Bill Gates didn't put up that "Freedom to Innovate" page for us, although we're giving him a lot of free press by talking about it. (As P.T. Barnum once said, "Any publicity is good publicity -- as long as they spell my name right.") No, he put it up there for people who *will* be swayed by it, and for people in whom it *might* cast a reasonable doubt. These are voters who might be ticked off if their elected officials allow the government to take strong action against Microsoft -- and so Microsoft wins itself some safety.
I think you're dead on in your aim here about Microsoft's goals with this 'campaign'. But they've already been caught fomenting an astroturf campaign; either they're very determined to see their strategy through to the bitter end, or they're just plain dumb. I don't think they're just plain dumb, though.
Although Barnum seems to have been more right than would be possible in a reasonable world (e.g. some serial killers get marriage proposals --serious ones -- while they're waiting for their trials), I hardly think that posting this on/. is likely to benefit them much (I think I'll fire off a letter to the editor of the local paper just to make that point). It just pisses the likes of most of us off!
Re: Clinton -- sure he's still in office, but do you think anybody has any respect for him? To a certain extent, Gates' reputation as a master businessman is part of the Microsoft mystique, so harm to that is harm to MS. Never admitting guilt, in the face of overwhelming evidence, was not the thing that protected Clinton. If anything, it hurt him. It was a combination of politics and the feeling that the offenses for which he was impeached were a) overblown and b) manufactured (yeah he lied, but they kept throwing the noose around his neck and kicking at his feet) that kept him from getting convicted not that there aren't parallels, too - I don't doubt that there is a "vast conspiracy" of companies out to get MS). My point being (not to start a flamewar about BC, but to point out that there's a very different context in the DOJ vs. MS than Ken Starr/the Republicans vs. Bill Clinton/the Democrats. So I don't think maintaining a straight face is going to help *this* Bill all that much. Especially since it's a single judge that will be making the decision this time, and one who doesn't appear to like being lied to. Judge Jackson is less subject to public pressure than the people in congress. Oh, and I note for the record that the public's opinion didn't seem to mean much to Congress during the slightly-more-recent-unpleasantness =)
It's probably just a lack of cluefulness on some PHB's part. Sooner or later the clue bubbles will percolate upwards that Linux !=Redhat and that, at least when it comes to the kernel, Linux A == (well, nearly so!) Linux B.
Just regard it as baby steps, and enjoy watching them grow and learn.
It sure does make 3com sound a little clueless about Linux distributions; probably 3com's programmers weren't given anything to work with other than RedHat (it sure does help being an IPO darling, don't it?).
My question is "how did they come up with the drivers for Linux?" Did they just tweak Becker's drivers (pardon me if it was someone else), or write them from scratch, or port them from Unices, or what?
BSD point: to those complaining about not directly supporting BSD -- hint, you have source code now (well, you had it before, but now you have it from the horse's programmers). The open-sourcing of drivers, etc. for Linux at least indirectly benefits BSD (or is this wrong? This is what seems to me to be the case, since I don't know enough of the technical details of the Linux vs. BSD kernels).
Oh, and it doesn't hurt that this hurts MS a bit too =)
Re:Unix is an alternative to NT! Since when?
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IBM takes aim at Sun
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err, the link at DH Brown says that AIX is tops in sysadmin satisfaction:
AIX 4.3 retains a wide lead in system management
Original claim re: sysadmin satisfaction made on this thread:
[AIX] consistently rates below NT in sys admin satisfaction surveys.
Just to make things clear, in case they weren't. I initially thought Spacelord was defending the original assertion that sysadmins like NT more than AIX. (I know of no NT admins who *love* NT, which is not to say there aren't any)
Or, again drawing an analogy from evolution: we're only seeing the successful selections, so we gravitate toward the idea that there must be a method to the madness that produced these ideas.
Think of all the ideas these programs spit out that didn't work, or, more likely, didn't really make sense. We don't hear about them, so we get the headline "computers as creative as ad agencies."
Bah! I say. It's just like looking at humans and saying "look how adapted they are! There must have been intelligent design!" without remembering that history is littered with the fossils of other of nature's blindly conducted experiments that didn't work. [take that, mush-minded creationists!]
It's a slow news day for most of the world
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9/9/99: News? Nein!
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I love the fact that every news outlet I listen to in the morning had something about th "9/9/99" problem. There's nothing to talk about, everybody knows about "the y2k bug" and so they have an instant hook to lead-in. The problem with this, as we all know, is that it became 9/9/99 in the US hours ago and nothing happened (Look, ma, no missiles launched!).
The only reason this is news at all is because places like morning TV shows have "nothing else to talk about," although of course there's serious shit of global importance happening in Indonesia. (instability in Indonesia can affect the financial situation there, which affects the rest of Asia, which... I think we know what happened last time).
And now we've stooped to destroying young boys heroes and dreams...
"Get a life, people!" -William Shatner
Sounds oddly familiar. Alec, you made your bed. It made you famous. Now, you have to lie in it.
First: Shatner said that on SNL, and it's one of the funniest things ever done or said on that show. He was, in part, making fun of his own continued popularity in the face of his incredibly cheesy acting. The devotion of hard-line fans of *anything* be it Jane Austen, Trek, Star Wars, is interesting, amusing, and, I'll admit it, a little frightening. The degree of obsession displayed by hard-core Trekkies is worth making fun of. Repeat after me: "it's only a TV and movie franchise". Now do the same with Star Wars, only leave out the "TV" part.
Not that this excuses Guinness for being rude to a young child; but I don't blame him for trying to shock the kid out of his obsession with what are, after all, movies that only scratch the surface of what can be done with the medium. If I saw a kid that obsessed I might not "harshly rebuke" him, but I'd sure take steps to ensure the kid gets some kind of life.
Finally: "Alec, you made your bed. It made you famous. Now, you have to lie in it." (a) it didn't make him famous. He was the only 'name' actor in the original movie. Check out his filmography on IMDB if you don't believe me. Yes, yes, it may have made him more famous, but it's not like he appears to have wanted the extra fame, and it's not like he got lots of work out of it (it happened at the tail end of his distinguished career) (b) what the heck do you mean by that anyway? Guinness has every right to complain about the movie or its effects on him after making it.
The recent discussion and possible code changes seem to have been prompted by a particular story (I know I may be a little late here, but I still think it needs to be said): granted, what happened sucked royally BUT the solution isn't necessarily to start adding more levels of complexity to the/. experience. Trolls and first posters detract from the pleasure of reading/. But posts like many of the ones I've seen in this story add to that pleasure: thoughtful responses to a serious issue. Once in a long while, the trolls come out of the woodwork. Once in a very long while, they spray venom whatever reason in an egregiously inappropriate manner. It happens.
Even though a grieving family was (potentially) involved in the incident in question, incidents like it are few and far between, and I'm not sure I see a pressing need for meta-moderation.
Besides, it won't cut down on the trolls, who post (for the most part) as ACs. I've disagreed a few times with moderators, but more often than not they seemed like ill-informed choices rather than biased or otherwise prompted by bad intentions. [note: I say this as the originator of the "Moderators smoking crack again" thread on a recent poll.]
The current system seems to be sufficient for most days, and it's not like the consequences of heavy flamage are dire enough often enough to make it worth the effort.
For MS, the mascot would have to be a dollar sign, or of a large boot stomping on a computer (with apologies to George Orwell). Unless, of course, MS would like to remind us of "Bob" =)
and, off-topic though it is (well, it concerns which mascot is "cooler"): anybody remember Thin Lizzy's "The Boys are Back in Town?"
Remember that chick who used to dance a lot? Man, when I tell you she was cool she was red-hot I mean, she was steamin'
So, in summation, the situation with which mascot is "cooler" is inevitably muddled =)
Maybe, but RH hasn't been buying up Linux sites, and the story explicitly states that the interest has come from such a company. Like the earlier poster, my money's on C|net.
OK, last one today =) [sorry, I've been spouting off and it's off-topic, but it's also interesting]
If there is absolute morality, then where is the line drawn? Who draws it? The Bible? The Bible quite clearly says, "Thou shalt not kill." It doesn't say, "unless thou art defending thyself."
Re: that commandment you quote -- in Hebrew, it says "thou shalt not murder", which is trivially true (that's just one I like to use when commandments come up). "Murder" being "wrongful killing."
Re: the Bible as a source of moral truths -- maybe so, maybe not. In large measure, probably so. But not in virtue of being the Bible, but in virtue of containing moral claims which, upon reflection, can be endorsed. As the King Missile song has it, "Jesus was Way Cool", at least on a lot of things (if only more Christians would pay attention to Jesus rather than Paul or the fire-and-brimstone stuff you see in the old testament, they might not have such a bad rap in some parts Don't confuse my anti-relativism with dogmatism. There are other options. Like, the way science works when it works right. Theorize, test, and revise (endless loop).
What is the "source" for moral truth? There's no canonical source, but there isn't one in science. So the answer, in the moral case too, is "honest inquiry". The morally lazy reasoner can usually be fairly easily spotted (racism, e.g. is often based on ignorance about the people at whom it is directed, often combined with faulty beliefs about why the racist's life has gone wrong). Hitler had crappy arguments based on bad logical leaps (demonstrably so: he made common cause with the Japanese, who are emphatically not Aryan).
As my parting words for the day (as you may have noticed, I've been on something like a high-horse here today): people keep trying to put me on the defensive. But I ask why that should be the case: moral relativism is only dubiously coherent in the first place. Why doesn't anybody ever try to *justify* relativism? I've provided responses to all the arguments that have been hinted at, and suggested that in fact for everybody here who's said something morally relativistic, their practice belies their apparent commitment to relativism (nobody takes polls to decide what the right thing to do is; or at least, they only do on quiz shows =). It's not simple either way, and I don't claim to have *the* knock-down argument that shows relativism is wrong, but I do have a bunch of considerations suggesting that it's not really true, and moreover that nobody here really believes it's true
How do you prove that the Holocaust or slavery were actually wrong, rather than just being perceived as wrong?
Good question. Let's take a look: how do you decide whether evolution or creation is correct (to take an issue near and dear to everyone's heart). Well, you provide reasons: and the Nazis did have what they took to be reasons for their hatred of Jews, make no mistake. "They're not Aryan, they try to take over the world and subjugate Aryans, they are filthy and spread disease" These are all either false -- and we take it that these questions are answerable in principle -- or irrelevant (what the hell does being Aryan have to do with superiority?) Look at those "facts", in turn, and you see they ain't facts at all. It's surprisingly like the way you decide issues in, say, science.
Do I have a single, easy to follow method? No. Does anybody? No, and not even in science. Have an argument with a Flat-Earther sometime: he'll have a response to every one of your arguments, so you can't "prove" the earth is round either.
Don't mistake disagreement (the amount of which is often overstated by relativists -- hell, we can recognize the Nazi aguments, for all their fallacies and errors, *as arguments about how to treat people*, even if they're horrible ones with absolutely foul conclusions) for lack of reasonable standards.
Actually morals are by definition what is considered socially accptable in a specific area at a specific time.
Not, I suspect, by the definition you actually use in your day to day life. When you have a moral disagreement with anybody, you don't take your disagreement to be decidable by looking at what people believe. Sensible moral debate is neither conducted nor decided by polls. You typically give *reasons* for thinking the other person is wrong, and they give you reasons for thinking you're wrong.
Or, to put it another way, I'm not interested in this purely anthropological notion of "morality", I'm interested in what people have reasons to do and not to do, and whether or not they recognize it, people have reasons not to exterminate people because of their ethnic or religious background.
I personally think what the nazis did is awful, as does most of the world, but that doesn't make it objectively wrong.
Exactly. What makes it wrong is not your thinking it so, but it's being a case of inflicting tremendous pain and suffering on a huge number of sentient beings.
Look, the only reason everyone thinks (as I certainly do) that killing the Jews was wrong is because the Nazis lost. If they had won, then most of the Jews of the world would probably be wiped out or in hiding, and everyone would probably think wiping them out was a regrettable thing but in the past so it wouldn't matter to them much. (Similar to the attitude that most Americans have toward the Native American slaughters in the U.S.'s past.)
This response confuses causation with justification. Winston Smith (in 1984) was *caused* to believe that 2+2=5 (if it even makes sense to say that's what he believed) but he had no *justification* for that belief. It still didn't *make* 2+2=5.
Like it or not, the guys with the most power win, and the winners define right and wrong.
Insert "what is perceived as" at the right point, and you're probably right. Leave it out, and you have a lot of arguing to do.
The Holocaust was wrong whether or not we won. Slavery was wrong whether or not we won. Just because people's beliefs would have been different had things turned out differently doesn't show that the things those beliefs were about would have been different.
Is the person who starts off by saying "Slavery is wrong" in the pre-bellum US contradicting himself?
"morals and ethics are all a matter of perspective..."
Sorry, I hear this line often but I can never let it pass. The Nazis thought it was a moral imperative to kill Jews. That doesn't mean it was *right* for them to kill Jews. We often lose sight of this in these discussions, but relativism rarely looks attractive unless you're considering issues that are --relatively-- trivial.
Yes, beliefs about what's right and wrong differ among cultures (as well as among individuals), but believing it don't make it so.Besides, not all beliefs are different (nobody thinks it's a good idea to go around killing babies for the fun of it).
I realize there's a nicer spin to be put on this: we shouldn't be arrogant and think that "we" (for whatever value of "we" you care to substitute) have "The Answer." Intolerance sucks (but then there's an absolute moral value for you).
Tolerance is one thing, full-blown relativism another; in fact, relativism doesn't imply tolerance. The relativist ends up saying that for the Nazis (e.g.) intolerance was right because that's what Nazis believed.
Why, yes, I do have my pedant's license on me, and the picture is quite attractive, really...
Being gay is not natural, You don't see two dogs, cat, squirls or monkeys on the side of the road getting each other up the ass.
You don't see monkeys on the side of the road often in North America. If you go to Africa, though, you may run into bonobos, who *ahem* are bisexual with a vengeance.
You don't see any of those critters wearing clothes or using computers either, do you? WTF does "natural" have to do with it?
Quite simply gay people are sick. Being insucure of my sexuality has nothing to do with it, even thinking about two men kissing is enough to make me gag.
Quite simply gay-haters are sick. They can't stop thinking about what other people are doing with each other as consenting adults.
Just thinking about someone wearing one of those stupid-ass vests from the gap is enough to make me gag.
You know what? I get on with my life without harassing gap-vest-wearing people. If thinking about what other people are doing makes you sick, it's *your* problem, not theirs. Get over it.
I think it is you is you who is messed up. Your mom must have dressed you up as a little girl, maybe that is why your a fag.
So well informed, and so insightful. And such razor-sharp logic. Oh, and look, posting as an Anonymous Coward really enhances your credibility too.
I'll tell you what: read on through the thread or reflect on the fact that you can screen out posts that have been moderated down and maybe you'll figure out why he seems to be shouting at the wind.
It's revenge for that "slashdot slashdotted" story segfault ran the other day. I can almost see Roblimo reading that, plotting, then finally getting an excuse -- "How do you like *them* apples, Mr. Remnant!" Of course I can't see it because I'm too far away, and also I don't know what Roblimo looks like. Other than that, though, I can picture it.
Better yet, Cleese could do ads where he tries to return MS-ware with a Bill-Gates lookalike behind the counter...
BG-alike: no, this OS isn't frozen, it's just reading the registry! Lovely OS, Windows, eh, beau'iful GUI!
Cleese: (incredulous) Readin' the registry??!?? Look, I took the liberty of typing 'ver' into a DOS window, and I found that the only reason that GUI works is because it's running DOS underneath.
BG-alike: If I hadn't put DOS underneath there, this OS would pry apart protected memory with GDI.EXE and... voom!
Cleese: Look, this OS wouldn't 'voom' if you ran Apache on it! this... is bloatware... it's had the biscuit... this... is an ex- OS!
well I'm not feeling terribly creative right now, but at least you get the idea...
Yeah, lets see: $7.2 BILLION in yearly EARNINGS $485 BILLION in Market Cap. Whoa, they are headed for bankruptcy!!!
I was gonna let this one go at first, but I decided against it.
The meaning of "decline" appears to be escaping you. The original poster did not say "MS is no longer pre-eminent," nor that they're going to go bankrupt: he simply said that they're on the way down.
And, for those of us who like to equate MS with Bill Gates in certain contexts, MS is probably hurting if BG can feel his stranglehold weakening. I hope he's losing sleep.
While I'm at it, market cap and stock price faw-down-go-boom pretty quick if the industry sees any serious signs of weakness in MS's position.
Wait, so is pharmaceutical giant Glaxo-Wellcome... they must all be working on some kinda computer-based drug thing that will ruin us all...
Yeah, IBM has been there for years. RTP is a development zone, the government of NC gives 'em incentives and also tech-types flock there... umm, here so there's a good labour pool. It's little more than a coincidence, K?
Mandrake sells itself as "Redhat +". It's pretty much just redhat + KDE (and I'm sure some other differences and improvements).
Granted this may change but given that Mandrake's strength is "improving on RedHat" there'll be precious little fragmentation as a result of this deal.
Microsoft tried to add 'smart' quotes to HTML, so if you edit a web page in, say Word that has apostrophes, Word will represent those as a special MS-only character that displays as a question mark on (eg) Netscape on a *nix platform.
That's what they are: what makes us mad is that it makes pages created with Word (and, for all I know, FrontPage) look really stupid when viewed on a non-MS platform. It's all part of MS trying to 'extend' a standard on its own initiative, mainly for the purpose of extending their grip on PCs. It's maybe not so much the appearance as the fact that the question marks give you a view of the tip of the monopolist's iceberg...
Disclaimer: I'm using the word "deconstructionist" incredibly loosely here. Really, I'm thinking of those sophomoric relativists to whom I have trouble attributing a coherent view; whoever they are, *you* are clearly not among them. If I had a better term, I'd use it.
It was called Social Text and it's actually a reasonably important (in that circle) lit. crit. type journal. Sokal wrote an article which involved him pulling a bunch of deconstructionist-sounding things out of his... err... well, out of his stinky sphincter, applying things deconstructionists say to some quantum-mechanical phenomena, making it sound as if some of the main deconstructionist contentions were being verified in particle accelerators and the like. Of course most of what he said didn't make sense, even if you speak PoMo.
The article, and a lot of the fallout, were really a lot of fun to read, especially the editors' backtracking (uh, we thought it was sophomoric and trite, but it came from a physicist trying to grok our deep stuff, so we published it).
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're dead on in your aim here about Microsoft's goals with this 'campaign'. But they've already been caught fomenting an astroturf campaign; either they're very determined to see their strategy through to the bitter end, or they're just plain dumb. I don't think they're just plain dumb, though.
Although Barnum seems to have been more right than would be possible in a reasonable world (e.g. some serial killers get marriage proposals --serious ones -- while they're waiting for their trials), I hardly think that posting this on /. is likely to benefit them much (I think I'll fire off a letter to the editor of the local paper just to make that point). It just pisses the likes of most of us off!
Re: Clinton -- sure he's still in office, but do you think anybody has any respect for him? To a certain extent, Gates' reputation as a master businessman is part of the Microsoft mystique, so harm to that is harm to MS. Never admitting guilt, in the face of overwhelming evidence, was not the thing that protected Clinton. If anything, it hurt him. It was a combination of politics and the feeling that the offenses for which he was impeached were a) overblown and b) manufactured (yeah he lied, but they kept throwing the noose around his neck and kicking at his feet) that kept him from getting convicted not that there aren't parallels, too - I don't doubt that there is a "vast conspiracy" of companies out to get MS). My point being (not to start a flamewar about BC, but to point out that there's a very different context in the DOJ vs. MS than Ken Starr/the Republicans vs. Bill Clinton/the Democrats. So I don't think maintaining a straight face is going to help *this* Bill all that much. Especially since it's a single judge that will be making the decision this time, and one who doesn't appear to like being lied to. Judge Jackson is less subject to public pressure than the people in congress. Oh, and I note for the record that the public's opinion didn't seem to mean much to Congress during the slightly-more-recent-unpleasantness =)
It's probably just a lack of cluefulness on some PHB's part. Sooner or later the clue bubbles will percolate upwards that Linux !=Redhat and that, at least when it comes to the kernel, Linux A == (well, nearly so!) Linux B.
Just regard it as baby steps, and enjoy watching them grow and learn.
It sure does make 3com sound a little clueless about Linux distributions; probably 3com's programmers weren't given anything to work with other than RedHat (it sure does help being an IPO darling, don't it?).
My question is "how did they come up with the drivers for Linux?" Did they just tweak Becker's drivers (pardon me if it was someone else), or write them from scratch, or port them from Unices, or what?
BSD point: to those complaining about not directly supporting BSD -- hint, you have source code now (well, you had it before, but now you have it from the horse's programmers). The open-sourcing of drivers, etc. for Linux at least indirectly benefits BSD (or is this wrong? This is what seems to me to be the case, since I don't know enough of the technical details of the Linux vs. BSD kernels).
Oh, and it doesn't hurt that this hurts MS a bit too =)
Original claim re: sysadmin satisfaction made on this thread:
Just to make things clear, in case they weren't. I initially thought Spacelord was defending the original assertion that sysadmins like NT more than AIX. (I know of no NT admins who *love* NT, which is not to say there aren't any)
Or, again drawing an analogy from evolution: we're only seeing the successful selections, so we gravitate toward the idea that there must be a method to the madness that produced these ideas.
Think of all the ideas these programs spit out that didn't work, or, more likely, didn't really make sense. We don't hear about them, so we get the headline "computers as creative as ad agencies."
Bah! I say. It's just like looking at humans and saying "look how adapted they are! There must have been intelligent design!" without remembering that history is littered with the fossils of other of nature's blindly conducted experiments that didn't work. [take that, mush-minded creationists!]
I love the fact that every news outlet I listen to in the morning had something about th "9/9/99" problem. There's nothing to talk about, everybody knows about "the y2k bug" and so they have an instant hook to lead-in. The problem with this, as we all know, is that it became 9/9/99 in the US hours ago and nothing happened (Look, ma, no missiles launched!).
The only reason this is news at all is because places like morning TV shows have "nothing else to talk about," although of course there's serious shit of global importance happening in Indonesia. (instability in Indonesia can affect the financial situation there, which affects the rest of Asia, which ... I think we know what happened last time).
First: Shatner said that on SNL, and it's one of the funniest things ever done or said on that show. He was, in part, making fun of his own continued popularity in the face of his incredibly cheesy acting. The devotion of hard-line fans of *anything* be it Jane Austen, Trek, Star Wars, is interesting, amusing, and, I'll admit it, a little frightening. The degree of obsession displayed by hard-core Trekkies is worth making fun of. Repeat after me: "it's only a TV and movie franchise". Now do the same with Star Wars, only leave out the "TV" part.
Not that this excuses Guinness for being rude to a young child; but I don't blame him for trying to shock the kid out of his obsession with what are, after all, movies that only scratch the surface of what can be done with the medium. If I saw a kid that obsessed I might not "harshly rebuke" him, but I'd sure take steps to ensure the kid gets some kind of life.
Finally: "Alec, you made your bed. It made you famous. Now, you have to lie in it." (a) it didn't make him famous. He was the only 'name' actor in the original movie. Check out his filmography on IMDB if you don't believe me. Yes, yes, it may have made him more famous, but it's not like he appears to have wanted the extra fame, and it's not like he got lots of work out of it (it happened at the tail end of his distinguished career) (b) what the heck do you mean by that anyway? Guinness has every right to complain about the movie or its effects on him after making it.
The recent discussion and possible code changes seem to have been prompted by a particular story (I know I may be a little late here, but I still think it needs to be said): granted, what happened sucked royally BUT the solution isn't necessarily to start adding more levels of complexity to the /. experience. Trolls and first posters detract from the pleasure of reading /. But posts like many of the ones I've seen in this story add to that pleasure: thoughtful responses to a serious issue. Once in a long while, the trolls come out of the woodwork. Once in a very long while, they spray venom whatever reason in an egregiously inappropriate manner. It happens.
Even though a grieving family was (potentially) involved in the incident in question, incidents like it are few and far between, and I'm not sure I see a pressing need for meta-moderation.
Besides, it won't cut down on the trolls, who post (for the most part) as ACs. I've disagreed a few times with moderators, but more often than not they seemed like ill-informed choices rather than biased or otherwise prompted by bad intentions. [note: I say this as the originator of the "Moderators smoking crack again" thread on a recent poll.]
The current system seems to be sufficient for most days, and it's not like the consequences of heavy flamage are dire enough often enough to make it worth the effort.
For MS, the mascot would have to be a dollar sign, or of a large boot stomping on a computer (with apologies to George Orwell). Unless, of course, MS would like to remind us of "Bob" =)
and, off-topic though it is (well, it concerns which mascot is "cooler"): anybody remember Thin Lizzy's "The Boys are Back in Town?"
So, in summation, the situation with which mascot is "cooler" is inevitably muddled =)
Maybe, but RH hasn't been buying up Linux sites, and the story explicitly states that the interest has come from such a company. Like the earlier poster, my money's on C|net.
OK, last one today =) [sorry, I've been spouting off and it's off-topic, but it's also interesting]
What is the "source" for moral truth? There's no canonical source, but there isn't one in science. So the answer, in the moral case too, is "honest inquiry". The morally lazy reasoner can usually be fairly easily spotted (racism, e.g. is often based on ignorance about the people at whom it is directed, often combined with faulty beliefs about why the racist's life has gone wrong). Hitler had crappy arguments based on bad logical leaps (demonstrably so: he made common cause with the Japanese, who are emphatically not Aryan).
As my parting words for the day (as you may have noticed, I've been on something like a high-horse here today): people keep trying to put me on the defensive. But I ask why that should be the case: moral relativism is only dubiously coherent in the first place. Why doesn't anybody ever try to *justify* relativism? I've provided responses to all the arguments that have been hinted at, and suggested that in fact for everybody here who's said something morally relativistic, their practice belies their apparent commitment to relativism (nobody takes polls to decide what the right thing to do is; or at least, they only do on quiz shows =). It's not simple either way, and I don't claim to have *the* knock-down argument that shows relativism is wrong, but I do have a bunch of considerations suggesting that it's not really true, and moreover that nobody here really believes it's true
Good question. Let's take a look: how do you decide whether evolution or creation is correct (to take an issue near and dear to everyone's heart). Well, you provide reasons: and the Nazis did have what they took to be reasons for their hatred of Jews, make no mistake. "They're not Aryan, they try to take over the world and subjugate Aryans, they are filthy and spread disease" These are all either false -- and we take it that these questions are answerable in principle -- or irrelevant (what the hell does being Aryan have to do with superiority?) Look at those "facts", in turn, and you see they ain't facts at all. It's surprisingly like the way you decide issues in, say, science.
Do I have a single, easy to follow method? No. Does anybody? No, and not even in science. Have an argument with a Flat-Earther sometime: he'll have a response to every one of your arguments, so you can't "prove" the earth is round either.
Don't mistake disagreement (the amount of which is often overstated by relativists -- hell, we can recognize the Nazi aguments, for all their fallacies and errors, *as arguments about how to treat people*, even if they're horrible ones with absolutely foul conclusions) for lack of reasonable standards.
Not, I suspect, by the definition you actually use in your day to day life. When you have a moral disagreement with anybody, you don't take your disagreement to be decidable by looking at what people believe. Sensible moral debate is neither conducted nor decided by polls. You typically give *reasons* for thinking the other person is wrong, and they give you reasons for thinking you're wrong.
Or, to put it another way, I'm not interested in this purely anthropological notion of "morality", I'm interested in what people have reasons to do and not to do, and whether or not they recognize it, people have reasons not to exterminate people because of their ethnic or religious background.
Exactly. What makes it wrong is not your thinking it so, but it's being a case of inflicting tremendous pain and suffering on a huge number of sentient beings.
This response confuses causation with justification. Winston Smith (in 1984) was *caused* to believe that 2+2=5 (if it even makes sense to say that's what he believed) but he had no *justification* for that belief. It still didn't *make* 2+2=5.
Insert "what is perceived as" at the right point, and you're probably right. Leave it out, and you have a lot of arguing to do.
The Holocaust was wrong whether or not we won. Slavery was wrong whether or not we won. Just because people's beliefs would have been different had things turned out differently doesn't show that the things those beliefs were about would have been different.
Is the person who starts off by saying "Slavery is wrong" in the pre-bellum US contradicting himself?
Sorry, I hear this line often but I can never let it pass. The Nazis thought it was a moral imperative to kill Jews. That doesn't mean it was *right* for them to kill Jews. We often lose sight of this in these discussions, but relativism rarely looks attractive unless you're considering issues that are --relatively-- trivial.
Yes, beliefs about what's right and wrong differ among cultures (as well as among individuals), but believing it don't make it so.Besides, not all beliefs are different (nobody thinks it's a good idea to go around killing babies for the fun of it).
I realize there's a nicer spin to be put on this: we shouldn't be arrogant and think that "we" (for whatever value of "we" you care to substitute) have "The Answer." Intolerance sucks (but then there's an absolute moral value for you).
Tolerance is one thing, full-blown relativism another; in fact, relativism doesn't imply tolerance. The relativist ends up saying that for the Nazis (e.g.) intolerance was right because that's what Nazis believed.
Why, yes, I do have my pedant's license on me, and the picture is quite attractive, really ...
You know what? I get on with my life without harassing gap-vest-wearing people. If thinking about what other people are doing makes you sick, it's *your* problem, not theirs. Get over it.
So well informed, and so insightful. And such razor-sharp logic. Oh, and look, posting as an Anonymous Coward really enhances your credibility too.
Don't try to defend the indefensible.
I'll tell you what: read on through the thread or reflect on the fact that you can screen out posts that have been moderated down and maybe you'll figure out why he seems to be shouting at the wind.
It's revenge for that "slashdot slashdotted" story segfault ran the other day. I can almost see Roblimo reading that, plotting, then finally getting an excuse -- "How do you like *them* apples, Mr. Remnant!" Of course I can't see it because I'm too far away, and also I don't know what Roblimo looks like. Other than that, though, I can picture it.
Better yet, Cleese could do ads where he tries to return MS-ware with a Bill-Gates lookalike behind the counter ...
BG-alike: no, this OS isn't frozen, it's just reading the registry! Lovely OS, Windows, eh, beau'iful GUI!
Cleese: (incredulous) Readin' the registry??!?? Look, I took the liberty of typing 'ver' into a DOS window, and I found that the only reason that GUI works is because it's running DOS underneath.
BG-alike: If I hadn't put DOS underneath there, this OS would pry apart protected memory with GDI.EXE and ... voom!
Cleese: Look, this OS wouldn't 'voom' if you ran Apache on it! this ... is bloatware ... it's had the biscuit ... this ... is an ex- OS!
well I'm not feeling terribly creative right now, but at least you get the idea ...
I was gonna let this one go at first, but I decided against it.
The meaning of "decline" appears to be escaping you. The original poster did not say "MS is no longer pre-eminent," nor that they're going to go bankrupt: he simply said that they're on the way down.
And, for those of us who like to equate MS with Bill Gates in certain contexts, MS is probably hurting if BG can feel his stranglehold weakening. I hope he's losing sleep.
While I'm at it, market cap and stock price faw-down-go-boom pretty quick if the industry sees any serious signs of weakness in MS's position.
Wait, so is pharmaceutical giant Glaxo-Wellcome ... they must all be working on some kinda computer-based drug thing that will ruin us all ...
Yeah, IBM has been there for years. RTP is a development zone, the government of NC gives 'em incentives and also tech-types flock there ... umm, here so there's a good labour pool. It's little more than a coincidence, K?
In all seriousness, though, I'm sure the GPL came up once or twice in the boardrooms.
Wha?
Mandrake sells itself as "Redhat +". It's pretty much just redhat + KDE (and I'm sure some other differences and improvements).
Granted this may change but given that Mandrake's strength is "improving on RedHat" there'll be precious little fragmentation as a result of this deal.
That's what they are: what makes us mad is that it makes pages created with Word (and, for all I know, FrontPage) look really stupid when viewed on a non-MS platform. It's all part of MS trying to 'extend' a standard on its own initiative, mainly for the purpose of extending their grip on PCs. It's maybe not so much the appearance as the fact that the question marks give you a view of the tip of the monopolist's iceberg ...
Disclaimer: I'm using the word "deconstructionist" incredibly loosely here. Really, I'm thinking of those sophomoric relativists to whom I have trouble attributing a coherent view; whoever they are, *you* are clearly not among them. If I had a better term, I'd use it.
It was called Social Text and it's actually a reasonably important (in that circle) lit. crit. type journal. Sokal wrote an article which involved him pulling a bunch of deconstructionist-sounding things out of his ... err ... well, out of his stinky sphincter, applying things deconstructionists say to some quantum-mechanical phenomena, making it sound as if some of the main deconstructionist contentions were being verified in particle accelerators and the like. Of course most of what he said didn't make sense, even if you speak PoMo.
The article, and a lot of the fallout, were really a lot of fun to read, especially the editors' backtracking (uh, we thought it was sophomoric and trite, but it came from a physicist trying to grok our deep stuff, so we published it).
But then I don't know if it's *that* Andrew Ross.