That's a fair point and quite a common situation - a conflict between what someone believes or claims and testable reality.
But I think what we were talking about is conflict between what person A believes, and what person B thinks person A believes. That's very different. I'd always give the benefit of the doubt to person who owns the belief, unless there is good evidence that person is being disingenuous.
In any case, let me please be the counter example - I believe God has a purpose for my life but I certainly don't believe that only I and those I know have free will. That's a direct statement about my beliefs and it directly contradicts your original assertion about what people like me believe.
That's the trouble with these kinds of discussions. The assertions by non-believers about what believers believe seem to carry more weight in the minds of the non-believers than what the believers do actually believe.;-)
The interesting thing I've found is that people who believe God has a purpose for their life, tend to believe that they and the people they know are the only people who have free will.
I have never come across this attitude.
As to your contention that if someone says "It was God's will" then the human agents involved could not have had free will, I think you've fundamentally misunderstood either what it means to say that something was God's will, or indeed what is meant by free will (which is understandable – philosophers down the ages have long argued this one).
Suffice it to say for now that from my own perspective as a Christian, to say that God willed something does in no way undermine the free will of the human agents involved. It can do, but only in exceedingly rare circumstances where God obliges the human agent to act in a certain way. Humans are perfectly able to do God's will through their own free choice, and often without even knowing it.
(Having said all that, I doubt that it is ever God's will that people should lose their lives in car accidents.)
I think there are still a few places where you can reach the top of the ladder in a purely technical role.
There are probably others where you clearly have to become a manager and this is explicitly stated.
But the current thinking seems to be that certain universal 'behaviours' or 'competencies' are required for more senior grades, and these always include things like being able to provide examples of where you have dealt with performance issues in others - even if your particular job isn't management.
So the official line is that, yes, you can get to the top in a purely technical role, but in practice if you don't have examples of all the standard corporate 'behaviours' then you won't get anywhere.
Everyone makes mistakes, but the 'bad guys' (what I meant by that) are the ones who make a habit of breaking laws and are well-practiced at not getting caught.
If every law on the books was enforced tomorrow by police with 100% visibility of everything everyone was doing all the time, then Western nations would collapse within a week.
Or more likely, it would become painfully obvious that many laws need to be repealed or modified.
Or do you really like it that law enforcement is a lottery? You get held to account but other people seem to get away with the same thing with impunity.
In a society where law enforcement is uncertain, it is generally the bad guy who gets away with it, and the good guy who slipped up who is brought to book.
I find it more convenient to connect my camera to my laptop than to take the card out of the camera and stick it in a card reader. But each to his own.
But if we're talking about the Pro or Semi-Pro models, then... for most brands the only other option is to manually copy the RAW format images from the memory card using a cardreader, as opposed to connecting the camera to the computer directly.
My Pentax DSLR appears as a USB mass storage device, and I would be most surprised if this wasn't also true of virtually every other DSLR. I certainly would be very wary of buying a camera that didn't do this. I regard it as a standard and essential feature.
My wife's Canon Powershot isn't a USB mass storage device, but it does implement PictBridge, which can be read directly by Mac OS X and Windows without installing any additional drivers.
RAW format is not standardized, so unless your editing software (or OS) supports it natively you're going to have to use their drivers and conversion software.
Mac OS X can read most RAW formats natively and I assume Windows can do likewise. If you are serious about using RAW format, you'll probably use a decent RAW image processing application anyway, such as Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture (or possibly Bibble). The free software bundled with the camera is usually inferior and not worth bothering with.
I certainly don't claim you shouldn't have those skills. If you do get into a bad situation, then being able to keep your car under control in an extreme manoeuvre is obviously going to be better than losing control.
My point is simply that we should never think of such skills as a substitute for driving in such a way as to avoid getting into those extreme situations in the first place.
The thing I found surprising when I did a short defensive driving course is just how much you can do to avoid emergency situations. If a child runs out in front of you it is not inevitable that you will have almost no time to react. A really good defensive driver will have seen the signs that a child was going to run out before it even happened.
Really good drivers all have one thing in common: Whenever an accident happens, or nearly happens, they are somewhere else. They are always calm and never seem to have to do anything suddenly. It is a real skill, and I'm nowhere near attaining it, though it is something I aspire to. Really got to work on that concentration;-(
Car physics are largely irrelevant when you are driving courteously, paying attention, and using sensible defensive driving techniques.
Car physics become important when you take a corner too fast, overtake in the wrong place, don't allow sufficient stopping distance, become distracted, or someone cuts you up and you haven't planned an escape route. The trick is not to get into that situation in the first place.
What worries me more is that the US aren't hideously embarrassed and resolving to tighten things up on their end but instead out to quell a single proponent of the discovered material. "Our systems failed and this guy got hold of it - I know, let's threaten to kill this guy and / or make his life hell!" not "Okay, let's fix this system".
It would be a fallacy if one were to use this particular case to define (in part) what Agile is or is not. But Agile is well-enough defined anyway that it is perfectly clear that this case is not Agile.
I was fired from a job because of Agile... Since then, I've had real Agile training... Still, my first Agile experience cost me my job.
I don't know enough about Agile to make a judgment myself, but you've practically said it yourself: your first experience wasn't Agile, it was just something that someone called 'Agile'.
there are idiots out there who want to have their search results filtered
It's far worse than people just filtering their search results.
Companies like Amazon make recommendations based on items you looked at previously. iTunes recommends music similar to the music you already have. Many commercial news sites allow you to customize your landing page so that you don't see news stories on subjects that don't interest you. Sites like Digg allow like-minded people to vote stories up and down so that you are more likely to see stories that fit well with your interests and world-view. Slashdot has a comment moderation system where ideas that don't fit with the group-think get hidden.
All so that we don't have to bother our poor little heads with things that disturb us.
I notice this very much when I am talking to certain people, but I think it is an issue with the telephone handset, not with the line (for landlines at least).
I assumed the cause is the feedback canceling mechanism in the handset. As handsets have become smaller, manufacturers have had to resort to more extreme measures to stop the microphone picking up the output of the speaker.
Some handsets seem to completely turn off the speaker whenever the microphone is picking up sound. This effectively means that the person talking into that handset has no way to know if the caller at the other end is trying to interject a comment or even interrupt.
This shouldn't be a problem, except that certain people seem to be almost irrationally uncomfortable with any moment of silence on a phone line, and so will just talk incessantly unless they know the person at the other end is trying to interrupt.
If you couple one of these people with such a feedback canceling handset, you end up with an enforced monologue (possibly followed by complaints that the other person never tells them anything).
So you choose your authorities very carefully, but it is still appeal to authority.
I actually agree with you and think you make a very important point. There is no way we could possibly apply methodological naturalism every time we had to make a decision. We all have to appeal to authority over and over again in order to hold all sorts of beliefs that are essential to us being able to function in everyday life.
We write off 'appeal to authority' far too readily as a valid means of determining what to believe. But yes, I entirely agree, we have to be very careful about which authorities to believe.
In the end it comes down to the question of who we put our faith in. I'm using the word 'faith' in its normal sense, not the opposite sense it has acquired when some people are talking about religion, that is, blind faith. Normal faith is a level of trust based on track record and is entirely rational. It is the reason someone might wait on a street corner for a lift even though they don't yet see the approaching car: past experience tells them that the person coming to collect them is reliable and will turn up as usual.
If we continue to put our faith in people who are faithful then we will generally not be disappointed. Similarly, we won't generally be dissapponted appealing to the authority of people who have a good track record of that authority.
The real reason the developer is poorly-placed to do the testing is that he has (presumably, if he is reasonably competent and motivated) already written and informally-tested the code to catch all the errors and corner cases he can think of.
So by the nature of the problem, the errors that you are asking the developer to catch are the very errors that haven't even occurred to the developer.
You might as well ask the question: "List for me all the potential problems you haven't thought of."
Except that in this case the argument does not depend on this distinction. If the argument is unaffected by a particular inaccuracy (or more to the point lack of clarity) then to attack the argument on this ground is to obfuscate what is actually important.
Truth is important. It would be better if the WHO website had been clearer about what they meant by "the world's first road traffic death". They don't mention that they are referring specifically to the death of a pedestrian caused by a motor vehicle hitting her, but I would hardly call that omission exaggeration or hyperbole - according to Wikipedia, the first road traffic death of any kind due to a motor vehicle was actually earlier, in 1869.
But that detail is insignificant compared to "1.2 million people are killed on roads every year and up to 50 million more are injured", and the fact that we seem to have become desensitised to this, which was the point of quoting that line from the coroner's report.
Actually did read the page and your comment. What I was however unprepared for is your apparent belief that the distinction between being killed by a car hitting you and being killed as a car occupant is vastly more important than than the point being made by the link.
OK, you win. The best way to discredit an argument is to pick a hole in an irrelevant detail.
No, I completely understood your point - that there are other ways of dying besides being hit by a motor car. No argument there.
But that is irrelevant when you had missed the point of the comment you were replying to, which was that, relating specifically to deaths caused by being hit by a motor car, while the first time this happened it was felt to be unacceptable, it has happened many millions of times again since then.
Um, the vehicles are all-electric. Admittedly, that isn't stated in the summary.
From the FAQ:
Is the solar panel used to recharge the vehicle batteries?
No, the solar panel is used to power the autonomous driving system only. Therefore cameras, lasers, PCs, and actuators are all powered by green energy, making the autonomous driving technology self-sustainable. The 'autonomous driver' is therefore seen as a plugin that is completely decoupled form the vehicle system and can be virtually adapted and installed on any vehicle.
How do you recharge the vehicles during the trip? Are there power outlets in the remote areas of the Siberia and China deserts?
Well, there are areas in which it is impossible to find power outlets and therefore recharging the vehicles would be impossible. In these areas we are using power generators. Remember that this is a test: should this be turned into a possible product, power outlets would be disseminated in the area covered by the vehicle.
Slashdot Mirror
I signed the petition.
I'm willing to put my head above the parapet. I hope you will be too.
That's a fair point and quite a common situation - a conflict between what someone believes or claims and testable reality.
But I think what we were talking about is conflict between what person A believes, and what person B thinks person A believes. That's very different. I'd always give the benefit of the doubt to person who owns the belief, unless there is good evidence that person is being disingenuous.
You are making too many assumptions.
In any case, let me please be the counter example - I believe God has a purpose for my life but I certainly don't believe that only I and those I know have free will. That's a direct statement about my beliefs and it directly contradicts your original assertion about what people like me believe.
That's the trouble with these kinds of discussions. The assertions by non-believers about what believers believe seem to carry more weight in the minds of the non-believers than what the believers do actually believe. ;-)
I have never come across this attitude.
As to your contention that if someone says "It was God's will" then the human agents involved could not have had free will, I think you've fundamentally misunderstood either what it means to say that something was God's will, or indeed what is meant by free will (which is understandable – philosophers down the ages have long argued this one).
Suffice it to say for now that from my own perspective as a Christian, to say that God willed something does in no way undermine the free will of the human agents involved. It can do, but only in exceedingly rare circumstances where God obliges the human agent to act in a certain way. Humans are perfectly able to do God's will through their own free choice, and often without even knowing it.
(Having said all that, I doubt that it is ever God's will that people should lose their lives in car accidents.)
If you believe God has a purpose for your life, the very worst thing you could do is throw that life away.
Depends where you work.
I think there are still a few places where you can reach the top of the ladder in a purely technical role.
There are probably others where you clearly have to become a manager and this is explicitly stated.
But the current thinking seems to be that certain universal 'behaviours' or 'competencies' are required for more senior grades, and these always include things like being able to provide examples of where you have dealt with performance issues in others - even if your particular job isn't management.
So the official line is that, yes, you can get to the top in a purely technical role, but in practice if you don't have examples of all the standard corporate 'behaviours' then you won't get anywhere.
Everyone makes mistakes, but the 'bad guys' (what I meant by that) are the ones who make a habit of breaking laws and are well-practiced at not getting caught.
Or more likely, it would become painfully obvious that many laws need to be repealed or modified.
Or do you really like it that law enforcement is a lottery? You get held to account but other people seem to get away with the same thing with impunity.
In a society where law enforcement is uncertain, it is generally the bad guy who gets away with it, and the good guy who slipped up who is brought to book.
Was I the only one who read the blueray tag as 'blurry'?
I find it more convenient to connect my camera to my laptop than to take the card out of the camera and stick it in a card reader. But each to his own.
My Pentax DSLR appears as a USB mass storage device, and I would be most surprised if this wasn't also true of virtually every other DSLR. I certainly would be very wary of buying a camera that didn't do this. I regard it as a standard and essential feature.
My wife's Canon Powershot isn't a USB mass storage device, but it does implement PictBridge, which can be read directly by Mac OS X and Windows without installing any additional drivers.
Mac OS X can read most RAW formats natively and I assume Windows can do likewise. If you are serious about using RAW format, you'll probably use a decent RAW image processing application anyway, such as Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture (or possibly Bibble). The free software bundled with the camera is usually inferior and not worth bothering with.
(I agree with the parent's other points though.)
Agreed. I don't mind if you call it something other than 'defensive.'
I certainly don't claim you shouldn't have those skills. If you do get into a bad situation, then being able to keep your car under control in an extreme manoeuvre is obviously going to be better than losing control.
My point is simply that we should never think of such skills as a substitute for driving in such a way as to avoid getting into those extreme situations in the first place.
The thing I found surprising when I did a short defensive driving course is just how much you can do to avoid emergency situations. If a child runs out in front of you it is not inevitable that you will have almost no time to react. A really good defensive driver will have seen the signs that a child was going to run out before it even happened.
Really good drivers all have one thing in common: Whenever an accident happens, or nearly happens, they are somewhere else. They are always calm and never seem to have to do anything suddenly. It is a real skill, and I'm nowhere near attaining it, though it is something I aspire to. Really got to work on that concentration ;-(
Car physics are largely irrelevant when you are driving courteously, paying attention, and using sensible defensive driving techniques.
Car physics become important when you take a corner too fast, overtake in the wrong place, don't allow sufficient stopping distance, become distracted, or someone cuts you up and you haven't planned an escape route. The trick is not to get into that situation in the first place.
Exactly.
Has everyone forgotten Gary McKinnon so quickly?
How history repeats itself.
Not actually a fallacy in this case.
It would be a fallacy if one were to use this particular case to define (in part) what Agile is or is not. But Agile is well-enough defined anyway that it is perfectly clear that this case is not Agile.
I don't know enough about Agile to make a judgment myself, but you've practically said it yourself: your first experience wasn't Agile, it was just something that someone called 'Agile'.
It's far worse than people just filtering their search results.
Companies like Amazon make recommendations based on items you looked at previously. iTunes recommends music similar to the music you already have. Many commercial news sites allow you to customize your landing page so that you don't see news stories on subjects that don't interest you. Sites like Digg allow like-minded people to vote stories up and down so that you are more likely to see stories that fit well with your interests and world-view. Slashdot has a comment moderation system where ideas that don't fit with the group-think get hidden.
All so that we don't have to bother our poor little heads with things that disturb us.
I notice this very much when I am talking to certain people, but I think it is an issue with the telephone handset, not with the line (for landlines at least).
I assumed the cause is the feedback canceling mechanism in the handset. As handsets have become smaller, manufacturers have had to resort to more extreme measures to stop the microphone picking up the output of the speaker.
Some handsets seem to completely turn off the speaker whenever the microphone is picking up sound. This effectively means that the person talking into that handset has no way to know if the caller at the other end is trying to interject a comment or even interrupt.
This shouldn't be a problem, except that certain people seem to be almost irrationally uncomfortable with any moment of silence on a phone line, and so will just talk incessantly unless they know the person at the other end is trying to interrupt.
If you couple one of these people with such a feedback canceling handset, you end up with an enforced monologue (possibly followed by complaints that the other person never tells them anything).
So you choose your authorities very carefully, but it is still appeal to authority.
I actually agree with you and think you make a very important point. There is no way we could possibly apply methodological naturalism every time we had to make a decision. We all have to appeal to authority over and over again in order to hold all sorts of beliefs that are essential to us being able to function in everyday life.
We write off 'appeal to authority' far too readily as a valid means of determining what to believe. But yes, I entirely agree, we have to be very careful about which authorities to believe.
In the end it comes down to the question of who we put our faith in. I'm using the word 'faith' in its normal sense, not the opposite sense it has acquired when some people are talking about religion, that is, blind faith. Normal faith is a level of trust based on track record and is entirely rational. It is the reason someone might wait on a street corner for a lift even though they don't yet see the approaching car: past experience tells them that the person coming to collect them is reliable and will turn up as usual.
If we continue to put our faith in people who are faithful then we will generally not be disappointed. Similarly, we won't generally be dissapponted appealing to the authority of people who have a good track record of that authority.
The real reason the developer is poorly-placed to do the testing is that he has (presumably, if he is reasonably competent and motivated) already written and informally-tested the code to catch all the errors and corner cases he can think of.
So by the nature of the problem, the errors that you are asking the developer to catch are the very errors that haven't even occurred to the developer.
You might as well ask the question: "List for me all the potential problems you haven't thought of."
Except that in this case the argument does not depend on this distinction. If the argument is unaffected by a particular inaccuracy (or more to the point lack of clarity) then to attack the argument on this ground is to obfuscate what is actually important.
Truth is important. It would be better if the WHO website had been clearer about what they meant by "the world's first road traffic death". They don't mention that they are referring specifically to the death of a pedestrian caused by a motor vehicle hitting her, but I would hardly call that omission exaggeration or hyperbole - according to Wikipedia, the first road traffic death of any kind due to a motor vehicle was actually earlier, in 1869.
But that detail is insignificant compared to "1.2 million people are killed on roads every year and up to 50 million more are injured", and the fact that we seem to have become desensitised to this, which was the point of quoting that line from the coroner's report.
Actually did read the page and your comment. What I was however unprepared for is your apparent belief that the distinction between being killed by a car hitting you and being killed as a car occupant is vastly more important than than the point being made by the link.
OK, you win. The best way to discredit an argument is to pick a hole in an irrelevant detail.
No, I completely understood your point - that there are other ways of dying besides being hit by a motor car. No argument there.
But that is irrelevant when you had missed the point of the comment you were replying to, which was that, relating specifically to deaths caused by being hit by a motor car, while the first time this happened it was felt to be unacceptable, it has happened many millions of times again since then.
Um, the vehicles are all-electric. Admittedly, that isn't stated in the summary.
From the FAQ: