Wrong. They don't try to "mislead" users. They want to push their sense of reality. You just did the exact same thing right now. And I'm also doing it in this exact moment.:)
Bah! Fox News went to court to establish their legal right to knowingly broadcast lies as news. Point to a factual error in my post.
There's a meme going around that having an opinion is the same thing as having a bias. I don't subscribe to that at all.
How can we know, when we can't even prove that anyone besides ourselves even exists at all.
I'm sorry, but that's schoolboy sophistry. Physics, law, and (apparently up until recently) journalism all have precisely well defined notions of truth and falsehood. To try and claim that everything is purely subjective and relative is to leave us powerless to exercise the faculty of judgement, and gives an open licence to every liar and confidence man on the planet.
I don't buy it, I'm afraid.
Bias isn't a reason not to trust a media source -- assuming you know they are biased.
I tend to disagree. A consistently biased news source is one that deliberately attempts to mislead its users. The trouble is that you don't necessarily know what the bias is on any particular subnject, or when that bias changes. All you know is that the data is unlikely to be reliable as presented.
As such, the rational thing to do is distrust the baised source.
A non-trivial number seem to think that any copyright is a bad thing, that it hurts the economy, etc
Of course, a non trivial number also seem to think that more copyright is always better, too.
There is some pretty good evidence to indicate that's not the case, but they aren't interested
I'm interested. If nothing else, I'm interested in what you'd consider "evidence" without a parallel universe to use as a control sample.
They have an all or nothing stance on it. As such, this treaty is automatically and "obviously" a bad thing to them, since it increases copyright.
Of course it is also possible to be of the opinion that copyright laws are currently too strong without necessarily being a deluded extremist. So you can make an entirely rational case that the ACTA is a bad thing in so far as it works solely to strengthen copyright provisions that many feel are already over strong.
So this is the kind of thing I like to see. Some real analysis to determine what benefits and costs it has
Why don't you start? What's this evidence you mention?
When you think something is obvious, especially something complex (as any new law is) ask yourself: Is it really, truly obvious, which would mean that nearly everyone should see it, or do I think it is obvious because of my biases?
So what, then? We should all sit tight and wait for someone in authority to tell us what everyone thinks? I can see problems with that approach, personally.
I should also add that I'd find your call for objective self-examination a lot more convicing were it addressed to both sides of the debate. Otherwise, it seems as though you don't think the copyright maximalists need to examine their preconceptions. Perhaps your own biases are showing here?
Yet DRM itself is trying to force "a perfectly legitimate desire for an artist [and publisher] to be recognized and compenstated [sic] for their work".
Hmmm... I'm not sure that works the way you seem to think it does. I have a perfectly legitimate desire for a snack. Does that mean that I have a right to force you to buy a bar of chocolate for me? Or does the act that force is a theoretical possibility make my urge for food somehow unethical?
I think it must be possible to have legitimate desires, without that legitimacy extending to forcing
others to co-operate.
The difference between me and you is that I see opportunity, while you see oppression and injustice. Wanna take bets on which of us will be worth more in a decade or two?
This makes me suspect I'm older than you. Probably be a decade or three. But yeah, come back when you're fifty and we'll see how you match up. I've not done badly for myself, thank you very much. I'm no Bill Gates, but I'm not living in Apollo Square either.
But the point I wanted to make was that you get "parasites" at the top, too.
Yes, like most skeptics and scientists, I'm careful to word my responses in an accurate manner
I know why you're doing it, and I applaud you for not trying to punch up the wording. But if your terminology is wooly, it suggests that the conclusions drawn by the researchers (repeatedly!) was similarly tenuous. And these presumably are the best support you can offer. Do you not see how that might be less than compelling?
And no, I'm not suggesting that you try and mislead people in future discussions. But you might want to re-consider the conclusions you drew from those studies. You seem to give more weight to their findings than did the authors themselves.
Oh, I see. Sure, I have no problem with that, but I think you'll find that rather difficult to do with an ideology like objectivism, simply because it has so few adherents and so little impact. I don't think it's possible to meaningfully comment on how it manifests in reality.
See, I take the viewpoint that Objectivist ideas have been pretty much at the heart of social and economic policy over the last 30 years or so, at least in the UK, and probably the US although I don't watch the situation there as closely. I don't know of anyone who attributes the source of the ideas to Rand, it's true, but I think she's been very influential in these matters.
Or maybe it's just that I tend to think "Objectivism" whenever I hear someone preaching callous indifference to the plight of those less well off than themselves and getting all self-righteous about it as if self-centered greed was somehow ennobling.
My first reaction is to say that, depending on what you're talking about, such ideas are probably not unique to objectivism, and the people whom you're referring to may well be capitalists, corporatists, liberterians, or any combination of the above
I think it's where their ideas intersect that I take issue. I mean if an idea from Ideology X is reprehensible, does it matter if the person promoting that idea gained it from a study of Ideology Y?
Admittedly Rand isn't responsible for the way the corporatists have extended the idea of individual freedoms to apply to corporations, although having read some of her thoughts on property rights, I have a a hard time thinking she'd disapprove. I'd like to think that she'd be against the continuing erosion of individual freedoms where it the benefits corporate interests... it's a pity she's not around to ask in some ways.
You could argue that some adherents of Objectivism are judgmental, but I think you'd have a hard time showing that the ideology itself is inherently judgmental
I thought we agreed we were discussing ideologies in terms of their application in the real world? My objection to Objectivisim isn't whatever Rand may have meant which I don't presume to know, but the way
its been used some people to try and create a moral justification for selfishness, callousness and spite.
I saw nothing in Rand's work which argued against willingly helping those in need.
I thought I had a quote from her where she pretty much claimed that helping those who couldn't help themselves was fundamentally immoral. I cna't find it thouhh, so my memory may be playing false. Closest I could find was
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
... which does sounds somewhat anti, to be fair.
I think Rand would agree with you. If you actually read her book(s), and you STILL think that she was arguing for "grinding the masses into the dirt", then there's probably not much I can say that would change your mind.
But as I said previously, we're supposed to be comparing apples to apples here. Soviet Russia was an economic train wreck, Objectivist ideas get trotted out every time some corporate PR flack wants to screw over the ordinary men and women in an area; whenever a politician needs a moral sounding excuse for something that's going to blatantly soak the poor and give to the rich.
Could be as short as 10 years, could be as long as a hundred, sure. The timeframe is irrelevant, the point is that money is just as hard to keep as it is to make, and the vast majority of those at the top tend to be the ones who worked their asses off to get there.
Or their parents. Or grandparents. Or great grandparents. Probably.
He was suggesting that the "really rich" are just the same few thousands families, all passing their money on to their descendants generation after generation. I've explained that to be false.
Well, given that we have upwards of 40% of unearned wealthy out there, I don't really see how it improves matters to think that my grandchildren will see a similar proportion with largely different surnames. It sounds convincing until you think about but at the end of the day -- so what?
There's also an awful lot of weasel wording in your explanation, which makes it less than compelling. It's "pretty clear" that these families "tend to lose" their wealth "within a few generations at most". If your rebuttal was any woolier, it would a sheep.
I'm also not enirely comfortable with calling 60% a "vast majority"
How can you not see the relevance?
I guess I was expecting something more than "don't worry - nothing will change, but some of the names will be different"
There have been plenty of studies done on the subject, and the conclusion has always been pretty clear: those who inherit their fortunes tend to lose them within a few generations at most, while being replaced at the top by those who started with nothing.
So you're saying that if I happen to be born rich and lazy, there's a reasonable chance that in a hundred years or so my descendants will be poor?
You clearly consider this a telling point, but I'm afraid I'm having difficulty seeing its relevance.
I'm not going to waste time providing definitions and explanations which are available there, but I will address your comments/questions.
Thank you. That's all I ask.
If that's your definition of communism, then it's very possible - we've seen that, in practice, communism leads to 99% of the people having a bottom 5% life:)
Fair enough. Then let's also discuss Objectivism in terms of how it has been applied to the world, and
how its adherents apply Rand's ideas, rather than limiting ourselves to what she wrote in her novels. Apples to apples, and all that.
Well, AFAIK, objectivism has nothing to do with assigning blame
Mmmm... you say that, but Objectivism seems to me to be deeply and fundamentally judgemental. Look at your next paragraph
It gives every parasite the opportunity to say "it's not MY fault I'm poor, so YOU need to take care of me!". It allows the lame and the lazy to shackle the strong and the industrious
Which seems to cast everyone as either affluent or as a parasite. But the real world doesn't work like that. If 90% of the people in a town work at the local steel mill, and if the mill is shut down, then a lot of them are going to be out of work through no particular fault of their own. When a tsunami devastates the coastline of half a continent, saying "shit happens" and turning our backs is neither admirable nor acceptable.
And yet that seems to be the response that obectivism calls for.
It allows the lame and the lazy to shackle the strong and the industrious - a situation far worse than the one which you seem to fear.
And are those the only two options? A world where the ablest are enslaved to the masses, one where the privileged and fortunate get to grind the masses into the dirt? I find both scenarios equally appalling, to be honsest. And I don't accept that those are the only options.
No, it's not. It's taking the current system of "you have an unending copyright and all downloading is illegal" and changing it to "companies get a reasonable amount of time to make a profit and after that short period, people can download it all they want".
No, you're both talking about a practical response to the problem of a fundamental change in the way some artistic forms can be distributed. The difference is that you're assuming that the problem is fixable by tweaking the current system, and Opportunist is assiming that the old model is now broken beyond repair.
You can make a good case for both sides, but I think Opportunist has the deeper insight. People are not going to stop behaving this way. We need to find social structures that can work in a world where you can no longer compensate creators by placing a surcharge on distribution.
Your view seems to be (since you bitched about "the old way of thinking") that companies shouldn't be able to make any profit
No, I think he's saying that the current business model isn't going to remain a viable means of generating revenue for very much longer, regardless of what we do. By all means let's have companies make profits. All I ask is that they do it for doing something useful, as opposed to something that was useful 20 years ago but that is now on the verge of becoming a historical curiosity.
Sure, some people will do it for free, but most of them will stop because they'll have to find another way to pay the bills. You have to allow them to make a reasonable profit if you want any real discussion to occur.
And what if that "reasonable profit" isn't in anyone's gift? This is like a wooly mammoth trying to negotiate that if he agrees to get a regular haircut, the would the ice age please not recede any more?
The world is changing, and we're all going to have to deal with that.
As the standard of living increases, and people become more expensive, this is likely to change. Epsilons aren't useful anymore, and deltas are starting to look a bit obsolete...
And yet we can't all be Alphas. And setting aside Huxley, even if the resources are there, we can't all be Alpha Males (or Females as appropriate) because our brains aren't wired like that.
However they spend their time, any society of human apes is always going to have its low monkeys. The question is do we treat them with a little dignity, or do we use their lowness as proof of their unworthiness and use that as an excuse to grind them lower?
Again, how is that a problem for objectivisim, rather than your misunderstanding of the objectivity philosophy?
I may well misunderstand Objectivism. If so, perhaps you'll be kind enough to explain why, politely.
But as I understand it, Objectivism takes the view that everyone is responsible fort their own actions. We all have the smae chances, the same opportunities, and that therefore anyone who doesn't do very well in life has only themselves to blame.
Which is fair enough in a world where we all start from an equal footing, and where hard work always results in material reward. However, I don't think we like in such a world
What you're describing is communism - a society in which 100% of people can (theoretically) have a top 5% lifestyle.
I don't think so. Communism says we can all have the same quality of life, which should be achieveable, if beset with practical difficulties. Objectivism, it seems to me, says that anyone who is poor has only themselves to blame, which has always struck me as somewhat self serving.
Oh I think they've played the games and realised how utterly paper thin, stupid, derivative, repetitive or outright silly most game plots are. However it would be nice that movies did follow the game plot where some or none of these things applied, and improved them in a positive way when they did.
I think it's largely the typical Hollywood contempt for the source material. Most of the time, when someone buys the movie rights to something, they don't want to make a film version of the source material. All they want is to buy a brand that they can use to bolster support for their pet project.
Admittedly when it comes to genre films in general we've been a bit spoilt lately. But for every LotR, Sin City or Watchmen there are dozens of I, Robots.
Interesting fact: Cory Doctorow rips his ideas from other people. The original quote was from Tim O'Reilly. If you watch the internet closely, you'll see him copy other people's quotes and ideas all the time without giving them credit
I was going to halp propagate your anti-Cory meme, but I've already forgotten who you are, and therefore I find myself ethicially unable to propagate your ideas.
Bioshock wasn't about how Ayn Rand was crazy or such (though she actually was extremely egotistical, and Andrew Ryan is similar in some ways to who she really was) but moreso how any ideology can fail due to the common element: the people.
Hmmm. But surely, under that analysis, it becomes impossible to pass judgement on any social ideology. Communism, Facsim, Religious Fundamentalism, Anarchy, Monarchy, even Capitalism - there isn't one of them where you can't dismiss all the flaws in the system by saying - oh, that was a failing of the people, not the ideology.
In Bioshock, Fontaine summed up the problem with Objectivism with the line "someone has to clean the toilets". It seems to me that Objectivism assumes a world where 100% of the people can have a top 5% lifestyle if only the work hard enough, and that anyone who fails to make that level is a slacker or a loser. The trouble is that 95% are necessarily going to fall short, no matter how hard they work.
I don't know that Google does better, but I do know that pretty much nowhere I've worked has had that attitude. They realize that developers are what gets stuff done, and are happy to invest resources
Mmmm... perhaps I should have said "the minimum necessary to get the job done". It's not that the resources aren't there, it's just that they tend to be slower than the public equivalents, and overloaded because they're having to host development versions of the main services, plus everyone's pet project to boot.
Remember, we're talking about dogfooding -- do you think developer's GMail accounts are slower than anyone else's?
No, but then I don't expect that they use development servers to read their email. The public ones will be faster.
think back to your TI suggestion -- it's a hell of a lot cheaper to give a developer a machine to work on than to pay him to sit idle.
I didn't actually sit idle - they had me camped out in a showroom, working on their demo machine until they could get me a proper PC. Not ideal, but good enough to get the job done. It's the same where I am now in that respect. We have a test server that's good enough to get the job done, but it's straining at the seams with all the stuff that's now hosted there.
you asked why I'd hate to work entirely through web based interfaces. Latency is one reason.
In other words, this is why you suspect there'd be latency -- but it's still possible that there wouldn't.
I suspect there'd be latency issues based on personal experience, which one reason I'd be reluctant to use a web based interface. There's also server uptime to consider (these machines are going to run some weird code from time to time, especially when folks get to trying out their blue sky Friday Afternoon projects) and network connectivity since the dev setup isn't likely to have multiple failovers in place.
Also, I must admit that I don't like IDEs in general. Give me a bash prompt any day.
I'm not saying every web-based IDE would suck, or that I'd prefer to work that way (I like Unix), but I'd certainly be willing to try one, and I think it could be made to work well, especially if you're working on web apps.
Oh, certainly. The obvious use case is for javascript development which ought to work well. Developing something like Chrome on the other hand... you'd be effectively downloading the binary afresh for each iteration in the edit-compile-test loop. Even with a Google speed intranet, I imagine that could get tedious rather quickly.
And that's the point, really. I'm sure there are lots of cases where a web based approach would work well, or could be made to work well. I'm just not convinced that there's a good general solution there.
Ah, but now we're talking about load, not latency.
Latency depends upon server load. If the server is overloaded, you get lag.
Would there be enough resources to go around, if they were all shared? Google does have warehouse-sized computers, so I find it hard to believe that there wouldn't.
That's the core question. Our natural instinct is to say to ourselves "Wow! If they provide that much computing power for free, just think how much they must keep back for themselves.".
The thing is, it tends not to work like that, at least not in most of the places I've worked. For instance, I worked a contract at Texas Instruments during their glory days. It took them three months to get me a PC, and this with a factory attached to the site. Not because they weren't efficient - just because every box that got built was earmarked for a paying customer.
And the attitude is not at all unusual. Most corporations invest the absolute minimum in development resources. If you're an accountant, that makes sense: developers cost money, and the money that you spend on development resources could be spent shaving another millisecond of response time for the users in Southern Uzbekistan (for instance), which might generate more revenue.
Look at it another way - if there's a cluster at Google running at 1% capacity, someone is going to suggest it be used to serve something to the outside world. Developers get left with whatever is overloaded. The devs get short rations - it's the way of the world, and there's probably no fixing it.
Of course, this is Google, and they're known for doing things differently, so maybe my experience doesn't apply here. Still, you asked why I'd hate to work entirely through web based interfaces. Latency is one reason.
But at least now we're talking about something real, not a kneejerk reaction
Sorry, what? I get less than 40 ms ping to Google most of the time, and that's from places which are not actually Google. Latency within a LAN is not going to be significant when we're talking about running GCC.
You're not considering server load. Any big organisation prioritises resources for customer. Developers tend to be stuck with limited resources. I've worked a lot of places, and in my experience, the bigger they are, the more likely this is to be true. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of google sites had development servers running
I'm not sure I understand where all this attitude is coming from... did you just get out the wrong side of bed, this morning?
Probably did, but it doesn't make this less valid.
Then go get some sleep and come back if and when you're prepared to be civil. I've got better things to do.
Hit "Submit" when I meant "Preview" (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it:)
Possibly, but you need to quantify what you consider a 'small tribal unit' and an 'area' (I'm not being pedantic, I swear =)
Fair enough. I'm arguing from half-assed bits and pieces gleaned from role-playing supplements and other similarly unreliable sources, so I'm not going to try and put figures to that. I mean it seems fairly clear that ancient Babylon (assuming wikipedia's figure of upwards of 200,000 inhabitants wasn't going to be supportable by hunt/gather. I have no idea what might make a reasonable lower limit, however.
The point being that these folks were basically camped on an unlimited resource node (in the popular parlance) without a need for much mobility.
I suppose the thing I find interesting is population density rather than mobility per se. It seems to me that you need to have a fairly large number of people in one place to support enough non-producers that they could get together and start discussing blue sky projects like architecture or mathematics.
That said, I'm not sure how well that stands up to close inspection. Do medieval monasteries disprove the case? Possibly not, since they needed a large organised society to get them founded. The druids on Anglesey? Would we even know if there had been a group of scholarly hunter/gatherers?
It seems like you've got the cart before the horse here a bit. I don't see how you'd have a large static population before you'd have serious and intensive agriculture.
That's what I'm saying - agriculture is a necessary precursor to city building.
There's actually a pretty good argument for the manufacture of alcohol as one of the key motivations behind agriculture. Hunt/gather provides a better diet with a great deal less effort.
Possibly, but unless I'm missing something, it can't support a large static population. The hunter/gatherer approach surely needs small tribal units that can move on when an area is depleted. It'd be hard to build a city on that basis, and without cities it's hard to see how larger collaborative projects could be sustained.
Which isn't to say you're wrong about alcohol being the driver behind agriculture. Just that the GP is correct to say that agriculture was the enabler for modern large scale organised society.
Given that your code is probably going to run on a cluster, why wouldn't you write it on a cluster?
Because of the added latency, the dependency on local network availability, the fact you'll probably need to share a development cluster with way too many other projects. Eventually you'll need to deploy and test on a cluster, but for early development, you'd be daft not to code on your local machine.
Also, I should point out that running on a cluster is by no means a given. Android doesn't run on clusters, for example. Neither does Chrome.
Developing code for a platform, while working on that same platform, with the platform itself blocking access to the underlying hardware and O/S? Sounds clumsy, and an utter pain when it comes to testing...
Sounds exactly like any modern OS.
mmmm... nope. I'm not aware of any modern operating system that prevents the user from using it. (Although some versions of Windows have tried very hard). A modern O/S will provide a degree of isolation from the hardware, I agree. But we were talking about sandboxing which provides an additional layer of abstraction, and blocks access to the OS as well.
Oh, and the first part you said makes no sense. Developing code for a platform while working on that same platform?
If you only consider two thirds of what someone says, then that's apt to happen. What I said was:
Developing code for a platform, while working on that same platform, with the platform itself blocking access to the underlying hardware and O/S
Do note the emphasised portion.
What, were you expecting to toggle code in via the front panel?
I'm not sure I understand where all this attitude is coming from. Are you trying to troll me, or did you just get out the wrong side of bed, this morning?
Now I don't think they're actually doing this for serious development work, not yet. I'm not convinced it's a good idea.
Thank you. That was my entire point. They're not doing this yet (otherwise, why discus dogfood?) and there are apt to be problems in this area because it's not a use case the designers originally had in mind.
I don't think you can know that. Which apps are you assuming can't be done in a browser?
Well, I'm assuming that no one wants to run GCC through a web front end, for starters. This is Google. They're known to write code in all sorts of languages.
Which isn't to say they don't have a really good web-based IDE in house, of course. But I'd hate to have to work that way myself.
I doubt it. What they have done is provided a way to run native code in a local sandbox, and desktop Chrome should be getting the same thing.
Developing code for a platform, while working on that same platform, with the platform itself blocking access to the underlying hardware and O/S? Sounds clumsy, and
an utter pain when it comes to testing. You'd need a virtual instance of the machine onto which to load the test image, or else a second box and remote compile everything.
You'd get all the aggravation of embedded development, without the necessity. It sounds like a nightmare.
I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised here, but it sounds unlikely. From what I gather, the ChromeOS interface wasn't designed with systems developers in mind. You pretty much said that yourself.
The point of Chrome OS is for people who live on the Web.
Which, to be fair, is where the "eat your own dogfood" crowd at Google may encounter problems, since most of them will need to do a fair bit of non-webapp work.
On the bright side, this may well result in a lot more of the underlying O/S being exposed for general use. I suppose it'll depend on how seriously Google take their dogfood.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah! Fox News went to court to establish their legal right to knowingly broadcast lies as news. Point to a factual error in my post.
There's a meme going around that having an opinion is the same thing as having a bias. I don't subscribe to that at all.
I'm sorry, but that's schoolboy sophistry. Physics, law, and (apparently up until recently) journalism all have precisely well defined notions of truth and falsehood. To try and claim that everything is purely subjective and relative is to leave us powerless to exercise the faculty of judgement, and gives an open licence to every liar and confidence man on the planet. I don't buy it, I'm afraid.
I tend to disagree. A consistently biased news source is one that deliberately attempts to mislead its users. The trouble is that you don't necessarily know what the bias is on any particular subnject, or when that bias changes. All you know is that the data is unlikely to be reliable as presented.
As such, the rational thing to do is distrust the baised source.
Of course, a non trivial number also seem to think that more copyright is always better, too.
I'm interested. If nothing else, I'm interested in what you'd consider "evidence" without a parallel universe to use as a control sample.
Of course it is also possible to be of the opinion that copyright laws are currently too strong without necessarily being a deluded extremist. So you can make an entirely rational case that the ACTA is a bad thing in so far as it works solely to strengthen copyright provisions that many feel are already over strong.
Why don't you start? What's this evidence you mention?
So what, then? We should all sit tight and wait for someone in authority to tell us what everyone thinks? I can see problems with that approach, personally.
I should also add that I'd find your call for objective self-examination a lot more convicing were it addressed to both sides of the debate. Otherwise, it seems as though you don't think the copyright maximalists need to examine their preconceptions. Perhaps your own biases are showing here?
Hmmm... I'm not sure that works the way you seem to think it does. I have a perfectly legitimate desire for a snack. Does that mean that I have a right to force you to buy a bar of chocolate for me? Or does the act that force is a theoretical possibility make my urge for food somehow unethical?
I think it must be possible to have legitimate desires, without that legitimacy extending to forcing others to co-operate.
Nyaa-nyaa-nee-nyaa-nyaa :P
This makes me suspect I'm older than you. Probably be a decade or three. But yeah, come back when you're fifty and we'll see how you match up. I've not done badly for myself, thank you very much. I'm no Bill Gates, but I'm not living in Apollo Square either.
But the point I wanted to make was that you get "parasites" at the top, too.
I know why you're doing it, and I applaud you for not trying to punch up the wording. But if your terminology is wooly, it suggests that the conclusions drawn by the researchers (repeatedly!) was similarly tenuous. And these presumably are the best support you can offer. Do you not see how that might be less than compelling?
And no, I'm not suggesting that you try and mislead people in future discussions. But you might want to re-consider the conclusions you drew from those studies. You seem to give more weight to their findings than did the authors themselves.
See, I take the viewpoint that Objectivist ideas have been pretty much at the heart of social and economic policy over the last 30 years or so, at least in the UK, and probably the US although I don't watch the situation there as closely. I don't know of anyone who attributes the source of the ideas to Rand, it's true, but I think she's been very influential in these matters.
Or maybe it's just that I tend to think "Objectivism" whenever I hear someone preaching callous indifference to the plight of those less well off than themselves and getting all self-righteous about it as if self-centered greed was somehow ennobling.
I think it's where their ideas intersect that I take issue. I mean if an idea from Ideology X is reprehensible, does it matter if the person promoting that idea gained it from a study of Ideology Y?
Admittedly Rand isn't responsible for the way the corporatists have extended the idea of individual freedoms to apply to corporations, although having read some of her thoughts on property rights, I have a a hard time thinking she'd disapprove. I'd like to think that she'd be against the continuing erosion of individual freedoms where it the benefits corporate interests... it's a pity she's not around to ask in some ways.
I thought we agreed we were discussing ideologies in terms of their application in the real world? My objection to Objectivisim isn't whatever Rand may have meant which I don't presume to know, but the way its been used some people to try and create a moral justification for selfishness, callousness and spite.
I thought I had a quote from her where she pretty much claimed that helping those who couldn't help themselves was fundamentally immoral. I cna't find it thouhh, so my memory may be playing false. Closest I could find was
But as I said previously, we're supposed to be comparing apples to apples here. Soviet Russia was an economic train wreck, Objectivist ideas get trotted out every time some corporate PR flack wants to screw over the ordinary men and women in an area; whenever a politician needs a moral sounding excuse for something that's going to blatantly soak the poor and give to the rich.
Or their parents. Or grandparents. Or great grandparents. Probably.
Well, given that we have upwards of 40% of unearned wealthy out there, I don't really see how it improves matters to think that my grandchildren will see a similar proportion with largely different surnames. It sounds convincing until you think about but at the end of the day -- so what?
There's also an awful lot of weasel wording in your explanation, which makes it less than compelling. It's "pretty clear" that these families "tend to lose" their wealth "within a few generations at most". If your rebuttal was any woolier, it would a sheep.
I'm also not enirely comfortable with calling 60% a "vast majority"
I guess I was expecting something more than "don't worry - nothing will change, but some of the names will be different"
So you're saying that if I happen to be born rich and lazy, there's a reasonable chance that in a hundred years or so my descendants will be poor?
You clearly consider this a telling point, but I'm afraid I'm having difficulty seeing its relevance.
Thank you. That's all I ask.
Fair enough. Then let's also discuss Objectivism in terms of how it has been applied to the world, and how its adherents apply Rand's ideas, rather than limiting ourselves to what she wrote in her novels. Apples to apples, and all that.
Mmmm... you say that, but Objectivism seems to me to be deeply and fundamentally judgemental. Look at your next paragraph
Which seems to cast everyone as either affluent or as a parasite. But the real world doesn't work like that. If 90% of the people in a town work at the local steel mill, and if the mill is shut down, then a lot of them are going to be out of work through no particular fault of their own. When a tsunami devastates the coastline of half a continent, saying "shit happens" and turning our backs is neither admirable nor acceptable.
And yet that seems to be the response that obectivism calls for.
And are those the only two options? A world where the ablest are enslaved to the masses, one where the privileged and fortunate get to grind the masses into the dirt? I find both scenarios equally appalling, to be honsest. And I don't accept that those are the only options.
No, you're both talking about a practical response to the problem of a fundamental change in the way some artistic forms can be distributed. The difference is that you're assuming that the problem is fixable by tweaking the current system, and Opportunist is assiming that the old model is now broken beyond repair.
You can make a good case for both sides, but I think Opportunist has the deeper insight. People are not going to stop behaving this way. We need to find social structures that can work in a world where you can no longer compensate creators by placing a surcharge on distribution.
No, I think he's saying that the current business model isn't going to remain a viable means of generating revenue for very much longer, regardless of what we do. By all means let's have companies make profits. All I ask is that they do it for doing something useful, as opposed to something that was useful 20 years ago but that is now on the verge of becoming a historical curiosity.
And what if that "reasonable profit" isn't in anyone's gift? This is like a wooly mammoth trying to negotiate that if he agrees to get a regular haircut, the would the ice age please not recede any more? The world is changing, and we're all going to have to deal with that.
And yet we can't all be Alphas. And setting aside Huxley, even if the resources are there, we can't all be Alpha Males (or Females as appropriate) because our brains aren't wired like that.
However they spend their time, any society of human apes is always going to have its low monkeys. The question is do we treat them with a little dignity, or do we use their lowness as proof of their unworthiness and use that as an excuse to grind them lower?
I may well misunderstand Objectivism. If so, perhaps you'll be kind enough to explain why, politely.
But as I understand it, Objectivism takes the view that everyone is responsible fort their own actions. We all have the smae chances, the same opportunities, and that therefore anyone who doesn't do very well in life has only themselves to blame.
Which is fair enough in a world where we all start from an equal footing, and where hard work always results in material reward. However, I don't think we like in such a world
I don't think so. Communism says we can all have the same quality of life, which should be achieveable, if beset with practical difficulties. Objectivism, it seems to me, says that anyone who is poor has only themselves to blame, which has always struck me as somewhat self serving.
I think it's largely the typical Hollywood contempt for the source material. Most of the time, when someone buys the movie rights to something, they don't want to make a film version of the source material. All they want is to buy a brand that they can use to bolster support for their pet project.
Admittedly when it comes to genre films in general we've been a bit spoilt lately. But for every LotR, Sin City or Watchmen there are dozens of I, Robots.
I was going to halp propagate your anti-Cory meme, but I've already forgotten who you are, and therefore I find myself ethicially unable to propagate your ideas.
Sorry about that.
Hmmm. But surely, under that analysis, it becomes impossible to pass judgement on any social ideology. Communism, Facsim, Religious Fundamentalism, Anarchy, Monarchy, even Capitalism - there isn't one of them where you can't dismiss all the flaws in the system by saying - oh, that was a failing of the people, not the ideology.
In Bioshock, Fontaine summed up the problem with Objectivism with the line "someone has to clean the toilets". It seems to me that Objectivism assumes a world where 100% of the people can have a top 5% lifestyle if only the work hard enough, and that anyone who fails to make that level is a slacker or a loser. The trouble is that 95% are necessarily going to fall short, no matter how hard they work.
Mmmm... perhaps I should have said "the minimum necessary to get the job done". It's not that the resources aren't there, it's just that they tend to be slower than the public equivalents, and overloaded because they're having to host development versions of the main services, plus everyone's pet project to boot.
No, but then I don't expect that they use development servers to read their email. The public ones will be faster.
I didn't actually sit idle - they had me camped out in a showroom, working on their demo machine until they could get me a proper PC. Not ideal, but good enough to get the job done. It's the same where I am now in that respect. We have a test server that's good enough to get the job done, but it's straining at the seams with all the stuff that's now hosted there.
I suspect there'd be latency issues based on personal experience, which one reason I'd be reluctant to use a web based interface. There's also server uptime to consider (these machines are going to run some weird code from time to time, especially when folks get to trying out their blue sky Friday Afternoon projects) and network connectivity since the dev setup isn't likely to have multiple failovers in place.
Also, I must admit that I don't like IDEs in general. Give me a bash prompt any day.
Oh, certainly. The obvious use case is for javascript development which ought to work well. Developing something like Chrome on the other hand ... you'd be effectively downloading the binary afresh for each iteration in the edit-compile-test loop. Even with a Google speed intranet, I imagine that could get tedious rather quickly.
And that's the point, really. I'm sure there are lots of cases where a web based approach would work well, or could be made to work well. I'm just not convinced that there's a good general solution there.
Latency depends upon server load. If the server is overloaded, you get lag.
That's the core question. Our natural instinct is to say to ourselves "Wow! If they provide that much computing power for free, just think how much they must keep back for themselves.".
The thing is, it tends not to work like that, at least not in most of the places I've worked. For instance, I worked a contract at Texas Instruments during their glory days. It took them three months to get me a PC, and this with a factory attached to the site. Not because they weren't efficient - just because every box that got built was earmarked for a paying customer.
And the attitude is not at all unusual. Most corporations invest the absolute minimum in development resources. If you're an accountant, that makes sense: developers cost money, and the money that you spend on development resources could be spent shaving another millisecond of response time for the users in Southern Uzbekistan (for instance), which might generate more revenue.
Look at it another way - if there's a cluster at Google running at 1% capacity, someone is going to suggest it be used to serve something to the outside world. Developers get left with whatever is overloaded. The devs get short rations - it's the way of the world, and there's probably no fixing it.
Of course, this is Google, and they're known for doing things differently, so maybe my experience doesn't apply here. Still, you asked why I'd hate to work entirely through web based interfaces. Latency is one reason.
And glad I am of it :)
You're not considering server load. Any big organisation prioritises resources for customer. Developers tend to be stuck with limited resources. I've worked a lot of places, and in my experience, the bigger they are, the more likely this is to be true. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of google sites had development servers running
Then go get some sleep and come back if and when you're prepared to be civil. I've got better things to do.
Hit "Submit" when I meant "Preview" (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it :)
Fair enough. I'm arguing from half-assed bits and pieces gleaned from role-playing supplements and other similarly unreliable sources, so I'm not going to try and put figures to that. I mean it seems fairly clear that ancient Babylon (assuming wikipedia's figure of upwards of 200,000 inhabitants wasn't going to be supportable by hunt/gather. I have no idea what might make a reasonable lower limit, however.
I suppose the thing I find interesting is population density rather than mobility per se. It seems to me that you need to have a fairly large number of people in one place to support enough non-producers that they could get together and start discussing blue sky projects like architecture or mathematics.
That said, I'm not sure how well that stands up to close inspection. Do medieval monasteries disprove the case? Possibly not, since they needed a large organised society to get them founded. The druids on Anglesey? Would we even know if there had been a group of scholarly hunter/gatherers?
That's what I'm saying - agriculture is a necessary precursor to city building.
Possibly, but unless I'm missing something, it can't support a large static population. The hunter/gatherer approach surely needs small tribal units that can move on when an area is depleted. It'd be hard to build a city on that basis, and without cities it's hard to see how larger collaborative projects could be sustained.
Which isn't to say you're wrong about alcohol being the driver behind agriculture. Just that the GP is correct to say that agriculture was the enabler for modern large scale organised society.
Because of the added latency, the dependency on local network availability, the fact you'll probably need to share a development cluster with way too many other projects. Eventually you'll need to deploy and test on a cluster, but for early development, you'd be daft not to code on your local machine.
Also, I should point out that running on a cluster is by no means a given. Android doesn't run on clusters, for example. Neither does Chrome.
mmmm... nope. I'm not aware of any modern operating system that prevents the user from using it. (Although some versions of Windows have tried very hard). A modern O/S will provide a degree of isolation from the hardware, I agree. But we were talking about sandboxing which provides an additional layer of abstraction, and blocks access to the OS as well.
If you only consider two thirds of what someone says, then that's apt to happen. What I said was:
Do note the emphasised portion.
I'm not sure I understand where all this attitude is coming from. Are you trying to troll me, or did you just get out the wrong side of bed, this morning?
Thank you. That was my entire point. They're not doing this yet (otherwise, why discus dogfood?) and there are apt to be problems in this area because it's not a use case the designers originally had in mind.
Really, was that so hard to get to?
Well, I'm assuming that no one wants to run GCC through a web front end, for starters. This is Google. They're known to write code in all sorts of languages.
Which isn't to say they don't have a really good web-based IDE in house, of course. But I'd hate to have to work that way myself.
Developing code for a platform, while working on that same platform, with the platform itself blocking access to the underlying hardware and O/S? Sounds clumsy, and an utter pain when it comes to testing. You'd need a virtual instance of the machine onto which to load the test image, or else a second box and remote compile everything. You'd get all the aggravation of embedded development, without the necessity. It sounds like a nightmare.
I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised here, but it sounds unlikely. From what I gather, the ChromeOS interface wasn't designed with systems developers in mind. You pretty much said that yourself.
Which, to be fair, is where the "eat your own dogfood" crowd at Google may encounter problems, since most of them will need to do a fair bit of non-webapp work.
On the bright side, this may well result in a lot more of the underlying O/S being exposed for general use. I suppose it'll depend on how seriously Google take their dogfood.