Only yesterday I heard a conversation which must surely be occuring up and down the country.
"When are you getting one of those zunes then Mr Gadget ?" "I'm not" "What ! A new gadget that you . . . aren't . . . buying. Surely the world must be ending ?" "I'm not buying something which decides for me when I need to delete songs and stop listening to them."
Gah ! I ditched my TV, Computer, Books and Bill Boards in 1976 and simply study the pattern of deer migrating across the moors to get all the news I need.
In time I plan to ditch them to and simply observe microbial life on the beach.
Morals are just another way of saying "things which I do/don't agree with" and will quite often have no logical or scientific basis, as if this wasn't bad enough people often choose their moral beliefs based on other organisations which they happen to be a part of e.g religious groups, environmentalist groups etc.
Of these religiously based morals are obviously the most dangerous since people are at least likely to engage in some form of reasoned thought before joining a particular environmental group or whatever.
Using an aggregate of a particular societies morals to determine scientific progress is a problem for a number of reasons. Firstly as mentioned above a lot of people do not reasonably consider their moral position on most subjects beyond their immediate day to day lives and secondly because various groups speak on behalf of their members and purport to represent their collective moral opinion on a subject when in fact they don't.
E.g. religious groups have a variety of moral based opinions on scientific research which it claims are shared by all adherents of their particular faith when in fact most of the individual members of the religion will never have thought rationally and independantly about the issue preferring instead to transfer their responisibily for doing so to the religious leaders to do it for them.
Science should determine the course of it's progress scientifically on a cost/benefit basis and it should also do more to educate people who may be ignorant about the actual costs and benefits involved in a particular line of enquiry.
"We can not arbitrarily allow everything in the name of science on the grounds that it may benefit humanity someday."
No one is saying that we should arbitratily endorse any idea for scientific investigation/engineering which pops into someones head.
However we certainly should be pursuing scientific progress and should not let it be derailed by ill informed pressure groups or concerns about the impact of the scientific investigation on some ill defined and unproven idea. E.g. "experimenting with stem cells is a bad thing", "nuclear power is always evil" etc.
A lot of people are simply scared by things they don't understand and seem to fall back in with opinion of whatever herd they are naturally inclined to follow, e.g. religious people invariably use the bible or the "Word Of The Lord" as a reason not to pursue some avenue of scientific research. More educated people who have been to university or whatever may find they associate more closely with the green movement which can use "fears about the environmental impact" to thwart various areas of science with which they disagree.
This isn't to say that the results of scientific research never have a negative impact on some aspect of our lives or society, quite often by its very nature scientific discovery will change things upon which people have come to rely or depend upon. Likewise even the best example of "evil" science is pretty much bound to have some benefit to someone or some area of society.
The difficulty of defining "evil" and "good" is why the impact of scientific investigations should be undertaken scientifically and not based upon who has the most firmly entrenched pre-conceptions and fears and the largest pressure group to bolster them.
I agree you're absolutely totally right. Evil science experiments torturing poor defenceless animals is just totally evil and we should all stop right now for the good of our souls.
On the other hand though science does need to progress, just not so evilly, so I suggest that in future we use nasty, evil or criminal animals for experiments.
Crocodiles for example are pretty evil just lurking in rivers waiting for lovely, amazing, wildebeeste or hapless tourists in Australia to gobble up.
Many lions and, unbeliveably, household cats are implacable serial killers so those who don't have their claws removed and their teeth filed blunt could be used.
Woodlouse, eeriewigs, spiders and worms are all pretty horrible so we can use them.
Many vegetarians don't believe chickens and fish are animals so there's no harm in using them.
Most animal rights campaigners are in fact evil terrorists who hack up the bodies of old ladies and should be used in preference to all the above.
I don't know the ins and outs of this situation but by the sounds of it Gracenote haven't really done anything wrong.
I may be wrong but it sounds like everything they got for free is still freely available and had anyone else at the time wanted to do what they did with the data they would have been able to.
The fact that, apparently, this didn't happen and Gracenote went on to build a profitable business seems perfectly reasonable to me.
It's the same here too but it's simple to vote twice, the lists with the names on it are always typed in fairly large type and always open on the desk so you just need to glance at it and say the first name you see which isn't crossed off.
You mean 1 vote + 1 vote = 2 votes or do you envisage some other type of statistical methods in use here ?
"Which means that as long as the aggregate results are accurate, your specific vote actually doesn't 'matter'"
So the aggregate vote here would be calculated by everyone who voted for each candidate being counted once for the candidate they voted for or is this process altered by the "statistical methods" you were imagining in the first instance.
Certainly it's the total number of votes cast which is important but your vote is important too since it has a direct impact on the number of votes cast.
"Sorry, but you're being naive. There's no way to ensure that a meteor or tornado doesn't strike, that a fire doesn't burn the building down, that the building doesn't plunge into a sinkhole, or that wild dogs don't kill everybody in the building and eat the computer."
Fair enough if any of those events occuring I would be prepared to accept that the count may be incorrect.
However in the absence of all of these events I would expect the vote counting machine to be 100% accurate and capable of coping with some of the more likely problems which may affect it, e.g. faulty hardwear, loss of power, loss of communication ( if it needs to communicate remotely ).
There really is no excuse, or reason to accept as normal the loss of 1 in 36 votes. If the machines can't be made to work perfectly then it is likely down to bad design, leading me to wonder just what else in the machine isn't working or hasn't been tested properly.
I don't know if anyones ever noticed this but in the vast majority of cases computers don't just randomly decide to "lose my stuff, delete my files etc etc" if they do do this it's because they are badly programmed and cannot cope with what they are being expected to do. If you can only make a voting machine to a similar level of incompetence then there really is no excuse to use them and not just stick with the old manual system.
"They don't even require them to wait until their men are dead before they can own the things"
Are you on crack here or something ? How is someone who is burnt to death on the funeral pyre ever going to own their late husbands things, most of those will also be burnt on the pyre.
If you think the principles we were founded on are so good, what's wrong with spreading them to a part of the world that's never been exposed to them before? That doesn't strike you as a "good thing?"
There's nothing wrong with spreading the principles you believe in, maybe through the TV, through the radio, through literatue, through song, through pretty much any medium.
I don't believe that invading countries in order to force your beliefs down the victims throat is necessarily a good thing but when you don't even get that right and engineer the biggest on-going disaster of recent times then that is a really bad thing.
Right now the "evil" the British & American forces are fighting against is the evil of an impending civil war which they are almost entirely responsible for engineering.
Certainly Saddam was an evil man and a power hungry dictator with little thought for the well being of a lot of his people ( although compared against some of the worlds various rulers in the past he is a fairly mild, innocuous dictator ), he killed a lot of people but then on the other hand the actions by the Americans & British etc have also killed an awful lot of people so does that make them evil in your eyes too ?
The bottom line is the Iraqui people seem to be rejecting the representative democracy the Americans have offered them and would prefer to fight a civil war to divide the country along ethnic and religious lines. This is obviously not what the American government wants to happen because its an outcome which would in all senses be a complete disaster for everyone involved, including the thousands or Iraquis who will likely lose out or die in the conflict, which is why Mr Bush & Mr Blair are so keen to point out how well democracy and freedom are working in Iraq now despite all the indicators on the ground pointing to things getting worse.
I bet when this war was announced you would have shouted down anyone who dared to suggest our leadership had got it wrong that Saddam had any WMDs. Maybe now you will begin to think for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Subject: Newsletter: Pay Freeze Continues. Inside, managements weekend on-board the companies new Luxury yacht.
Body: Click here to view the photos and eye witness accounts of the tragic sinking of the company yacht in force 10 gales off the Cornish coast. 5 still missing, presumed dead. RNLI claims lack of planning, insufficient investment in crucial safety equipment and communication difficulties with the Azerbajani crew to blame.
Do you seriously work 60 hour weeks for $4000 a month, it sounds like you may be selling yourself way short there, that's just over £2,000 ( GBP ) or just over 8 pounds an hour which is about the same as I'd get working behind a bar.
What was the advert with that kung fu fighting bear in it, I think it was some kind of fish related product, that was funny even on the 2nd and 3rd viewings.
No, I haven't seen American Ads and if they truly do elevate their British cousins to the status of "great art" then I really hope I never do.
There are perhaps a couple of ads a year which are amusing, the first time you see them, but in the main they're just a nuisance and quite likely indistinguishable from American Ads. Having said that some of the most irritating are those for cosmetic products with the stupid, inane, catchphrase stuck on the end of some insipid dross showing women using the product and the massive impact shiny hair has had on their vapid lives. These seem to me to have been transferred directly from American TV and you do have my sympathy if you have to put up with even more of them than we do.
Are all Welsh people pure blood descendents of Jones The First or are they in fact a society of people racially very similar to the other inhabitants of the British Isles ?
In Wales they do the same thing, everyone is called Jones but they differentiate by calling each other Jones e.g. Jones The Drunk, Jones The Heroin, Jones The Fence, Jones The Raper etc etc
A lot of IT has been processed or held centrally on large servers since time began, the invention of the desktop PC didn't kill this off and both systems have lived happily side by side.
In the meantime there have been constant predictions that computing will move en-masse and irrevocably to one system or another with only slight nods to reality ( yes, we will keep the desktop PC but these will only be thin clients for our massive array of backend processing power on which everything will be run ).
This article seems to be saying that in the future we will use a mixture of both, like we do already. Yes, obviously it would be nice to be able to synchronize data between my different devices or groups of people and yes its quite likely that some of the companies mentioned in the article might be working towards this for the average user. That much is obvious, I fail to see what else there is in the article which is interesting ?
Slashdot Mirror
Only yesterday I heard a conversation which must surely be occuring up and down the country.
"When are you getting one of those zunes then Mr Gadget ?"
"I'm not"
"What ! A new gadget that you . . . aren't . . . buying. Surely the world must be ending ?"
"I'm not buying something which decides for me when I need to delete songs and stop listening to them."
Gah ! I ditched my TV, Computer, Books and Bill Boards in 1976 and simply study the pattern of deer migrating across the moors to get all the news I need.
In time I plan to ditch them to and simply observe microbial life on the beach.
I agree and in that sense libertarianism is effectivley the same thing as facism, corporations end up in control.
Sounds like he signed in to me.
Morals are just another way of saying "things which I do/don't agree with" and will quite often have no logical or scientific basis, as if this wasn't bad enough people often choose their moral beliefs based on other organisations which they happen to be a part of e.g religious groups, environmentalist groups etc.
Of these religiously based morals are obviously the most dangerous since people are at least likely to engage in some form of reasoned thought before joining a particular environmental group or whatever.
Using an aggregate of a particular societies morals to determine scientific progress is a problem for a number of reasons. Firstly as mentioned above a lot of people do not reasonably consider their moral position on most subjects beyond their immediate day to day lives and secondly because various groups speak on behalf of their members and purport to represent their collective moral opinion on a subject when in fact they don't.
E.g. religious groups have a variety of moral based opinions on scientific research which it claims are shared by all adherents of their particular faith when in fact most of the individual members of the religion will never have thought rationally and independantly about the issue preferring instead to transfer their responisibily for doing so to the religious leaders to do it for them.
Science should determine the course of it's progress scientifically on a cost/benefit basis and it should also do more to educate people who may be ignorant about the actual costs and benefits involved in a particular line of enquiry.
"We can not arbitrarily allow everything in the name of science on the grounds that it may benefit humanity someday."
No one is saying that we should arbitratily endorse any idea for scientific investigation/engineering which pops into someones head.
However we certainly should be pursuing scientific progress and should not let it be derailed by ill informed pressure groups or concerns about the impact of the scientific investigation on some ill defined and unproven idea. E.g. "experimenting with stem cells is a bad thing", "nuclear power is always evil" etc.
A lot of people are simply scared by things they don't understand and seem to fall back in with opinion of whatever herd they are naturally inclined to follow, e.g. religious people invariably use the bible or the "Word Of The Lord" as a reason not to pursue some avenue of scientific research. More educated people who have been to university or whatever may find they associate more closely with the green movement which can use "fears about the environmental impact" to thwart various areas of science with which they disagree.
This isn't to say that the results of scientific research never have a negative impact on some aspect of our lives or society, quite often by its very nature scientific discovery will change things upon which people have come to rely or depend upon. Likewise even the best example of "evil" science is pretty much bound to have some benefit to someone or some area of society.
The difficulty of defining "evil" and "good" is why the impact of scientific investigations should be undertaken scientifically and not based upon who has the most firmly entrenched pre-conceptions and fears and the largest pressure group to bolster them.
I agree you're absolutely totally right. Evil science experiments torturing poor defenceless animals is just totally evil and we should all stop right now for the good of our souls.
On the other hand though science does need to progress, just not so evilly, so I suggest that in future we use nasty, evil or criminal animals for experiments.
Crocodiles for example are pretty evil just lurking in rivers waiting for lovely, amazing, wildebeeste or hapless tourists in Australia to gobble up.
Many lions and, unbeliveably, household cats are implacable serial killers so those who don't have their claws removed and their teeth filed blunt could be used.
Woodlouse, eeriewigs, spiders and worms are all pretty horrible so we can use them.
Many vegetarians don't believe chickens and fish are animals so there's no harm in using them.
Most animal rights campaigners are in fact evil terrorists who hack up the bodies of old ladies and should be used in preference to all the above.
i've seen debbie actually doing dallas but i don't know what that has to do with dolphins, except perhaps a lingering fishy smell.
I the US army is struggling generally with the "Is this person/object an enemy" one.
I don't know the ins and outs of this situation but by the sounds of it Gracenote haven't really done anything wrong.
I may be wrong but it sounds like everything they got for free is still freely available and had anyone else at the time wanted to do what they did with the data they would have been able to.
The fact that, apparently, this didn't happen and Gracenote went on to build a profitable business seems perfectly reasonable to me.
It's the same here too but it's simple to vote twice, the lists with the names on it are always typed in fairly large type and always open on the desk so you just need to glance at it and say the first name you see which isn't crossed off.
"mostly due to the statistical methods used."
You mean 1 vote + 1 vote = 2 votes or do you envisage some other type of statistical methods in use here ?
"Which means that as long as the aggregate results are accurate, your specific vote actually doesn't 'matter'"
So the aggregate vote here would be calculated by everyone who voted for each candidate being counted once for the candidate they voted for or is this process altered by the "statistical methods" you were imagining in the first instance.
Certainly it's the total number of votes cast which is important but your vote is important too since it has a direct impact on the number of votes cast.
"Sorry, but you're being naive. There's no way to ensure that a meteor or tornado doesn't strike, that a fire doesn't burn the building down, that the building doesn't plunge into a sinkhole, or that wild dogs don't kill everybody in the building and eat the computer."
Fair enough if any of those events occuring I would be prepared to accept that the count may be incorrect.
However in the absence of all of these events I would expect the vote counting machine to be 100% accurate and capable of coping with some of the more likely problems which may affect it, e.g. faulty hardwear, loss of power, loss of communication ( if it needs to communicate remotely ).
There really is no excuse, or reason to accept as normal the loss of 1 in 36 votes. If the machines can't be made to work perfectly then it is likely down to bad design, leading me to wonder just what else in the machine isn't working or hasn't been tested properly.
I don't know if anyones ever noticed this but in the vast majority of cases computers don't just randomly decide to "lose my stuff, delete my files etc etc" if they do do this it's because they are badly programmed and cannot cope with what they are being expected to do. If you can only make a voting machine to a similar level of incompetence then there really is no excuse to use them and not just stick with the old manual system.
"They don't even require them to wait until their men are dead before they can own the things"
Are you on crack here or something ? How is someone who is burnt to death on the funeral pyre ever going to own their late husbands things, most of those will also be burnt on the pyre.
If you think the principles we were founded on are so good, what's wrong with spreading them to a part of the world that's never been exposed to them before? That doesn't strike you as a "good thing?"
There's nothing wrong with spreading the principles you believe in, maybe through the TV, through the radio, through literatue, through song, through pretty much any medium.
I don't believe that invading countries in order to force your beliefs down the victims throat is necessarily a good thing but when you don't even get that right and engineer the biggest on-going disaster of recent times then that is a really bad thing.
Right now the "evil" the British & American forces are fighting against is the evil of an impending civil war which they are almost entirely responsible for engineering.
Certainly Saddam was an evil man and a power hungry dictator with little thought for the well being of a lot of his people ( although compared against some of the worlds various rulers in the past he is a fairly mild, innocuous dictator ), he killed a lot of people but then on the other hand the actions by the Americans & British etc have also killed an awful lot of people so does that make them evil in your eyes too ?
The bottom line is the Iraqui people seem to be rejecting the representative democracy the Americans have offered them and would prefer to fight a civil war to divide the country along ethnic and religious lines. This is obviously not what the American government wants to happen because its an outcome which would in all senses be a complete disaster for everyone involved, including the thousands or Iraquis who will likely lose out or die in the conflict, which is why Mr Bush & Mr Blair are so keen to point out how well democracy and freedom are working in Iraq now despite all the indicators on the ground pointing to things getting worse.
I bet when this war was announced you would have shouted down anyone who dared to suggest our leadership had got it wrong that Saddam had any WMDs. Maybe now you will begin to think for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Subjects lines like this would work well too:
Subject: Newsletter: Pay Freeze Continues. Inside, managements weekend on-board the companies new Luxury yacht.
Body: Click here to view the photos and eye witness accounts of the tragic sinking of the company yacht in force 10 gales off the Cornish coast. 5 still missing, presumed dead. RNLI claims lack of planning, insufficient investment in crucial safety equipment and communication difficulties with the Azerbajani crew to blame.
Do you seriously work 60 hour weeks for $4000 a month, it sounds like you may be selling yourself way short there, that's just over £2,000 ( GBP ) or just over 8 pounds an hour which is about the same as I'd get working behind a bar.
What was the advert with that kung fu fighting bear in it, I think it was some kind of fish related product, that was funny even on the 2nd and 3rd viewings.
The last Carling one I liked was the guy stranded on the island with his mate the crab, that was funny when I first saw it.
European Ads: Ferrero Roche ? If so say no more.
No, I haven't seen American Ads and if they truly do elevate their British cousins to the status of "great art" then I really hope I never do.
There are perhaps a couple of ads a year which are amusing, the first time you see them, but in the main they're just a nuisance and quite likely indistinguishable from American Ads. Having said that some of the most irritating are those for cosmetic products with the stupid, inane, catchphrase stuck on the end of some insipid dross showing women using the product and the massive impact shiny hair has had on their vapid lives. These seem to me to have been transferred directly from American TV and you do have my sympathy if you have to put up with even more of them than we do.
Are all Welsh people pure blood descendents of Jones The First or are they in fact a society of people racially very similar to the other inhabitants of the British Isles ?
Claws_Of_Doom The Whinger ?
In Wales they do the same thing, everyone is called Jones but they differentiate by calling each other Jones e.g. Jones The Drunk, Jones The Heroin, Jones The Fence, Jones The Raper etc etc
A lot of IT has been processed or held centrally on large servers since time began, the invention of the desktop PC didn't kill this off and both systems have lived happily side by side.
In the meantime there have been constant predictions that computing will move en-masse and irrevocably to one system or another with only slight nods to reality ( yes, we will keep the desktop PC but these will only be thin clients for our massive array of backend processing power on which everything will be run ).
This article seems to be saying that in the future we will use a mixture of both, like we do already. Yes, obviously it would be nice to be able to synchronize data between my different devices or groups of people and yes its quite likely that some of the companies mentioned in the article might be working towards this for the average user. That much is obvious, I fail to see what else there is in the article which is interesting ?
I'd say that this is fairly conclusive proof of a doomed project. Buy a $100 for $300, who on earth would sign up for that ?