There needs to be a system where you can leave a tip. That way the 15 year olds can have their mp3s, and when they grow up, they can support their bands with actual money.
But if the GPL came first, wasn't mixing incompatible licenses KDE's fault? Don't get me wrong: I never read fine print, either. However, I don't encourage thousands of people to use my "hello world"-level code. These guys are supposed to be professionals, don't they RTFL(icense)?
I use KDE, but I have to admit, the licensing conflicts are a concern. If they're thoughtless about something like code licensing, how do they react to security issues? And the response that you toss off, pure arrogance: "change the GPL." How many people have released code under the GPL? Who's going to call all of them and ask if it's OK?
Between all that and the deluge of useless stuff that installs with KDE under SuSE, I'm thinking of just canning it in favor of something lighter. Maybe back to E?
What is it about the QPL that makes KDE illegal to distribute? Something about not mixing it with code from the GPL? That's how KDE is set up, right? I know this topic came by the other day, but I can't remember the specifics...
Well, not the "GPL people" exactly, but those of us who like the idea behind GPLed software will certainly make our opinions known. Those opinions, by the way, in no way change what mikpos said above: you're free to license as you please.
Look, here's one of those opinions, now: to think you can just grab the license that looks best on paper without thinking about the repercussions for the end-user and then bitch later about compatibility complaints (which is what you're gonna get) is plain irresponsible.
What good is my unstoppable army of liquid-steel robots if you people can just shut them off with a.vbs file? I'll be programming mine to attack humans, thank you. And I'll program them all in COBOL because all the coders who saved us from Y2K will be my first victims! Then I'll show you all...
I like some of the Office apps. Only for what they are, mind you, but back in medieval times when you had to know 500 key commands to use Word Perfect or Lotus, I had Works and it was great. My mom could type 100wpm+ after years of practice, but I sat down and was writing my own book reports in about five minutes.
I know this costs me on the linux geek cool scale (just when I was feeling good about explaining to the IBM employees how to install SuSE on a 770...), but I can't tell you how happy I when I first got X up and installed StarOffice. I don't know any of the Tex/Latex stuff, so it was great to be able to work with something fairly familiar.
We have WP9(Corel2000) for linux, but I still have some residual resentment against the wall of key commands they used in their early days. I haven't tried applix yet...
Anyway, I'd like to see them port MS Office to Unix. I've seen all the complaints about bloat and monopolies, etc... but Excel really is the best spreadsheet app of its type, and Word is just so easy to pick up at the basic Cut/Paste/Bold/Italic level... Maybe they could port the basic parts of each app (including Visio!), cutting the size in half, and then replace the VB macros with C scripting.
That would, I think, be a great compromise. Especially if there were some way to uninstall Outlook.
We're about to set one up here: Teleform takes data right from the scanner, OCRs (reads) it, passes the text and the image (tiff or pdf) to an image database (alchemy or imagexx), which has search tools and links to various webserver software. The whole thing will be stored in a DVD jukebox. It wasn't my call, but even though we have huge SPARCs and stuff at our disposal, this will all be under NT (imagexx runs either).
Total cost: more than I'm worth. Value of having 8 million documents in a 2x2 cube: your guess is as good as anyone's.
Errata: -Number of alternate solutions we looked at: 0. -Number of comparisons between this and alternate solutions I could find: 0. -Number of replies I got to a request for comparisons on IWETHEY: 0 -Number of seconds my.org considered my request to look at alternate solutions: 0. -Rank, among the reasons I'm looking for a new job: 2, right behind "Hey let's get Citrix Metaframe so our lame-ass accounting software can track 100 PCs at your location!"
Yeah but you have to have the decryption app at the other end, and pass the key somehow. Reverse engineering takes care of the rest. There's no such thing as true security.
Why is it that people feel they just have to use the N-word (Nazi) when they dislike some organization?
Because they seem capable of making the distinction between what you're talking about and their general organizational behavior over the course of decades before that war, which was evil in a different way. Yes, there was a Nazi Party back in Nietzche's day, and while they didn't slaughter Jews (and my kin the Gypsies), they still displyed the same weird organizational behaviors.
We discuss it because the motivation to enforce conformity seems to be something we Americans as a society can't shake, especially in the corporate sector, and any part of our society that easily compared to theirs needs to be watched very carefully.
As it's often said: "Never forget." It's easier to keep it in mind if you talk it out.
Absolutely. As M$ said, open-source is the biggest threat to their dominance. I'm not saying every company should jump on the bandwagon, but someone with as broad and varied a customer base as them would be stupid to look at the long term and not try to contribute.
My understanding of filesystems is a little slim, but if this new thing of theirs does journaling, that's one step closer to being US military-ready. Big Bucks.
but I don't know that that's their motivation. They definitely seem to show signs of having made a transition from their old behavior. Not that they aren't a bunch of corporate jackals out to make a quick buck, but all of their actions during the growth of linux seem to demonstrate an understanding of the nature of innovation and market change: the future of network computing is mutliple servers, each with whatever OS/HW config fits the task. Who's company is better prepared for it than IBM? All this linux stuff they do is energy poured into further preparation for that market's radical growth over the next few years.
Now they just need to reorganize some people out of the old development centers and into new ones. Encourage them to think in new ways in a new environment. Maybe up here in Boston, so I can work there. That way you can pay me for all the installing-linux-on-Thinkpads advice I give you people.
It usually takes a little while for these things. Since RedHat doesn't concentrate on KDE, they won't be in a hurry. SuSE will probably have a package first, but they don't always play nice with each other's installs.
It's already started. They're both a a pain in the ass to set up. Why bother? Any X window manager gets me the Xterms I need to do my job and run Netscape.
Everything else is a waste, and trying to make it look and act like Win95 is dumb. "Oh, let's give the game/application as little hardware resources as we can! Let's force it to run in a little window and translate everything through our useless libs!"
They need to go back to runtime environments for games. Look at that little BeOS thing you can download. I'd give up 100MB on my PC to be able to run a game under that environment, the video is phenominal. Then you have GNU/linux or some other unix to do real work and not have to compete with an OS/GUI (Win) that tries to do everything and is good at nothing.
-jpowers
Re:Corel would be better matched...
on
Linux Mergers?
·
· Score: 1
I feel the same way, but I don't make the HW decisions, really. I recommend, and if there's a Compaq solution that's close, I get vetoed. And we already use WP. So for me Corel/Linux/Compaq would be a great thing.
-jpowers
Re:Corel would be better matched...
on
Linux Mergers?
·
· Score: 1
Actually I run a hundred + users on it, both Win and Linux. You are 100% correct about the speed, which is why you could run it client-server off an Alpha. They used to run an old WP (5?) off a Banyan here before I started, and ANYTHING would be faster than running it on the p75s they've got here. I still think my solution would work...
-jpowers
Corel would be better matched...
on
Linux Mergers?
·
· Score: 2
With a hardware vendor, more specifically Compaq. Word Perfect for Linux already runs on RedHat, but with Compaq's acquisition of Digital, this would be perfect for Alpha hardware:
"Come to Compaq for your small business/legal/research/government needs! Get a super-fast Alpha server and Compaq PCs, all running the same OS, customized, configured and supported by a company you trust! It's your total small business/legal/research/government solution!"
By developing Corel Office (it's more than just Word Perfect) as a "total solution," Compaq would have the opportunity to compete with the IBM/Lotus setup. Think how easy the support would be at the IT end: everything looks shiny and bright (KDE, WordPerfect 9, Netscape 6), but underneath that, the IT people know it's really just Linux, GNU, XFree86, Mozilla and probably IMAP/SMTP.
We've all tested WP 8 for Linux (used to be a free download), you know it's no different than fscking Word or StarOffice, really. Tons of legal, government and research (like mine) offices still use the MS version, so what ties them to Windows once Compaq slaps their seal of approval on it? The other IT people where I work LOVE Compaq, and they'd jump at it.
No, but it's my hard drive and my company's bandwidth down at this end. We just overloaded our mail spool AGAIN this morning, partially thanks to morons sending UCE with attachments to our webpage.
You can't just tattle on people you don't agree with and have their wire cut?
It's got nothing to do with agreement. They're trying to do business using my company's resources, and they're not paying for it. And don't get me wrong: I chase the fucking bastards down and have their wire cut EVERY TIME. We have a board of printed e-mails that all say the same thing:
"Thank you alerting us to the misuse of our services. This UCE was sent to you in violation of our acceptable use policy, and now that we've verified it, their account has been terminated."
I don't really get all that much spam by having my e-mail address here. Last time I posted to usenet, though...
Well enough. At least I understand your personal position now. Before I assumed that there was a chance that you were a person who might not follow a civilized argument, as my experience was limited to a one line post of yours.
Absolutely my fault for not qualifying my statement. Seems like a rash generalization on the surface, but I happen to be very aware of the details of numerous religions, and I continue to support my original argument.
I have no particular qualifications for this other than a brain and an opinion. The basis of these rules was my attempt to reduce the concept of a religion to the most basic level I could and include all of the religions I had heard of to date. Once I had done that, some number of months ago, I noted that at the level I was looking at, the difference between what I had considered a religion and what I had considered a philosophy seemed to vanish. I considered science a philosophy at that time. When I was writing this, I was trying to pull those simplified factors to mind after not having thought about them for several months.
This is a trick the mind commonly plays on itself: by thinking in terms of one system, you attach those qualities to another. When that happens, we can get trapped by circular logic. A good example of this is the Argument from Design, where people look at nature and assume it had to be made by some intelligent force, since it looked so much like the things we make. As you can see, this was easily refuted by wiser men than I, since the things we make are copied from nature.
I suppose I should have explained this joke too. My point was that if you determine the rules in your mind and state an opinion as fact, you are basically stating an opinion.
In the broadest definition, all statements are opinion. In the most useful definition, all statements which are not based on valid, reasoned arguments are opinion. My original post had to be qualified by anyone reading it as opinion, since it had no reasoned argument accompanying it. Basically, I was at work and too lazy to write out the basis for it. (As you saw, I was only too happy to do so once I got home.)
My discussion was not meant to be taken without a large grain of salt. In short, I was trying for irony. I had a much better version of this written up when Netscape crashed on my attempt to preview, and I believe that my dashed off re-write lacked a bit of skill in conveying a few of my points. As for you being a heathen, why would I care? I barely can claim to fit in any given religion and have long defined myself as agnostic. I objected to the generalization, not you.
The generalization was based on a fairly broad knowledge [if I may be so modest...;P ] of the past and present behavior of multiple religions.
Had you used this argument originally, I wouldn't have been annoyed. It is one of the better stated versions of it I have heard. My simple answer is that (technology != ethics) and (technology != morality). The fact that we have the ability to destroy our own race does not mean we should abandon the philosophies and religions of our prior generations in favor of new ones. I'd rather go with "Ancient Ethics version 200.1.7" than "MS Ethics ver 1.0.1". One of the more famous families of religions contains rather prominatly the line: "Thou shalt not kill." That is pretty direct if you ask me. The reason that religions are couched in "fables" is that they aid in comprehension for a fair-sized chunk of people.
The statement on technology should have (but didn't) included the further qualifier: The intellectual complexity of our technological advancement demonstrates that we are capable of thinking in terms beyond simple allegory... So my bad there.
I no longer have doubts about your intelligence. I didn't have many to start with. The brevity and absolute confidence I perceived in your post led me to assume that I might have to hit you in the head with my points to make you listen to them rather than dismissing me as a crackpot for not agreeing with you. That has come to sound like it was my reading more into your post than was there. I don't know that I am smarter than you in any way, but I don't have many awful difficulties in the ethics department. I rely on the ethics I was taught by my parents and that I molded through my experiences. Maybe I am the less perceptive because I do not struggle with them as much as you do, but I don't perceive myself to. If I find a circumstance that lies outside the model I have worked from my whole life, I make whatever logical extensions I can figure out and err on the side of safety or leniency. I don't believe that I or anyone else has the right to TELL you what to believe. I believe that I do have the responsibility to tell you the conclusions I might have made in a similar circumstance and let you determine whether they will help you in your dilemma. In my view, religion is very much like philosophy. You can take it or you can leave it. Some religions warn about the dangers of leaving them, an for all I happen to know about an afterlife, they might well be right. I simply have to make the best choices I can in the frameworks I am aware of and live with them.
It's the frameworks that get you, and here's where I get less civil...
A long time ago, in a country far, far away, a man named Parmenides made the most brilliant statement ever heard, before or since. Here's a rough translation from the Greek:
"(Morally)Thou Shalt Not speak of what is not, nor indicate it in (Moral) speech."
My Greek is non-existant, so I got this from someone else. The parentheticals are mine, there because Classical Greek had no way of speaking about human reason/action that did not include morality (ours does, I'll get to that).
Anyway, practical upshot so far: you can't make decisions based on unicorns because you can't factor in the unicorns behavior if you can't OBSERVE them. No reality=no morality, get it?
Anyway, this is the great rule, back in Greece, that no one could disprove. Then this guy comes along and uses a trick, wordplay, sophistry, to refute Parmenides. His name was Plato, who said, "oh but you can speak metaphorically." Which allows us "in theory" to speak about something while meaning something else Thus begins 2000 years of psychotic tyranny by the sophists, who can talk about whatever they want and say they meant something else later. Of course you know who I'm -really- talking about. Thanks a lot, Plato.
Alright, so one of their kind comes along 1800 years after and borrows some stuff from other people and then says "wait a second! The Impossible Argument Is Always Immoral!" That's a rough translation from the German, and the God-fearing plagiarist's name was Kant. There was a graph, too, which he stole from Hume:
Possible Arguments times Moral Arguments equals the range of all reasoned arguments, only one of which is most right*: |------------------------------------------------- ----------| | *Possible and Moral | Impossible and Moral | |------------------------------------------------- ----------| | Possible and Immoral | Impossible and Immoral | |------------------------------------------------- ----------|
You see, Kant's suggestion is that the Impossible boxes really amount to something roughly like "null set." Thus did Kant rip off the real genius, Parmenides, and begin the reversal of 2 millennia of lies, damn lies and religion.
Anyway, the practical upshot of this part, whether Kant likes it or not, is that he proved that you can't call something moral reason if it doesn't comply with possible reality. A good example of this is the US Drug War: you can't possibly stop people from taking drugs, and its impossibility makes it immoral. Nice, huh?
Also falling here are abortion (no observable soul=no moral consequence) and a few other thorny moral issues.
Kant also talked a lot of crap about slippery slope, whose sheer unpredictability disproves it under his own little impossibility statment, universalization of principles, a stupid, easily refuted trick he stole from St.Anselm's reductio ad absurdum, and absolute morality, about which he was both right and wrong though that's another discussion. Next up: the shell game.
I will reiterate myself now: "There are some religions now that I think are garbage, but I am not going to trash them without first understanding them a bit.
Me either. I know religion, and, from me at least, they gets what they deserves.
There are a lot of other religions that I think are on the right track to providing a way of dealing with the world.
Nope. Not possible=not moral. Metaphoric speech can not MORALLY be used to direct human action.
If you are talking about a particular religion that is cheating people, I don't object in the slightest.
Does it take money and tell you what to do with abstract fables? Immorality!
I object to you assuming that what one religious group is doing, every last one is.
They all do this. Sorry, but the money part doesn't even really matter. In the end it's the Big Shell Game in the Sky.
That is exactly like saying 'A black man stole from me, so black men are all thieves.'
No one stole from me. They lie with no repercussions. That's a more basic injustice than theft.
I will defend the right of religions in general to ask for money, not any religion in particular, because of the purpose behind it. The idea is that you are paying to provide a service.You are paying to have someone else study the ethics, etc. you agree with and teach you as if you were attending a school. The priest, rabbi, monk, etc. probably spends most of his time perfecting their interpretation of the religion and conveys it to the students. I view it in much the same way I view the structure of a martial arts school, be it the Tendo Dojo or a more probable one.
The School of Indiscriminate Grappling rules! But I wouldn't use it to teach kids right and wrong. Since you brought up race war, I'll use it, too: back when they were discussing what to do with slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation, the argument was raised: what if they want to be slaves, can we keep them then? The answer, of course, is no. The reason that answer's obvious is the same reason why paying someone to contemplate ethics for you is wrong: The ability to use moral reason implies its own necessity, ie. You can't make a moral decision to stop making your own moral decisions, it's impossible and therefore immoral!
You can fool yourself into thinking you've pitched that right/responsibility to someone/thing else, but you haven't, so by lying to ourselves about moral reason we try (and fail) to give up the right to reason morally without being able to shake the responsibility. The shell game, of course, is that religions perpetuate this, knowing self-deluded people are easier to manipulate, and conveniently ignoring that they're asking you to give up the essence of your sentience. Not nice.
Slashdot Mirror
There needs to be a system where you can leave a tip. That way the 15 year olds can have their mp3s, and when they grow up, they can support their bands with actual money.
-jpowers
But if the GPL came first, wasn't mixing incompatible licenses KDE's fault? Don't get me wrong: I never read fine print, either. However, I don't encourage thousands of people to use my "hello world"-level code. These guys are supposed to be professionals, don't they RTFL(icense)?
I use KDE, but I have to admit, the licensing conflicts are a concern. If they're thoughtless about something like code licensing, how do they react to security issues? And the response that you toss off, pure arrogance: "change the GPL." How many people have released code under the GPL? Who's going to call all of them and ask if it's OK?
Between all that and the deluge of useless stuff that installs with KDE under SuSE, I'm thinking of just canning it in favor of something lighter. Maybe back to E?
-jpowers
What is it about the QPL that makes KDE illegal to distribute? Something about not mixing it with code from the GPL? That's how KDE is set up, right? I know this topic came by the other day, but I can't remember the specifics...
-jpowers
Well, not the "GPL people" exactly, but those of us who like the idea behind GPLed software will certainly make our opinions known. Those opinions, by the way, in no way change what mikpos said above: you're free to license as you please.
Look, here's one of those opinions, now: to think you can just grab the license that looks best on paper without thinking about the repercussions for the end-user and then bitch later about compatibility complaints (which is what you're gonna get) is plain irresponsible.
-jpowers
Really? My bad. How many knuckles do I have to break hitting meta-keys to activate it? Or am I better off using mutt with emacs as an editor?
-jpowers
What good is my unstoppable army of liquid-steel robots if you people can just shut them off with a .vbs file? I'll be programming mine to attack humans, thank you. And I'll program them all in COBOL because all the coders who saved us from Y2K will be my first victims! Then I'll show you all...
-jpowers
Emacs isn't a mail client.
/.
As for Outlook's quality, I really prefer Eudora. Under windows, that is.
Mmmmm... finally getting sleepy. GNite,
-jpowers
I like some of the Office apps. Only for what they are, mind you, but back in medieval times when you had to know 500 key commands to use Word Perfect or Lotus, I had Works and it was great. My mom could type 100wpm+ after years of practice, but I sat down and was writing my own book reports in about five minutes.
I know this costs me on the linux geek cool scale (just when I was feeling good about explaining to the IBM employees how to install SuSE on a 770...), but I can't tell you how happy I when I first got X up and installed StarOffice. I don't know any of the Tex/Latex stuff, so it was great to be able to work with something fairly familiar.
We have WP9(Corel2000) for linux, but I still have some residual resentment against the wall of key commands they used in their early days. I haven't tried applix yet...
Anyway, I'd like to see them port MS Office to Unix. I've seen all the complaints about bloat and monopolies, etc... but Excel really is the best spreadsheet app of its type, and Word is just so easy to pick up at the basic Cut/Paste/Bold/Italic level... Maybe they could port the basic parts of each app (including Visio!), cutting the size in half, and then replace the VB macros with C scripting.
That would, I think, be a great compromise. Especially if there were some way to uninstall Outlook.
-jpowers
He's so pissed you'd think Katz had posted this story....
-jpowers
Yeah, but now you can actually use it.
-jpowers
We're about to set one up here: Teleform takes data right from the scanner, OCRs (reads) it, passes the text and the image (tiff or pdf) to an image database (alchemy or imagexx), which has search tools and links to various webserver software. The whole thing will be stored in a DVD jukebox. It wasn't my call, but even though we have huge SPARCs and stuff at our disposal, this will all be under NT (imagexx runs either).
.org considered my request to look at alternate solutions: 0.
Total cost: more than I'm worth.
Value of having 8 million documents in a 2x2 cube: your guess is as good as anyone's.
Errata:
-Number of alternate solutions we looked at: 0.
-Number of comparisons between this and alternate solutions I could find: 0.
-Number of replies I got to a request for comparisons on IWETHEY: 0
-Number of seconds my
-Rank, among the reasons I'm looking for a new job: 2, right behind "Hey let's get Citrix Metaframe so our lame-ass accounting software can track 100 PCs at your location!"
Anyone need linux support in boston?
-jpowers
I want my country to declare War on Suicide.
"They're committing suicide! stop them by any means necessary! Oh wait..."
-jpowers
Yeah but you have to have the decryption app at the other end, and pass the key somehow. Reverse engineering takes care of the rest. There's no such thing as true security.
-jpowers
We like to think of it as "stealing them back."
-jpowers
If I had a moderator point, you'd get it.
jpowers
AC cause I'm running out of karma!
-jpowers
Why is it that people feel they just have to use the N-word (Nazi) when they dislike some organization?
Because they seem capable of making the distinction between what you're talking about and their general organizational behavior over the course of decades before that war, which was evil in a different way. Yes, there was a Nazi Party back in Nietzche's day, and while they didn't slaughter Jews (and my kin the Gypsies), they still displyed the same weird organizational behaviors.
We discuss it because the motivation to enforce conformity seems to be something we Americans as a society can't shake, especially in the corporate sector, and any part of our society that easily compared to theirs needs to be watched very carefully.
As it's often said: "Never forget." It's easier to keep it in mind if you talk it out.
-jpowers
Absolutely. As M$ said, open-source is the biggest threat to their dominance. I'm not saying every company should jump on the bandwagon, but someone with as broad and varied a customer base as them would be stupid to look at the long term and not try to contribute.
My understanding of filesystems is a little slim, but if this new thing of theirs does journaling, that's one step closer to being US military-ready. Big Bucks.
-jpowers
but I don't know that that's their motivation. They definitely seem to show signs of having made a transition from their old behavior. Not that they aren't a bunch of corporate jackals out to make a quick buck, but all of their actions during the growth of linux seem to demonstrate an understanding of the nature of innovation and market change: the future of network computing is mutliple servers, each with whatever OS/HW config fits the task. Who's company is better prepared for it than IBM? All this linux stuff they do is energy poured into further preparation for that market's radical growth over the next few years.
Now they just need to reorganize some people out of the old development centers and into new ones. Encourage them to think in new ways in a new environment. Maybe up here in Boston, so I can work there. That way you can pay me for all the installing-linux-on-Thinkpads advice I give you people.
-jpowers
It usually takes a little while for these things. Since RedHat doesn't concentrate on KDE, they won't be in a hurry. SuSE will probably have a package first, but they don't always play nice with each other's installs.
-jpowers
It's already started. They're both a a pain in the ass to set up. Why bother? Any X window manager gets me the Xterms I need to do my job and run Netscape.
Everything else is a waste, and trying to make it look and act like Win95 is dumb. "Oh, let's give the game/application as little hardware resources as we can! Let's force it to run in a little window and translate everything through our useless libs!"
They need to go back to runtime environments for games. Look at that little BeOS thing you can download. I'd give up 100MB on my PC to be able to run a game under that environment, the video is phenominal. Then you have GNU/linux or some other unix to do real work and not have to compete with an OS/GUI (Win) that tries to do everything and is good at nothing.
-jpowers
I feel the same way, but I don't make the HW decisions, really. I recommend, and if there's a Compaq solution that's close, I get vetoed. And we already use WP. So for me Corel/Linux/Compaq would be a great thing.
-jpowers
Actually I run a hundred + users on it, both Win and Linux. You are 100% correct about the speed, which is why you could run it client-server off an Alpha. They used to run an old WP (5?) off a Banyan here before I started, and ANYTHING would be faster than running it on the p75s they've got here. I still think my solution would work...
-jpowers
With a hardware vendor, more specifically Compaq. Word Perfect for Linux already runs on RedHat, but with Compaq's acquisition of Digital, this would be perfect for Alpha hardware:
"Come to Compaq for your small business/legal/research/government needs! Get a super-fast Alpha server and Compaq PCs, all running the same OS, customized, configured and supported by a company you trust! It's your total small business/legal/research/government solution!"
By developing Corel Office (it's more than just Word Perfect) as a "total solution," Compaq would have the opportunity to compete with the IBM/Lotus setup. Think how easy the support would be at the IT end: everything looks shiny and bright (KDE, WordPerfect 9, Netscape 6), but underneath that, the IT people know it's really just Linux, GNU, XFree86, Mozilla and probably IMAP/SMTP.
We've all tested WP 8 for Linux (used to be a free download), you know it's no different than fscking Word or StarOffice, really. Tons of legal, government and research (like mine) offices still use the MS version, so what ties them to Windows once Compaq slaps their seal of approval on it? The other IT people where I work LOVE Compaq, and they'd jump at it.
-jpowers
You mean it's not your internet any longer?
No, but it's my hard drive and my company's bandwidth down at this end. We just overloaded our mail spool AGAIN this morning, partially thanks to morons sending UCE with attachments to our webpage.
You can't just tattle on people you don't agree with and have their wire cut?
It's got nothing to do with agreement. They're trying to do business using my company's resources, and they're not paying for it. And don't get me wrong: I chase the fucking bastards down and have their wire cut EVERY TIME. We have a board of printed e-mails that all say the same thing:
"Thank you alerting us to the misuse of our services. This UCE was sent to you in violation of our acceptable use policy, and now that we've verified it, their account has been terminated."
I don't really get all that much spam by having my e-mail address here. Last time I posted to usenet, though...
-jpowers
Well enough. At least I understand your personal position now. Before I assumed that there was a chance that you were a person who might not follow a civilized argument, as my experience was limited to a one line post of yours.
;P ] of the past and present behavior of multiple religions.
- ----------|- ----------| - ----------|
Absolutely my fault for not qualifying my statement. Seems like a rash generalization on the surface, but I happen to be very aware of the details of numerous religions, and I continue to support my original argument.
I have no particular qualifications for this other than a brain and an opinion. The basis of these rules was my attempt to reduce the concept of a religion to the most basic level I could and include all of the religions I had heard of to date. Once I had done that, some number of months ago, I noted that at the level I was looking at, the difference between what I had considered a religion and what I had considered a philosophy seemed to vanish. I considered science a philosophy at that time. When I was writing this, I was trying to pull those simplified factors to mind after not having thought about them for several months.
This is a trick the mind commonly plays on itself: by thinking in terms of one system, you attach those qualities to another. When that happens, we can get trapped by circular logic. A good example of this is the Argument from Design, where people look at nature and assume it had to be made by some intelligent force, since it looked so much like the things we make. As you can see, this was easily refuted by wiser men than I, since the things we make are copied from nature.
I suppose I should have explained this joke too. My point was that if you determine the rules in your mind and state an opinion as fact, you are basically stating an opinion.
In the broadest definition, all statements are opinion. In the most useful definition, all statements which are not based on valid, reasoned arguments are opinion. My original post had to be qualified by anyone reading it as opinion, since it had no reasoned argument accompanying it. Basically, I was at work and too lazy to write out the basis for it. (As you saw, I was only too happy to do so once I got home.)
My discussion was not meant to be taken without a large grain of salt. In short, I was trying for irony. I had a much better version of this written up when Netscape crashed on my attempt to preview, and I believe that my dashed off re-write lacked a bit of skill in conveying a few of my points. As for you being a heathen, why would I care? I barely can claim to fit in any given religion and have long defined myself as agnostic. I objected to the generalization, not you.
The generalization was based on a fairly broad knowledge [if I may be so modest...
Had you used this argument originally, I wouldn't have been annoyed. It is one of the better stated versions of it I have heard. My simple answer is that (technology != ethics) and (technology != morality). The fact that we have the ability to destroy our own race does not mean we should abandon the philosophies and religions of our prior generations in favor of new ones. I'd rather go with "Ancient Ethics version 200.1.7" than "MS Ethics ver 1.0.1". One of the more famous families of religions contains rather prominatly the line: "Thou shalt not kill." That is pretty direct if you ask me. The reason that religions are couched in "fables" is that they aid in comprehension for a fair-sized chunk of people.
The statement on technology should have (but didn't) included the further qualifier: The intellectual complexity of our technological advancement demonstrates that we are capable of thinking in terms beyond simple allegory... So my bad there.
I no longer have doubts about your intelligence. I didn't have many to start with. The brevity and absolute confidence I perceived in your post led me to assume that I might have to hit you in the head with my points to make you listen to them rather than dismissing me as a crackpot for not agreeing with you. That has come to sound like it was my reading more into your post than was there. I don't know that I am smarter than you in any way, but I don't have many awful difficulties in the ethics department. I rely on the ethics I was taught by my parents and that I molded through my experiences. Maybe I am the less perceptive because I do not struggle with them as much as you do, but I don't perceive myself to. If I find a circumstance that lies outside the model I have worked from my whole life, I make whatever logical extensions I can figure out and err on the side of safety or leniency. I don't believe that I or anyone else has the right to TELL you what to believe. I believe that I do have the responsibility to tell you the conclusions I might have made in a similar circumstance and let you determine whether they will help you in your dilemma. In my view, religion is very much like philosophy. You can take it or you can leave it. Some religions warn about the dangers of leaving them, an for all I happen to know about an afterlife, they might well be right. I simply have to make the best choices I can in the frameworks I am aware of and live with them.
It's the frameworks that get you, and here's where I get less civil...
A long time ago, in a country far, far away, a man named Parmenides made the most brilliant statement ever heard, before or since. Here's a rough translation from the Greek:
"(Morally)Thou Shalt Not speak of what is not, nor indicate it in (Moral) speech."
My Greek is non-existant, so I got this from someone else. The parentheticals are mine, there because Classical Greek had no way of speaking about human reason/action that did not include morality (ours does, I'll get to that).
Anyway, practical upshot so far: you can't make decisions based on unicorns because you can't factor in the unicorns behavior if you can't OBSERVE them. No reality=no morality, get it?
Anyway, this is the great rule, back in Greece, that no one could disprove. Then this guy comes along and uses a trick, wordplay, sophistry, to refute Parmenides. His name was Plato, who said, "oh but you can speak metaphorically." Which allows us "in theory" to speak about something while meaning something else Thus begins 2000 years of psychotic tyranny by the sophists, who can talk about whatever they want and say they meant something else later. Of course you know who I'm -really- talking about. Thanks a lot, Plato.
Alright, so one of their kind comes along 1800 years after and borrows some stuff from other people and then says "wait a second! The Impossible Argument Is Always Immoral!" That's a rough translation from the German, and the God-fearing plagiarist's name was Kant. There was a graph, too, which he stole from Hume:
Possible Arguments times Moral Arguments equals the range of all reasoned arguments, only one of which is most right*:
|------------------------------------------------
| *Possible and Moral | Impossible and Moral |
|------------------------------------------------
| Possible and Immoral | Impossible and Immoral |
|------------------------------------------------
You see, Kant's suggestion is that the Impossible boxes really amount to something roughly like "null set." Thus did Kant rip off the real genius, Parmenides, and begin the reversal of 2 millennia of lies, damn lies and religion.
Anyway, the practical upshot of this part, whether Kant likes it or not, is that he proved that you can't call something moral reason if it doesn't comply with possible reality. A good example of this is the US Drug War: you can't possibly stop people from taking drugs, and its impossibility makes it immoral. Nice, huh?
Also falling here are abortion (no observable soul=no moral consequence) and a few other thorny moral issues.
Kant also talked a lot of crap about slippery slope, whose sheer unpredictability disproves it under his own little impossibility statment, universalization of principles, a stupid, easily refuted trick he stole from St.Anselm's reductio ad absurdum, and absolute morality, about which he was both right and wrong though that's another discussion.
Next up: the shell game.
I will reiterate myself now: "There are some religions now that I think are garbage, but I am not going to trash them without first understanding them a bit.
Me either. I know religion, and, from me at least, they gets what they deserves.
There are a lot of other religions that I think are on the right track to providing a way of dealing with the world.
Nope. Not possible=not moral. Metaphoric speech can not MORALLY be used to direct human action.
If you are talking about a particular religion that is cheating people, I don't object in the slightest.
Does it take money and tell you what to do with abstract fables? Immorality!
I object to you assuming that what one religious group is doing, every last one is.
They all do this. Sorry, but the money part doesn't even really matter. In the end it's the Big Shell Game in the Sky.
That is exactly like saying 'A black man stole from me, so black men are all thieves.'
No one stole from me. They lie with no repercussions. That's a more basic injustice than theft.
I will defend the right of religions in general to ask for money, not any religion in particular, because of the purpose behind it. The idea is that you are paying to provide a service.You are paying to have someone else study the ethics, etc. you agree with and teach you as if you were attending a school. The priest, rabbi, monk, etc. probably spends most of his time perfecting their interpretation of the religion and conveys it to the students. I view it in much the same way I view the structure of a martial arts school, be it the Tendo Dojo or a more probable one.
The School of Indiscriminate Grappling rules! But I wouldn't use it to teach kids right and wrong. Since you brought up race war, I'll use it, too: back when they were discussing what to do with slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation, the argument was raised: what if they want to be slaves, can we keep them then? The answer, of course, is no. The reason that answer's obvious is the same reason why paying someone to contemplate ethics for you is wrong: The ability to use moral reason implies its own necessity, ie. You can't make a moral decision to stop making your own moral decisions, it's impossible and therefore immoral!
You can fool yourself into thinking you've pitched that right/responsibility to someone/thing else, but you haven't, so by lying to ourselves about moral reason we try (and fail) to give up the right to reason morally without being able to shake the responsibility. The shell game, of course, is that religions perpetuate this, knowing self-deluded people are easier to manipulate, and conveniently ignoring that they're asking you to give up the essence of your sentience. Not nice.
-jpowers