, and what standards I have for what I'll do for money.
True, my apologies ... I was more just making a general comment there about what appears to be a viewpoint shared by many on the forum, it wasn't intended to be a directed attack on you.
transparency is crucial to ethical behavior
Just a question, do you think that all private companies should be required to publicly disclose their financials, like publicly traded companies are, in the interests of "ethical behaviour"?
If you owned a private business would you think it's best to keep your finances public? (One problem with this line of thinking is that the smaller the business, the more blurry the line between the individual and the company --- at some point one would inevitably have to also then argue that the financials of an individual should be public information, and then hence, every individual's. It isn't really my business what my neighbour is spending his money on so long as his actions aren't harming me or others - and if they are, it's usually possible to tell regardless of transparency due to the consequences.)
I'm not convinced that transparency is vital to maintain ethical behaviour within an organisation. If it was, private companies would be havens of illegal behaviour, yet we already have enough checks and safeguards against actual illegal activities that transparency isn't really necessary to keep the system working ... there are millions of private companies that are run quite ethically. For example I own a private business and of course do not release my financials ... but there is little opportunity for me to behave unethically or illegally (even if I wanted to, which I don't), because my financials are still audited and because it wouldn't be possible for me to charge others without delivering the product - I'd get sued.
I don't see mention of Mozilla's "business model" anywhere on their site, and that disappoints me
I start to agree with you somewhat here: The Mozilla Foundation tends to "parade itself" almost as a kind of charity / non-profit organisation. But clearly there is a "business model" of sorts. This seems deceptive. Without transparency, the executives could be (for example) paying themselves millions. This isn't necessarily illegal but would be unethical. This is the real issue here and what "nags", not the mere fact that they make money or that they market.