Patents and copyrights are a blight upon the economy and upon innovation. You're partially right, but mostly wrong. I don't like how copyright and patents have been applied in this country, but there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that the parent is mostly correct, and you're mostly incorrect. You're right that an open, IP-free society increases competition, which also increases innovation. However, at the same time, it drastically reduces the actual payoff for any innovation. America's economy has thrived almost exclusively for one reason, and one reason only: it has been very attractive to form and operate businesses here in the last century. Laws, taxes, societal outlook, natural resources, regulatory freedom -- you name it -- the US gives companies what they want, 99.9% of the time.
Companies don't WANT competition. They know that innovation is a flukey business, and economies run much better on "sure things" -- companies that people will actually invest their money in. If that company you're buying stock in didn't have copyrights, and patents, and all that other crap, anyone could just come along at any time and unseat them from their spot, without warning, and with disastrous effects for your investment. Turns out that most people don't want to invest in companies that have a 90% fail rate -- even the 10% of successful companies will have a hard time attracting investors, since they too could be dethroned at any moment. So by protecting these companies' research, development, and market positions, we have made the US a corporation-friendly place -- the kind of place where companies can be sure their new innovation is going to get the recognition, protection, and market position necessary to make it a solid investment. Only then can you attract investors, start your company, and make a profit.
To emphasize my point, think of this: you invent the next big thing (tm). Let's say it's a brilliant new form of computer input, orders of magnitude faster than keyboard and mouse. You just try founding a company around that without patenting it. If you went to a VC and said "oh, I didn't patent it, because I figured the free market would actually make this innovation work best" -- you'd be laughed out of the room. You may be right -- if it makes it to the free market, that might increase innovation -- but if nobody is willing to spend the money to get it there, why would companies even bother? So yes, you're right -- but mostly, you're wrong. Your point makes sense until you look at it from the perspective of the foundations of a capitalist economy -- the corporations.
Or perhaps your fingers are too tired to type out the names of the FOSS applications that are used as much as Microsoft Office, iTunes, Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat by the average user? That's not the question at hand. The question is: are they innovative? Microsoft Office, iTunes, Acrobat -- what MAJOR innovations have they brought us? I would contend that all of the "innovative" features in each were completely and shamelessly stolen from external projects -- often open source (or public domain) projects!
Making music "easy" isn't an innovation. Making documents "portable" is hardly an innovation, and it was done way before Acrobat. Even Photoshop -- not that innovative (though moreso than the other apps listed). Just because it's the dominant image editor doesn't mean its features are innovative. As we have gained processing power and more professional uses have evolved, companies have naturally developed features to meet changing needs.
Even then, a lot of the most innovative research in applications like Photoshop is actually grounded in Open Source anyway. The article, and your sentiment, is bunk. Truly creative innovation doesn't come about by lots of people applying themselves to a problem, honestly. It comes about accident, or by a stroke of insight from someone, often someone not even strongly related to the field at hand. I don't have any idea why you or the author of TFA would ever think that's likely to be a closed-source corporation.
Often, when there is innovation in closed-source software, it has nothing to do with the development model at all -- the company is founded BECAUSE of the innovation. You have a clever idea, and you make a company to try and get rich off of it. Is that so surprising? Just because most of those people choose closed source models doesn't causally link either development style with innovation of any kind.
Aha -- I thought you might have a problem with the zero argument. I thought about elaborating, but decided it wasn't worth our time =). Anyway, such concerns don't have me gnashing my teeth in the slightest; I just prefer to actually verify that the concepts I use are actually valid =P.
To your point: I think you're missing a critical aspect here -- that I'm only arguing against zero as a "real" or "practical" number. As you accurately point out, we use the concept of "absence" and "owing" all the time; to assume that means we understand ZERO as a number is just silly. We can easily understand the absence of something without applying the concept of the NUMBER zero. A lack of something is one thing, assigning a number to that lack is to impose an artificial abstract concept where none belongs. We're comfortable with it because we've studied math our entire lives, but in fact, many mathematicians argued against it viciously when the idea of zero was first introduced. There are a lot of problems with numbers and application to the real world; this is just the tip of the iceberg. The truth is that we only apply mathematics to the "concrete" world around us by abstracting from things that are not abstract. There is nothing about an apple that makes it ONE apple or some such nonsense; we take a look at things and assign abstract descriptors willy-nilly. We assign labels to things and categorize them by made-up abstract ideas -- that's the whole problem of universals. Assigning numbers to objects is the same problem, with additional difficulties.
To quote: "Nor is it impossible to observe zero. You might say anytime I look for apples and don't find them, then I've observed zero." More accurately, you're looking at a scene, and one of the abstract descriptors you're applying to that scene is "0" with reference to apples. Anyway, let's move away from that debate, since I don't think it's that productive anyway =). One very important quote, here:
I'm a confirmed empiricist. What works in practise is good enough for me. I couldn't agree more. If we want to apply abstract mathematical concepts to real-world problems, more power to us. If it works, even better. But that does not, in any way, mean that there is a direct relationship between our assignment of abstracts/formulas and the "real" world. That's pretty much the point I'm making. Here's a great example of why: say, for example, we "figured out" gravity, and could make accurate predictions of projectiles on Earth. Handy! But then later we find out that what we thought isn't how gravity works at all; in fact, there's a larger, more universal explanation, of which our previous understanding was only one small facet or coincidental bit. Obviously, we would refute or refine our previous understanding. Even if some abstract assignments yield practical results, they can easily be wrong, and indeed, mislead us into thinking that they are certain, when in fact they are not.
Anyway, goodly debate, I hope that I swayed you a little bit (at least to read a bit about universals), and I thank you for sticking some more objections/responses into my toolkit =).
Bah an edited end of comment got left on there. Oops. Anyway, it addresses a different point -- we could theoretically create a "false" identity for real world objects (just to anticipate a response you might have). For example, I have an apple. I can call it 'my apple' or I could call it "Frank." In this case, we could say "Frank = my apple" -- but that's not a statement about the real world at all. It's just a statement about how we name things =P.
Also, 1 = 1 is not an axiom but an observable fact. The most obvious proof is that 1 - 1 = 0, that is, if I have an apple and I eat it, I now have zero apples. Would you deny this? Yes. I wouldn't deny that you have no apples after your eating -- you certainly don't. But that doesn't prove that 1 - 1 = 0, or even cause one to reasonably infer it. Regardless, you're actually compounding a lot of difficult problems into one short bit. First, the concept of zero as a number: zero is not a real-world concept. If I asked you, after you ate your apple: "do you have any apples?" You would be an idiot to answer: "why yes I do. I have zero apples."
In the real world, we use numbers to do things like counting. If you apply a NUMBER zero to something, you're actually taking an axiomatic concept and applying it to a situation where it doesn't belong. You can't OBSERVE zero. We've created an "imaginary" number to do so. So no, it's not an observable fact in that sense.
A second problem: you have to assume that 1=1 to make the statement "1 - 1 = 0" sensical. Unfortunately, the law of non-contradiction is (regardless of what you believe) axiomatic. Even if "1 - 1 = 0" is true, you still need an axiomatic statement to reach the conclusion that "1=1".
Third: identity and "equality" of real objects. Instead of sidestepping the problem, let's examine troubles that arise from "x = x", when applies to real world objects. In an abstract (see: analytic) world, equality is simple; when we say "x = x", there can be two identifiers for the same abstract value. But in the REAL world (see: synthetic propositions), equality is almost an absurd concept. Let's take apples. Say we have two apples. Those two apples can NEVER be equal, NEVER be identical. It's simply impossible.
Here's why: if something is literally equal, it is a relationship of identity. That means every single way you can describe the two objects is synonymous. Every property you can ascribe to an object. Let's assume our apples are "physically" identical, down to an atomic level. One is on my left, and another on my right. They're still not equal, not identical. Why? Because one has the property of being in place X, and another has the property of being in place Y. If the objects are distinguishable by any means, then they are not identical.
The strongest you can say is this: I have an apple. It is identical with this apple (e.g., itself). Even that is stretching it -- you have to specify that you're talking about the same instant of existence for the apple with both statements (after all, if the earth is spinning, it's in a different place with every passing moment).
There's a whole field of philosophy that is devoted essentially to this and similar problems -- and it's one of the very hardest of human existence. It's called the philosophy of universals. It's absolutely fascinating -- if you'd like a list of resources, I would happily oblige.l is if we assign them different names.
You can tell them no. I basically agree, but there's a better way to do it. I just lie, and feign ignorance. For example:
Aunt: Every time I plug in my digital camera, my computer has this problem, and then the screen is funny, and then I can't seem to find my pictures, and then the camera gets full and runs out of battery, so I have to click it, and then I am not sure if I need this thingie I saw for it online!
Me: Huh, that's strange... sounds like your camera's not loaded with the proper drivers. Unfortunately, they're all so different, I don't really know what to tell you... Sorry....
Then everyone goes away happy-ish -- not satisfied, but happy. Of course, any idiot could just download the appropriate drivers. But that causes a whole slew of problems -- them annoying you, and you wasting your time trying to diagnose simple problems. When you just say "NO!!" they get angry, and persist in asking you anyway. This way, they eventually figure that you don't really know anything about computers anyway, and just stop asking. Everyone wins!
Look, the reason you calculate sample size for a study is so that you have an adequately powered trial to show some hypothesized effect size Right on the head. Furthermore, people have no clue about the balance of Type I and Type II error -- a fallacy that you even see from a lot of quantitative researchers. Just one more reason why I think that basic stats concepts should be mandatory high school curriculum -- it's easy stuff compared to most HS math, and could actually "help" you in "real life."
Honestly, if they just thoroughly taught and tested on the relationship between correlation and causation, I'd be happy. That fallacy alone is used to bamboozle millions during political and social discourse. I'm no fan of Bush, but the number of times I've heard arguments that essentially amount to "look, ever since Bush has been in office, X has been awful" -- it boggles the mind. Fine, you may have relevant information that shows HOW the Bush administration made X awful, but jesus, do you really think THAT stupid statement should persuade anyone?
Yeah, but only because he was gettin' ladies -- most biographers are nigh on certain it was syphilitic mental destabilization. Quite common for late-stage syphilis.
you cant do ANYTHING with "My Location" except watch a pretty blue point on the map
No My Location for route finding Not how it works on my BlackBerry Pearl. On mine, it automatically focuses on where you are, and allows you to do a bunch of nifty stuff from that position:
Search right around where you are (say, for a train station or restaurant)
Get directions from your current guessed location. Could be a hair inaccurate if you're on foot, but by car, it's fine. Here in Boston, the service is realistically accurate to 200 yards or so.
Once you find bars or stations or whatever, you can view DETAILS like hours of operation, costs, reviews... completely full-featured information delivery
Easily favorite (press **) the location to remember it later or go directly there using integrated driving directions
The coolest to me is how I really have to provide almost no information. I search for "bars" and it pops up a bunch of red pinpoints around my location, that I can then float over to view details. I can see what's close to me, what's good, what's bad, and even if the location's a little off, I can generally figure out where I am in relation to my points of interest.
All in all, by far the best mobile app I've ever used. I will definitely use it quite a bit. Just load the app, press 0, and then search for anything your little heart desires, and POW, there it is, all laid out for you. Call straight from the listing, so on, so forth. Really awesome.
Nope, that's not what they said. You should generally check to make sure your correction is correct. FTFA:
About 4,000 children were afflicted with cancer. Less well-known, however, is the fact that only nine of those 4,000 died -- thyroid cancers are often easy to operate on. Cheers!
He was implying, through sarcasm, that nine people dying was a big deal, and worthy of condemnation. I think it truly is amazing that they could save 3,992ish lives even though doing so required such a complicated and life-threatening surgery! If all of our disasters were handled thusly, we would hardly have to worry about anything =)
Tell me when the actual research articles are available in a refereed journal. OK!
Also, you may want to check the lead researcher's other research. Turns out it's all published in a lot of "refereed journals" and comes to the same types of "evidence-based" conclusions. Fancy that!
See there, not so bad! "Only" nine people died. Wow, that's really a ridiculously uninformed thing to say. That such a major surgery could be carried out on four THOUSAND people with only nine deaths, REGARDLESS of the type of malady, is miraculous to me. You're practically that likely to get killed in US hospitals going in for the sniffles! And what's the point of your little "sickness?" Do you have a point? That we shouldn't use nuclear materials because they caused the deaths of NINE people? Hate to break it to you, more people than that died of starvation as I type this message. So you're willing to spend 10x as much and kill 10x as many because of some irrational bogeyman fear? You gotta be kidding.
A lot about this study doesn't really add up. If you're using death as the only symptom of something dangerous then your observations are definitely going to be flawed. All in all these studies don't make a whole lot of sense in there conclusions. Notice to all moderators: please read the article before modding up fools! First, TFA doesn't talk about "this study" -- it talks about a LOT of recent research that shows how low-risk radiation is relative to previous estimates. It focuses on a group collecting radioactive materials in Siberia, but actually doesn't even discuss the results of that collection.
And they definitely don't just focus on death! For example, they talk about mental retardation as a result of irradiation in the (nearly 90,000) survivors of Hiroshima: 30 fetuses. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that math. Or how about how they debunk a "common knowledge" bit about Chernobyl -- that 4,000 children got cancer as a result. Turns out, that's true! But guess what -- only NINE of those four thousand died. I may not be the greatest mathematician on slashdot, but I think even I can figure out the significance of those figures. That's for two of the top 3 unarguably most destructive radioactive events in history!
Furthermore, if you take some initiative, you could even FIND some of the original research yourself! See:
and is often represented as fact when it is still just theory And what would you propose calling it? Guess what -- any non-synthetic belief you have (e.g., anything you don't base solely on faith or math) is falsifiable, and therefore a theory. Everything you work under is a theory. Here's a theory I have: the Sun will rise tomorrow. It's true, the Sun could not rise tomorrow (some galactic cataclysm -- or if you prefer, God decided to eradicate the Sun overnight). Therefore, my theory could be proven wrong. But that doesn't mean it IS wrong. In fact, I would contend you'd be foolish to believe otherwise.
Oh my god, the Sun might not rise tomorrow! It's just a theory! Strike all mention of orbits and our solar system from science textbooks; this is just a theory!
So to ask that FSM be taught alongside ID is to show a category misunderstanding. ID does not stand in contrast with FSM, but rather FSM falls under ID (as does directed panspermia and other non-religious creation scenarios) Right. I'm not sure what immaterial fantasy world you live in, but clearly you're reducing ID to something that is basically worthless if you're going to reduce it to something "common to all religions" or some such nonsense. If all you mean by ID is that SOMETHING created stuff with an intelligent purpose, that's one thing, but it's completely Intellectually Dishonest (ID? =P) to claim that's what the ID debate is.
It's only when you start making SPECIFIC claims about how/what was designed, and when, that the debate gets sticky. Go back far enough, we don't have any explanation for how things came about (e.g., far before the Big Bang) -- so Intelligent Design becomes as reasonable a candidate as any other. But what most ID proponents are talking about is the evolution (sorry, creation) of complex biological organisms. In that respect, FSMism differs GREATLY from Christianity. Furthermore, the "major" religions, and all the minor ones too, seem to be unable to agree on all that as well.
So yeah, if you reduce Intelligent Design to a stupid undebatable metaphysical nothing, you're right that it's a class misunderstanding. However, for those of us that live in the real world, the ID debate is clearly linked to particular religious ideologies, and will be embraced with THOSE ideologies in mind if adopted in PRACTICE.
Long story short: nobody buys the stupid argument that ID "isn't about Christianity" -- least of all the people who support it. ID proponents are clearly just using that as an intellectually dishonest shield from rightful criticism. And FSMism exposes such crap for what it is: an affront to the legitimate search for reasonable explanation of observable phenomena.
This definitely isn't new. I've had my (Verizon LG VX7000) for about 2.5 years, and it also makes a loud audible alarm when you call 911. The alarm is quite distracting, and persists even if I'm on vibrate or silent mode. I've used 911 to report a few crimes and a downed powerline in my area, and each time it infuriates me. I don't know what kind of an idiot would think it a good idea, but I called and complained already. Good to see they take that (and common sense) into account, eh?
But I just want you to know; it's not like these people don't have a very good reason to distrust and even hate the Japanese. They have the best reason you can find in the world to hate a group of people. That's all well and good. But they want to live in the country of the people they hate, and seem to have no problem surrounding themselves with their oppressors? It doesn't seem like rocket science to figure out this logic:
If you don't want to be a Japanese citizen, don't live in Japan.
If you hate the Japanese and want to separate yourself from them, don't live in Japan.
If you're bursting with Koreanness, well -- there are actually two Korean countries to choose from!
The truth is, they may have good reasons to be upset with the historical actions of the Japanese, but that seems to have no bearing on what citizenship they have. It sounds to me like these people want special treatment for no good reason. Get off your high horse; if you want to be a Korean, then you can be one, either as an alien resident with no special treatment, or as a resident of Korea. Otherwise, welcome to the world everyone else lives in, too.
Neat article. This really stood out to me:
As I mentioned in August, a reporter for the Indian Express newspaper was able to access the e-mail account belonging to India's ambassador to China and obtained the transcript of a meeting between the embassador and the Chinese foreign minister.
So let's get this straight -- you're arresting the dude who sniffed information that legit clients CHOSE to send to him via Tor, and this "journalist" gets a free pass? That's about the MOST illegal thing I can possibly imagine. Plus, he's probably violating a lot MORE laws since its his own ambassador (countries tend to get pissy about stolen confidential diplomatic information). Amazing.
Bull, that's awful. Why should you have to revolt to ensure your safety? Imagine that you disagree with the Iraq war. Does the fact that you're a US citizen mean that it would suddenly be OK for an Iraqi nuke to wipe you off the planet? Is it your ethical duty to overthrow the US government to prevent such an occurrence? Don't be ridiculous.
As for it being "involuntary" -- absolutely not. We're talking about a pretty serious ethical decision here, one that I'm sure you've never actually been in a position to consider. We're talking about ending another person's (or persons') life. If you had a choice, would you rather shoot your neighbor or go to prison for 5 years? What's the realistic, ethical difference between your relationship with your neighbor and a random civilian in, say, WWII-era Japan? Is your personal ethic really that wrapped up in your tertiary relation to some external power, such as a government? Is theirs?
If you're religious, this question (in my opinion) becomes even more meaningful. What is the ethical implication of killing someone who you probably have no real quarrel with, especially in a situation where that person will never really be in a position to harm you? I think there may be a couple religions that disavow such actions...
You can say it's involuntary as much as you want, but it's not too hard to see that going to prison for a relatively short period of time would be preferable to wanton killing of someone I don't even know anything about. Yes, people do it, and it's the way the world works -- I have a realist's understanding of the world, but that doesn't mean I want to participate in its barbarism.
Yeah, it wasn't even that I thought all of these problems were insurmountable -- they were just a super pain in the ass. I mean, come on -- the system was supposed to be preconfigured! No matter whether it's the software vendor's fault or whatever, that makes almost no difference to me; I just want it to work. The fact that what I need or want to use doesn't work or doesn't work right makes it an inferior product in my book.
I also use fast user-switching in XP, and a non-admin acct for most apps (separate user for gaming, too). Never had that cause a problem for me, except when installing programs or with a couple programs that liked to break into non-user-land. I do have to agree with you, though: Steam is a huge, erm....steaming..... steam-thing. Awful. I think the dual monitor thing was because of the drivers not playing nice, but you'd think that for a pre-loaded system with dual output, that crap would just work. And no driver update was readily available at the time.
That, combined with all of the annoyances of the UI alone, would have made me switch back for sure, after giving it the old college try. There's just not any positive to outweigh the negative that I saw.
I'm not going to respond to any complaints about Vista running on hardware made by a competitor with an BIOS emulation/driver set made by a competitor. Try Vista on an actual PC, then come back and let us know how much you hate it. (Since you obviously wouldn't change your mind.) I think I'll finally reply to one of these. Before I begin in on why I dislike Vista, I'd like to note that I am not a fervent Linux user. I've used Windows for most of my life, and I'm perfectly happy with XP. That said, I wasn't actually expecting Vista to be bad.
But it was. Oh, it was. I bought a new computer a few months back (a pretty decent Acer), and it came with Vista pre-loaded. I'd actually already installed an illegal version of Vista on another PC purely out of curiosity. When it didn't work right, I figured it was because the hardware wasn't up to snuff. But when I started using my new computer, I could hardly believe that any QA group would allow it out of the door.
My main problem with Vista wasn't some ideological or geeky imperative -- it was the UI. The UI in Vista is completely awful. Time and time again, I found that operations I could do with just a few clicks or keystrokes in 2000/XP were completely ridiculous in Vista -- never mind UAC (which got turned off a couple minutes after first boot-up). Where something might have taken me three clicks in XP, it suddenly took me 10 clicks in Vista, and in a completely unintuitive way. And keyboard shortcuts? It's like they decided to completely ignore them.
The UI problems go on and on -- "Explorer" is an incredible mess. But I had a lot of other gripes I wasn't expecting, as well:
Sound -- even on a pre-configured system, the sound system would SKIP worse than a 90s CD player if you tried to, say, move a window. Also, during MP3 playback, my shiny new CPU would spik to 75% usage. Joy.
Dual monitor support -- I have used two monitors for quite a while -- it's a godsend. Vista liked to forget all of my dual-monitor settings with every resolution change and restart, which is incredibly annoying when setting it back using their awful menus takes about 5 minutes. And if you play games, you switch resolutions a LOT.
Steam -- I use steam for CS, and there were unending problems with Vista and Steam. It liked to crash during updates, particularly. That, and I couldn't figure out why I would get 90-100 choke constantly in Vista (same comp now runs XP, no choke)
DVD Playback -- in Windows Media Player, any DVD would "pause" for a second at chapter switches on DVDs. Completely ruins any movie. No problem at all on XP.
Complete hiding of most customization -- if you thought Control Panel was obscured in XP, it's freakin' CRAZY in Vista. The amazing thing to me is that ALL of the functionality, boxes, everything -- it's all the same! They just partition it into a million new windows that are un-intuitively located, so I can't change options without hunting the third level of "advanced" dialog down for an hour.
IE7 -- completely married to the UI, and is honestly quite bad. One gripe that really gets me: tabs open so slowly, that if you open a new tab and click a bookmark, it will load in the CURRENT window because the tab takes 3-4 seconds to load on a fast machine! That completely defies the PURPOSE of me opening a new tab! Another gripe: doing FTP in IE/explorer is now nigh-on-impossible. Another annoyance, yay.
Performance -- I don't play cutting-edge games, but on my older games, I got much worse performance in Vista than I do on XP. Everquest crashed constantly, and did the herky-jerky. CS, I would often dip below 60 fps. Both run at glass-smooth 100 fps on XP.
All in all, thoroughly unimpressed with the offering. And to be completely honest, I thought I would actually like it. So unfortunate.
They did not volunteer, they were drafted.
That's all well and good, but you still have to voluntarily go. No matter the laws, you don't HAVE to go to war if you're drafted in the United States. Of course, you'll probably go to prison for a good while, but you certainly have that choice. Given the choice, it's the one I would make, simply because I'd personally prefer not to take an active role in killing people I've never even met.
On the other hand, you don't really have a voluntary choice to LIVE, even if you do have a choice to live somewhere. Before that first bomb was dropped, do you really think those who died had any real choice in whether they lived or died? Absolutely not.
Follow the energy:
OK, I will. The major flaw in your argument is the assumption that "chemical energy" is going to yield the same amount of energy or efficiency. If my engine is 1% efficient and directly powers my car, would you say that's better than another vehicle that uses an in-home generator to charge batteries at 40% efficiency, even though the batteries cause 10% loss in efficiency? Of course not.
But, by your logic, the 1% efficient direct power would be superior, because it had less "steps" to go through to get to the vehicle? Pretty awful argument, really -- not sure if the mods were asleep, or what.
Slashdot Mirror
Companies don't WANT competition. They know that innovation is a flukey business, and economies run much better on "sure things" -- companies that people will actually invest their money in. If that company you're buying stock in didn't have copyrights, and patents, and all that other crap, anyone could just come along at any time and unseat them from their spot, without warning, and with disastrous effects for your investment. Turns out that most people don't want to invest in companies that have a 90% fail rate -- even the 10% of successful companies will have a hard time attracting investors, since they too could be dethroned at any moment. So by protecting these companies' research, development, and market positions, we have made the US a corporation-friendly place -- the kind of place where companies can be sure their new innovation is going to get the recognition, protection, and market position necessary to make it a solid investment. Only then can you attract investors, start your company, and make a profit.
To emphasize my point, think of this: you invent the next big thing (tm). Let's say it's a brilliant new form of computer input, orders of magnitude faster than keyboard and mouse. You just try founding a company around that without patenting it. If you went to a VC and said "oh, I didn't patent it, because I figured the free market would actually make this innovation work best" -- you'd be laughed out of the room. You may be right -- if it makes it to the free market, that might increase innovation -- but if nobody is willing to spend the money to get it there, why would companies even bother? So yes, you're right -- but mostly, you're wrong. Your point makes sense until you look at it from the perspective of the foundations of a capitalist economy -- the corporations.
Making music "easy" isn't an innovation. Making documents "portable" is hardly an innovation, and it was done way before Acrobat. Even Photoshop -- not that innovative (though moreso than the other apps listed). Just because it's the dominant image editor doesn't mean its features are innovative. As we have gained processing power and more professional uses have evolved, companies have naturally developed features to meet changing needs.
Even then, a lot of the most innovative research in applications like Photoshop is actually grounded in Open Source anyway. The article, and your sentiment, is bunk. Truly creative innovation doesn't come about by lots of people applying themselves to a problem, honestly. It comes about accident, or by a stroke of insight from someone, often someone not even strongly related to the field at hand. I don't have any idea why you or the author of TFA would ever think that's likely to be a closed-source corporation.
Often, when there is innovation in closed-source software, it has nothing to do with the development model at all -- the company is founded BECAUSE of the innovation. You have a clever idea, and you make a company to try and get rich off of it. Is that so surprising? Just because most of those people choose closed source models doesn't causally link either development style with innovation of any kind.
To your point: I think you're missing a critical aspect here -- that I'm only arguing against zero as a "real" or "practical" number. As you accurately point out, we use the concept of "absence" and "owing" all the time; to assume that means we understand ZERO as a number is just silly. We can easily understand the absence of something without applying the concept of the NUMBER zero. A lack of something is one thing, assigning a number to that lack is to impose an artificial abstract concept where none belongs. We're comfortable with it because we've studied math our entire lives, but in fact, many mathematicians argued against it viciously when the idea of zero was first introduced. There are a lot of problems with numbers and application to the real world; this is just the tip of the iceberg. The truth is that we only apply mathematics to the "concrete" world around us by abstracting from things that are not abstract. There is nothing about an apple that makes it ONE apple or some such nonsense; we take a look at things and assign abstract descriptors willy-nilly. We assign labels to things and categorize them by made-up abstract ideas -- that's the whole problem of universals. Assigning numbers to objects is the same problem, with additional difficulties.
To quote: "Nor is it impossible to observe zero. You might say anytime I look for apples and don't find them, then I've observed zero." More accurately, you're looking at a scene, and one of the abstract descriptors you're applying to that scene is "0" with reference to apples. Anyway, let's move away from that debate, since I don't think it's that productive anyway =). One very important quote, here: I'm a confirmed empiricist. What works in practise is good enough for me. I couldn't agree more. If we want to apply abstract mathematical concepts to real-world problems, more power to us. If it works, even better. But that does not, in any way, mean that there is a direct relationship between our assignment of abstracts/formulas and the "real" world. That's pretty much the point I'm making. Here's a great example of why: say, for example, we "figured out" gravity, and could make accurate predictions of projectiles on Earth. Handy! But then later we find out that what we thought isn't how gravity works at all; in fact, there's a larger, more universal explanation, of which our previous understanding was only one small facet or coincidental bit. Obviously, we would refute or refine our previous understanding. Even if some abstract assignments yield practical results, they can easily be wrong, and indeed, mislead us into thinking that they are certain, when in fact they are not.
Anyway, goodly debate, I hope that I swayed you a little bit (at least to read a bit about universals), and I thank you for sticking some more objections/responses into my toolkit =).
Cheers,
Tris.
Bah an edited end of comment got left on there. Oops. Anyway, it addresses a different point -- we could theoretically create a "false" identity for real world objects (just to anticipate a response you might have). For example, I have an apple. I can call it 'my apple' or I could call it "Frank." In this case, we could say "Frank = my apple" -- but that's not a statement about the real world at all. It's just a statement about how we name things =P.
In the real world, we use numbers to do things like counting. If you apply a NUMBER zero to something, you're actually taking an axiomatic concept and applying it to a situation where it doesn't belong. You can't OBSERVE zero. We've created an "imaginary" number to do so. So no, it's not an observable fact in that sense.
A second problem: you have to assume that 1=1 to make the statement "1 - 1 = 0" sensical. Unfortunately, the law of non-contradiction is (regardless of what you believe) axiomatic. Even if "1 - 1 = 0" is true, you still need an axiomatic statement to reach the conclusion that "1=1".
Third: identity and "equality" of real objects. Instead of sidestepping the problem, let's examine troubles that arise from "x = x", when applies to real world objects. In an abstract (see: analytic) world, equality is simple; when we say "x = x", there can be two identifiers for the same abstract value. But in the REAL world (see: synthetic propositions), equality is almost an absurd concept. Let's take apples. Say we have two apples. Those two apples can NEVER be equal, NEVER be identical. It's simply impossible.
Here's why: if something is literally equal, it is a relationship of identity. That means every single way you can describe the two objects is synonymous. Every property you can ascribe to an object. Let's assume our apples are "physically" identical, down to an atomic level. One is on my left, and another on my right. They're still not equal, not identical. Why? Because one has the property of being in place X, and another has the property of being in place Y. If the objects are distinguishable by any means, then they are not identical.
The strongest you can say is this: I have an apple. It is identical with this apple (e.g., itself). Even that is stretching it -- you have to specify that you're talking about the same instant of existence for the apple with both statements (after all, if the earth is spinning, it's in a different place with every passing moment).
There's a whole field of philosophy that is devoted essentially to this and similar problems -- and it's one of the very hardest of human existence. It's called the philosophy of universals. It's absolutely fascinating -- if you'd like a list of resources, I would happily oblige.l is if we assign them different names.
Aunt: Every time I plug in my digital camera, my computer has this problem, and then the screen is funny, and then I can't seem to find my pictures, and then the camera gets full and runs out of battery, so I have to click it, and then I am not sure if I need this thingie I saw for it online!
Me: Huh, that's strange... sounds like your camera's not loaded with the proper drivers. Unfortunately, they're all so different, I don't really know what to tell you... Sorry....
Then everyone goes away happy-ish -- not satisfied, but happy. Of course, any idiot could just download the appropriate drivers. But that causes a whole slew of problems -- them annoying you, and you wasting your time trying to diagnose simple problems. When you just say "NO!!" they get angry, and persist in asking you anyway. This way, they eventually figure that you don't really know anything about computers anyway, and just stop asking. Everyone wins!
Honestly, if they just thoroughly taught and tested on the relationship between correlation and causation, I'd be happy. That fallacy alone is used to bamboozle millions during political and social discourse. I'm no fan of Bush, but the number of times I've heard arguments that essentially amount to "look, ever since Bush has been in office, X has been awful" -- it boggles the mind. Fine, you may have relevant information that shows HOW the Bush administration made X awful, but jesus, do you really think THAT stupid statement should persuade anyone?
Yeah, but only because he was gettin' ladies -- most biographers are nigh on certain it was syphilitic mental destabilization. Quite common for late-stage syphilis.
No My Location for route finding Not how it works on my BlackBerry Pearl. On mine, it automatically focuses on where you are, and allows you to do a bunch of nifty stuff from that position:
- Search right around where you are (say, for a train station or restaurant)
- Get directions from your current guessed location. Could be a hair inaccurate if you're on foot, but by car, it's fine. Here in Boston, the service is realistically accurate to 200 yards or so.
- Once you find bars or stations or whatever, you can view DETAILS like hours of operation, costs, reviews... completely full-featured information delivery
- Easily favorite (press **) the location to remember it later or go directly there using integrated driving directions
- The coolest to me is how I really have to provide almost no information. I search for "bars" and it pops up a bunch of red pinpoints around my location, that I can then float over to view details. I can see what's close to me, what's good, what's bad, and even if the location's a little off, I can generally figure out where I am in relation to my points of interest.
All in all, by far the best mobile app I've ever used. I will definitely use it quite a bit. Just load the app, press 0, and then search for anything your little heart desires, and POW, there it is, all laid out for you. Call straight from the listing, so on, so forth. Really awesome.He was implying, through sarcasm, that nine people dying was a big deal, and worthy of condemnation. I think it truly is amazing that they could save 3,992ish lives even though doing so required such a complicated and life-threatening surgery! If all of our disasters were handled thusly, we would hardly have to worry about anything =)
Also, you may want to check the lead researcher's other research. Turns out it's all published in a lot of "refereed journals" and comes to the same types of "evidence-based" conclusions. Fancy that!
And they definitely don't just focus on death! For example, they talk about mental retardation as a result of irradiation in the (nearly 90,000) survivors of Hiroshima: 30 fetuses. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that math. Or how about how they debunk a "common knowledge" bit about Chernobyl -- that 4,000 children got cancer as a result. Turns out, that's true! But guess what -- only NINE of those four thousand died. I may not be the greatest mathematician on slashdot, but I think even I can figure out the significance of those figures. That's for two of the top 3 unarguably most destructive radioactive events in history!
Furthermore, if you take some initiative, you could even FIND some of the original research yourself! See:
Techa River Radiation Studay. Found that of nearly 2,000 cancer deaths in the area, about 2.5% were connected to the massive irradiation of the area.
The massive 90,000 participant Hiroshima study.
The GSF research about that abandoned soviet town where workers treated weapons-grade plutonium without even wearing gloves. This site is in German, but is unbelievably interesting, for those of us who can understand it. Audio, summaries directly from the researchers, it's pretty awesome.
Don't feed the "I can troll the comments for 3 minutes before posting in an asinine manner without R'ing T F'ing A" dummies, please.
Oh my god, the Sun might not rise tomorrow! It's just a theory! Strike all mention of orbits and our solar system from science textbooks; this is just a theory!
It's only when you start making SPECIFIC claims about how/what was designed, and when, that the debate gets sticky. Go back far enough, we don't have any explanation for how things came about (e.g., far before the Big Bang) -- so Intelligent Design becomes as reasonable a candidate as any other. But what most ID proponents are talking about is the evolution (sorry, creation) of complex biological organisms. In that respect, FSMism differs GREATLY from Christianity. Furthermore, the "major" religions, and all the minor ones too, seem to be unable to agree on all that as well.
So yeah, if you reduce Intelligent Design to a stupid undebatable metaphysical nothing, you're right that it's a class misunderstanding. However, for those of us that live in the real world, the ID debate is clearly linked to particular religious ideologies, and will be embraced with THOSE ideologies in mind if adopted in PRACTICE.
Long story short: nobody buys the stupid argument that ID "isn't about Christianity" -- least of all the people who support it. ID proponents are clearly just using that as an intellectually dishonest shield from rightful criticism. And FSMism exposes such crap for what it is: an affront to the legitimate search for reasonable explanation of observable phenomena.
Makes me feel so good inside
Only a chocolate jesus
Can keep me satisfied
Chocolate Jesus -- Tom Waits. Note: those lyrics are a bit off, but pretty much correct. The live version on storytellers is priceless.
This definitely isn't new. I've had my (Verizon LG VX7000) for about 2.5 years, and it also makes a loud audible alarm when you call 911. The alarm is quite distracting, and persists even if I'm on vibrate or silent mode. I've used 911 to report a few crimes and a downed powerline in my area, and each time it infuriates me. I don't know what kind of an idiot would think it a good idea, but I called and complained already. Good to see they take that (and common sense) into account, eh?
If you don't want to be a Japanese citizen, don't live in Japan.
If you hate the Japanese and want to separate yourself from them, don't live in Japan.
If you're bursting with Koreanness, well -- there are actually two Korean countries to choose from!
The truth is, they may have good reasons to be upset with the historical actions of the Japanese, but that seems to have no bearing on what citizenship they have. It sounds to me like these people want special treatment for no good reason. Get off your high horse; if you want to be a Korean, then you can be one, either as an alien resident with no special treatment, or as a resident of Korea. Otherwise, welcome to the world everyone else lives in, too.
So let's get this straight -- you're arresting the dude who sniffed information that legit clients CHOSE to send to him via Tor, and this "journalist" gets a free pass? That's about the MOST illegal thing I can possibly imagine. Plus, he's probably violating a lot MORE laws since its his own ambassador (countries tend to get pissy about stolen confidential diplomatic information). Amazing.
Bull, that's awful. Why should you have to revolt to ensure your safety? Imagine that you disagree with the Iraq war. Does the fact that you're a US citizen mean that it would suddenly be OK for an Iraqi nuke to wipe you off the planet? Is it your ethical duty to overthrow the US government to prevent such an occurrence? Don't be ridiculous.
As for it being "involuntary" -- absolutely not. We're talking about a pretty serious ethical decision here, one that I'm sure you've never actually been in a position to consider. We're talking about ending another person's (or persons') life. If you had a choice, would you rather shoot your neighbor or go to prison for 5 years? What's the realistic, ethical difference between your relationship with your neighbor and a random civilian in, say, WWII-era Japan? Is your personal ethic really that wrapped up in your tertiary relation to some external power, such as a government? Is theirs?
If you're religious, this question (in my opinion) becomes even more meaningful. What is the ethical implication of killing someone who you probably have no real quarrel with, especially in a situation where that person will never really be in a position to harm you? I think there may be a couple religions that disavow such actions...
You can say it's involuntary as much as you want, but it's not too hard to see that going to prison for a relatively short period of time would be preferable to wanton killing of someone I don't even know anything about. Yes, people do it, and it's the way the world works -- I have a realist's understanding of the world, but that doesn't mean I want to participate in its barbarism.
Cheers.
PS -- that would be "too."
Yeah, it wasn't even that I thought all of these problems were insurmountable -- they were just a super pain in the ass. I mean, come on -- the system was supposed to be preconfigured! No matter whether it's the software vendor's fault or whatever, that makes almost no difference to me; I just want it to work. The fact that what I need or want to use doesn't work or doesn't work right makes it an inferior product in my book.
I also use fast user-switching in XP, and a non-admin acct for most apps (separate user for gaming, too). Never had that cause a problem for me, except when installing programs or with a couple programs that liked to break into non-user-land. I do have to agree with you, though: Steam is a huge, erm....steaming..... steam-thing. Awful. I think the dual monitor thing was because of the drivers not playing nice, but you'd think that for a pre-loaded system with dual output, that crap would just work. And no driver update was readily available at the time.
That, combined with all of the annoyances of the UI alone, would have made me switch back for sure, after giving it the old college try. There's just not any positive to outweigh the negative that I saw.
Cheers!
But it was. Oh, it was. I bought a new computer a few months back (a pretty decent Acer), and it came with Vista pre-loaded. I'd actually already installed an illegal version of Vista on another PC purely out of curiosity. When it didn't work right, I figured it was because the hardware wasn't up to snuff. But when I started using my new computer, I could hardly believe that any QA group would allow it out of the door.
My main problem with Vista wasn't some ideological or geeky imperative -- it was the UI. The UI in Vista is completely awful. Time and time again, I found that operations I could do with just a few clicks or keystrokes in 2000/XP were completely ridiculous in Vista -- never mind UAC (which got turned off a couple minutes after first boot-up). Where something might have taken me three clicks in XP, it suddenly took me 10 clicks in Vista, and in a completely unintuitive way. And keyboard shortcuts? It's like they decided to completely ignore them.
The UI problems go on and on -- "Explorer" is an incredible mess. But I had a lot of other gripes I wasn't expecting, as well:
- Sound -- even on a pre-configured system, the sound system would SKIP worse than a 90s CD player if you tried to, say, move a window. Also, during MP3 playback, my shiny new CPU would spik to 75% usage. Joy.
- Dual monitor support -- I have used two monitors for quite a while -- it's a godsend. Vista liked to forget all of my dual-monitor settings with every resolution change and restart, which is incredibly annoying when setting it back using their awful menus takes about 5 minutes. And if you play games, you switch resolutions a LOT.
- Steam -- I use steam for CS, and there were unending problems with Vista and Steam. It liked to crash during updates, particularly. That, and I couldn't figure out why I would get 90-100 choke constantly in Vista (same comp now runs XP, no choke)
- DVD Playback -- in Windows Media Player, any DVD would "pause" for a second at chapter switches on DVDs. Completely ruins any movie. No problem at all on XP.
- Complete hiding of most customization -- if you thought Control Panel was obscured in XP, it's freakin' CRAZY in Vista. The amazing thing to me is that ALL of the functionality, boxes, everything -- it's all the same! They just partition it into a million new windows that are un-intuitively located, so I can't change options without hunting the third level of "advanced" dialog down for an hour.
- IE7 -- completely married to the UI, and is honestly quite bad. One gripe that really gets me: tabs open so slowly, that if you open a new tab and click a bookmark, it will load in the CURRENT window because the tab takes 3-4 seconds to load on a fast machine! That completely defies the PURPOSE of me opening a new tab! Another gripe: doing FTP in IE/explorer is now nigh-on-impossible. Another annoyance, yay.
- Performance -- I don't play cutting-edge games, but on my older games, I got much worse performance in Vista than I do on XP. Everquest crashed constantly, and did the herky-jerky. CS, I would often dip below 60 fps. Both run at glass-smooth 100 fps on XP.
All in all, thoroughly unimpressed with the offering. And to be completely honest, I thought I would actually like it. So unfortunate.That's all well and good, but you still have to voluntarily go. No matter the laws, you don't HAVE to go to war if you're drafted in the United States. Of course, you'll probably go to prison for a good while, but you certainly have that choice. Given the choice, it's the one I would make, simply because I'd personally prefer not to take an active role in killing people I've never even met.
On the other hand, you don't really have a voluntary choice to LIVE, even if you do have a choice to live somewhere. Before that first bomb was dropped, do you really think those who died had any real choice in whether they lived or died? Absolutely not.
OK, I will. The major flaw in your argument is the assumption that "chemical energy" is going to yield the same amount of energy or efficiency. If my engine is 1% efficient and directly powers my car, would you say that's better than another vehicle that uses an in-home generator to charge batteries at 40% efficiency, even though the batteries cause 10% loss in efficiency? Of course not.
But, by your logic, the 1% efficient direct power would be superior, because it had less "steps" to go through to get to the vehicle? Pretty awful argument, really -- not sure if the mods were asleep, or what.