I see your game. You're neither Chuang-Tzu nor the butterfly; you're either a troll or a smoker of the good crack.
You first decide that anything that contradicts you has to be backed up with hard evidence, and not, as you say, speculation. Then you decide to dismiss evolution, which in fact is based on hard evidence, with the hand-waving that it might be overturned on some speculative, as-yet unseen evidence.
Why do you think that being machines is no less wonderful than being...whatever it is you think we are? Why is the wonder and diversity of nature somehow less fascinating because it is orderly, and not the result of arbitrary processes? If anything, the fact that incredible sophistication can arise from organic, physical processes is even more awe-inspiring than resorting to easy cop-outs like special creation.
(And one more thing...lay off the sophomoric imagery, please. "Beautiful and terrifying in its complexity" proves nothing.)
You've made a classic amateur's blunder, between specific cases and categories.
We speculate and can make predictions quite rationally about all sorts of events in the universe that we may never see--that a star ten times as massive as our sun will exert ten times the gravitational pull, for instance, or that it's heat and light are given off as a result of hydrogen fusion reactions. Even though the overwhelming number of stars will never be catalogued, we can say that, as a category, they follow the same laws of physics as ours does.
But you seem to be saying that nothing about the known laws of biology or physics prevents seven-foot-tall Beaver people from living on Venus, which is simply not the case. It isn't just a matter of "we haven't seen them." It's that their existence would contradict everything we know about biology, chemistry, and evolution.
Speaking of evolution, I believe that's what the original poster is saying: that life began as the result of knowable chemical mechanisms; that, as time wore on, complexity, added through successive mutations, and pruned through natural selection, eventually created us (and every other living thing we see); and that, since no special agents were required, it is not in any way inappropriate to call living organisms complex machines. Very complex machines, no argument, but machines nevertheless.
If that is not how you believe humanity arose, then I strongly doubt your claim that you aren't arguing on religious/superstitious grounds.
Re:"Need" for open source in a PDA--clarification
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Linux PDA Part Deux
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· Score: 1
By "don't rely on economies of scale" I mean these benefits apply regardless of the size of code or system resources available. Not exactly the most precise or accurate terminology to use; mea culpa.
Sure it's open source. But do you really need that in a PDA?
--I can only say that, if you think Open Source is a valid methodology/philosophy/religion in the first place, then it applies to any software-running device, from the smallest to the greatest. Availability of source, freedom to modify and redistribute, and freedom from dependence on (often unreliable) software vendors to provide bug fixes are all valuable attributes that don't rely on economies of scale.
We don't even know everything about our own planet, much less the universe. Saying that we're unique in the very, very small part of the universe that is our experience proves nothing.
Fencepost cases like termites constructing their castles and chimps learning sign language just reinforce the evidence for a fundamental difference between humans and other creatures or things.
The reason MS is criticized for this is because the price is supposed to be a part of punitive damages, and it costs them next to nothing to stamp out a jintillion copies of Windows. It's like paying a fine for fraud with counterfeit money.
I see a lot of discussion about what value a philosophy class about the Simpsons would have. People seem to forget that a liberal arts degree isn't only about what will be useful--that's what trade schools are for. Liberal arts are supposed to, well, liberate your mind, for the purpose of making your life more rewarding. They have no innate value in and of themselves, they're all about getting more value out of the rest of your life.
Literature, philosophy, blah blah blah aren't civics lessons, and they don't put food on the table. They're there to help you appreciate the so-called finer things in life, and, honestly, well-concieved and -executed humor is one of the finer things. So what if there isn't some tangible value? There isn't supposed to be one.
I'm not sure he can sue for anything. Let the lawyers among us correct me, but it's my understanding that, in most cases, you can't sue the government.
There was a case a few years ago here in Michigan where a father had his child taken from him because the boy had several broken bones, and someone at Child Protective Services decided that this was grounds for an abuse charge. Within hours of filing the charge, though, the boy's medical condition (extremely low calcium in his bones, making them brittle and prone to breaking) was brought to light, but the clerk at CPS decided to suppress this information. It took almost two years, and put the father $180,000 in debt, to get his children back.
And no, he was told he could not sue a government agency for damages. So he works three jobs to keep up with his creditors and the clerk, IIRC, continues to "protect" children.
That was back in '97. I regrettably don't have a link to the story (but a google search found this page that indicates it's happened all over the country), so maybe that clerk's been fired for all I know. But when I read the news originally, it made me want to puke.
The "Have you stopped beating your wife" question is a classic no-win paradox based on verbal ambiguity that goes back at least to the 1930s, probably earlier. If you say "yes," that means you had been beating her at some point in the past. If you say "no," it means you haven't stopped--and are therefore guilty of domestic abuse. The unstated third option is "no, because I never started," but the questioner typically demands a simple yes-or-no response.
The fact that it is a Bad Thing to admit is part of the poignancy of the paradox, since our perceptions of truth are, in law (and in every other walk of life), tainted by the very way we ask questions. This example was most likely used because geeks are into verbal and logical paradoxes, not because they like to make light of domestic violence.
(On a related note, if I make a joke about Schrodinger's cat, it doesn't mean I think animal cruelty is funny. It's just a shared piece of geek culture that I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters would recognize.)
The principle of sunk costs is not so simple as you make it out to be. The idea is that, once expenditures are made, and the benefits purchased can in no way be further extended(read: "leveraged"),then the costs incurred don't matter anymore. Past experience with MS apps doesn't qualify as a sunk cost.
I'm working at a company that uses JCL and COBOL, some of it written before I was born. Believe me, past expenditures still carry weight. Oh, how I wish they didn't...
...There is one standard GUI interface across all distrubutions; even though GNOME and KDE are remarkably similar in function, the different appearance of windows will confuse the average user.
I'm not so sure. I know a lot of non-technical people who are perfectly adept at switching between the interfaces of the Mac and Windows. Even that funny one-button mouse doesn't throw them.
learning vi is like learning to multiply large numbers on paper, yeah you should always use a calculator or a computer, but you never know when one might not be available...
Of course, if there's no computer available, you can't use vi now, can you?:)
If you take the canonical description of freedom ("Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins") and apply it to software, it's pretty clear that true freedom would not let one person control what another does with software.
My question is, is software I write "my fist" or "your nose?" Seriously, I don't really see how this metaphor justifies anything.
It reminds me of the debate about "tolerance" when it comes to other people's viewpoints. People say they advocate tolerance until it comes to tolerating the intolerant (e.g., Nazis freely assembling in Skokie, or Leonard Jeffries speaking about the evil "ice people"). I remember some people, apparently with no sense of the irony involved, petitioning to halt a Klan march in Ann Arbor with signs that read, "No free speech for fascists!"
To me, RMS resembles nothing so much as those deluded protesters.
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
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Review: Harry Potter
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· Score: 1
Ah, but you have different publishing houses and practices. I remember working in a bookstore when Angela's Ashes was still only in hardcover here in the U.S. Someone from Germany wanted to buy it in paperback and I told him it wasn't available. So he whipped out the European paperback edition and said "order that." I had a hard time convincing him that we could only order from U.S. distributors. He left with what I'm sure was the conviction that I was somehow holding out on him.
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
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Review: Harry Potter
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· Score: 1
I think the reason your brother was bored of Wuthering Heights is because it's so goddamn dull.
I think he was talking about the HP books, not Wuthering Heights. And Wuthering Heights is not dull for people who've advanced beyond the "barbarian swordsman vs. evil overlord" school of plot development.
Having to look up every second word in Coles Notes just to figure out what everyone's saying is highly irritating.
I'm afraid you've revealed more about your vocabulary level than that of the book.
Perhaps something written within the last century might be just a tad more relevant for teaching english literacy.
Now, you probably got that idea from your Middle School textbooks, so I don't blame you, but no, classic works are not supposed to teach literacy. That's what "Dick and Jane" books are for. Among other things, literary works are supposed to expose us to ideas and viewpoints we might not otherwise encounter, y'know, stretch our minds a little. Great stories don't go out of date, and the fact that you may have to learn something about an earlier culture is, in fact, a Good Thing about older books.
This guy's a troll. He's dissing C because it punishes people who don't know what they're doing. (Unlike other languages we won't mention, which reward people for not knowing what they're doing.)
The idea is, after doing something tortuous and gruelling, people think, "WHY in the hell did I just do that?" There are at least two answers:
I really hated it, but people made me do it, but they didn't really make me do it, they just showed me that things were going to be more difficult for me if I didn't do it, so I went along with it, but I was really working so it wasn't just "going along with it", I was actively participating in it even though I hated it because....AARGH!
I must have really liked it.
People don't like living with contradictions, and the brain likes to simplify and condense, so the shorter answer becomes the truth, even it if wasn't to begin with. In other words, it reduces the cognitive dissonance.
Slashdot Mirror
Locksmiths have master keys that can get them into all sorts of buildings and vehicles, so by your argument, they are "granted access" to them.
Why the Hell else would I be posting to Slashdot on Christmas, if I weren't slacking off at work?
You first decide that anything that contradicts you has to be backed up with hard evidence, and not, as you say, speculation. Then you decide to dismiss evolution, which in fact is based on hard evidence, with the hand-waving that it might be overturned on some speculative, as-yet unseen evidence.
Why do you think that being machines is no less wonderful than being...whatever it is you think we are? Why is the wonder and diversity of nature somehow less fascinating because it is orderly, and not the result of arbitrary processes? If anything, the fact that incredible sophistication can arise from organic, physical processes is even more awe-inspiring than resorting to easy cop-outs like special creation.
(And one more thing...lay off the sophomoric imagery, please. "Beautiful and terrifying in its complexity" proves nothing.)
We speculate and can make predictions quite rationally about all sorts of events in the universe that we may never see--that a star ten times as massive as our sun will exert ten times the gravitational pull, for instance, or that it's heat and light are given off as a result of hydrogen fusion reactions. Even though the overwhelming number of stars will never be catalogued, we can say that, as a category, they follow the same laws of physics as ours does.
But you seem to be saying that nothing about the known laws of biology or physics prevents seven-foot-tall Beaver people from living on Venus, which is simply not the case. It isn't just a matter of "we haven't seen them." It's that their existence would contradict everything we know about biology, chemistry, and evolution.
Speaking of evolution, I believe that's what the original poster is saying: that life began as the result of knowable chemical mechanisms; that, as time wore on, complexity, added through successive mutations, and pruned through natural selection, eventually created us (and every other living thing we see); and that, since no special agents were required, it is not in any way inappropriate to call living organisms complex machines. Very complex machines, no argument, but machines nevertheless.
If that is not how you believe humanity arose, then I strongly doubt your claim that you aren't arguing on religious/superstitious grounds.
Ah, well, then, there you go.
By "don't rely on economies of scale" I mean these benefits apply regardless of the size of code or system resources available. Not exactly the most precise or accurate terminology to use; mea culpa.
Read my post again.
The reason MS is criticized for this is because the price is supposed to be a part of punitive damages, and it costs them next to nothing to stamp out a jintillion copies of Windows. It's like paying a fine for fraud with counterfeit money.
So what does that make a spirit made of corrupted astroturf?
Literature, philosophy, blah blah blah aren't civics lessons, and they don't put food on the table. They're there to help you appreciate the so-called finer things in life, and, honestly, well-concieved and -executed humor is one of the finer things. So what if there isn't some tangible value? There isn't supposed to be one.
There was a case a few years ago here in Michigan where a father had his child taken from him because the boy had several broken bones, and someone at Child Protective Services decided that this was grounds for an abuse charge. Within hours of filing the charge, though, the boy's medical condition (extremely low calcium in his bones, making them brittle and prone to breaking) was brought to light, but the clerk at CPS decided to suppress this information. It took almost two years, and put the father $180,000 in debt, to get his children back.
And no, he was told he could not sue a government agency for damages. So he works three jobs to keep up with his creditors and the clerk, IIRC, continues to "protect" children.
That was back in '97. I regrettably don't have a link to the story (but a google search found this page that indicates it's happened all over the country), so maybe that clerk's been fired for all I know. But when I read the news originally, it made me want to puke.
The fact that it is a Bad Thing to admit is part of the poignancy of the paradox, since our perceptions of truth are, in law (and in every other walk of life), tainted by the very way we ask questions. This example was most likely used because geeks are into verbal and logical paradoxes, not because they like to make light of domestic violence.
(On a related note, if I make a joke about Schrodinger's cat, it doesn't mean I think animal cruelty is funny. It's just a shared piece of geek culture that I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters would recognize.)
I alwaysh thought it wash shome kinda triangle...
I'm working at a company that uses JCL and COBOL, some of it written before I was born. Believe me, past expenditures still carry weight. Oh, how I wish they didn't...
I'm not so sure. I know a lot of non-technical people who are perfectly adept at switching between the interfaces of the Mac and Windows. Even that funny one-button mouse doesn't throw them.
Of course, if there's no computer available, you can't use vi now, can you?
To me, RMS resembles nothing so much as those deluded protesters.
Ah, but you have different publishing houses and practices. I remember working in a bookstore when Angela's Ashes was still only in hardcover here in the U.S. Someone from Germany wanted to buy it in paperback and I told him it wasn't available. So he whipped out the European paperback edition and said "order that." I had a hard time convincing him that we could only order from U.S. distributors. He left with what I'm sure was the conviction that I was somehow holding out on him.
This guy's a troll. He's dissing C because it punishes people who don't know what they're doing. (Unlike other languages we won't mention, which reward people for not knowing what they're doing.)
The idea is, after doing something tortuous and gruelling, people think, "WHY in the hell did I just do that?" There are at least two answers:
I really hated it, but people made me do it, but they didn't really make me do it, they just showed me that things were going to be more difficult for me if I didn't do it, so I went along with it, but I was really working so it wasn't just "going along with it", I was actively participating in it even though I hated it because....AARGH!
I must have really liked it.
People don't like living with contradictions, and the brain likes to simplify and condense, so the shorter answer becomes the truth, even it if wasn't to begin with. In other words, it reduces the cognitive dissonance.
Remember, C++ doesn't force you to use its OOP features, so you can work efficiently and at a low level pretty handily.