...innovation. The idea is that you give inventors a monopoly over their inventions that lasts longer than the life cycle of the invention. The result is that every company that innovates will eventually have a monopoly on every little thing they invent and eventually we'll reach a point where nobody else can invent anything for fear of infringing on someone else's monopoly. I think I will call this invention "The Patent".
Gameplay, graphics, sound, literary quality (I'm old, I used to play text adventure games), responsiveness, intelligence of the AI and so on. "Is this a sequel?" is nowhere on my list. I have played good sequels and I've played bad sequels. I've played good games that are not sequels and bad games that are not sequels. "Sequelness" just isn't relevant. If you want to know how EA are doing don't look at the number that comes at the end of the name of the game. Play the actual game and then make a judgement. I haven't played an EA game that doesn't suck for quite a while now. (It pains me to say that, I have good friends there.)
I guess if you want to make a bogus argument so you can get paid as a journalist it's easy to write an article based on the names of games because it looks convincing to the average non-game playing reader who sees only ads for games and never plays them. But I think the average/. reader ought to be able to see beyond that.
Well I just read Alvin Plantinga's Ontological 'proof' of the existence of God. Like Swinburne he knows how to derive propositions from axioms and premises using derivation rules. But as Swinburne and Plantinga both pick and choose their axioms and premises to suit their conclusions they clearly concede their right to be called rational. This is cargo cult rationality. They go through the motions but no planes are going to land.
I'm completely fine with that approach. Ordinary probability emerges from this exotic probability because when you look at probabilities in large systems you tend to get lots of 'cross terms' that have random phase and tend to cancel each other out. Unfortunately 'random phase' is an idea from classical probability theory so I'm not sure what it means here.
lets do the alternative - in the summer we'll pass a law/blockquote?
I'm not sure where the law comes in. Maybe for public schools and government offices you'd need laws, but not for anyone else.
...having things that act like negative probabilities. For example the classic two slit experiment shows that we can make it less likely for a particle to travel from A to B even though we have increased the number of paths by which it can travel from A to B. I'm not terribly suprised, therefore, by the existence of negative information.
And what exactly is wrong with this other solution? We shoudln't change the definition of the gallon to make our cars appear more fuel efficient and similarly we shouldn't change the definition of the time to give the illusion that we can have more time for barbecuing. We can have more time for barbecuing by going to work earlier and coming home earlier. Why is that so difficult for people to grasp?
I wasn't impressed. It does give a vague impression of being off balance but it didn't have a very strong effect and it wasn't very directional. When I tried their racing game demo I felt nothing that was in any way coordinated with what was happening in the game. It did give me a vague feeling of motion sickness which continued after I had removed the device. The electrodes also felt unpleasant though the other people I tried it with didn't feel this.
Argument by authority. Blah. Use your own brain. The guy uses Bayes' theorem to prove that there is a 97% chance that the resurrection happened. This work is laughable and reviewers of his work don't say so simply because it's impolite to do so. I care little about such formalities. Even in highly technical subjects, unlike ancient history, few people assign probabilities like this because it is well known to be unreliable. For example, you'll have a hard time pinning down a physicist who'll use the available evidence to give a probability that String Theory is correct. Swinburne is a charlatan. Study his work for yourself and see.
I don't know anything about the other person you mentioned however.
Swinburne is worse than the Creationists. He has undergone a religious conversion. He believes that 2000 years ago the creator of the universe impregnated a woman in the Middle East and that she gave birth to a man who was resurrected after his death. Swinburne is the most egregious kind of irrational person. He has written vast tomes in which he writes long specious arguments that look like rational argument but are actually nothing but post hoc rationalizations. Because he has a good technical education he is able to make his arguments look good to less educated people. But his arguments look quite ridiculous to people who are well versed in the argument forms he uses. But this ability to construct technical looking arguments that lead to a predetermined conclusion is what makes Swinburne much more dangerous than creationists.
The fact is, people who have undergone a religious conversion are no longer able to think rationally. There really is no point trying to debate with Creationists because they didn't arrive at their position through debate. Creationists typically become creations either as a result of parental misguidance or through an emotional religious experience which has caused a dramatic shift in world view. When someone is wrong, but it is impossible to argue with them, and yet their beliefs matter because it affects the well-being of you and the people around you, there is only one solution left - violence. So I would propose blowing up creationists, maybe carpet bombing the Bible belt, but unfortunately it looks like the people who have access to the best weapons are in fact the creationists themselves. So we're completely screwed: you can't argue with them, you can't fight them. I think we just have to accept that the future of science in the US is a depressing one and live with it. Or maybe just head for the hills, hide out for a century, and wait for Christian America to collpase under the weight of its own folly.
In one respect you're right to say this. It doesn't matter what race, specifically, the Founders were. They were more interested in protected the wealth of rich people, rather than rich white people, it's just that the rich landowners just happened to be white. On the other hand you're not right to say this because race was an essential fact of American culture at the time: many people did not have rights precisely because of the color of their skin and this was quite explicit in the politics of the day, something that's hard to ignore.
many people talk virtue but fail to live up to those standards. who truely can?
Right. But I'm not making a moral judgement of the Founders. It may be that by my own standards they were moral people for their day. I may even have some admiration for them for what they did in their day and compared to their contemporaries. My point is that I don't see what their ideas have to contribute when thinking about issues today. When you stop viewing the Founders as omnipotent gods you realize the world has changed very significantly since their time. They couldn't have foreseen the incredible power of corporations, the ease of exchange of unthinkable quantities of information, the importance of intangible goods, the variety of pornography available today, the ease of production of powerful explosives, and so on. I prefer to look to more modern thinkers when thinking about issues like freedom of speech.
Funny. I've done pretty well in my life - married, successful at work with a good income, international recognition for some of my work, and so on - but when I look back I sometimes think I'd rather have spent my life making lesbian porn for a living.
one fault of a person makes all of their intellectual ideals null and void?
No, never said that. But when the 'fault' is a complete disregard of the freedom of their fellow human I think I'll just ignore their ideas on freedom. If, on the other hand, I were looking for some ideas on how to create an economically and militarily powerful nation I might look to what the Founding Fathers had to say, after all, no more powerful nation has arisen since the founding of the US.
you act like only "rich white" guys have owned slaves. blacks did as well as numerous other societies throughout history.
I won't look to these people either for ideas about freedom. If X is bad at something, and then you discover that Y is also, it doesn't mean X was good.
Politicians frequently arrange laws to benefit themselves. When they do so they tend not to be too fussy about who else they might benefit. That some blacks prospered under slavery is no argument against the claim that the laws were essentially for the benefit of rich white landholding slaveholding men.
in my view it does not diminish the contributions those cultures made to the world.
Again you misread me. There are many great things that have come out of bad cultures. The US space program is a great thing to come out of Nazism. If I want to build rockets, I'll hire some ex-Nazi rocket builders (as the US did). If I want some advice about freedom, I'll look elsewhere.
The Founding Fathers did a pretty amazing job at putting together the framework for a successful nation. But when I want inspiration on the subject of freedom that is applicable today there are far more recent people whose ideas I will consider will before I consider those of the Founding Fathers. If nobody in the intervening 200 years had had anything cogent to say on this subject I might have look at the writings of the Founders, they were an improvement over much of what had come before. But fortunately I have many more enlightened people to sample from.
Or it might just be that they're using an algorithm that's tricky to understand. Of course nobody on/. would know about that as all anyone seems to do these days is write code to copy text from web forms into databases and vice versa. But I'd like to point out that there are still people out there who do actual programming, the kind of stuff Knuth discusses in his Art Of Programming.
Um...no. A Constitution exists independently of the people who wrote it. The question wasn't "why should we follow the Constitution" but "why do the opinions of the Founders matter so much?". You haven't answered that.
it doesnt devalue the contribution they made.
Just saying that it doesn't doesn't make it so. If I were looking for the guidance of someone in my thinking about freedom the last place I'd look is the writings of a slaveholder. I'd say that any contribution they might have to the subject of freedom was likely to be worthless. It may have had some value in its day - maybe it reduced taxes for some rich white men free even though it left the status of everyone else unchanged, but that's not the kind of thinking I'm looking for today. In the 200 years since the Declaration we've seen some incredible advances in the way people other than rich white men have been treated. But we've also seen some incredible rewriting of history so that we can view the Founders with rose-tinted spectacles as being part of those advances.
Who cares? He didn't invent the patent. He has no special insight into patents. His idea of what intellectual notions might and might not have needed legal protection bear little relationship to the state of the world today. He could have had no conception of the ability today to transfer gigabytes of IP practically instantaneoulsy, or the way vast economic enterprises today are founded on products for which physical presence is more or less irrelevant.
Of course if you've been brought up in the Cult of America you believe that every word that exudes from the mouths of the Holy Founding Fathers is the wisdom of the Gods.
The thing is, there wasn't any obvious jargon in these claims. It just looked like bizarrely convoluted English. Maybe the jargon consisted of non-technical looking words so it just looked like it wasn't jargon when in fact it was. And I'm pretty sure it's a requirement of patents that they be comprehensible by people "of ordinary skill in the art".
Slashdot Mirror
...innovation. The idea is that you give inventors a monopoly over their inventions that lasts longer than the life cycle of the invention. The result is that every company that innovates will eventually have a monopoly on every little thing they invent and eventually we'll reach a point where nobody else can invent anything for fear of infringing on someone else's monopoly. I think I will call this invention "The Patent".
It's not like education is about conveying information that people will use in the real world...
I guess if you want to make a bogus argument so you can get paid as a journalist it's easy to write an article based on the names of games because it looks convincing to the average non-game playing reader who sees only ads for games and never plays them. But I think the average /. reader ought to be able to see beyond that.
A computer?
Well I just read Alvin Plantinga's Ontological 'proof' of the existence of God. Like Swinburne he knows how to derive propositions from axioms and premises using derivation rules. But as Swinburne and Plantinga both pick and choose their axioms and premises to suit their conclusions they clearly concede their right to be called rational. This is cargo cult rationality. They go through the motions but no planes are going to land.
I'm completely fine with that approach. Ordinary probability emerges from this exotic probability because when you look at probabilities in large systems you tend to get lots of 'cross terms' that have random phase and tend to cancel each other out. Unfortunately 'random phase' is an idea from classical probability theory so I'm not sure what it means here.
...having things that act like negative probabilities. For example the classic two slit experiment shows that we can make it less likely for a particle to travel from A to B even though we have increased the number of paths by which it can travel from A to B. I'm not terribly suprised, therefore, by the existence of negative information.
And what exactly is wrong with this other solution? We shoudln't change the definition of the gallon to make our cars appear more fuel efficient and similarly we shouldn't change the definition of the time to give the illusion that we can have more time for barbecuing. We can have more time for barbecuing by going to work earlier and coming home earlier. Why is that so difficult for people to grasp?
I wasn't impressed. It does give a vague impression of being off balance but it didn't have a very strong effect and it wasn't very directional. When I tried their racing game demo I felt nothing that was in any way coordinated with what was happening in the game. It did give me a vague feeling of motion sickness which continued after I had removed the device. The electrodes also felt unpleasant though the other people I tried it with didn't feel this.
I don't know anything about the other person you mentioned however.
Swinburne is worse than the Creationists. He has undergone a religious conversion. He believes that 2000 years ago the creator of the universe impregnated a woman in the Middle East and that she gave birth to a man who was resurrected after his death. Swinburne is the most egregious kind of irrational person. He has written vast tomes in which he writes long specious arguments that look like rational argument but are actually nothing but post hoc rationalizations. Because he has a good technical education he is able to make his arguments look good to less educated people. But his arguments look quite ridiculous to people who are well versed in the argument forms he uses. But this ability to construct technical looking arguments that lead to a predetermined conclusion is what makes Swinburne much more dangerous than creationists.
The fact is, people who have undergone a religious conversion are no longer able to think rationally. There really is no point trying to debate with Creationists because they didn't arrive at their position through debate. Creationists typically become creations either as a result of parental misguidance or through an emotional religious experience which has caused a dramatic shift in world view. When someone is wrong, but it is impossible to argue with them, and yet their beliefs matter because it affects the well-being of you and the people around you, there is only one solution left - violence. So I would propose blowing up creationists, maybe carpet bombing the Bible belt, but unfortunately it looks like the people who have access to the best weapons are in fact the creationists themselves. So we're completely screwed: you can't argue with them, you can't fight them. I think we just have to accept that the future of science in the US is a depressing one and live with it. Or maybe just head for the hills, hide out for a century, and wait for Christian America to collpase under the weight of its own folly.
Tell me, who is the famous person who proved that space is not infinite?
Funny. I've done pretty well in my life - married, successful at work with a good income, international recognition for some of my work, and so on - but when I look back I sometimes think I'd rather have spent my life making lesbian porn for a living.
- I won't look to these people either for ideas about freedom. If X is bad at something, and then you discover that Y is also, it doesn't mean X was good.
- Politicians frequently arrange laws to benefit themselves. When they do so they tend not to be too fussy about who else they might benefit. That some blacks prospered under slavery is no argument against the claim that the laws were essentially for the benefit of rich white landholding slaveholding men.
Again you misread me. There are many great things that have come out of bad cultures. The US space program is a great thing to come out of Nazism. If I want to build rockets, I'll hire some ex-Nazi rocket builders (as the US did). If I want some advice about freedom, I'll look elsewhere.The Founding Fathers did a pretty amazing job at putting together the framework for a successful nation. But when I want inspiration on the subject of freedom that is applicable today there are far more recent people whose ideas I will consider will before I consider those of the Founding Fathers. If nobody in the intervening 200 years had had anything cogent to say on this subject I might have look at the writings of the Founders, they were an improvement over much of what had come before. But fortunately I have many more enlightened people to sample from.
Or it might just be that they're using an algorithm that's tricky to understand. Of course nobody on /. would know about that as all anyone seems to do these days is write code to copy text from web forms into databases and vice versa. But I'd like to point out that there are still people out there who do actual programming, the kind of stuff Knuth discusses in his Art Of Programming.
Well he couldn't have wanted it that much or it wouldn't be so hard.
Of course if you've been brought up in the Cult of America you believe that every word that exudes from the mouths of the Holy Founding Fathers is the wisdom of the Gods.
You mean 'underclocking'. Movies look fast if you underclock your eyes. I mean, like, everyone knows that dude.
The thing is, there wasn't any obvious jargon in these claims. It just looked like bizarrely convoluted English. Maybe the jargon consisted of non-technical looking words so it just looked like it wasn't jargon when in fact it was. And I'm pretty sure it's a requirement of patents that they be comprehensible by people "of ordinary skill in the art".