Personally, I think if gthumb had gimps "Levels" and "Curves" dialog, and a quicker way to open a file in Gimp, I'd probably use that for my main snapshot processing. My wife is a semi-pro photog who loves Lightroom, but I'd be much happier in Linux.:-)
If I had time, I'd pull the functionality over myself.
You need to read "Collapse", by Jared Diamond. It's a really awesome book -- in it he analyzes various civilizations that have grown and the collapsed. The core issue in all of the collapses had to do with resources: using up a limited resource, damaging the environment so that it produced less food, &c. When the resources limited the ability of the populations to produce enough food to feed themselves, the societies collapsed into anarchy and cannibalism.
So what would happen if tomorrow we suddenly ran out of oil? Farms wouldn't be able to produce as much food as before w/o tractors; the food they could produce couldn't be transported to cities where most people live; without electricity, it can't be refrigerated, so even the food that was made would have a much lower shelf life. Billions of people, especially in cities, would starve to death (and if Easter Island or Anasazi Indians are any example, billions of people will be eaten by other people starving to death). Civilization would collapse, and along with our industry and research infrastructure, preventing us from developing any new technology to replace oil for probably hundreds of years.
Now, it's true that we have a couple of decades left before this happens, so we have time to look for alternate energy sources. But the fact is that our current global way of life requires a certain amount of "energy" as input to sustain it. What happens if, by the time the oil runs out, we simply cannot find an alternate source, or can't build up the infrastructure to use such an alternate source in time? We need to start looking in earnest now, while we still have plenty of time for false starts, and reducing our consumption now, when conservation will be most effective.
It's true that "the market will adjust" to find a new equilibrium population and political organization that can be sustained with the energy we'll have, but any adjustment that involves going from 6 billion people down to 1.2 billion (the world population in 1850) within a few years is going to involve an immense amount of suffering.
That's the thing -- there's no need to have 10 million people each checking the same web page independently. They could have a centralized server keep cached results; they could probably even set up a peer-to-peer system to share results without having to spam web pages.
I'm an American living in the UK, and I heard a rather curious weather forecast the other day. The weather forecaster said that there would be lows approaching 0 overnight. Then, after describing where it might rain when in the next few days, he said that in a few days there would be warmer weather, with highs as high as 90 in the south.
No units explicitly given, so it's going to be either really cold overnight, or really hot in a few days!
Where exactly do you live? I'm not in the US right now, but I'd be pretty depressed if the people in my neck of the woods were talking like that... the Midwest is a big place.
You know what's funny, is that just today I took a mandatory online training course on anti-trust regulations, just like everyone in my company does. It was funny reading the article, because like at least 3 or 4 things were specifically mentioned:
Predatory pricing to prevent a new entrant into a market by a company with market dominance
Limitations on what resellers can do with the product purchased (only on low-end PCs)
Arbitrary discounts to some distributors over others
Agreements between different members of the supply chain to limit customer choice
If the EU is at all consistent with the policies explained in my training today, MS should be forced to either sell low-cost XP to everyone, regardless of the hardware, or not sell XP at all. Who do I write in the EU to get an injunction?
I think "IP Moat" can clearly be applied to Verizon (suing Vonage for an obvious way -- sorry, the only way to connect a phone to the internet), but whom has IBM and MS ever sued for patent infringement? Large software corporations need it to protect themselves from patent infringement from other software corporations, since just about anything in software is patentable. As my software company has become larger, we've been encouraged to submit software patents on our technology to provide "air cover" against an established competitor, who has had a decade to come up with obvious software patents. If we have our own, then it will end up in a "cross-licensing" deal.
Maybe a linguist can pitch in to explain why tebibyte sounds so awful?
I don't care how it sounds, it's just a pain in the neck to pronounce the two 'b' sounds in a row. In England they're to lazy to pronounce the "chest" in Leichester, and pronounce it "Lie-ster". Here in Cambridge, they're too lazy to prounounce Mag-da-lene in Magdalene College, and pronounce it Mawd-lin. Do you really expect English speakers to say "Mebbbibbbyte"? It's not going to happen.
So how do you prove that something was designed? What kind of evidence would be convincing to you?
This is part of the problem with the debate -- people say, "Science means falsifiable; you can't falsify this; therefore, this isn't science (and therefore not true)." Under those conditions, discussing things with evolutionists is a bit like playing Yu-Gi-Oh with my 7-year-old nephew: the rules are defined at the outset so you lose.
Plese remember, I'm trying to give you an idea of someone else's perspective. I realize it's not your perspective or experience. My main goal is not to say whether one or the other is true, but to explain where someone else is coming from.
I tried to give you a description of my direct experience as a Christian in the GP. I'm afraid that's the best I can do over Slashdot.:-)
To a layman, evolution does sound implausible. They look at the incredibly complex world, that looks just as if it had been designed to work the way it does, and say, "This cannot have happened by chance. It just doesn't make any sense." The fact is that in our normal life, all non-living complex systems are created by an intelligence. Furthermore, anything non-living tends to go decay from complex organization to simple. Evolution says exactly the opposite: mechanistic processes going from simple to complex without any intelligent interference. So there is a gap between "common sense" and what evolution describes. There have been all kinds of essays and writings trying to bridge this gap, but the fact is that there is a gap there to be bridged. And just with other gaps between science and common experience (like, "heaver objects fall at the same rate as light objects", and "the earth goes around the sun"), most people need at least a little bit of evidence and convincing before they're willing to accept them.
I assume you're asking, "If it shown that there really were no God, would that change how you would believe and act?" Yes. I think optimal behavior is to believe and act according to the truth, no matter what it is. If God isn't real, then there are a lot of inefficiencies in how I'm receiving whatever benefit I am receiving from my religious activities, and I could best be obtained in a different manner.
Religion presents an interesting conundrum to atheistic evolution. The fact is that the vast majority of humans over the course of history have believed in some sort of spiritual realm. According to atheistic evolution, this must mean that this belief in a spiritual realm gave reproductive advantage to those who held it. But if there really is no spiritual realm, then it means that there can be evolutionary advantage in believing something that is not true.
Now, according to atheistic evolution, our capability of logic and reasoning also must have evolved because it gives a reproductive advantage somehow. And we all of us believe that our logic and reasoning allow us to discover what is true. However, evolution only cares about providing selective advantage. So if religion evolved, in spite of being untrue, we cannot guarantee that our logic, which we rely on to understand the world and even evolution itself, has not evolved to provide false conclusions in some areas.
My main point was that Christians have direct experience which confirms (to them) the truth of Christianity, whereas they frequently do not have direct experience of the truth of evolution.
Lots of things are rewardng and/or comforting which are not "opiates".
Christianity gives them a framework to understand their purpose, value, and experience.
Improvement in their lives comes from having (as they perceive) a relationship with God. The rewards and life improvements of this kind of relationship can be compared to rewards of other relationships: marriage, parent/son, &c.
I submit that people continue doing things only when they get a reward of some kind. (The distinction between a "good" person and a "bad" person is where they find their reward. If you go to great personal inconvenience to help someone else, it's because you get more reward from seeing the other person happy than you would have had from your own comfort and ease. It's not whether you got a reward or not, but what kind of a reward you chose to value.) As an engineer, I get a lot of reward out of solving problems and making things work properly. As a husband, I find my relationship with my wife rewarding (not without trials, but well worth the effort). I've had direct experience with living the single life, and being married. You can imagine that if someone came to me with some implausible-sounding theory, and then said that because of this theory I should give up solving problems or that I'd be much better off if I left my wife and went back to living the single life, I'd think they were nuts. And if they started trying to teach my children that because of this implausible-sounding theory, engineering was valueless and that marriage was a waste of time, I'd be pretty upset, and would be doing something to fight back.
As for what kind of rewards and experience: I'm trying to bridge the gap here between people who are looking in from the outside, and people seeing things from the inside. I can tell you what it seems like from the inside. And I happen to believe that what "seems" is actually true. You may disagree with the interpretation of my experience, but you need to accept the validity* of my experience -- i.e., that I have experienced what I describe, and that it is rewarding to me.
The main reward I get from Christianity is having a relationship with God. God knows me, cares about me, values me, and loves me. I also love God -- I love serving him, I love seeing the cool things that he's made, I love talking to him and learning from him. God guides me: I am where I am right now because God has led me here, and although I don't know exactly where I'll be living or doing in one year from now, I know he has a plan and trust him to let me know when I need to know. God protects me and provides for me.
He also works in me to make me more holy. He puts me in situations which bring out flaws in my character. He puts me in situations that stress me and strengthen my character and my trust in him. I've had plenty of experiences where I tried to change something about myself, and finally at my wit's end pray and ask for God's help, and it changes immediately.
And he forgives me. I'm far from perfect; I do lots of things that are hurtful to other people and to myself. Christianity has an explanation: because of Adam's disobedience, all of us are born flawed: knowing what is right and wrong, but unable to do it. Christianity also has a solution: God's forgiveness can be obtained because Jesus was tortured, died, and rose again from the dead, setting us right with God again. Jesus' resurrection also gives us hope that one day we will be whole and complete, without flaws. I can fully accept the guilt of what I've done, without being crippled by the guilt of who I am. (If anything is an opiate, it's modern psychology's take on guilt. See
FAITH - "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence."
I assume this is a definition that you got from some dictionary or other, though you don't cite it. If it was a good dictionary it probably listed other definitions; google "define:faith" and you'll see a few. But it is convenient to quote an unnamed dictionary as an authority to win your argument, instead of, oh, asking what I did mean by faith, and how I can say that the Bible doesn't espouse your definition.
Hmmmmm amazing you got modded up when you didn't touch on his comment. Instead you just said Christianity relies on reasoning.
I probably got modded up because:
my post had something to do with the original article -- communicating evolution to conservative religious people, and
it's something a lot of slashdotters don't think about: why exactly is it that people are so willing to put Christianity above Evolution? (That may be why it's more "interesting" than "insightful").
The quick-and-easy answers are too simplistic. I'm not a psychologist, but from what I've observed, nobody can sustain any activity without psychological reward; the more demanding the activity, the more powerful the reward needs to be. To attempt to do so only causes burnout and risks ending in a complete lack of interest. People must find great reward from Christianity to spend so much time and effort living according to its principles. It should be no surprise that when someone says to such a person, "Evolution means all that religious stuff is pointless", they say, "Well, this religious stuff seems pretty point-full to me; it must be Evolution that has the problem."
As for GGP, he merely stated something as a premise without attempting to justify it. I contradicted his premise. Seems about equal to me. If you want to know about Christianity, faith, evidence, and reasoning, I'm happy to discuss it.
In fact, the faith the Bible extols is never accepting something as fact despite a lack of evidence. Nor is it refusing to reason. No one is condemned in the Bible for not believing what they don't know. They're condemned for not believing what they do or could know, or in abandoning the knowledge that they have.
Have you ever seriously asked why people are willing to believe in Christianity over Evolution? The main reason, as far as I can tell is that belief in evolution has no perceived impact on their lives. Christianity gives them hope, comfort, healing, strength, a way to understand the world, a way to improve themselves and their life. They have direct, first-hand experience of this help to them. Evolution gives them none of that; worse, it tells them that there's no real hope at all: they're just animals, doing what animals do; there's no hope for anything other than this life, and no hope even for humanity in the long run. Given the choice between some insulting theoretical interpretation of the past which they've never had any personal experience with, and a life-giving present help and future hope they have had experience with, is it any wonder that they chose Christianity over evolution?
There are lots of intelligent Christians who don't believe that it's necessary to cho0se -- who believe that God created the world and that the Bible is God's word, but still believe in evolution as the basic way most species became the way they are. Those who do believe in evolution believe it because they themselves have some experience in it -- they've at least talked to scientists and studied geology, history, biology, and so on.
Until people attempting to persuade people about evolution realize where people who believe in Christianity are coming from, there's not much real hope of doing it. People like Dawkins seem to think that people believe in Christianity only because they don't know any better, and that if they just showed them evidence or asserted their authority as scientists, people should just accept what they say. But many people's faith in Christianity actually rests on a solid foundation of experience, evidence and reason (not at all "believing in somthing despite lack of evidence"), compared with which all the clever arguments about bones and canyons and radioactive stuff is just an illusion.
The ONLY REASON to keep IP exclusive, is for monitary gain, isn't it? Make it public domain if you value it for the esoteric social benefit it provides...
No. The GPL, for instance, uses it as a big stick to make sure that people "play fair" -- i.e., you can use my code, but only if you let us use your code. Furthermore, composers have used it to make sure that their songs aren't just played, but played *well*, and artists have used it to demand things like artistic integrity.
What whould happen to the Free Software movement if such a law were put in place? If people couldn't afford to maintian copyrights on the code, the GPL would effectively be BSD-after-N-years (where N is the number of years you can keep your IP for free).
Money is a form of power: if you have it, you can pay people to do whatever they're willing to be paid to do. People with money decide what buildings will be built, what movies will be made, and what products will be produced.
The reason the free market works so well is that, in general, people who make wise decisions with that power (usually meanying those who create the most value to the customer & society) are rewarded with more money (and thus more power), while the people who make poor decisions (wasting money, or sticking with poor products or policies) end up losing money (and thus losing power). So there's this kind of feedback, such that people who make better decisions end up being the ones making more of the decisions.
Another reason they work is that they (frequently) promote diversity -- lots of different people trying to solve the same problem in different ways, so that (frequently) the best one wins.
The problem with governments (and I submit, any kind of government) running things is that there is very little feedback of this kind. Once people get control of some area in a government, it takes something major to actually get them out. There's also only one person, or group of people, trying to solve the problem. So if the way they're doing it is "good enough", there's nothing to force them to change. The same things happen in corporations (see Dilbert), but to a much lower degree; and because there are a diversity of corporations, there's more of a chance that someone will find a better way or make better decisions.
Personally, I think that the free market is a good system (better than a centrally planned government), but I don't believe that capitalism as it's imlemented to day is necessarily the best overall system. "Maximizing shareholder value" frequently means making more value for society as a whole, but frequently it also means short-sighted policies (environmental damage, or even the suit against Yahoo for not accepting Microsoft's buy-out offer) or even evil, destructive policies (such as labor practices in the 1800's, before unions and labor laws corrected egregious abuse of factory workers' lives and health). If there were some other way which gave more power to people who made good decisions and encouraged innovation and entrepreneurship, while distributing the resulting value fairly to everyone in the supply chain, I'd rather have that.
It was unclear you'd be okay with unlimited consumption of renewable energy. To the extent its costs are internalized (so renewable means 100%), you should be.
I wasn't trying to make a judgement either way on how much we should consume; I was trying to show that "overconsumption" is a useful word. (The previous poster had said that "There's no such thing as overconsumption".)
I guess there's lots of reasons why one might want to limit consumption of energy; to toss some out there:
Sustainability (To what degree are we using non-renewable resources, and what happens when we run out?)
Environmental impact of energy use -- i.e., heat and light damaging the environment
Moral considerations -- there's something just not right about being wasteful, even if a resource is plentiful. (But of course, what "wasteful" means depends on the circumstances.)
But yeah, if we could find renewable resources that would provide us with energy / food/ &c at first-world levels to everyone in the world (including those in the current third world) indefinitely, then that would be great. But until we do have those resources in place, we need to do something. (And I'm definitely a first-world consumer of energy...)
"Overconsumption" is akin to "overspending". If you have an income of $2000 and $100K in the bank, and you're spending $10000 a month, you're overspending. You can get away with it until your "banked" resources run out, at which case you will be spending only $2000 a month. The only question at that point is whether you've prepared your finances for that sudden change, or whether things will crash and burn (i.e., your home and car get reposessed, you have to pay exhorbitant cancellation costs for cell phone contracts, &c).
If your income is from your capital (i.e., if your income is dividends from stocks, &c), you have an even worse problem: that the more of your savings you spend, the less income you have. If you keep spending at your "overspending" rate, you'll eventually have no capital at all. Moderation early on may mean a sustainable income of $2000, but the longer you wait to adjust to your sustainable income, the lower your sustinable income will be when you finally get your head on straight.
Oil, coal, copper, steel, and other non-renewable resources are like money in the bank. Right now our energy consumption, as a society, is several times what our "income" is from renewable energy sources. We're running on our "bank" of oil, coal, &c. What happens when the oil & coal run out, if we don't find a renewable energy source that can provide us energy at the rates we're used to? "The market will adjust", certainly, but it's likely that it will "adjust" by massive wars, anarchy, starvation, and societal collapse. (See "Collapse", by Jared Diamond for a history of many such past societies that have had exactly that happen.)
Renewable resources like ocean fish, trees, and soil are like the stock market. If fishing and logging happen at replacement rate, then you have a sustainable renewable resource indefinitely. But if you fish or log at more than replacement rates, then your stock of reproducing fish or trees goes down, meaning a lower rate of the sustainable resource, until the resource is finally exhausted and cannot be renewed.
With these kind of fixed resources, "overconsumption" definitely has a well-defined meaning that has nothing to do with "externalities".
Both parties overwhelmingly voted for the Bono Act, Bankrupcy reform, the PATRIOT Act, the DMCA, are both against marijuana, are both against Prostitution.
And if we had three parties, would any of that change? If marijuana and prostitution are opposed by the majority of the populace, then politicians voting against it is called "democracy".
There was more difference between the various factions of the USSR's Communist Party than there are between the two factions of our single Corporate Republicrat Party.
Examples?
The main reason there will always be two parties, as far as I can tell (I'm certainly not an expert) is that you don't need a majority of votes to win, you just need more than anyone else. If a majority were required, then there would be a market (so to speak) for hundreds of individual parties that would make coalitions to achieve a majority. As it is, the only way to form a coalition is to join the party you least dislike. If you form a new party that is successful in attracting voters, it will in all likelihood draw voters away from the party you least dislike, guaranteeing that the party you most dislike will win.
The way our voting system is set up, it guarantees that the stable state is exactly two dominant parties. If at any point a small party begins to draw significant support from a larger party, the vote is split, both parties lose, and the opposition wins. At that point, everyone either goes back to the old large party, or rushes to the growing, previously small party, and we have two stable parties again.
At least we have two parties, which is better than one-party "systems"...
Most of the games he's testing DON'T WORK ON EITHER SYSTEM. It's just that under Vista, a lot of them crash.
One that doesn't crash -- Civ 4 -- Microsoft warns that it won't work, then doesnt' work; while Wine just doesn't work. How is that better?
The first one he tested was a game that he doesn't even play. WTH? "There's a game that I've heard of that I don't play but it doesn't work on Vista so I'm angry."
The second game is some ancient DOS game. It won't play because DOSBox doesn't work on Vista. Maybe you should... wait until they have a version of DOSBox for Vista?
Honestly, I was expecting a list of games people commonly play these days, not a bunch of randomness. The fact that Vista crashed for him is, of course, bad; but the fact that Wine doesn't play the games but just crashes instead hardly makes Linux a better gaming platform.
Re:Why should the labels be in control anyway?
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Sony BMG Dropping DRM
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The answer is actually pretty simple. In any industry, you rarely have one entity starting with raw materials and selling directly to the public; you have a chain of entities who buy materials or labour, do something to "add value", and sell it to the next guy down the line. In the music industry, musicians create music, which is produced and refined into an album, marked and distributed by stores. The final product -- in this case a CD -- has some amount of "value" to customers (denominated in dollars).
When you're looking at the strategic landscape of an industry, one of the important question to ask is, "who captures the value"? I.e., how much of that final value to the consumer ($20 CD sale) goes to each person in the line?
Bargaining power of buyers (i.e., the people buying what you make)
Bargaining power of sellsers (i.e., the people you're buying from)
So, artist -> record labels -> record stores -> end consumer, who captures the value?
Artists are in a really weak bargaining position. Tons of people want to make music, so the threat of substitution, threat of entry of new competitors, is really high. Distribution and marketing has historically required a lot of money, which means that there aren't very many alternatives, there's a high barrier to entry, and not a ton of competitive rivalry. The record stores historically haven't had much bargaining power either -- so the record companies capture a lion's share of the value (although, to be fair, they also risk and invest a huge amount of money in distribution and such).
But now, because of Apple's dominance of the hardware market, iTunes has a lot more bargaining power than record stores ever had. Going to DRM-less is basically the only alternative for the labels to reduce Apple's bargaining power.
What an interesting post! Very well put. Not often that I read a slashdot post that causes so much introspection.
Two points. First, Buddha's observation relates only to questions about life after death. However, the question "Is there a God" doesn't necessarily have to do with "eternity". If you read the Old Testament of the Bible, there is no explicit mention of Heaven. (Or, at least, almost no mention of heaven -- haven't done a search.) There is a vague shadowy idea of the afterlife in terms of "Sheol", but that's nothing like what people think of heaven and eternity these days. Almost all of the focus of God and our relationship with him is about the here and now -- the blessings of walking with God and being a righteous man.
Second, Buddha's observation about the source of the question may reveal something about us; but the question still remains as a question of fact, and it does matter. If Buddha I were on the Titanic, and I had heard people say that it was sinking, and I asked Buddha if he thought it was sinking and if we should try to escape on some lifeboats, his series of observational questions are still as valid as they are when asking about God. Yes, I want to know if the Titanic is sinking in part because I'm afraid of dying; and yes, that's in part because I'm afraid of what will happen to me when I die. But I must insist that the answer to the original question is still important, since how I believe and act will determine whether I die a cold icy death soon, or of old age after a long full life later.
Similarly, the answer to the question of God's existence and nature -- whether I can live in a relationship with him now, and whether he will judge me after I die for how I've lived my life here -- will be of material significance to my happiness.
I think a better way to put it would be, "The absolute most important factor of success is effort." When I was in school, I got top scores on all the standardized tests without working a bit. Because of this, I got all kinds of rewards and accolades for "my hard work". Instead of teaching me to value working hard and challenging myself, it taught me to expect honors and recognition without having to do anything for it.
I think it was lucky for me that:
I really do love to learn, so that's always been reward enough in many areas of my life to encourage me to press onward.
"Failure" happened very slowly.
At college I gradually had less accolades for not doing anything special, and gradually had to work harder to do well; so I never "hit a wall" where I thought I was dumb. I did feel jealous for awhile of other people who got rewards for actually going over and above; but I just had to suck it up and tell myself that they were rewarded because they put in extra effort, and I'm not being rewarded because I didn't.
The goal is a fair and structured hearing, and punishment or acquittal based on the laws, decided by a jury & judge as impartial as possible.
In fact, it seems a bit like the whole posting-to-the-blog thing (and even the parents going to the media) is a form of vigilante-ism. The parents and the bloggers don't expect the courts to actually punish the woman in question, or not sufficiently; so they are attempting to ensure that at least public shame, possibly worse punishment gets handed out.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think if gthumb had gimps "Levels" and "Curves" dialog, and a quicker way to open a file in Gimp, I'd probably use that for my main snapshot processing. My wife is a semi-pro photog who loves Lightroom, but I'd be much happier in Linux. :-)
If I had time, I'd pull the functionality over myself.
You need to read "Collapse", by Jared Diamond. It's a really awesome book -- in it he analyzes various civilizations that have grown and the collapsed. The core issue in all of the collapses had to do with resources: using up a limited resource, damaging the environment so that it produced less food, &c. When the resources limited the ability of the populations to produce enough food to feed themselves, the societies collapsed into anarchy and cannibalism.
So what would happen if tomorrow we suddenly ran out of oil? Farms wouldn't be able to produce as much food as before w/o tractors; the food they could produce couldn't be transported to cities where most people live; without electricity, it can't be refrigerated, so even the food that was made would have a much lower shelf life. Billions of people, especially in cities, would starve to death (and if Easter Island or Anasazi Indians are any example, billions of people will be eaten by other people starving to death). Civilization would collapse, and along with our industry and research infrastructure, preventing us from developing any new technology to replace oil for probably hundreds of years.
Now, it's true that we have a couple of decades left before this happens, so we have time to look for alternate energy sources. But the fact is that our current global way of life requires a certain amount of "energy" as input to sustain it. What happens if, by the time the oil runs out, we simply cannot find an alternate source, or can't build up the infrastructure to use such an alternate source in time? We need to start looking in earnest now, while we still have plenty of time for false starts, and reducing our consumption now, when conservation will be most effective.
It's true that "the market will adjust" to find a new equilibrium population and political organization that can be sustained with the energy we'll have, but any adjustment that involves going from 6 billion people down to 1.2 billion (the world population in 1850) within a few years is going to involve an immense amount of suffering.
That's the thing -- there's no need to have 10 million people each checking the same web page independently. They could have a centralized server keep cached results; they could probably even set up a peer-to-peer system to share results without having to spam web pages.
I'm an American living in the UK, and I heard a rather curious weather forecast the other day. The weather forecaster said that there would be lows approaching 0 overnight. Then, after describing where it might rain when in the next few days, he said that in a few days there would be warmer weather, with highs as high as 90 in the south.
No units explicitly given, so it's going to be either really cold overnight, or really hot in a few days!
Where exactly do you live? I'm not in the US right now, but I'd be pretty depressed if the people in my neck of the woods were talking like that... the Midwest is a big place.
- Predatory pricing to prevent a new entrant into a market by a company with market dominance
- Limitations on what resellers can do with the product purchased (only on low-end PCs)
- Arbitrary discounts to some distributors over others
- Agreements between different members of the supply chain to limit customer choice
If the EU is at all consistent with the policies explained in my training today, MS should be forced to either sell low-cost XP to everyone, regardless of the hardware, or not sell XP at all. Who do I write in the EU to get an injunction?I think "IP Moat" can clearly be applied to Verizon (suing Vonage for an obvious way -- sorry, the only way to connect a phone to the internet), but whom has IBM and MS ever sued for patent infringement? Large software corporations need it to protect themselves from patent infringement from other software corporations, since just about anything in software is patentable. As my software company has become larger, we've been encouraged to submit software patents on our technology to provide "air cover" against an established competitor, who has had a decade to come up with obvious software patents. If we have our own, then it will end up in a "cross-licensing" deal.
I don't care how it sounds, it's just a pain in the neck to pronounce the two 'b' sounds in a row. In England they're to lazy to pronounce the "chest" in Leichester, and pronounce it "Lie-ster". Here in Cambridge, they're too lazy to prounounce Mag-da-lene in Magdalene College, and pronounce it Mawd-lin. Do you really expect English speakers to say "Mebbbibbbyte"? It's not going to happen.
So how do you prove that something was designed? What kind of evidence would be convincing to you?
This is part of the problem with the debate -- people say, "Science means falsifiable; you can't falsify this; therefore, this isn't science (and therefore not true)." Under those conditions, discussing things with evolutionists is a bit like playing Yu-Gi-Oh with my 7-year-old nephew: the rules are defined at the outset so you lose.
Religion presents an interesting conundrum to atheistic evolution. The fact is that the vast majority of humans over the course of history have believed in some sort of spiritual realm. According to atheistic evolution, this must mean that this belief in a spiritual realm gave reproductive advantage to those who held it. But if there really is no spiritual realm, then it means that there can be evolutionary advantage in believing something that is not true.
Now, according to atheistic evolution, our capability of logic and reasoning also must have evolved because it gives a reproductive advantage somehow. And we all of us believe that our logic and reasoning allow us to discover what is true. However, evolution only cares about providing selective advantage. So if religion evolved, in spite of being untrue, we cannot guarantee that our logic, which we rely on to understand the world and even evolution itself, has not evolved to provide false conclusions in some areas.
Ah, so many questions, so little time. In brief:
I submit that people continue doing things only when they get a reward of some kind. (The distinction between a "good" person and a "bad" person is where they find their reward. If you go to great personal inconvenience to help someone else, it's because you get more reward from seeing the other person happy than you would have had from your own comfort and ease. It's not whether you got a reward or not, but what kind of a reward you chose to value.) As an engineer, I get a lot of reward out of solving problems and making things work properly. As a husband, I find my relationship with my wife rewarding (not without trials, but well worth the effort). I've had direct experience with living the single life, and being married. You can imagine that if someone came to me with some implausible-sounding theory, and then said that because of this theory I should give up solving problems or that I'd be much better off if I left my wife and went back to living the single life, I'd think they were nuts. And if they started trying to teach my children that because of this implausible-sounding theory, engineering was valueless and that marriage was a waste of time, I'd be pretty upset, and would be doing something to fight back.
As for what kind of rewards and experience: I'm trying to bridge the gap here between people who are looking in from the outside, and people seeing things from the inside. I can tell you what it seems like from the inside. And I happen to believe that what "seems" is actually true. You may disagree with the interpretation of my experience, but you need to accept the validity* of my experience -- i.e., that I have experienced what I describe, and that it is rewarding to me.
The main reward I get from Christianity is having a relationship with God. God knows me, cares about me, values me, and loves me. I also love God -- I love serving him, I love seeing the cool things that he's made, I love talking to him and learning from him. God guides me: I am where I am right now because God has led me here, and although I don't know exactly where I'll be living or doing in one year from now, I know he has a plan and trust him to let me know when I need to know. God protects me and provides for me.
He also works in me to make me more holy. He puts me in situations which bring out flaws in my character. He puts me in situations that stress me and strengthen my character and my trust in him. I've had plenty of experiences where I tried to change something about myself, and finally at my wit's end pray and ask for God's help, and it changes immediately.
And he forgives me. I'm far from perfect; I do lots of things that are hurtful to other people and to myself. Christianity has an explanation: because of Adam's disobedience, all of us are born flawed: knowing what is right and wrong, but unable to do it. Christianity also has a solution: God's forgiveness can be obtained because Jesus was tortured, died, and rose again from the dead, setting us right with God again. Jesus' resurrection also gives us hope that one day we will be whole and complete, without flaws. I can fully accept the guilt of what I've done, without being crippled by the guilt of who I am. (If anything is an opiate, it's modern psychology's take on guilt. See
I assume this is a definition that you got from some dictionary or other, though you don't cite it. If it was a good dictionary it probably listed other definitions; google "define:faith" and you'll see a few. But it is convenient to quote an unnamed dictionary as an authority to win your argument, instead of, oh, asking what I did mean by faith, and how I can say that the Bible doesn't espouse your definition.
I probably got modded up because:
- my post had something to do with the original article -- communicating evolution to conservative religious people, and
- it's something a lot of slashdotters don't think about: why exactly is it that people are so willing to put Christianity above Evolution? (That may be why it's more "interesting" than "insightful").
The quick-and-easy answers are too simplistic. I'm not a psychologist, but from what I've observed, nobody can sustain any activity without psychological reward; the more demanding the activity, the more powerful the reward needs to be. To attempt to do so only causes burnout and risks ending in a complete lack of interest. People must find great reward from Christianity to spend so much time and effort living according to its principles. It should be no surprise that when someone says to such a person, "Evolution means all that religious stuff is pointless", they say, "Well, this religious stuff seems pretty point-full to me; it must be Evolution that has the problem."As for GGP, he merely stated something as a premise without attempting to justify it. I contradicted his premise. Seems about equal to me. If you want to know about Christianity, faith, evidence, and reasoning, I'm happy to discuss it.
In fact, the faith the Bible extols is never accepting something as fact despite a lack of evidence. Nor is it refusing to reason. No one is condemned in the Bible for not believing what they don't know. They're condemned for not believing what they do or could know, or in abandoning the knowledge that they have.
Have you ever seriously asked why people are willing to believe in Christianity over Evolution? The main reason, as far as I can tell is that belief in evolution has no perceived impact on their lives. Christianity gives them hope, comfort, healing, strength, a way to understand the world, a way to improve themselves and their life. They have direct, first-hand experience of this help to them. Evolution gives them none of that; worse, it tells them that there's no real hope at all: they're just animals, doing what animals do; there's no hope for anything other than this life, and no hope even for humanity in the long run. Given the choice between some insulting theoretical interpretation of the past which they've never had any personal experience with, and a life-giving present help and future hope they have had experience with, is it any wonder that they chose Christianity over evolution?
There are lots of intelligent Christians who don't believe that it's necessary to cho0se -- who believe that God created the world and that the Bible is God's word, but still believe in evolution as the basic way most species became the way they are. Those who do believe in evolution believe it because they themselves have some experience in it -- they've at least talked to scientists and studied geology, history, biology, and so on.
Until people attempting to persuade people about evolution realize where people who believe in Christianity are coming from, there's not much real hope of doing it. People like Dawkins seem to think that people believe in Christianity only because they don't know any better, and that if they just showed them evidence or asserted their authority as scientists, people should just accept what they say. But many people's faith in Christianity actually rests on a solid foundation of experience, evidence and reason (not at all "believing in somthing despite lack of evidence"), compared with which all the clever arguments about bones and canyons and radioactive stuff is just an illusion.
No. The GPL, for instance, uses it as a big stick to make sure that people "play fair" -- i.e., you can use my code, but only if you let us use your code. Furthermore, composers have used it to make sure that their songs aren't just played, but played *well*, and artists have used it to demand things like artistic integrity.
What whould happen to the Free Software movement if such a law were put in place? If people couldn't afford to maintian copyrights on the code, the GPL would effectively be BSD-after-N-years (where N is the number of years you can keep your IP for free).
Money is a form of power: if you have it, you can pay people to do whatever they're willing to be paid to do. People with money decide what buildings will be built, what movies will be made, and what products will be produced.
The reason the free market works so well is that, in general, people who make wise decisions with that power (usually meanying those who create the most value to the customer & society) are rewarded with more money (and thus more power), while the people who make poor decisions (wasting money, or sticking with poor products or policies) end up losing money (and thus losing power). So there's this kind of feedback, such that people who make better decisions end up being the ones making more of the decisions.
Another reason they work is that they (frequently) promote diversity -- lots of different people trying to solve the same problem in different ways, so that (frequently) the best one wins.
The problem with governments (and I submit, any kind of government) running things is that there is very little feedback of this kind. Once people get control of some area in a government, it takes something major to actually get them out. There's also only one person, or group of people, trying to solve the problem. So if the way they're doing it is "good enough", there's nothing to force them to change. The same things happen in corporations (see Dilbert), but to a much lower degree; and because there are a diversity of corporations, there's more of a chance that someone will find a better way or make better decisions.
Personally, I think that the free market is a good system (better than a centrally planned government), but I don't believe that capitalism as it's imlemented to day is necessarily the best overall system. "Maximizing shareholder value" frequently means making more value for society as a whole, but frequently it also means short-sighted policies (environmental damage, or even the suit against Yahoo for not accepting Microsoft's buy-out offer) or even evil, destructive policies (such as labor practices in the 1800's, before unions and labor laws corrected egregious abuse of factory workers' lives and health). If there were some other way which gave more power to people who made good decisions and encouraged innovation and entrepreneurship, while distributing the resulting value fairly to everyone in the supply chain, I'd rather have that.
I wasn't trying to make a judgement either way on how much we should consume; I was trying to show that "overconsumption" is a useful word. (The previous poster had said that "There's no such thing as overconsumption".)
I guess there's lots of reasons why one might want to limit consumption of energy; to toss some out there:
But yeah, if we could find renewable resources that would provide us with energy / food/ &c at first-world levels to everyone in the world (including those in the current third world) indefinitely, then that would be great. But until we do have those resources in place, we need to do something. (And I'm definitely a first-world consumer of energy...)
Can you give a reference? Or are you speaking from personal observation?
"Overconsumption" is akin to "overspending". If you have an income of $2000 and $100K in the bank, and you're spending $10000 a month, you're overspending. You can get away with it until your "banked" resources run out, at which case you will be spending only $2000 a month. The only question at that point is whether you've prepared your finances for that sudden change, or whether things will crash and burn (i.e., your home and car get reposessed, you have to pay exhorbitant cancellation costs for cell phone contracts, &c).
If your income is from your capital (i.e., if your income is dividends from stocks, &c), you have an even worse problem: that the more of your savings you spend, the less income you have. If you keep spending at your "overspending" rate, you'll eventually have no capital at all. Moderation early on may mean a sustainable income of $2000, but the longer you wait to adjust to your sustainable income, the lower your sustinable income will be when you finally get your head on straight.
Oil, coal, copper, steel, and other non-renewable resources are like money in the bank. Right now our energy consumption, as a society, is several times what our "income" is from renewable energy sources. We're running on our "bank" of oil, coal, &c. What happens when the oil & coal run out, if we don't find a renewable energy source that can provide us energy at the rates we're used to? "The market will adjust", certainly, but it's likely that it will "adjust" by massive wars, anarchy, starvation, and societal collapse. (See "Collapse", by Jared Diamond for a history of many such past societies that have had exactly that happen.)
Renewable resources like ocean fish, trees, and soil are like the stock market. If fishing and logging happen at replacement rate, then you have a sustainable renewable resource indefinitely. But if you fish or log at more than replacement rates, then your stock of reproducing fish or trees goes down, meaning a lower rate of the sustainable resource, until the resource is finally exhausted and cannot be renewed.
With these kind of fixed resources, "overconsumption" definitely has a well-defined meaning that has nothing to do with "externalities".
Examples?
The main reason there will always be two parties, as far as I can tell (I'm certainly not an expert) is that you don't need a majority of votes to win, you just need more than anyone else. If a majority were required, then there would be a market (so to speak) for hundreds of individual parties that would make coalitions to achieve a majority. As it is, the only way to form a coalition is to join the party you least dislike. If you form a new party that is successful in attracting voters, it will in all likelihood draw voters away from the party you least dislike, guaranteeing that the party you most dislike will win.
The way our voting system is set up, it guarantees that the stable state is exactly two dominant parties. If at any point a small party begins to draw significant support from a larger party, the vote is split, both parties lose, and the opposition wins. At that point, everyone either goes back to the old large party, or rushes to the growing, previously small party, and we have two stable parties again.
At least we have two parties, which is better than one-party "systems"...
- Most of the games he's testing DON'T WORK ON EITHER SYSTEM . It's just that under Vista, a lot of them crash.
- One that doesn't crash -- Civ 4 -- Microsoft warns that it won't work, then doesnt' work; while Wine just doesn't work. How is that better?
- The first one he tested was a game that he doesn't even play. WTH? "There's a game that I've heard of that I don't play but it doesn't work on Vista so I'm angry."
- The second game is some ancient DOS game. It won't play because DOSBox doesn't work on Vista. Maybe you should... wait until they have a version of DOSBox for Vista?
Honestly, I was expecting a list of games people commonly play these days, not a bunch of randomness. The fact that Vista crashed for him is, of course, bad; but the fact that Wine doesn't play the games but just crashes instead hardly makes Linux a better gaming platform.The answer is actually pretty simple. In any industry, you rarely have one entity starting with raw materials and selling directly to the public; you have a chain of entities who buy materials or labour, do something to "add value", and sell it to the next guy down the line. In the music industry, musicians create music, which is produced and refined into an album, marked and distributed by stores. The final product -- in this case a CD -- has some amount of "value" to customers (denominated in dollars).
When you're looking at the strategic landscape of an industry, one of the important question to ask is, "who captures the value"? I.e., how much of that final value to the consumer ($20 CD sale) goes to each person in the line?
The answer is, in part, determined by Porter's Five Forces. They are:
So, artist -> record labels -> record stores -> end consumer, who captures the value?
Artists are in a really weak bargaining position. Tons of people want to make music, so the threat of substitution, threat of entry of new competitors, is really high. Distribution and marketing has historically required a lot of money, which means that there aren't very many alternatives, there's a high barrier to entry, and not a ton of competitive rivalry. The record stores historically haven't had much bargaining power either -- so the record companies capture a lion's share of the value (although, to be fair, they also risk and invest a huge amount of money in distribution and such).
But now, because of Apple's dominance of the hardware market, iTunes has a lot more bargaining power than record stores ever had. Going to DRM-less is basically the only alternative for the labels to reduce Apple's bargaining power.
What an interesting post! Very well put. Not often that I read a slashdot post that causes so much introspection.
Two points. First, Buddha's observation relates only to questions about life after death. However, the question "Is there a God" doesn't necessarily have to do with "eternity". If you read the Old Testament of the Bible, there is no explicit mention of Heaven. (Or, at least, almost no mention of heaven -- haven't done a search.) There is a vague shadowy idea of the afterlife in terms of "Sheol", but that's nothing like what people think of heaven and eternity these days. Almost all of the focus of God and our relationship with him is about the here and now -- the blessings of walking with God and being a righteous man.
Second, Buddha's observation about the source of the question may reveal something about us; but the question still remains as a question of fact, and it does matter. If Buddha I were on the Titanic, and I had heard people say that it was sinking, and I asked Buddha if he thought it was sinking and if we should try to escape on some lifeboats, his series of observational questions are still as valid as they are when asking about God. Yes, I want to know if the Titanic is sinking in part because I'm afraid of dying; and yes, that's in part because I'm afraid of what will happen to me when I die. But I must insist that the answer to the original question is still important, since how I believe and act will determine whether I die a cold icy death soon, or of old age after a long full life later.
Similarly, the answer to the question of God's existence and nature -- whether I can live in a relationship with him now, and whether he will judge me after I die for how I've lived my life here -- will be of material significance to my happiness.
I think a better way to put it would be, "The absolute most important factor of success is effort." When I was in school, I got top scores on all the standardized tests without working a bit. Because of this, I got all kinds of rewards and accolades for "my hard work". Instead of teaching me to value working hard and challenging myself, it taught me to expect honors and recognition without having to do anything for it.
I think it was lucky for me that:
At college I gradually had less accolades for not doing anything special, and gradually had to work harder to do well; so I never "hit a wall" where I thought I was dumb. I did feel jealous for awhile of other people who got rewards for actually going over and above; but I just had to suck it up and tell myself that they were rewarded because they put in extra effort, and I'm not being rewarded because I didn't.
In fact, it seems a bit like the whole posting-to-the-blog thing (and even the parents going to the media) is a form of vigilante-ism. The parents and the bloggers don't expect the courts to actually punish the woman in question, or not sufficiently; so they are attempting to ensure that at least public shame, possibly worse punishment gets handed out.