Consider yourself lucky. I work for Myself too. My boss, Me, is a real dickhead. This year, he made all of his employees work on Christmas. Sometimes, he makes up reasons to fire people around the holidays, just for fun. Last year, he rented a hotel around Christmas so he could bang his secretary while his wife was at home preparing the holiday meal. He even made a big scene at last year's office event, drove home a little wrecked, and ended up crashing his Mercedes into a children's playground. Man, you should be grateful you don't work for Me. He's a real douchebag.
The Schroedinger wave equation is completely deterministic.
I guess I don't interpret it the same way you do. The solutions to Schrodinger's equation are wave functions and the magnitude of a wave function squared describes a normal probability distribution.
I would describe this probabilistic quality of wave functions as an not just describing observations but actually describing reality. More specifically, I think that reality simply isn't determined before one measures an observable.
Moreover, even though the time-dependence of a wave function makes the wave function evolve deterministically, that just means the shape of the probability curve is deterministic, not what that probability wave describes, namely the likelihood of measuring particle psi at a specific momentum p.
The concept of a determinate reality before measurement is meaningless, because we cannot ever access or observe this reality by definition, since all observations are perturbations of a system.
Measurements are perturbations of a system. You cannot possibly couple a measuring apparatus to a quantum system without changing it.
What do you mean "'free will' is pre-Enlightenment jargon"?? The concept (and jargon) of "free will" has been espoused from long before the Enlightenment to long after it.
Exactly. The idea of free will originated before the Enlightenment. Pre-Enlightenment.
'It has changed its counterpart of determinism, so now instead of having the only possibilities of free will and determinism, we have the possibilities of free will, determinism, and quantum random causation.'
How can free will be possible in a deterministic physical universe, and if it doesn't happen in the physical world at all, how did you explain mind-body interaction in such a case? I for one take it for granted that our thoughts and beliefs are related to our brain functioning, and are probably instantiated somewhere in physical reality. You may take issue with this, but I think a lot of neuroscientists would disagree.
Explanation: . Either you have to assert the existence of a non-physical substance that is responsible for our thoughts and actions and can somehow interact causally with the physical world, or you have to say that our decisions occur in the real world. In such a case, free will can only exist if there is no determined chain of causal relations. This can only happen if the universe has non-deterministic laws. A theory in physics that appears to be non-deterministic is quantum mechanics, and it is very accurate. But quantum mechanics is not random in the strictest sense. It is probabilistic. It can be more likely for a quantum particle to be at position A than position B. So there is an idea in which our "will" in the sense that we just mean our intent to perform actions, is free, or undetermined, but not strictly random.
But as for its larger ramifications, quantum random causation is not fundamentally different from determinism.
It's entirely different. An orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics asserts that there is no determined reality before a measurement is made. It's probabilistic. That means events don't relate causally in the same way as a deterministic universe. Event A is not by necessity related to Event B, only probabilistically related. This means that the tiny particles in our brains that determine how impulses cross synapses may not fall into determined states - there simply *is* no reality before a thought is thought, before an action is acted. It is literally determined the moment it occurs, spontaneously. But it is NOT determined randomly, because again a particle may be much more likely to be in position A than position B.
Determinism is completely different. In determinism every event can be traced in a causal chain with great reliability to preceding causes. Every event has to have a cause. Those are two entirely different views of how the universe works, and they include our decision-making in their jurisdiction.
In both cases, it is true that a firm idea of agency suffers a blow. But it suffers a blow in a different way for each case. In one we can salvage a sense in which our will is not necessarily determined by causal relations in the physical world which are necessarily outside of our control, but then what is it determined by? Nobody really knows. These are simply statistical relations, but they make it possible for mental events to be undetermined but not strictly random.
In the other case of strict determinism, we are simply witnessing our own thoughts and actions.
The way you frame what you are saying suggests that there has been some sort of monolithic progression of thought, that we all thought one thing in Aquinas' time, and now we think something else.. This is bizarre (and untrue). The thinking on the subject was diverse then and it is diverse now. As for me, I have free will. And I exist in the singular, although I am interconnected with others.
I already possess this concept of justice and responsibility. I'm pretty much trying to get at how to get society to go along with this, especially since unlike you, the average member of society isn't a perfectly rational agent who can accept that the person who raped and killed their daughter has an illness.
What you say sounds great - justice is easy when you think about it in the abstract. But in practice nothing is clear cut. In American society, for example, every major argument for the death penalty involves deterrence and retribution. The same people who take the stance of "personal responibility at all costs" are also people who vote for our leaders, who in turn enact domestic and foreign policies that operate with aims of retribution rather than practical aims. I would rather as you say we not be oriented around retribution, but unfortunately, we are. So these are quite valid questions to be asking about redefining - on a large scale - how we think of justice. In short, I'm not having any trouble with this concept - but I guarantee you other people are and will.
If a tumour is causing a person's pedophilia, then remove the tumour and the problem is solved. If it can be demonstrated that the tumour was only providing him with those tendencies but he was still "in control", then he should also be punished after the tumour is removed in order to reinforce the notion that one's impulses must be controlled.
The tumor is a very clear cut example. There are tons and tons of examples that are not clear cut at all. Like every person in prison right now who was born into a poor minority family, and never had a decent chance to live life outside of crime, and has been habituated to a different understanding of justice than we share.
If you just view humans as robots that learn by experience/inputs, but sometimes have mechanical flaws or stress-induced failure modes resulting in delinquent behaviour, perhaps that will clarify this subject for you.
Logical behaviorism and psychological behaviorism are obsolete modes of thought, for a reason. That model is not very good for understanding human beings. Behavioral explanation stops at the point where you have to interpret motive, identify the pathology at work, begin to understand how to correct it. It sounds very easy just to recondition a human being who has been habituated to a life of crime using just associational, reconditioning strategies, but it isn't. But as soon as we move into lines of intensive, therapeutic cognitive-behavioral therapy, the personal responsibility crowd is going to be talking about 'coddling' the criminal.
These are all practical issues. But there is still extant philosophical issue. Humans aren't robots. They are sentient things. They feel things. The philosophical issue here is that our behavior is mostly physically determined, at the psychophysical level, yet an existent entity still has to suffer the consequences for these behaviors despite having apparently no influence over them.
There are a whole host of issues that go along with redefining responsibility.
For instance, if the quality of the action is the only criteria by which we decide to punish a person, then how do we deal with, for example, a child who accidentally shoots somebody, and sharks, when they eat people? We don't blame right now because we believe they have no choice in the matter - they don't have the cognitive ability to reason ethically. But certainly their action was horrible. Do we kill them or throw them in jail for life?
But what if we're all like the baby or the shark, we have no responsibility for our choices?
You don't want punish a person who has a brain disease and wasn't able to choose another way, do you?
What if we're all like the person with the brain disease? We don't have a choice in the matter. Our failure to reason ethically is just a deficiency in our brain structure and chemistry. Why should we suffer for something we didn't choose to do?
How does one redefine the concept of responsibility? Where do we place the responsibility without causing undue suffering?
Do we just set up a 're-education' camp to condition each other not to commit crimes? That sounds authoritarian and collectivist. Thus one possible choice becomes: either we're free individuals with personal responsbility, or we're collectivized zombies without personal responsibility, who have to indoctrinate each other on correct thinking and correct actions. Free and creative thinking is out the window.
Maybe the purpose of the penal system is simply to rehabilitate. What constitutes rehabilitation? How about people who are serial murderers - those who pathologically murder 10, 20, people, simply because they don't have the cognitive ability to empathize or to reason ethically? They should be put away forever? They didn't choose what they did, so why should they suffer for it?
How to we get rid of the common-sense impulse among victims to blame people for things, especially for horrendous, violent things? The impulse to achieve retribution? That would take a lot of work.
All ethical issues are much, much murkier without the same concept of personal responsibility. I'm not saying it's impossible to revise our ideas of responsibility. As a practical matter, it's extremely difficult.
The term "free will" is pre-Enlightenment jargon. Now that our inquiry is informed by modern scientific thought, "Free will" doesn't mean free will any more - it means undetermined will, if we're to follow the orthodox interpretation of Quantum Physics, which (if one follows the orthodox interpretation) insists that we give up the idea of a determinate reality that exists completely independent its observers.
Furthermore, people find that the "I" in "I have free will" is not constituted of the same things we thought it around St. Thomas Aquinas' time. The "I" might not even exist as a singular entity at all. So of course saying "I have free will" is misleading - "I" now means, the sum of the mental states which supervene on physical brain states, and the phenomenal experience accompanying those states.
The problem is of course that we cannot place the burden of personal responsibility on the individual. This is a huge problem, since our notion of social order and justice comes because we can't locate any agent on which to place the burden of responsibility.
Funny you mention Cogito. Descartes is the one who actually came up with the argument you just reiterated - namely, people do bad things because their will is infinite while their intellect is only finite in comparison with God's. It's a shaky argument, but this, along with his ontological arguments for the existence of God, is a popular way of framing the concept of free will.
These are deep philosophical questions which cut to the core of our ability to preserve order in society. It cuts into our present fantasies of retribution. Since we no longer have a place to assign personal responsibility, how can we do anything else but what Christians supposedly advocate - forgive? Unfortunately, that kind of society could devolve into a dystopian nightmare.
Humans are now technically viewed great apes( part of the family Hominidae). Humans and chimpanzees are very close relatives and share a common ancestor, who was also an ape, 4 to 7 million years ago.
What evoluton does not claim:
1. Jesus was a monkey. 2. God didn't create the planet or the universe. 3. God doesn't exist. 4. Natural selection is random.
If by 'nature' intended, you mean it gave us certain skills nature in order to survive, then nature gave us the ability to hunt and gather.
More importantly, nature gave us a set of rather expensive cognitive abilities that enable us to be ethical, thinking, reasoning beings who are capable of compassion. 'Compassion' includes not inflicting pain on a harmless animal, who most certainly senses it.
Nature also gave us language and culture, which enabled us to form societies, which grew into larger civilizations, which eventually rendered the need for hunting/gathering societies altogether obsolete.
Now we are at a stage in the development of civilization where hunting is completely unnecessary.
I say we ought to use the other tools that nature gave us, namely, the ability to empathize and reason ethically, to see that if something is both unnecessary and causes suffering, we should stop doing it.
Re the information 'wants' - I put it in single quotes. Not meant to be a literal attribution of desire to information. Information tends is more accurate. But it would be pretty hard to deny that people - socialized animals - can resist communicating to each other. This is why information tends to leak. Great efforts must be employed in order to contain it. It was really a remark about people more than information.
The reason religion is contagious and often insidious is because it is used in place of education. It teaches people *what* to think before they know *how* to think. This is bad. It gives people the idea that they have answers to questions they haven't even got around to asking. It can be addressed by strong education which teaches things like independent thinking and logic rather than rote memorization, ritual and dogma.
If you're an atheist: it is just as presumptuous to claim there is no god as it is to claim there is one. That is why I remain safely agnostic, and don't pretend to know what I can't.
I think you're giving people way too much credit on the whole about their privacy sensitivities. You're forgetting that we're in a country where we allowed the Patriot Act to be signed. Do you really think people are, as a general rule, vigilant regarding their privacy? Not that this is a good thing, necessarily. People should worry about their privacy more. The fact is, they just don't. Some even eagerly give up their privacy in exchange for guarantees of safety and, more unsettingly, convenience. The number 1 selling point for software aren't higher-level concerns such as how well it protects privacy. The number one sellling point is how convenient and easy to use it is. People accept black boxes. It doesn't make a difference to them whether their data is on their own computer or stored somewhere in Southeast Asia on a RAID array.
The average user isn't as much like us Slashdotters as we like to believe. The average user doesn't care about filesystems, directory structures, magnetic media, etc. The average user just wants it to work. This is a general rule, and of course there are exceptions.
There's a lot of rubbish everywhere, not just on the internet. The internet provides infinite shelf space for content and commerce. Like with anything, this can be rubbish, or it can be substantive. There are plenty of examples of both. Fortunately, by and large, you get to choose what content you view, which sites you go to, which emails you read, and what products you buy. Some things that you think are rubbish are not rubbish to other people. I expect that we are both democrats with a lower-case 'd.' We think that people should be able to choose what they value. If they value information that we don't value, that's their right.
The important thing about the internet is that it facilitates access to information for everybody. The internet is thus the major (re-) democratizing force in the world. Access to information is never a bad thing - no matter what you hear from those who prefer secrecy, ownership, and deprivation of something which is inherently free and open. Information 'wants' to go places - it will not be locked up gladly. The internet recognizes this.
As for your suggestions
1. Definitely agreed. The internet coupled with your recommendation of good education and critical thinking will ensure that people don't assent to false beliefs. 2. Yes. 3. It's not religion that's the problem with violent religious practices. It's the people. People who are uneducated, deprived, and can't think critically about which beliefs they assent to. This is already addressed by your number 1.
It's strange, actually. I heard the body of the new Taepodong II nuclear missile is actually constructed out of refurbished iPods, clock radios, and 5 megapixel Sony cameras straight from Best Buy web site. These sanctions are good! That Kim Jong is just too thrifty!
Right, but again, this was a demo application that was designed to look neat and take advantage of the multitouch screen...
The only reason I brought it up was to show that a touchscreen-only interface wouldn't end typing efficiency by removing the keyboard, and thus this touchscreen system would still be useful and efficient in productive tasks because oyu still have access to a virtual keyboard.
What I'm saying is that while this is neat for quick applications that don't require much text, it would be painful for multi-hour coding or authoring. And this is what most people do. For this kind of use, there is one absolute requirement: you don't need to look at it. And if you're not looking at it, you don't need an LCD powering it. (Any sort of predictive or dynamic keyboard violates this rule and makes typing require too much thought.)
It would be painful in this current incarnation. I don't see any a priori reason why future screen development couldn't allow for a virtual keyboard that's just as comfortable as the keyboards we use now. People can adapt to new technologies, albeit slowly, and technology adopts as well. And as the other poster said, there's no real reason why we need to remove the standard keyboard entirely from the picture right away either.
You dont' "need" an LCD powering it. Just the same people don't "need" 2.16GhZ Intel Core Duos or incredibly powerful GPU or 21" Cinema displays. Yet they still buy them, even though they aren't needed for 99% of tasks. The thing about good technology is it enables things to occur that you didn't know were possible before, and more improtantly that you didn't know you *wanted* to be possible. I'm sure there are applications for an LCD-powered keyboard that neither you are I, not being able to tell the future, are predicting right now, and can turn out to make such an invention incredibly valuable.
Yes, touchscreen interfaces are very neat. But they're not the answer to the world's problems. They won't magically make you be able to produce art where the mouse or tablet or whatever was getting in the way before. It may streamline things a bit, but it doesn't remove the need for skill.
Right - but that's not the goal. The goal is not to remove the need for skill. We're trying to make it easier for people with skill to realize their "vision." People who still work in physical spaces with physical tools don't migrate to computer replacements most likely because the computer replacements can't be absolutely manipulated in the way physical objects can, and thus it wouldn't really make sense at technology's present state. This screen is just one more step to erasing the barriers to adoption for many people who could benefit from widely applicable, extremely useful digital technology, but can't migrate in its current form.
Again, only in very limited situations. Plus, onscreen keyboard means losing screen space, which is arguably far more valuable than desk space.
One important thing that the presenter mentioned was that the device was "scalable" - meaning various versions of it can have different sizes and applications. I'm sure a screen of sufficient size that an on-screen keyboard wouldn't be so costly in terms of screen space. Also, the keyboard can be put away when you don't need it, saving that screen area for other tasks. Moreover, can you imagine the implications for future PDAs, tablet PCs, and other portable devices, which need to get rid of the keyboard because it reduces portability?
This technology might take a long time to adopt, I'm not arguing that. But saying it has no foreseeable niche or wide applicability(which is in part what I think you're saying) I don't think is accurate given the demonstration.
Additionally while it was neat, it's not suited for everything. It would work great for playing with Xgl or graphical things, but it's not going to help much when writing code, papers, spreadsheets, and generally all the things most people do most of the day.
I'm not sure about this. In the photo library application demo, he brought up a keyboard with his hands, typed out a label for a photo, and put it away, in fewer than 10 seconds.
It seems pretty widely adaptable and convenient, especially if we can make the transition from physical keyboard and mouse to "virtual" keyboard and our hands, respsectively. The mouse was supposed to be away of extending our native manual precision and dexterity into our computer programs - now that this screen is here, the mouse is pretty mcuh obsolete, and we can bridge the hand-computer gap in a seemingly more natural, more direct way. Not only that, but the virtual keyboard frees us from the physical constraints and space requirements imposed by having an actual physical keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider yourself lucky. I work for Myself too. My boss, Me, is a real dickhead. This year, he made all of his employees work on Christmas. Sometimes, he makes up reasons to fire people around the holidays, just for fun. Last year, he rented a hotel around Christmas so he could bang his secretary while his wife was at home preparing the holiday meal. He even made a big scene at last year's office event, drove home a little wrecked, and ended up crashing his Mercedes into a children's playground. Man, you should be grateful you don't work for Me. He's a real douchebag.
The Schroedinger wave equation is completely deterministic.
I guess I don't interpret it the same way you do. The solutions to Schrodinger's equation are wave functions and the magnitude of a wave function squared describes a normal probability distribution.
I would describe this probabilistic quality of wave functions as an not just describing observations but actually describing reality. More specifically, I think that reality simply isn't determined before one measures an observable.
Moreover, even though the time-dependence of a wave function makes the wave function evolve deterministically, that just means the shape of the probability curve is deterministic, not what that probability wave describes, namely the likelihood of measuring particle psi at a specific momentum p.
The concept of a determinate reality before measurement is meaningless, because we cannot ever access or observe this reality by definition, since all observations are perturbations of a system.
Measurements are perturbations of a system. You cannot possibly couple a measuring apparatus to a quantum system without changing it.
Exactly. The idea of free will originated before the Enlightenment. Pre-Enlightenment.
How can free will be possible in a deterministic physical universe, and if it doesn't happen in the physical world at all, how did you explain mind-body interaction in such a case? I for one take it for granted that our thoughts and beliefs are related to our brain functioning, and are probably instantiated somewhere in physical reality. You may take issue with this, but I think a lot of neuroscientists would disagree.
Explanation: . Either you have to assert the existence of a non-physical substance that is responsible for our thoughts and actions and can somehow interact causally with the physical world, or you have to say that our decisions occur in the real world. In such a case, free will can only exist if there is no determined chain of causal relations. This can only happen if the universe has non-deterministic laws. A theory in physics that appears to be non-deterministic is quantum mechanics, and it is very accurate. But quantum mechanics is not random in the strictest sense. It is probabilistic. It can be more likely for a quantum particle to be at position A than position B. So there is an idea in which our "will" in the sense that we just mean our intent to perform actions, is free, or undetermined, but not strictly random.
It's entirely different. An orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics asserts that there is no determined reality before a measurement is made. It's probabilistic. That means events don't relate causally in the same way as a deterministic universe. Event A is not by necessity related to Event B, only probabilistically related. This means that the tiny particles in our brains that determine how impulses cross synapses may not fall into determined states - there simply *is* no reality before a thought is thought, before an action is acted. It is literally determined the moment it occurs, spontaneously. But it is NOT determined randomly, because again a particle may be much more likely to be in position A than position B.
Determinism is completely different. In determinism every event can be traced in a causal chain with great reliability to preceding causes. Every event has to have a cause. Those are two entirely different views of how the universe works, and they include our decision-making in their jurisdiction.
In both cases, it is true that a firm idea of agency suffers a blow. But it suffers a blow in a different way for each case. In one we can salvage a sense in which our will is not necessarily determined by causal relations in the physical world which are necessarily outside of our control, but then what is it determined by? Nobody really knows. These are simply statistical relations, but they make it possible for mental events to be undetermined but not strictly random.
In the other case of strict determinism, we are simply witnessing our own thoughts and actions.
I'm ta
I already possess this concept of justice and responsibility. I'm pretty much trying to get at how to get society to go along with this, especially since unlike you, the average member of society isn't a perfectly rational agent who can accept that the person who raped and killed their daughter has an illness.
What you say sounds great - justice is easy when you think about it in the abstract. But in practice nothing is clear cut. In American society, for example, every major argument for the death penalty involves deterrence and retribution. The same people who take the stance of "personal responibility at all costs" are also people who vote for our leaders, who in turn enact domestic and foreign policies that operate with aims of retribution rather than practical aims. I would rather as you say we not be oriented around retribution, but unfortunately, we are. So these are quite valid questions to be asking about redefining - on a large scale - how we think of justice. In short, I'm not having any trouble with this concept - but I guarantee you other people are and will.
If a tumour is causing a person's pedophilia, then remove the tumour and the problem is solved. If it can be demonstrated that the tumour was only providing him with those tendencies but he was still "in control", then he should also be punished after the tumour is removed in order to reinforce the notion that one's impulses must be controlled.
The tumor is a very clear cut example. There are tons and tons of examples that are not clear cut at all. Like every person in prison right now who was born into a poor minority family, and never had a decent chance to live life outside of crime, and has been habituated to a different understanding of justice than we share.
If you just view humans as robots that learn by experience/inputs, but sometimes have mechanical flaws or stress-induced failure modes resulting in delinquent behaviour, perhaps that will clarify this subject for you.
Logical behaviorism and psychological behaviorism are obsolete modes of thought, for a reason. That model is not very good for understanding human beings. Behavioral explanation stops at the point where you have to interpret motive, identify the pathology at work, begin to understand how to correct it. It sounds very easy just to recondition a human being who has been habituated to a life of crime using just associational, reconditioning strategies, but it isn't. But as soon as we move into lines of intensive, therapeutic cognitive-behavioral therapy, the personal responsibility crowd is going to be talking about 'coddling' the criminal.
These are all practical issues. But there is still extant philosophical issue. Humans aren't robots. They are sentient things. They feel things. The philosophical issue here is that our behavior is mostly physically determined, at the psychophysical level, yet an existent entity still has to suffer the consequences for these behaviors despite having apparently no influence over them.
There are a whole host of issues that go along with redefining responsibility.
For instance, if the quality of the action is the only criteria by which we decide to punish a person, then how do we deal with, for example, a child who accidentally shoots somebody, and sharks, when they eat people? We don't blame right now because we believe they have no choice in the matter - they don't have the cognitive ability to reason ethically. But certainly their action was horrible. Do we kill them or throw them in jail for life?
But what if we're all like the baby or the shark, we have no responsibility for our choices?
You don't want punish a person who has a brain disease and wasn't able to choose another way, do you?
What if we're all like the person with the brain disease? We don't have a choice in the matter. Our failure to reason ethically is just a deficiency in our brain structure and chemistry. Why should we suffer for something we didn't choose to do?
How does one redefine the concept of responsibility? Where do we place the responsibility without causing undue suffering?
Do we just set up a 're-education' camp to condition each other not to commit crimes? That sounds authoritarian and collectivist. Thus one possible choice becomes: either we're free individuals with personal responsbility, or we're collectivized zombies without personal responsibility, who have to indoctrinate each other on correct thinking and correct actions. Free and creative thinking is out the window.
Maybe the purpose of the penal system is simply to rehabilitate. What constitutes rehabilitation? How about people who are serial murderers - those who pathologically murder 10, 20, people, simply because they don't have the cognitive ability to empathize or to reason ethically? They should be put away forever? They didn't choose what they did, so why should they suffer for it?
How to we get rid of the common-sense impulse among victims to blame people for things, especially for horrendous, violent things? The impulse to achieve retribution? That would take a lot of work.
All ethical issues are much, much murkier without the same concept of personal responsibility. I'm not saying it's impossible to revise our ideas of responsibility. As a practical matter, it's extremely difficult.
The term "free will" is pre-Enlightenment jargon. Now that our inquiry is informed by modern scientific thought, "Free will" doesn't mean free will any more - it means undetermined will, if we're to follow the orthodox interpretation of Quantum Physics, which (if one follows the orthodox interpretation) insists that we give up the idea of a determinate reality that exists completely independent its observers.
Furthermore, people find that the "I" in "I have free will" is not constituted of the same things we thought it around St. Thomas Aquinas' time. The "I" might not even exist as a singular entity at all. So of course saying "I have free will" is misleading - "I" now means, the sum of the mental states which supervene on physical brain states, and the phenomenal experience accompanying those states.
The problem is of course that we cannot place the burden of personal responsibility on the individual. This is a huge problem, since our notion of social order and justice comes because we can't locate any agent on which to place the burden of responsibility.
Funny you mention Cogito. Descartes is the one who actually came up with the argument you just reiterated - namely, people do bad things because their will is infinite while their intellect is only finite in comparison with God's. It's a shaky argument, but this, along with his ontological arguments for the existence of God, is a popular way of framing the concept of free will.
These are deep philosophical questions which cut to the core of our ability to preserve order in society. It cuts into our present fantasies of retribution. Since we no longer have a place to assign personal responsibility, how can we do anything else but what Christians supposedly advocate - forgive? Unfortunately, that kind of society could devolve into a dystopian nightmare.
So that's where Karl Rove went!
Excuse me, the common ancestor was ape-like.
Humans are now technically viewed great apes( part of the family Hominidae). Humans and chimpanzees are very close relatives and share a common ancestor, who was also an ape, 4 to 7 million years ago.
What evoluton does not claim:
1. Jesus was a monkey.
2. God didn't create the planet or the universe.
3. God doesn't exist.
4. Natural selection is random.
The 'nature intended' argument is dicey.
If by 'nature' intended, you mean it gave us certain skills nature in order to survive, then nature gave us the ability to hunt and gather.
More importantly, nature gave us a set of rather expensive cognitive abilities that enable us to be ethical, thinking, reasoning beings who are capable of compassion. 'Compassion' includes not inflicting pain on a harmless animal, who most certainly senses it.
Nature also gave us language and culture, which enabled us to form societies, which grew into larger civilizations, which eventually rendered the need for hunting/gathering societies altogether obsolete.
Now we are at a stage in the development of civilization where hunting is completely unnecessary.
I say we ought to use the other tools that nature gave us, namely, the ability to empathize and reason ethically, to see that if something is both unnecessary and causes suffering, we should stop doing it.
For Windows Vista systems, the printer relies on the new "Plug and Live" technology.
Unfortunately, the technology was released prematurely and is still in its "Plug and Die" phase of development.
Re the information 'wants' - I put it in single quotes. Not meant to be a literal attribution of desire to information. Information tends is more accurate. But it would be pretty hard to deny that people - socialized animals - can resist communicating to each other. This is why information tends to leak. Great efforts must be employed in order to contain it. It was really a remark about people more than information.
The reason religion is contagious and often insidious is because it is used in place of education. It teaches people *what* to think before they know *how* to think. This is bad. It gives people the idea that they have answers to questions they haven't even got around to asking. It can be addressed by strong education which teaches things like independent thinking and logic rather than rote memorization, ritual and dogma.
If you're an atheist: it is just as presumptuous to claim there is no god as it is to claim there is one. That is why I remain safely agnostic, and don't pretend to know what I can't.
I think you're giving people way too much credit on the whole about their privacy sensitivities. You're forgetting that we're in a country where we allowed the Patriot Act to be signed. Do you really think people are, as a general rule, vigilant regarding their privacy? Not that this is a good thing, necessarily. People should worry about their privacy more. The fact is, they just don't. Some even eagerly give up their privacy in exchange for guarantees of safety and, more unsettingly, convenience. The number 1 selling point for software aren't higher-level concerns such as how well it protects privacy. The number one sellling point is how convenient and easy to use it is. People accept black boxes. It doesn't make a difference to them whether their data is on their own computer or stored somewhere in Southeast Asia on a RAID array.
The average user isn't as much like us Slashdotters as we like to believe. The average user doesn't care about filesystems, directory structures, magnetic media, etc. The average user just wants it to work. This is a general rule, and of course there are exceptions.
There's a lot of rubbish everywhere, not just on the internet. The internet provides infinite shelf space for content and commerce. Like with anything, this can be rubbish, or it can be substantive. There are plenty of examples of both. Fortunately, by and large, you get to choose what content you view, which sites you go to, which emails you read, and what products you buy. Some things that you think are rubbish are not rubbish to other people. I expect that we are both democrats with a lower-case 'd.' We think that people should be able to choose what they value. If they value information that we don't value, that's their right.
The important thing about the internet is that it facilitates access to information for everybody. The internet is thus the major (re-) democratizing force in the world. Access to information is never a bad thing - no matter what you hear from those who prefer secrecy, ownership, and deprivation of something which is inherently free and open. Information 'wants' to go places - it will not be locked up gladly. The internet recognizes this.
As for your suggestions
1. Definitely agreed. The internet coupled with your recommendation of good education and critical thinking will ensure that people don't assent to false beliefs.
2. Yes.
3. It's not religion that's the problem with violent religious practices. It's the people. People who are uneducated, deprived, and can't think critically about which beliefs they assent to. This is already addressed by your number 1.
You're preaching to the choir, my friend. Preaching to the choir.
It's strange, actually. I heard the body of the new Taepodong II nuclear missile is actually constructed out of refurbished iPods, clock radios, and 5 megapixel Sony cameras straight from Best Buy web site. These sanctions are good! That Kim Jong is just too thrifty!
Reality really got mad when it overheard Bill trying to convince Fantasy-land to have sultry phone sex with him.
Looks like we're probably going to need that pre-nup after all.
Of course, then you risk being modded "-1, Redundant"
Plus we had to walk 5 miles in 3 feet of snow to the computer to fix it. Uphill! Both way....
with vacuum tube shards in your eye.
Right, but again, this was a demo application that was designed to look neat and take advantage of the multitouch screen...
The only reason I brought it up was to show that a touchscreen-only interface wouldn't end typing efficiency by removing the keyboard, and thus this touchscreen system would still be useful and efficient in productive tasks because oyu still have access to a virtual keyboard.
What I'm saying is that while this is neat for quick applications that don't require much text, it would be painful for multi-hour coding or authoring. And this is what most people do. For this kind of use, there is one absolute requirement: you don't need to look at it. And if you're not looking at it, you don't need an LCD powering it. (Any sort of predictive or dynamic keyboard violates this rule and makes typing require too much thought.)
It would be painful in this current incarnation. I don't see any a priori reason why future screen development couldn't allow for a virtual keyboard that's just as comfortable as the keyboards we use now. People can adapt to new technologies, albeit slowly, and technology adopts as well. And as the other poster said, there's no real reason why we need to remove the standard keyboard entirely from the picture right away either.
You dont' "need" an LCD powering it. Just the same people don't "need" 2.16GhZ Intel Core Duos or incredibly powerful GPU or 21" Cinema displays. Yet they still buy them, even though they aren't needed for 99% of tasks. The thing about good technology is it enables things to occur that you didn't know were possible before, and more improtantly that you didn't know you *wanted* to be possible. I'm sure there are applications for an LCD-powered keyboard that neither you are I, not being able to tell the future, are predicting right now, and can turn out to make such an invention incredibly valuable.
Yes, touchscreen interfaces are very neat. But they're not the answer to the world's problems. They won't magically make you be able to produce art where the mouse or tablet or whatever was getting in the way before. It may streamline things a bit, but it doesn't remove the need for skill.
Right - but that's not the goal. The goal is not to remove the need for skill. We're trying to make it easier for people with skill to realize their "vision." People who still work in physical spaces with physical tools don't migrate to computer replacements most likely because the computer replacements can't be absolutely manipulated in the way physical objects can, and thus it wouldn't really make sense at technology's present state. This screen is just one more step to erasing the barriers to adoption for many people who could benefit from widely applicable, extremely useful digital technology, but can't migrate in its current form.
Again, only in very limited situations. Plus, onscreen keyboard means losing screen space, which is arguably far more valuable than desk space.
One important thing that the presenter mentioned was that the device was "scalable" - meaning various versions of it can have different sizes and applications. I'm sure a screen of sufficient size that an on-screen keyboard wouldn't be so costly in terms of screen space. Also, the keyboard can be put away when you don't need it, saving that screen area for other tasks. Moreover, can you imagine the implications for future PDAs, tablet PCs, and other portable devices, which need to get rid of the keyboard because it reduces portability?
This technology might take a long time to adopt, I'm not arguing that. But saying it has no foreseeable niche or wide applicability(which is in part what I think you're saying) I don't think is accurate given the demonstration.
Additionally while it was neat, it's not suited for everything. It would work great for playing with Xgl or graphical things, but it's not going to help much when writing code, papers, spreadsheets, and generally all the things most people do most of the day.
I'm not sure about this. In the photo library application demo, he brought up a keyboard with his hands, typed out a label for a photo, and put it away, in fewer than 10 seconds.
It seems pretty widely adaptable and convenient, especially if we can make the transition from physical keyboard and mouse to "virtual" keyboard and our hands, respsectively. The mouse was supposed to be away of extending our native manual precision and dexterity into our computer programs - now that this screen is here, the mouse is pretty mcuh obsolete, and we can bridge the hand-computer gap in a seemingly more natural, more direct way. Not only that, but the virtual keyboard frees us from the physical constraints and space requirements imposed by having an actual physical keyboard.
the Prince of Persia was turned into a rugged rock star, as opposed to the effeminate, but also rocking, Artist Formerly Known as Prince of Persia.
Then again, I wouldn't go up against the latter in a game of "First to Impale the Other On A Floor With Metal Spikes Wins."
Smoking weed doesn't require you to go there (the Vista developer web site).
But going there requires you to be smoking weed.
Just my luck. The one time I falsely accuse a towering figure of 20th century technology of using drugs, he's actually reading my comments.
Sigh.
Is there nowhere that I can turn where I can safely slander people?
Are you angry because he's making fun of potheads and junkies or because he's making fun of Vista?
If it's the latter, then newsflash: Apple engineers dislike Microsoft.
If it's the former, newsflash: Woz probably knows from experience.