Um. You're taking Singer's argument for his position. He's equating the defense of eating animals due to mental capacity with the comparable mental capacity of "newborns/the retarded/the invalid," and then performing a type of reductio ad absurdum. He's saying that to defend your meat eating by appealing to mental capacity is to imply that mentally comparable beings deserve the same fate.So the argument does not hold because of the absurd result.
But the dude does not condone killing the mentally handicapped and simultaneously defend animal rights. I don't know where you've gotten that interpretation, but it's flat out wrong.
I don't agree with utilitarianist ethics, so I also disagree with him. But don't misrepresent the man's position.
That's exactly how I feel. Except for me the group of friends was Asimov, Clarke, and Vonnegut. I know Vonnegut isn't usually grouped in with that generation of Science Fiction writers, but I was profoundly influenced by those three personalities all through my grade-school education.
The generation's mostly gone now. It's now time for the posthumous reevaluation and critiques to really begin. As I think it should.
But, ah, to scour libraries for literature that wasn't considered literature......and finding people from the era and context of Clarke. That's over.
R.I.P. seems inappropriate. He can't hear me. He's dead.
I loved his work, and his thought is a part of my thought. That's the best thing I can say right now.
People are machines. Meat-machines. Being a machine doesn't necessarily eliminate the possibility for emotion. We have emotions because we say we do. Feelings are feelings because we perceive (experience would be a better word) them as feelings. Fear and joy exhibit different physiological phenomena within the brain, yet we call them both emotion.
However, computer operations do not occur, in any way, similarly to the operations of a meat-brain. If you raise the possibility that something along the lines of emotion occurs within commonplace commodity computers,then either you're severely stretching the definition of 'emotion' to the point where it no longer resembles an emotion at all, or you're just wrong. There is no distinctly analogous operation within a PC to what happens in a human brain.
This is similar to what happens in the inevitable "If you're vegetarian, how do you know that plants don't feel pain" argument. They don't feel pain because they don't have brains. I don't think it's that ridiculous to place the requirement of a brain (let's be generous, let's say it could even be a large collection of nerve ganglia) as necessary for pain or any other type of feeling because it provides the necessary physical condition for similar function to take place. A piece of broccoli doesn't have the hardware for feeling. Nor do commodity computers.
There has been work to replicate emotion, however. And I do think it will eventually be successful in producing something with a level of complexity that allows the function of human-like emotion. The key is in the operation, not the medium. It is very likely that emotion will be simulated relatively soon. I may be wrong, but hasn't a mosquito brain already been simulated virtually?
I don't know if I'm a "self-aware mathematical entity in a mathematical universe." I very much doubt it, but it really doesn't make any difference if I am. If I discovered that my world has simply been a simulation all along, then I find out that I've been wrong about a lot of things. This, however, IMHO, does not change the function of my consciousness (though you could make the argument that one's consciousness is dependent on methods of embodiment, to an extent).
NOTE: I don't like microsoft at all. I know my way around bash, and have run a flavor of linux since mandrake 6.0. However, I've been running Vista on three systems. One laptop, and two desktops. I have to either use XP or Vista for the work that I do.
File copying is slow. Everything else is slashfud or a rare occurrence. I've never had any graphical problems. In fact, switching between Aero Glass and a more basic scheme is usually transparent and instantaneous. I've never experienced being locked into an application, and I run quite a few simultaneously all the time. Driver support, as it is with all new OSes, is behind in some areas. However, I've yet to have an issue with any peripheral. Gaming isn't important to me, but I haven't noticed gaming slowdown in the ones that I have played. I'd imagine that slowdown would occur if Aero wasn't turned off. I'm not the guy to ask, though. Multimedia is absolutely fine. Use free/open codecs. Use open players. I've never run into any more DRM problems on Vista than I have on XP. And complaining about IE7 is like complaining that shit smells bad. Why is anyone using that? True, on Vista it incorporates overflow protection, but I'll stick to firefox and the occasional opera tear, thanks.
If you know what you're doing (firewall, virus protection, spyware detector, etc.)Vista should not give you a problem.
I guess it's cold down in hell today. There's an article on slashdot promoting a microsoft product.
Ugh. The collection of Opera widgets is depressing. Go to widgets.opera.com. Go to addons.mozilla.org.
Opera: Popular: Touch the sky (weather), SimAquarium (really?), Analog Clock, Stay Secure (app to remind you how secure you are according to a bar graph), Google Toolbar (this isn't the official Google client. I've tried this...this...hideous thing. Don't think I've ever uninstalled something faster.), Video Downloader, Pandora Widget (admittedly cool), Sketchbook, Spirograph, Torus (block game), Functions 3d, Scientific calculator
Ah, personally I'd choose Firefox. I lean towards the more technical side of things, anyway.
Opera: Highest Rated:Touch The Sky, SimAquarium (really? again?), Artists Sketchbook, Torus, Staysecure, Pandora, Analog Clock, Dotoo (todoo list), VideoDownload Helper, Google toolbar (REALLY?), Spirograph, Functions 3d
Firefox: Reccomended (not all of them, and this list isn't based on user reivews necessarily): ChatZilla, Greasemonkey, Clipmarks, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, WebDeveloper, Adblock Plus, Firefox Bookmark Synchronizer, Foxytunes, Firebug
I'm sorry, but there's more functionality in firefox's library of extensions. To be honest, sometimes I think that because my browser can: turn tor functionality on with a click, swap cookie profiles in a second, choose which sites I want to give permission to run scripts on my pc, open an Internet Explorer tab without firing up another browser window, do god knows what with Greasemonkey, initiate an irc or an ftp session, download both embedded objects and embedded video, control itunes, access a gmail drive, and a whole slew of other useful things from within the browser, that the memory hoggage might be worth it. It's not necessary, by any means, and it requires a quit and restart every so often, but, really, where else are you going to be able to do something like this? There's no need to reinvent the wheels and write a widget for a closed-source browser when all the wheels are already attached to an open-source one.
And what was the content of the pages you were loading? Plain-text HOWTOs? Straight HTML webpages where the most demanding element was a line of animated gifs and the dreaded blink tag?
That's what stops me from using Opera. It simply doesn't have all of the functionality I need. It reminds me of a mac. It's slick as heck, but the wee nerdy obscure apps just aren't as plentiful. Don't need page-zooming! Need cookie profile switchers, torbuttons, and slashdot extensions!
And FF3 is running like a charm, actually. Much faster. Most of the plugins I use work fine if I force the install.
Okay, now that I feel appropriately douchey, I realize that people don't know how to run multiple instances of firefox.
This'll get firefox 2 and 3b running at the same time. Don't type the quotes.
1. Right-click on My Computer. 2. Click on Properties. 3. Click on Advanced. 4. Click on Environment Variables 5. Click New 6. When the dialog pops up, type "MOZ_NO_REMOTE" in the top box, and in the bottom, type "1". Hit okay until the dialogs are gone. 7. Make sure Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 are installed in separate directories. For example, I have FF2 in c:\program files\Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.9\ and FF3 in c:\program files\Mozilla Firefox 3 beta\ 8. Find the executable for FF2 (for me, in c:\program files\mozilla firefox 2.0.0.9\firefox.exe), and make a shortcut to the desktop. 9. Do the same thing for FF3 (c:\program files\mozilla firefox 3 beta\firefox.exe) 10. Right-click on the new shortcut for FF2 on the desktop 11. Where it says "Target", go to the end of the line, and after the quotation marks add "-p default". The final total line will read: "C:\program files\mozilla firefox 2.0.0.9\firefox" -p default 12. Click okay. 13. For the new shortcut to FF3, right-click on it and on the line marked "target", add a "-p betatest" so that the final line reads: "C:\program files\mozilla firefox 3 beta\firefox.exe" -p betatest 14. Click okay. 15. When you double-click on either of those shortcuts for the first time, you'll get a scrange window asking which profile to use. for FF2, select "default". For FF3, create a new one called "betatest". This window should not appear again. 16. Now FF2 should work with all FF2 plugins and whatnot, and FF3 will live in its own private world for you to fuck around with to your heart's delight.
The rant is still directed at people who demand that beta software do everything a final release is supposed to. Of course, this does not include people who rant at Google, because Google doesn't seem to quite know what the final project is going to end up doing anyway.
Um. Howabout switching back to FF2? I mean, until FF3 is out of BETA.
***BETA***
FF3 is faster and "cool" or whatever...but it's BETA.
I'm really not expecting all of my plugins to work until the final version comes out. I won't be surprised if they pop up as compatible earlier (as NoScript has), but I can understand the need to put software out there to work out the bugs of the basic functionality over the nibblings of a kajillion plugins. But you know what I do if I want them back?
Thats right! I run FF2. It's okay to be serious about something like that. BECAUSE IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE.
That's because FF3 is BETA.
BETA.
Next time forecastfox or Mr. Whahoo's Porno Screensaver for teh Internet doesn't work, remember this one simple word: BETA. Firefox 3 is STILL IN BETA. Not only that, but it was RELEASED LESS THAN 48 HOURS AGO.
Not only that, but be prepared FOR ANOTHER BETA VERSION that might (gasp!) make some things not work again!
To complain that BETA software doesn't have all the features of a final release is like complaining that a one-year-old can't tie their shoes.
Coincidence? Perhaps. But: good god? you think Comcast would give a shit about your local football team? I mean, what percentage of the total audience is that? I'm not being rhetorical. I'm really asking. Do you think that really factored into their timing? It seems rather unlikely to me. I could be wrong.
Jesus Christ. People on Slashdot are the only people who still talk about Microsoft Bob. It was thirteen years ago. I'm not saying that Microsoft hasn't made some utterly disastrous software in the meantime, but this meme has gone on for far too long.
Take it from a guy with a brand new heart defect: it's not worth it. Jog. It improves the quality of the other thing's you're doing *and* increases life expectancy.
Slashdot Mirror
Um. You're taking Singer's argument for his position. He's equating the defense of eating animals due to mental capacity with the comparable mental capacity of "newborns/the retarded/the invalid," and then performing a type of reductio ad absurdum. He's saying that to defend your meat eating by appealing to mental capacity is to imply that mentally comparable beings deserve the same fate.So the argument does not hold because of the absurd result.
But the dude does not condone killing the mentally handicapped and simultaneously defend animal rights. I don't know where you've gotten that interpretation, but it's flat out wrong.
I don't agree with utilitarianist ethics, so I also disagree with him. But don't misrepresent the man's position.
Yeah. I agree. Slip-up on the Foundation reference, but I agree with the gist of your comment. Thumbs up.
Is the only writer from my youth who hasn't kicked the bucket yet. But he will. Soon.
Gads, I should write some science fiction.
That's exactly how I feel. Except for me the group of friends was Asimov, Clarke, and Vonnegut. I know Vonnegut isn't usually grouped in with that generation of Science Fiction writers, but I was profoundly influenced by those three personalities all through my grade-school education.
...and finding people from the era and context of Clarke. That's over.
The generation's mostly gone now. It's now time for the posthumous reevaluation and critiques to really begin. As I think it should.
But, ah, to scour libraries for literature that wasn't considered literature...
R.I.P. seems inappropriate. He can't hear me. He's dead.
I loved his work, and his thought is a part of my thought. That's the best thing I can say right now.
People are machines. Meat-machines. Being a machine doesn't necessarily eliminate the possibility for emotion. We have emotions because we say we do. Feelings are feelings because we perceive (experience would be a better word) them as feelings. Fear and joy exhibit different physiological phenomena within the brain, yet we call them both emotion.
However, computer operations do not occur, in any way, similarly to the operations of a meat-brain. If you raise the possibility that something along the lines of emotion occurs within commonplace commodity computers,then either you're severely stretching the definition of 'emotion' to the point where it no longer resembles an emotion at all, or you're just wrong. There is no distinctly analogous operation within a PC to what happens in a human brain.
This is similar to what happens in the inevitable "If you're vegetarian, how do you know that plants don't feel pain" argument. They don't feel pain because they don't have brains. I don't think it's that ridiculous to place the requirement of a brain (let's be generous, let's say it could even be a large collection of nerve ganglia) as necessary for pain or any other type of feeling because it provides the necessary physical condition for similar function to take place. A piece of broccoli doesn't have the hardware for feeling. Nor do commodity computers.
There has been work to replicate emotion, however. And I do think it will eventually be successful in producing something with a level of complexity that allows the function of human-like emotion. The key is in the operation, not the medium. It is very likely that emotion will be simulated relatively soon. I may be wrong, but hasn't a mosquito brain already been simulated virtually?
I don't know if I'm a "self-aware mathematical entity in a mathematical universe." I very much doubt it, but it really doesn't make any difference if I am. If I discovered that my world has simply been a simulation all along, then I find out that I've been wrong about a lot of things. This, however, IMHO, does not change the function of my consciousness (though you could make the argument that one's consciousness is dependent on methods of embodiment, to an extent).
Anyhoo.
Fun Links:
http://www.cs.umu.se/kurser/TDBC12/HT99/Dennett.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/brain-vat/
NOTE: I don't like microsoft at all. I know my way around bash, and have run a flavor of linux since mandrake 6.0. However, I've been running Vista on three systems. One laptop, and two desktops. I have to either use XP or Vista for the work that I do.
File copying is slow. Everything else is slashfud or a rare occurrence. I've never had any graphical problems. In fact, switching between Aero Glass and a more basic scheme is usually transparent and instantaneous. I've never experienced being locked into an application, and I run quite a few simultaneously all the time. Driver support, as it is with all new OSes, is behind in some areas. However, I've yet to have an issue with any peripheral. Gaming isn't important to me, but I haven't noticed gaming slowdown in the ones that I have played. I'd imagine that slowdown would occur if Aero wasn't turned off. I'm not the guy to ask, though. Multimedia is absolutely fine. Use free/open codecs. Use open players. I've never run into any more DRM problems on Vista than I have on XP. And complaining about IE7 is like complaining that shit smells bad. Why is anyone using that? True, on Vista it incorporates overflow protection, but I'll stick to firefox and the occasional opera tear, thanks.
If you know what you're doing (firewall, virus protection, spyware detector, etc.)Vista should not give you a problem.
I guess it's cold down in hell today. There's an article on slashdot promoting a microsoft product.
This article's a troll.
Playing good music does not necessarily involve a lot of skill.
Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.
Yes. This is extremely likely and will be welcomed by everybody.
Ugh. The collection of Opera widgets is depressing. Go to widgets.opera.com. Go to addons.mozilla.org.
Opera:
Popular: Touch the sky (weather), SimAquarium (really?), Analog Clock, Stay Secure (app to remind you how secure you are according to a bar graph), Google Toolbar (this isn't the official Google client. I've tried this...this...hideous thing. Don't think I've ever uninstalled something faster.), Video Downloader, Pandora Widget (admittedly cool), Sketchbook, Spirograph, Torus (block game), Functions 3d, Scientific calculator
Firefox:
Popular: Adblock, Noscript, Flashgot, Video Downloadhelper, IE tab, Download Statusbar, Stumbleupon, Greasemonkey, Firebug, Forecastfox
Ah, personally I'd choose Firefox. I lean towards the more technical side of things, anyway.
Opera:
Highest Rated:Touch The Sky, SimAquarium (really? again?), Artists Sketchbook, Torus, Staysecure, Pandora, Analog Clock, Dotoo (todoo list), VideoDownload Helper, Google toolbar (REALLY?), Spirograph, Functions 3d
Firefox:
Reccomended (not all of them, and this list isn't based on user reivews necessarily): ChatZilla, Greasemonkey, Clipmarks, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, WebDeveloper, Adblock Plus, Firefox Bookmark Synchronizer, Foxytunes, Firebug
I'm sorry, but there's more functionality in firefox's library of extensions. To be honest, sometimes I think that because my browser can: turn tor functionality on with a click, swap cookie profiles in a second, choose which sites I want to give permission to run scripts on my pc, open an Internet Explorer tab without firing up another browser window, do god knows what with Greasemonkey, initiate an irc or an ftp session, download both embedded objects and embedded video, control itunes, access a gmail drive, and a whole slew of other useful things from within the browser, that the memory hoggage might be worth it. It's not necessary, by any means, and it requires a quit and restart every so often, but, really, where else are you going to be able to do something like this? There's no need to reinvent the wheels and write a widget for a closed-source browser when all the wheels are already attached to an open-source one.
And what was the content of the pages you were loading? Plain-text HOWTOs? Straight HTML webpages where the most demanding element was a line of animated gifs and the dreaded blink tag?
That's what stops me from using Opera. It simply doesn't have all of the functionality I need.
It reminds me of a mac. It's slick as heck, but the wee nerdy obscure apps just aren't as plentiful. Don't need page-zooming! Need cookie profile switchers, torbuttons, and slashdot extensions!
And FF3 is running like a charm, actually. Much faster. Most of the plugins I use work fine if I force the install.
You know, 14mb seems like a hell of a lot for this.
I wonder how many presidents have actually made use of that tennis court.
Yeah. You're right. What kind of debugging tools were you using?
Okay, now that I feel appropriately douchey, I realize that people don't know how to run multiple instances of firefox.
This'll get firefox 2 and 3b running at the same time.
Don't type the quotes.
1. Right-click on My Computer.
2. Click on Properties.
3. Click on Advanced.
4. Click on Environment Variables
5. Click New
6. When the dialog pops up, type "MOZ_NO_REMOTE" in the top box, and in the bottom, type "1". Hit okay until the dialogs are gone.
7. Make sure Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 are installed in separate directories. For example, I have FF2 in c:\program files\Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.9\ and FF3 in c:\program files\Mozilla Firefox 3 beta\
8. Find the executable for FF2 (for me, in c:\program files\mozilla firefox 2.0.0.9\firefox.exe), and make a shortcut to the desktop.
9. Do the same thing for FF3 (c:\program files\mozilla firefox 3 beta\firefox.exe)
10. Right-click on the new shortcut for FF2 on the desktop
11. Where it says "Target", go to the end of the line, and after the quotation marks add "-p default". The final total line will read:
"C:\program files\mozilla firefox 2.0.0.9\firefox" -p default
12. Click okay.
13. For the new shortcut to FF3, right-click on it and on the line marked "target", add a "-p betatest" so that the final line reads:
"C:\program files\mozilla firefox 3 beta\firefox.exe" -p betatest
14. Click okay.
15. When you double-click on either of those shortcuts for the first time, you'll get a scrange window asking which profile to use. for FF2, select "default". For FF3, create a new one called "betatest". This window should not appear again.
16. Now FF2 should work with all FF2 plugins and whatnot, and FF3 will live in its own private world for you to fuck around with to your heart's delight.
The rant is still directed at people who demand that beta software do everything a final release is supposed to. Of course, this does not include people who rant at Google, because Google doesn't seem to quite know what the final project is going to end up doing anyway.
Sincerely,
me
Um. Howabout switching back to FF2? I mean, until FF3 is out of BETA.
***BETA***
FF3 is faster and "cool" or whatever...but it's BETA.
I'm really not expecting all of my plugins to work until the final version comes out. I won't be surprised if they pop up as compatible earlier (as NoScript has), but I can understand the need to put software out there to work out the bugs of the basic functionality over the nibblings of a kajillion plugins. But you know what I do if I want them back?
Thats right! I run FF2. It's okay to be serious about something like that. BECAUSE IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE.
That's because FF3 is BETA.
BETA.
Next time forecastfox or Mr. Whahoo's Porno Screensaver for teh Internet doesn't work, remember this one simple word: BETA. Firefox 3 is STILL IN BETA. Not only that, but it was RELEASED LESS THAN 48 HOURS AGO.
Not only that, but be prepared FOR ANOTHER BETA VERSION that might (gasp!) make some things not work again!
To complain that BETA software doesn't have all the features of a final release is like complaining that a one-year-old can't tie their shoes.
Patience!
Because shit is fucked up. Fix it. Don't let this comment be the last thing you do about it.
Coincidence? Perhaps. But: good god? you think Comcast would give a shit about your local football team? I mean, what percentage of the total audience is that? I'm not being rhetorical. I'm really asking. Do you think that really factored into their timing? It seems rather unlikely to me. I could be wrong.
I'm just guessing, but I'm sure there are many other factors beside customer satisfaction that drive his salary. Just a guess, though.
If it were possible, I'd be a professional devil's advocate.
I'm sorry. It's a new market. Start downloading. This isn't an ethical insight. It's a matter of fact.
Jesus Christ. People on Slashdot are the only people who still talk about Microsoft Bob. It was thirteen years ago. I'm not saying that Microsoft hasn't made some utterly disastrous software in the meantime, but this meme has gone on for far too long.
Good analogy
Take it from a guy with a brand new heart defect: it's not worth it. Jog. It improves the quality of the other thing's you're doing *and* increases life expectancy.
Committing something to memory isn't necessarily a willed act. What did you have for breakfast? Did you purposely memorize that?