Re:Beauty for beauty's sake makes crappy software
on
Software Aesthetics
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· Score: 1
Engineers still sometimes fail at creating safe (or perceived safe) bridges - e.g. the Millenium Bridge in London. They still risk failure when they try out something new. And because "software engineers" are doing much more complicated work than bridge-designing, they are more "innovative" on a day-to-day level, simply because the reasonable possibility space is much larger.
Damn, I never thought I'd end up calling microsoft "innovative"!;)
and the cynical side of my nature suspects that at least part of that popularity is due to their safe, harmless nature.
Well... you could say that about the first three, maybe. But the Goblet of Fire is much darker towards the end, and probably not suitable for younger children.
Next time read before posting. As the reviewer points out:
Our future is threatened not only by a technical understanding of human nature but also by nuclear weapons and war. Issues like these may even challenge Professor Barrett's thesis that the fundamental issue which faces us is not freedom or even meaning, but simple survival.
Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Might as well stick with chalk and a chalkboard for all the good being a cyborg will do you.
I think cyborgs will have significant survival advantages over "ordinary" humans. Which means "the thing itself" does matter a great deal.
Oh, I forgot to point out the most important point - the argument shows that desires directed at other people's happiness or similar are not selfish desires. Since extremely huge numbers of people have these desires (particularly towards their own children), extremely huge numbers of people are not 100% selfish - in any sense of the word.
"However we look at it, everything that the majority of humanity ever does is selfish."
And while it's technically true, I don't think it speaks the whole truth anymore.
Actually, it's not even technically true. The philosopher Arnold Zuboff has a very good thought experiment to demonstrate this (I've embellished it a little):
Imagine there is a very rich and powerful person, Bob, who delights in doing experiments to test philosophical hypotheses (but let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether this is true philosophy... it doesn't matter for these purposes whether we call it philosophy or not). He is also a skilled hypnotist. Assume for the sake of argument that he can hypnotise you so completely that you'd never realise afterwards what really happened, or even that you'd been hypnotised. Imagine you have a relative Susan living in a faraway country. He offers you the choice between two alternatives:
Life for Susan will be made to go very well through all sorts of secret interventions by Bob. Susan will believe that this is all just very good luck. But Bob will hypnotise you to believe that Susan is doing very badly.
The reverse. Life for Susan will be made to go very badly, through all sorts of secret interventions that seem to Susan like just bad luck. But Bob will hypnotise you to believe that Susan is doing very well.
In both cases, Bob will arrange things so that you'll never manage to actually contact Susan, and Susan will never manage to contact you, ever again; and he'll hypnotise you to forget you ever met him. If you refuse to choose one, he'll choose. Which would you choose?
No matter which one you would actually choose, it seems not actually irrational to choose the first. But this cannot be selfish in any sense of the word, because the payoff for you is worse, and you don't even have any memory of doing a good deed.
Finally, I want to point out that this thought experiment doesn't have to be feasible to implement in reality to be convincing. It only has to be logically possible - which it surely is.
Yes, in the case of the Israeli and Palestinian children in your example, I would suggest that this could only occur if they had other ethical intuitions which logically conflicted with their feeling that it was right to kill the other. In other words, they had to get rid of one of their axioms because their set of axioms was inconsistent. And they chose to get rid of the killing axiom because they realised that it was only based on ultimately meaningless hate. Logic cannot be excluded from morality if you want to stay sane, simply because it is insane to believe that it is both simultaneously evil and virtuous to murder a particular person. Thus you have to avoid logical contradictions. I high recommend reading any book by R. M. Hare on this subject. You might not agree with everything he says, but he's very astute.
Well, there's vmware, vmware express, win4lin, etc. No need to use wine - why not use the real thing (a real copy of Windows) and get bug-for-bug compatibility? That's what I do.
Re:The only chance the industry has against micros
on
Linux Office Suites
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· Score: 1
He was talking about on Unix platforms. Besides, Sun has said the desktop is to go due to poor user feedback, so that'll all be water under the bridge soon.
I don't think anyone have said that, thats why we have antitrust laws and such things.
You obviously haven't heard about libertarianism. Some people really do believe what's good for big business is good for the rest of us. They actually believe things like, if you've got an environmental problem, deregulate and the market will solve it. I didn't say it made sense!
Im not a lawyer.. but I do know a bit about common sense and a bit about how copyright works.
You are misunderstanding one thing. If I print out something of mine and give it to you to read, it doesn't automatically become yours. Same goes for if I email it to you. No legal difference there. I have to agree to sign the copyright over for that to happen.
So despite compilation copyrights, a single copyright owner of say 100 lines of code can still sue another copyright owner of 100000 lines of code for selling his/her code without permission.
That's really amusing... anyway, this theory that flaming never works sounds a bit wishy-washy and New Agey to me - a bit like Neurolinguistic Programming;)
("Counting all the votes might undermine the credibility of Bush's victory.")
Actually, they did, unofficially, and Gore should have won - not only the popular vote (which is well-known) but also the electoral college (which is not so well-known)! This was not widely reported in the corporate media.
So, you're in favour of letting US war criminals like Henry Kissinger get off scott free? Oh wait, you don't understand what I'm talking about do you - forget it.
Votes in large numbers do matter though, so campaign for whomever you want. Convince your friends to vote for whomever you want. But when you are in the election box, remember that a single vote is absolutely meaningless.
The trouble is, there seems to be some kind of contradiction in rationality here. Surely logically if everyone thought (puportedly rationally!) "my vote doesn't count", no-one would vote at all - and then where would we be!?;)
Seems to be an unsolved philosophical paradox, from what I've read on it.
No, fool, it's because it would all be perfectly legal if MS didn't have a monopoly. How many times do we have to say this? - monopolies are restricted by law to serve the public interest. You can whine as many times as you like about being "unfair" to MS, but this is just how the system works - and I personally put the public interest above the interests of MS shareholders.
Oh will you libbies stop whining about paying tax. In a workfare locality, single people who are poor, and can't find a job they are able and want to do, have to do workfare or starve. There is essentially no difference between that and tax. In fact, one is the threat of fines and imprisonment, and the other is the threat of death. And paying taxes is much less onerous than doing a shit job that you hate. So shutup your whining.
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Damn, I never thought I'd end up calling microsoft "innovative"!
Well... you could say that about the first three, maybe. But the Goblet of Fire is much darker towards the end, and probably not suitable for younger children.
It couldn't have been. The Turing Test is completely domain-inspecific.
Our future is threatened not only by a technical understanding of human nature but also by nuclear weapons and war. Issues like these may even challenge Professor Barrett's thesis that the fundamental issue which faces us is not freedom or even meaning, but simple survival.
Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Might as well stick with chalk and a chalkboard for all the good being a cyborg will do you.
I think cyborgs will have significant survival advantages over "ordinary" humans. Which means "the thing itself" does matter a great deal.
Imagine there is a very rich and powerful person, Bob, who delights in doing experiments to test philosophical hypotheses (but let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether this is true philosophy... it doesn't matter for these purposes whether we call it philosophy or not). He is also a skilled hypnotist. Assume for the sake of argument that he can hypnotise you so completely that you'd never realise afterwards what really happened, or even that you'd been hypnotised. Imagine you have a relative Susan living in a faraway country. He offers you the choice between two alternatives:
- Life for Susan will be made to go very well through all sorts of secret interventions by Bob. Susan will believe that this is all just very good luck. But Bob will hypnotise you to believe that Susan is doing very badly.
- The reverse. Life for Susan will be made to go very badly, through all sorts of secret interventions that seem to Susan like just bad luck. But Bob will hypnotise you to believe that Susan is doing very well.
In both cases, Bob will arrange things so that you'll never manage to actually contact Susan, and Susan will never manage to contact you, ever again; and he'll hypnotise you to forget you ever met him. If you refuse to choose one, he'll choose. Which would you choose?No matter which one you would actually choose, it seems not actually irrational to choose the first. But this cannot be selfish in any sense of the word, because the payoff for you is worse, and you don't even have any memory of doing a good deed.
Finally, I want to point out that this thought experiment doesn't have to be feasible to implement in reality to be convincing. It only has to be logically possible - which it surely is.
You obviously haven't heard about libertarianism. Some people really do believe what's good for big business is good for the rest of us. They actually believe things like, if you've got an environmental problem, deregulate and the market will solve it. I didn't say it made sense!
You are misunderstanding one thing. If I print out something of mine and give it to you to read, it doesn't automatically become yours. Same goes for if I email it to you. No legal difference there. I have to agree to sign the copyright over for that to happen.
So despite compilation copyrights, a single copyright owner of say 100 lines of code can still sue another copyright owner of 100000 lines of code for selling his/her code without permission.
Er. That's like asking "Am I allowed to eat food?" Of course it's allowed!
Or am I missing something here?
Actually, they did, unofficially, and Gore should have won - not only the popular vote (which is well-known) but also the electoral college (which is not so well-known)! This was not widely reported in the corporate media.
So, you're in favour of letting US war criminals like Henry Kissinger get off scott free? Oh wait, you don't understand what I'm talking about do you - forget it.
The trouble is, there seems to be some kind of contradiction in rationality here. Surely logically if everyone thought (puportedly rationally!) "my vote doesn't count", no-one would vote at all - and then where would we be!?
Seems to be an unsolved philosophical paradox, from what I've read on it.
Says you.
The FTAA has little to do with these treaties that were signed yonks ago.
If so why mention it? I cannot understand your logic. In fact the FTAA does have new copyright provisions, as the article explicitly stated.
Participatory economics