The fact that something isn't perfect doesn't mean you might as well do a complete crap work instead. Yes, a small minority were relatives of party officials. That too did devalue the diploma. But that doesn't mean that then you might as well go ahead and just hand diplomas at a street corner to anyone who wants one. Adding even more untrained idiots with diplomas (e.g., the batch with radios in the ear) doesn't do much more than devalue that even more.
A more appropriate Heinline quote (paraphrased from memory): "The society that values the artist over the plumber merely because art is more noble, has neither good art nor good plumbing."
Except in this case they merely make sure that someone flashing their college engineering diploma at a job interview, has actually earned that diploma, and not just had someone else write their exams for them. (Even via a micro-radio in the ear.)
And no, it's not elitism against the plumbers or anything else. If a plumber has some professional credentials (certified to work on a certain kind of pipes or whatever), then I hope to God that those aren't just a bogus piece of paper either. If that guy works on a high pressure steam pipe or on a gas pipe, for example, I certainly hope he won't cause some problem waiting to happen.
Ditto for anything else:
- if they're a truck driver, then I certainly hope that they've earned that class of driver's license the old fashioned way, and not with a radio in the ear and someone telling them which boxes to tick. When that big truck comes into an intersection, I _don't_ want to discover that the guy doesn't actually know who has the priority there.
- if they're they're an auto mechanic, I sure hope to heck and back that they learned something about engines, and someone actually tested that knowledge. _Their_ knowledge, not that of whoever is at the other end of the radio-in-the-ear cheat.
- if they're an electrician, I sure hope they've been trained and tested too. For the obvious reasons.
Etc.
So, yes, any job that requires some training and some skills, no matter how lowly, I fail to see a reason to devalue it by selling a diploma to any cheater who wants one. If there's something as lowly as being certified to dig a hole with a shovel, then, yes, whoever has that certification has something to be proud of. It seems to me like starting to just hand that certifficate to anyone who wants one is devaluing and disrespectful to those who actually have the skills and passion for that profession.
And if anything, it's that kind of giving anyone a diploma just because they want one, that's the way to end up with neither good art, nor good plumbing, nor good engineering.
Seeing some information that I'm asked for at every freakin' step, just makes me wonder if they even have thought some legitimate use up. Some stuff can't even be really mined, because it's useless at that fine grained level.
And in some cases it irks me that they even ask for it. E.g., ok, I can see how a bank would want my home address, birth date, etc, but FFS, nowadays you can't even register a forum account in some places without giving that info. Or the one that irked me was having to submit that info to be allowed to download a patch for a game I had bought. I mean, ffs, I thought patches were more like a late apology for releasing a half-arsed untested game, not as some token to barter against someone's personal data.
And how are they going to mine that level of detail anyway? There's a not-so-fine line between a statistic and useless trivia. E.g., it may be a statistic to track the number of wins vs loses for football teams, but it's useless trivia to track stuff like "which team has won the most games played on a rainy Tuesday evening under artifficial light?"
So let's look at some of the stuff everyone asks for, and speciffically that patch download required:
- street and house number. What useful correlation can you draw from _that_ level of detail? It can be a useful statistic to see if, say, New York sells more games per capita than Chicago, or the other way around. But going datamining at the level of street an house number? Are they going to mine some trivia as "people living on a street ending in a vowel, and whose house number is prime, buy the most games"? Or what?
- exact date of birth. Seriously, wth. I can imagine how they could use the age in years in a statistic (hence the year of birth.) But what use do they have for the day of month there? Exactly what meaningful correlation can be extracted that needs that level of detail.
So it seems to me that even data-mining is used more as an excuse than anything else. Noone seems to have sat and given some serious thought as to exactly _what_ data they need for their mining operation. Everyone seems to just assume that the more data they have, the better, and that maybe just one more piece of personal information from everyone is all they need to reach that covetted critical mass and make the discovery of the century.
So, yeah, I'd like to see a law that makes them pay for every single piece of personal data lost. Not just per account lost. Each piece of extra data they have about someone should raise the total. Maybe _then_ they'll actually stop and think about whether they actually need each of those pieces of info.
Unlike the USA, most of the world doesn't see colleges as just some business, and the more you can serve, the merrier.
Especially in the Soviet block -- which I assume to be the model that China copied -- education was free at all levels (and if you were really good, they actually paid you to study there), _but_ you had to prove that you have the brains and the will to learn. I.e., you couldn't just have daddy save up a few tens of grand and buy you a place at a college. You had to go through exams and prove that you've learned and can apply the maths/physics/biology/whatever that you've learned in high school.
(And let me also say that high-school classes included stuff that was well in the realm of colleges in the USA. E.g., quantum physics.)
The same applied between semesters _and_ at the end. To stay in college you had to prove that you have a damn good grasp of everything they taught you in that year.
This wasn't just to save state money, but also to _guarantee_ a certain high level of intelligence, competence and ability to learn, if you had a college diploma.
So what these students are doing with their cheating is go though university _without_ proving that. E.g., to end up with a diploma that says "electrical engineer" without having the knowledge, intelligence or will to learn.
And letting them just do that does devalue what that diploma means for everyone else. It's like saying, "ah, let's let every dog owner just buy a bogus pedigree certifficate for their mut, if they want one that much." Well, yes, it may sound like a supply-and-demand kind of solution, but that devalues it for those whose diploma_isn't_ a bogus bought piece of paper.
"When i saw this i mean it like someone is responsible for their own mugging if they walk through a bad neighborhood at night."
Dude, noone is _responsible_ for their own mugging or their own rape, especially when the _only_ "fault" is being at that place at that time. It's not like someone went to the biggest gangster in the neighbourhood and started calling them names or anything even remotely resembling starting it. So blaming the victim or making them _responsible_ of their mis-fortune, when again all they've done was happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, strikes me as _absurd_ to the extreme.
You may call it poor foresight, maybe even bad judgment, but outright shifting the blame onto the victim is just surrealistic.
Also, as a guy, I feel insulted by being compared to a mugger in a bad neighbourhood. The implication that going to a guy's house is obviously (enough to deserve blaming the victim) gonna result in getting raped if you don't put out, is outright insulting to males as a whole.
And generally, I don't know in what geek fantasy world do you live, where that kind of an attitude towards women is normal, but rest assured that most males can understand such notions as "free will." Nothing "is expected of" anyone just because you gave them a meal and a cinema ticket. If you want to get laid, there's that "free will" again: you have to make them want to do that and/or get past their inhibitions. You're trying to win someone's _consent_, not buying a quick fuck at a brothel. Wining and dining them is a means of making yourself likeable enough to that end, not buying a non-refundable ticket for sex.
I can tell you that I've had classmates and such coming to my home, or me going over to theirs, and the notion didn't even enter my head that I have some obvious right to fuck them one way or another. Sure, I'd try to make some move, rarely it actually worked, most of the time it _didn't_ work (guess my being fairly nerdy didn't help either), but at no point was there an idea that they have some duty to put out, much less that failure to do so is punishable by rape.
So excuse me if I take it as an insult when I read no less than that coming to my place was comparable to going to get mugged at night in a bad neighbourhood.
And let's not even get into the whole aspect of doing it with a underage kid, in any form or shape.
"This lawsuit is rediculous becuase MySpace is where they met, not where the crime happened."
With that I can aggree, though. But again, that doesn't make the girl guilty of her own rape either.
Ah, sorry if I wasn't too clear. The point wasn't that MS is now in the same situation as SGI, far from it. I'm saying that one _could_ bring a bright new CEO that does the same mistakes at MS too, and Wall Street would actually love it. In fact, they're _asking_ for it.
Never mind that MS is making a healthy (some would even say ludicrious) profit, and even shows some growth. But its shares have dropped, and that's enough to get Wall Street screaming for blood.
And just look at who's singled out as a heir: an ex-Wal-Mart employee who's already done extremely stupid and damaging stuff in the name of cost-cutting. It takes a special kind of retard to do a "cost-cutting" move that costs more than it saves, but there you go. That's who Wall Street sees as the successor to Ballmer.
That's really where all the analogy with SGI starts and stops. There too they asked for an idiot who'll gut the company and shift markets to pump up share value in the short term. In MS's case, not yet (and I hopefully never), but they're asking for it anyway. That's all the analogy, really.
(As a side-note, don't get me wrong, I'm not even a MS fan. I'm not against their products, as such, but I do have a dislike for their ethics. But still... good grief... I don't wish even unto them to be gutted in the name of some investor's quick pump-and-dump profit.)
Hmm... at least in the case of psychopaths, I'll take a guess and say that
A) they're medically speaking "short-sighted." Being unable or not inclined to do long term plans is one of the points on any APD (Antisocial Personality Disorder, a.k.a., sociopathy or psychopathy) test. Not _the_ dominant factor, to be sure, but present very often. Psychopaths tend to be more inclined to seek quick thrills, immediately available power games, quick rewards.
(Hmm... I'm starting to see why they're so loved in by investors for which quick gains and quarterly profits are everything, and in a culture where quarterly profits are everything.)
B) by definition they just don't care about anyone else, including investors, employees, the company's founders, or society as a whole. E.g., the guy in the example wasn't there to cause some long term growth, and just too short-sighted to do it right. He was there to flex his muscles, shaft some people, shaft the company, shaft the investors, get some quick thrill in the process, and any long term benefit was at most the price to pay so he can do it again next time. They're the guys so willing to fire half the workers and do other radical stuff mostly because _that_ is the whole fun, not as an unfortunate measure that needs to be taken by someone.
You identified a problem correctly, but the fact nevertheless is: it wasn't screwed yet. Nvidia at least infringed on a ton of SGI's texturing patents, so SGI could easily either (A) make them stop competing, or (B) ask for license payments.
Ok, I know we're on/. and we like to rant against patents, but please bear with me. I'm talking from the POV of a company making money here, not from the POV of which patents are good and which are bad. That's an entirely different discussion for a different time.
And from the POV of making money for the company, most analysts saw that situation as looking great for SGI.
What that particular idiot did instead was sell everything to Nvidia at garage sale prices. I don't just mean the patents, but the whole damn R&D department.
_That's_ when SGI finally was screwed in the graphics arena.
And again, that wasn't even his only mistake. As I was saying, the guy did more than half the idiocies I listed there.
I was tempted to add this as #5, actually. Losing more people in the middle of a project. I don't expect that an ex-Wal-Mart manager understands it, but replacing a programmer in the middle of a project is less trivial than replacing a cashier or even a data entry typist. Even if you had an instant replacement with exactly the right skills (which, in practice might take a while and some interviews to find: there's a reason companies pay bonuses to headhunters), you'll have to get them over the learning experience of the project itself. They have to assimilate all the info that the old guy knew, including goals, coding styles, teamwork style (each team works slightly differently), knowing who to ask about what, internal frameworks, etc. Even if they're perfectly documented and have crystal-clear APIs and the old guy wrote perfectly clear and commented code (which, judging by the reactions to some internal code MS submitted instead of protocol docs in the EU anti-trust trial, might not always be the case), it's still one big chunk to assimilate and takes some time.
So basically doing something that disruptive to several projects at the same time, just to see who's prepared to suck up and polish the PHB's ego... is... uninspired, and that's going for the understatement of the century.
And I'm not even going into how much of a PHB someone needs to be, to want to shake off those who are talented enough to not need to put up with crap, and be left with those underperforming or insecure enough to take any shit as long as it keeps them in the job.
Plus, it adds even more to the #4 problem. I doubt that everyone who does leave, instantly quit in that week. Most people, especially those with families, will first look for a new job and _then_ quit. And in the meantime they'll do the job with the half-arsedness of someone who'll be out of there in a couple of months anyway.
Alas, I didn't have the fortune of being born a psychopath
Read that link, seriously. It's an eye opener. Here's my favourite paragraph:
"Chainsaw" Al Dunlap might score impressively on the corporate Psychopathy Checklist too. What do you say about a guy who didn't attend his own parents' funerals? He allegedly threatened his first wife with guns and knives. She charged that he left her with no food and no access to their money while he was away for days. His divorce was granted on grounds of "extreme cruelty." That's the characteristic that endeared him to Wall Street, which applauded when he fired 11,000 workers at Scott Paper, then another 6,000 (half the labor force) at Sunbeam. Chainsaw hurled a chair at his human-resources chief, the very man who approved the handgun and bulletproof vest on his expense report. Dunlap needed the protection because so many people despised him. His plant closings kept up his reputation for ruthlessness but made no sense economically, and Sunbeam's financial gains were really the result of Dunlap's alleged book cooking. When he was finally exposed and booted, Dunlap had the nerve to demand severance pay and insist that the board reprice his stock options. Talk about failure to accept responsibility for one's own actions.
I took the liberty of highlighting what I find partially funny, partially sad there. Sorta like a tragic clown. Wall Street loved him for some massive firing waves and plant closing that didn't even make any fucking sense economically. And he continued doing those even knowing full well that they don't make sense, reflected in the fact that he cooked the books to make it seem like they actually helped in any way. Yet he kept on doing it.
This wasn't a manager taking tough measures for tough times, it was just a psychopath finding personal entertainment in screwing the company that hired him.
So, alas, much as I'd love to take my place on the executive golf courses, a cruel fate has decided I shouldn't be born in that 1% of the population that Wall Street loves. I have too much empathy for that. I couldn't look myself in the mirror after even thinking about doing something like that. So, alas, I've been condemned to a life of honest work instead. Fate can be cruel like that, you know.
" He's believed to be behind a recent cost-cutting move to force the company's substantial contractor workforce to take an unpaid week off. Since contractors at Microsoft contribute to important projects and are often hired on as full-time employees, the move hurt morale."
Ah, so he knows the magic words ("cost-cutting move") and likes to kick the workers in the teeth. I can see how Wall Street would love him.
*sigh* There's been a recent article linked to by/. about how some people at the top are really psychopaths, in the medical sense of the word. Still, technically that only has to mean not caring about others. But the more time goes by, the more it seems that some people at the top aren't just psychopathic, but also the sadistic kind. And some just seem to have a sort of hatred for those they're supposed to manage.
I mean, look at his cost-cutting move:
1. There are 52 weeks in a year, even if _everyone_ at MS was a contractor, and if salaries were the _only_ expenses MS ever has, it still would have saved less than 5% of the costs. But when you factor in that not everyone is, and also that execs salaries aren't the same as those of the peons thus shafted, and all the other costs, I'll take a wild guess and say that maybe he's saved 1% for the whole year. But wait, it gets better:
2. It's not like those people were sitting around idle. MS has enough coding going on at any given time, and taking enough flak over, say, Vista delays. So here's the more important part: that "cost saving" is more than offset by the fact that it was a week of them not producing stuff for MS. We're not talking a factory who's over-produced taking a week off, but forcing it onto people who were actually producing value for the company during that time. It's as idiotic a decision as, say, closing a bunch of Wal-Mart shops for a week: sure, you've saved the money for running them for a week, _but_ you've made a bigger loss by not selling anything in that time. So far from being a "cost-cutting measure", it was more like a profit-losing measure.
3. It was done purely for greed sake. It's not like MS was making heavy losses and needed that kind of penny-pinching to stay afloat. Forcing people to take unpaid time off when the company is making a healthy profit is... just pure unhealthy greed. Nothing more, nothing less.
4. It was accompanied by a drop in morale. Partially also because we're talking about people smart enough to understand points 1 to 3, and recognize a _stupid_ penny-pincher when they see one. Being shafted when the company is in dire straits is one thing, but being shafted for such a completely idiotic reason tends to leave a very bad aftertaste. Even if number 2 hadn't already done more harm than good, we're talking a loss of morale that'll span many months and for some people it will even stay around for ever. And it won't even affect only those shafted, but also the people who got to see their co-workers shafted by a dumb PHB. This alone is more than enough to cause more harm than any cost-savings he might have made.
So basically we're not even talking about a regular penny-pincher, we're talking about the dumbest kind of a PHB. The kind that makes the original PHB from Dilbert actually seem smart and competent by comparison. And the dumbest kind of decision one can do at a company.
And yet Wall Street loves him for it and likes the idea of him as a CEO...
I don't know... I really don't know... Are these people even focused on profit, or share value, or whatever, or are they just getting their jollies from shafting the workers and using profit as just an excuse?
"Is this some sort of natural outgrowth of MP3 downloading and software piracy? What are we going to pretend is "victimless" next?"
AFAIK, at least one psychopath has already argued that raping children is a victimless crime. It should be pretty hard to beat that, but I have no doubt that someone will try to.
Anyway, it's nothing new. The software pirates certainly didn't start it, they just found a niche where it's easier to convince someone that since a copy of the original was made, nothing had really been lost. But, as you can see, it doesn't prevent people from claiming the exact same when some demonstrable harm _did_ get done. (E.g., money from someone's account aren't duplicated, they actually disappear from person A to enter the possession of person B.)
And honestly seeing some of the arguments made, I can't help notice a common theme of handwaving someone else's loss, time, suffering, even pain, as unimportant and not enough to make anyone a victim or to make the act a crime. In effect, the gross disregard for other people. It's beyond individualism, and outright in the realm of sociopathy.
Actually, Wall Street would love to do the standard rise-the-stock-value-so-we-can-sell-even-if-it-kil ls-the-company dance:
- bring in a new CEO who promises radical cost-saving changes all over the place (watch stock value invariably rise)
- have him fire half the workforce, accompanied by giving interviews all over the place about trimming the fat and returning to good ol' capitalism values (ditto)
- make it an official policy to only hire re-trained ex-burger-flippers and transfer half the remaining jobs to Elbonia and East Bumfuckistan in the next years (look at all those money we were wasting on paying highly-qualified people. Stock price rises some more.)
- "motivate" the remaining employees with mottos like "your job could be the next one that goes to India", and unrealistic productivity demands. Accompany it with some speeches showing that you see them as a bunch of slackers, just to be sure they have no illusions left that their contribution is appreciated in any form or shape. (Hell, yeah, high productivity here we come. Watch everyone buy MS stock, driving the share value even higher.)
- drop half the products, on account that they weren't directly making that much money. Never mind that they help form the interlocking whole that makes MS almost impossible to displace in the market. (Ditto.)
- sell the relevant IP and know-how to competitors for some quick cash (yeehaw, MS income was above estimates this quarter. Let's all rush to buy their shares.)
- spin off and sell half the acquisitions that MS ever made. Preferrably for less than half the price originally paid for those companies. (Ditto.)
- reshuffle departments and internal policies for no good reason, just to seem like you're doing something new and radical (ok, by this point it only adds a few more cents per share, but it's better than nothing, you know?)
- announce some hare-brained new products, but miss the mark or the market by a mile because of having no fucking clue about the technology involved
- rape the brand recognition, as much as MS does have of it, for some quick buck for the next quarter, at the expense of annoying and losing existing customers
- take some more flashy measures that'll get lots of press like suddenly rebranding to a new name (and losing most of the brand recognition the old name had), moving to another town, "reinventing oneself" by moving completely into a new market, or whatever
At this point the big Wall Street names sell their own stock, making a quick profit. The company starts a long and painful downward spiral, a la SGI, except MS has cash reserves to last much longer. The CEO soon moves to another company, with Wall Street's full backing, to do the same again. A few years down the line, MS is as relevant to the OS market as SGI now is to the computer graphics market, but Wall Street have gotten their quick buck already.
Think I'm exaggerating? Look at what happened to SGI, for example, and then tell me I'm exaggerating. It only took one bright new CEO to do more than half of what I wrote above, and set SGI on a downwards spiral from which it never recovered. Where SGI is now, you already know.
The Huns' or Mongolians' composite (short) bow, for example, was good enough to conquer half of Europe. And they faced Roman legions in chain armour (lorica hamata) and even banded armour (lorica segmentata.) Now it may be useless against the gothic plate of the late medieval era, but to kill a stupid city guard in a chain vest, they're perfectly good.
I find it the easiest to use a MMO or, back in the 90's, a MUD. Otherwise you run into answers of the "well, duh, if the universe is everything, a deity or anything else can't be outside the universe" kind. It can be a long uphill battle from there. A computer game provides a readily available example of a creator that's completely outside the universe he's created.
Heh. You assume too much. I'm not even religious, but I can give a nod to an answer that is scientiffically and logically correct, even if it comes from the late Pope. But I digress.
"Actually, morality can be measured my measuring the success of the cultures with the moral precepts you are interested in. Morality is after all nothing more than game theory."
The problem is that you can't, or not that easily:
1. Read some anthropology first. Between a culture having a moral precept, even professing it in polls or whatever, and actually applying it in practice, there's a _huge_ difference. People invariably answer how they'd like to be, not how they really are.
There was no culture ever that actually practiced "love thy neighbour" or "thou shalt not kill". And conversely, you have no culture which was signifficantly more psychopathic on the whole, as to cover for the other variables there. So how can you compare two ideals, if you don't actually have an example where they were the dominant factor? (Or for that matter where they were applied to any signifficant degree.)
2. You have a _lot_ of other variables there. You'd have to find two cultures which had equal access to resources and information, equal natural and human threats to overcome, equally good or bad decisions of their rulers, etc, and know exactly how much they applied those precepts at all points in their history. Because otherwise you're not comparing apples to apples.
E.g., you can't go and say "China was confucianist, England was protestant, ergo, looking at where they're now, protestantism's precepts are better than confucianism's." But when you factor in access to colonies (England didn't discover America on its own either, but was close enough to Spain to get the idea), different internal pressures (England's overpopulation and some religion frictions _forced_ it to expand it colonially faster than anyone else), revolts (China was wrecked by some waves of massive internal problems starting in the 1600's, England wasn't), external invasions and bad leadership (the Manchu pretty much pushed China back into the middle ages, while England didn't have anything similar), etc, it's hard to argue with a straight face that religious precepts were what made the most difference there.
"Science can and does contradict their claims."
And here in one fell swoop you proved that you don't know that much about how science works, nor understand Occam's Razor. But I'll get back to that later.
"And as far is Blizzard is concerned, who made the Titans? How do we know the Christian God isn't a fiction invented by the *real* creator?"
You don't know that either, obviously. In fact, you've just described the medieval Cathar sect, so it's not even a new idea. And yes, that too can't be proved or disproved, so they too wouldn't have had to answer anything else to Sagan't question.
"I don't understand why the religious nuts aren't the most ardent aderhents of the scientific method. [...] Otherwise you're calling your own ignorance a form of knowledge."
What I find funny is that the most rabid christian-bashers don't know their science either. They may be able to google "cell division", but don't actually understand how science itself works. A lot are, in fact, exactly as close-minded as the "religious nuts" they troll. A lot have, in fact, discovered just religion in another guise.
I'm sorry, anyone who can see science as some truth set in stone, able to _prove_ or disprove anything and everything, even things they don't even have the data about... just doesn't know jack squat about its being a process or how that process works. Science doesn't even have "proofs" for the most part, it "just" has a set of hypotheses that (A) explain the available data, (B) are the simplest to that end (see Occam's Razor), and (C) that noone managed to disprove yet. That's the
And on the other hand, JPII's answer is also pretty valid for a scientist too.
You can ask someone who designs a rocket or missile, "And what would you do if the world really is flat and on the back of a turtle?" Or, "And what would you do if we're on the inside of a hollow sphere?" The question isn't trivial, because the ballistic and Coriolis effect corrections would be _massively_ different. I see it as a perfectly valid answer to say, "wtf, I already know that that's not the case." _Especially_ if he's been bombarded to death with that kinda nonsense every day, ever since he was in college. (Don't underestimate the kind of national sport it can be for some people to bait and troll the christians.)
Yes, he knows that he'd have to recalculate it all if that were even possible, but I see no real need to restate the obvious. Again. Especially for a nonsense question. At some point it's entirely legitimate to say, basically, "no need, here's how I know that that isn't the case." Or, "RTFM." Or, basically, "I have enough real scientific issues to ponder if I'm bored, thank you very much. I don't have the time or inclination to start designing a missile for a concave Earth, just in case it suddenly deforms that way."
And since everyone is so focused on the Dalai Lama's answer, may I point out that it's equally a purely PR answer? Just as JPII wouldn't have risen to be Pope without being able to answer anything like a true believer, the Dalai Lama wouldn't have risen to be Dalai Lama without being able to sound all enlightened by buddhist standards. You don't really know what he'd actually do if you could really pull the rug from under him like that, but if he has more than two braincells he too knows that you can't ever prove something like that. So he can answer any bullshit that makes him sound good, because it's something he'll never have to prove that he'll actually do it.
Scientifically disproving Buddhist precepts is even more impossible (if that's possible) than the Christian ones, because Buddhism is even heavier on purely moral judgments and lighter on claiming historical events and miracles on demand. How do you scientiffically disprove the idea that people should be nice, do good deeds and do their duty, for example? Build a copy of Earth where everyone is a psychopath and can't care less about the others? Even if you could do that (but you can't, because even then you can't prove that you cloned the "souls" too), it would degenerate into chaos and massive crimes so fast, that it would rather prove their point, rather than disprove it.
So if he's not completely brain-dead -- and he probably isn't -- he too knows that you can't ever do that. So he's free to say anything. So he gave the one that polishes his image as a wise enlightened eastern guru.
In a sense, I find that JPII's answer was at least a honest one, even if it plays right into the christian-bashers' hands.
Kinda makes me wonder how would you explain that kind of things to a Tauren. Or, heck, to a human living 5000 years ago. I can just see it:P
God: "So I saw that the database was corrupt and..." Moses: "What's a database, Lord?" God: "uhh... how do I explain this... uhh, you know there's this data representing your world..." Moses: "I don't understand, Lord? Like a map or painting?" God: "No, in a sense it _is_ your world, and everything in it." Moses: "So the world was corrupt?" God: "*sigh* Yeah, whatever, the world was corrupt. You all were more corrupt than a senator... err... than a Grand Vizier. Anyway, so our database admin Noah saved the game files on tape and I did a full format." Moses: "I don't understand, Lord? Database admin? Game files?" God: "*sigh* Uh, you know, the models and all for these animals and... *sigh* He put one of each animal in a big ark, ok? And then I formatted... (gah, how do I explain a format to this guy)... right, I _flooded_ it all to get rid of the old animals and people."
Nothing against all that, and it's even insightful and all. I'm not discussing the probability of God existing, nor the utility of a God, nor saying you should pray to a God that may have buggered off on vacation. I'm just saying that it's impossible for someone to _prove_ that God doesn't exist, which is what Sagan asked and what JPII answered. I.e., that technically speaking JPII was right.
Mind you, it's the kind of "right" which, as you've noted, doesn't have any further practical uses. Still, it's a perfectly logical answer. That's all I'm saying.
In a sense, JPII is actually right there: it's impossible for science to prove anything about an entity outside the observable universe.
Let me use WoW as an example. Let's say the observable universe is WoW. Even the wisest scholar living _in_ the WoW universe, even with the best gnomish instruments, can only observe and measure things that are _inside_ this universe.
What it _can't_ observe is the universe's creator: Blizzard.
Can such a scholar prove, with only the data in his universe, that Blizzard doesn't exist? No. He just doesn't have the data on which to base such a proof. The best his science can do is state that the universe can be explained well enough without this mystical "Blizzard" entity at the helm.
Same is it with RL science and God. Science _can't_ prove that God doesn't exist. All science can do is explain the universe well enough without needing some "God" entity. But that's all.
No, seriously, I know that we all love to troll and bait the christians. But put your thinking cap for a second and you'll realize the same: if a "creator" exists _outside_ the universe he created (just like Blizzard exists outside the WoW universe), science can't prove or disprove this creator in any form or shape. It just can't get any data from there. At all. Ever.
Not to mention that it's not even possible to prove a negative like that. As long as science can't know every single atom in the universe, _and_ go back in time and observe what happened at every single moment since Big Bang, you simply can't have enough proof that something _doesn't_ exist even _inside_ your universe. It's like proposing to prove that a green three-legged rabbit doesn't exist and never existed. You only need one specimen to prove that it does exist, but it's simply unfeasible to prove that nowhere in the universe such a creature ever existed.
The best science can do is apply Occam's Razor. Basically to say "well, we can explain the universe perfectly well even without some 'God' hypothesis, so we don't need such a hypothesis." But that's all.
Plus, some of the precepts of Christianity are pretty much notions, ideals or moral judgments. How do you scientifically disprove "love thy neighbour"? How would you scientifically disprove "thou shalt not kill"? No, seriously. They're moral precepts that reflect a certain set of values, not something you can run through a spectrograph or whatever other instrument.
So basically, yes, JPII was right: it's not even possible. So while it makes for some good christian-bashing material to compare the answers there, in practice it's about as relevant as asking "what would you do if gravity just suddenly disappeared?" It seems to me like "it's not even possible" is a perfectly valid answer there. Sure, it's not the most interesting or imaginative kind of an answer, but nevertheless it is a valid one.
I don't know, I'm not even religious, but it seems the kind of deity I could _really_ respect.
I mean, seriously, _if_ the universe has a creator, then its creation is _the_ ultimately elegant hack. The guy didn't edit each map by hand, so to speak, he just gave it a set of simple rules and enough energy and let the whole thing build _itself_.
And look at how neatly it all fits together. E.g., nuclei having resonances at just the right places so anything can be built by fusion from hydrogen. It may seem trivial, but move, say, Carbon's excited states just a tiny bit and you couldn't get Carbon any more in a star fusing Helium. Yes, that Carbon's states are those is the result of other rules, but that's the whole point. Everything fits together just perfectly, and a small set of rules combine just right to form a whole universe, galaxies, sentient life, etc.
_If_ some "creator" came up with all the constants involved, the guy is a fucking genius. No, seriously. I'm humbled. I can honestly say I can't even imagine coming even close to achieving something so grandiose with so little "code". It's like writing a page of code and watching it combine and arrange everything by itself to form a MMO from scratch, _including_ all the skins, maps, physics, races, classes, quests, and everything. Only many many orders of magnitude bigger than WoW.
"Galileo got in trouble for saying that the earth moves... in a book that irreverently satirized the current pope."
Read again the part after the "..." and there you have the real problem.
AFAIK, Galileo had had a pretty civilized talk with the Pope, and while the Pope wasn't convinced by Galileo's argumentation, he let Galileo go.
Before you blame the Pope of being too fanatical to accept science, remember that it wasn't just faith, but they did have their own explanations (derived from Aristotles) about how the world works. It may have been wrong in retrospect, but as far as any wise man at the time was concerned, they already had a science of sorts. Something that comes and turns the whole cosmic model on its head, damn better be convincing, and at any rate the Pope wasn't convinced. And remember that the Pope had been willing to hear Galileo's arguments, which doesn't strike me as too closed-minded.
Unfortunately, Galileo seems to have had the same kind of personality one can see often on/. So Galileo proceeds to publish a book in which he thoroughly flames the Pope, and puts the Pope's words, in some cases distorted or taken out of context, in the mouth of a character whose name is just one letter away from "Stupid"... and is pronounced almost the same as "Stupid." In effect it's the kinda flamebait post that goes on and on about how the opponent is just too stupid to understand, only in print.
Now also bear in mind that the Pope at the time was debatably the biggest political figure. A king above kings, if you will. They weren't big on democracy and freedom of speech back then...
And Galileo goes and flames him in public and calls him stupid...
I don't know, seems to me like science-vs-religion had _nothing_ to do with what happened from there. You get in a public pissing contest with the dictator of the realm, you get roughed up in return. It's that simple.
No, it just basically means "If you're an OEM that sells computers, you can only put the Windows logo on your computers if every single component in it is certified." This isn't even something new. I'm sure this is already the status quo.
Will those computers stop working? Nope.
All that will happen is that the OEM has to start using a different card in their future computers, or stop putting the logo on those computers.
E.g., if, say, Creative's drivers are proved to crash lots and Creative doesn't fix it ASAP, then Creative loses the certification. So now when Random J User to Dell's web site to buy a high end gaming rig (hey, Dell sells such rigs, so someone must buy them), now Dell must either sell it without a SoundBlaster or without a Windows logo.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that something isn't perfect doesn't mean you might as well do a complete crap work instead. Yes, a small minority were relatives of party officials. That too did devalue the diploma. But that doesn't mean that then you might as well go ahead and just hand diplomas at a street corner to anyone who wants one. Adding even more untrained idiots with diplomas (e.g., the batch with radios in the ear) doesn't do much more than devalue that even more.
Except in this case they merely make sure that someone flashing their college engineering diploma at a job interview, has actually earned that diploma, and not just had someone else write their exams for them. (Even via a micro-radio in the ear.)
And no, it's not elitism against the plumbers or anything else. If a plumber has some professional credentials (certified to work on a certain kind of pipes or whatever), then I hope to God that those aren't just a bogus piece of paper either. If that guy works on a high pressure steam pipe or on a gas pipe, for example, I certainly hope he won't cause some problem waiting to happen.
Ditto for anything else:
- if they're a truck driver, then I certainly hope that they've earned that class of driver's license the old fashioned way, and not with a radio in the ear and someone telling them which boxes to tick. When that big truck comes into an intersection, I _don't_ want to discover that the guy doesn't actually know who has the priority there.
- if they're they're an auto mechanic, I sure hope to heck and back that they learned something about engines, and someone actually tested that knowledge. _Their_ knowledge, not that of whoever is at the other end of the radio-in-the-ear cheat.
- if they're an electrician, I sure hope they've been trained and tested too. For the obvious reasons.
Etc.
So, yes, any job that requires some training and some skills, no matter how lowly, I fail to see a reason to devalue it by selling a diploma to any cheater who wants one. If there's something as lowly as being certified to dig a hole with a shovel, then, yes, whoever has that certification has something to be proud of. It seems to me like starting to just hand that certifficate to anyone who wants one is devaluing and disrespectful to those who actually have the skills and passion for that profession.
And if anything, it's that kind of giving anyone a diploma just because they want one, that's the way to end up with neither good art, nor good plumbing, nor good engineering.
Seeing some information that I'm asked for at every freakin' step, just makes me wonder if they even have thought some legitimate use up. Some stuff can't even be really mined, because it's useless at that fine grained level.
And in some cases it irks me that they even ask for it. E.g., ok, I can see how a bank would want my home address, birth date, etc, but FFS, nowadays you can't even register a forum account in some places without giving that info. Or the one that irked me was having to submit that info to be allowed to download a patch for a game I had bought. I mean, ffs, I thought patches were more like a late apology for releasing a half-arsed untested game, not as some token to barter against someone's personal data.
And how are they going to mine that level of detail anyway? There's a not-so-fine line between a statistic and useless trivia. E.g., it may be a statistic to track the number of wins vs loses for football teams, but it's useless trivia to track stuff like "which team has won the most games played on a rainy Tuesday evening under artifficial light?"
So let's look at some of the stuff everyone asks for, and speciffically that patch download required:
- street and house number. What useful correlation can you draw from _that_ level of detail? It can be a useful statistic to see if, say, New York sells more games per capita than Chicago, or the other way around. But going datamining at the level of street an house number? Are they going to mine some trivia as "people living on a street ending in a vowel, and whose house number is prime, buy the most games"? Or what?
- exact date of birth. Seriously, wth. I can imagine how they could use the age in years in a statistic (hence the year of birth.) But what use do they have for the day of month there? Exactly what meaningful correlation can be extracted that needs that level of detail.
So it seems to me that even data-mining is used more as an excuse than anything else. Noone seems to have sat and given some serious thought as to exactly _what_ data they need for their mining operation. Everyone seems to just assume that the more data they have, the better, and that maybe just one more piece of personal information from everyone is all they need to reach that covetted critical mass and make the discovery of the century.
So, yeah, I'd like to see a law that makes them pay for every single piece of personal data lost. Not just per account lost. Each piece of extra data they have about someone should raise the total. Maybe _then_ they'll actually stop and think about whether they actually need each of those pieces of info.
Unlike the USA, most of the world doesn't see colleges as just some business, and the more you can serve, the merrier.
Especially in the Soviet block -- which I assume to be the model that China copied -- education was free at all levels (and if you were really good, they actually paid you to study there), _but_ you had to prove that you have the brains and the will to learn. I.e., you couldn't just have daddy save up a few tens of grand and buy you a place at a college. You had to go through exams and prove that you've learned and can apply the maths/physics/biology/whatever that you've learned in high school.
(And let me also say that high-school classes included stuff that was well in the realm of colleges in the USA. E.g., quantum physics.)
The same applied between semesters _and_ at the end. To stay in college you had to prove that you have a damn good grasp of everything they taught you in that year.
This wasn't just to save state money, but also to _guarantee_ a certain high level of intelligence, competence and ability to learn, if you had a college diploma.
So what these students are doing with their cheating is go though university _without_ proving that. E.g., to end up with a diploma that says "electrical engineer" without having the knowledge, intelligence or will to learn.
And letting them just do that does devalue what that diploma means for everyone else. It's like saying, "ah, let's let every dog owner just buy a bogus pedigree certifficate for their mut, if they want one that much." Well, yes, it may sound like a supply-and-demand kind of solution, but that devalues it for those whose diploma_isn't_ a bogus bought piece of paper.
"When i saw this i mean it like someone is responsible for their own mugging if they walk through a bad neighborhood at night."
Dude, noone is _responsible_ for their own mugging or their own rape, especially when the _only_ "fault" is being at that place at that time. It's not like someone went to the biggest gangster in the neighbourhood and started calling them names or anything even remotely resembling starting it. So blaming the victim or making them _responsible_ of their mis-fortune, when again all they've done was happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, strikes me as _absurd_ to the extreme.
You may call it poor foresight, maybe even bad judgment, but outright shifting the blame onto the victim is just surrealistic.
Also, as a guy, I feel insulted by being compared to a mugger in a bad neighbourhood. The implication that going to a guy's house is obviously (enough to deserve blaming the victim) gonna result in getting raped if you don't put out, is outright insulting to males as a whole.
And generally, I don't know in what geek fantasy world do you live, where that kind of an attitude towards women is normal, but rest assured that most males can understand such notions as "free will." Nothing "is expected of" anyone just because you gave them a meal and a cinema ticket. If you want to get laid, there's that "free will" again: you have to make them want to do that and/or get past their inhibitions. You're trying to win someone's _consent_, not buying a quick fuck at a brothel. Wining and dining them is a means of making yourself likeable enough to that end, not buying a non-refundable ticket for sex.
I can tell you that I've had classmates and such coming to my home, or me going over to theirs, and the notion didn't even enter my head that I have some obvious right to fuck them one way or another. Sure, I'd try to make some move, rarely it actually worked, most of the time it _didn't_ work (guess my being fairly nerdy didn't help either), but at no point was there an idea that they have some duty to put out, much less that failure to do so is punishable by rape.
So excuse me if I take it as an insult when I read no less than that coming to my place was comparable to going to get mugged at night in a bad neighbourhood.
And let's not even get into the whole aspect of doing it with a underage kid, in any form or shape.
"This lawsuit is rediculous becuase MySpace is where they met, not where the crime happened."
With that I can aggree, though. But again, that doesn't make the girl guilty of her own rape either.
Ah, sorry if I wasn't too clear. The point wasn't that MS is now in the same situation as SGI, far from it. I'm saying that one _could_ bring a bright new CEO that does the same mistakes at MS too, and Wall Street would actually love it. In fact, they're _asking_ for it.
Never mind that MS is making a healthy (some would even say ludicrious) profit, and even shows some growth. But its shares have dropped, and that's enough to get Wall Street screaming for blood.
And just look at who's singled out as a heir: an ex-Wal-Mart employee who's already done extremely stupid and damaging stuff in the name of cost-cutting. It takes a special kind of retard to do a "cost-cutting" move that costs more than it saves, but there you go. That's who Wall Street sees as the successor to Ballmer.
That's really where all the analogy with SGI starts and stops. There too they asked for an idiot who'll gut the company and shift markets to pump up share value in the short term. In MS's case, not yet (and I hopefully never), but they're asking for it anyway. That's all the analogy, really.
(As a side-note, don't get me wrong, I'm not even a MS fan. I'm not against their products, as such, but I do have a dislike for their ethics. But still... good grief... I don't wish even unto them to be gutted in the name of some investor's quick pump-and-dump profit.)
Hmm... at least in the case of psychopaths, I'll take a guess and say that
A) they're medically speaking "short-sighted." Being unable or not inclined to do long term plans is one of the points on any APD (Antisocial Personality Disorder, a.k.a., sociopathy or psychopathy) test. Not _the_ dominant factor, to be sure, but present very often. Psychopaths tend to be more inclined to seek quick thrills, immediately available power games, quick rewards.
(Hmm... I'm starting to see why they're so loved in by investors for which quick gains and quarterly profits are everything, and in a culture where quarterly profits are everything.)
B) by definition they just don't care about anyone else, including investors, employees, the company's founders, or society as a whole. E.g., the guy in the example wasn't there to cause some long term growth, and just too short-sighted to do it right. He was there to flex his muscles, shaft some people, shaft the company, shaft the investors, get some quick thrill in the process, and any long term benefit was at most the price to pay so he can do it again next time. They're the guys so willing to fire half the workers and do other radical stuff mostly because _that_ is the whole fun, not as an unfortunate measure that needs to be taken by someone.
You identified a problem correctly, but the fact nevertheless is: it wasn't screwed yet. Nvidia at least infringed on a ton of SGI's texturing patents, so SGI could easily either (A) make them stop competing, or (B) ask for license payments.
/. and we like to rant against patents, but please bear with me. I'm talking from the POV of a company making money here, not from the POV of which patents are good and which are bad. That's an entirely different discussion for a different time.
Ok, I know we're on
And from the POV of making money for the company, most analysts saw that situation as looking great for SGI.
What that particular idiot did instead was sell everything to Nvidia at garage sale prices. I don't just mean the patents, but the whole damn R&D department.
_That's_ when SGI finally was screwed in the graphics arena.
And again, that wasn't even his only mistake. As I was saying, the guy did more than half the idiocies I listed there.
I was tempted to add this as #5, actually. Losing more people in the middle of a project. I don't expect that an ex-Wal-Mart manager understands it, but replacing a programmer in the middle of a project is less trivial than replacing a cashier or even a data entry typist. Even if you had an instant replacement with exactly the right skills (which, in practice might take a while and some interviews to find: there's a reason companies pay bonuses to headhunters), you'll have to get them over the learning experience of the project itself. They have to assimilate all the info that the old guy knew, including goals, coding styles, teamwork style (each team works slightly differently), knowing who to ask about what, internal frameworks, etc. Even if they're perfectly documented and have crystal-clear APIs and the old guy wrote perfectly clear and commented code (which, judging by the reactions to some internal code MS submitted instead of protocol docs in the EU anti-trust trial, might not always be the case), it's still one big chunk to assimilate and takes some time.
So basically doing something that disruptive to several projects at the same time, just to see who's prepared to suck up and polish the PHB's ego... is... uninspired, and that's going for the understatement of the century.
And I'm not even going into how much of a PHB someone needs to be, to want to shake off those who are talented enough to not need to put up with crap, and be left with those underperforming or insecure enough to take any shit as long as it keeps them in the job.
Plus, it adds even more to the #4 problem. I doubt that everyone who does leave, instantly quit in that week. Most people, especially those with families, will first look for a new job and _then_ quit. And in the meantime they'll do the job with the half-arsedness of someone who'll be out of there in a couple of months anyway.
Read that link, seriously. It's an eye opener. Here's my favourite paragraph:
I took the liberty of highlighting what I find partially funny, partially sad there. Sorta like a tragic clown. Wall Street loved him for some massive firing waves and plant closing that didn't even make any fucking sense economically. And he continued doing those even knowing full well that they don't make sense, reflected in the fact that he cooked the books to make it seem like they actually helped in any way. Yet he kept on doing it.
This wasn't a manager taking tough measures for tough times, it was just a psychopath finding personal entertainment in screwing the company that hired him.
So, alas, much as I'd love to take my place on the executive golf courses, a cruel fate has decided I shouldn't be born in that 1% of the population that Wall Street loves. I have too much empathy for that. I couldn't look myself in the mirror after even thinking about doing something like that. So, alas, I've been condemned to a life of honest work instead. Fate can be cruel like that, you know.
" He's believed to be behind a recent cost-cutting move to force the company's substantial contractor workforce to take an unpaid week off. Since contractors at Microsoft contribute to important projects and are often hired on as full-time employees, the move hurt morale."
/. about how some people at the top are really psychopaths, in the medical sense of the word. Still, technically that only has to mean not caring about others. But the more time goes by, the more it seems that some people at the top aren't just psychopathic, but also the sadistic kind. And some just seem to have a sort of hatred for those they're supposed to manage.
Ah, so he knows the magic words ("cost-cutting move") and likes to kick the workers in the teeth. I can see how Wall Street would love him.
*sigh* There's been a recent article linked to by
I mean, look at his cost-cutting move:
1. There are 52 weeks in a year, even if _everyone_ at MS was a contractor, and if salaries were the _only_ expenses MS ever has, it still would have saved less than 5% of the costs. But when you factor in that not everyone is, and also that execs salaries aren't the same as those of the peons thus shafted, and all the other costs, I'll take a wild guess and say that maybe he's saved 1% for the whole year. But wait, it gets better:
2. It's not like those people were sitting around idle. MS has enough coding going on at any given time, and taking enough flak over, say, Vista delays. So here's the more important part: that "cost saving" is more than offset by the fact that it was a week of them not producing stuff for MS. We're not talking a factory who's over-produced taking a week off, but forcing it onto people who were actually producing value for the company during that time. It's as idiotic a decision as, say, closing a bunch of Wal-Mart shops for a week: sure, you've saved the money for running them for a week, _but_ you've made a bigger loss by not selling anything in that time. So far from being a "cost-cutting measure", it was more like a profit-losing measure.
3. It was done purely for greed sake. It's not like MS was making heavy losses and needed that kind of penny-pinching to stay afloat. Forcing people to take unpaid time off when the company is making a healthy profit is... just pure unhealthy greed. Nothing more, nothing less.
4. It was accompanied by a drop in morale. Partially also because we're talking about people smart enough to understand points 1 to 3, and recognize a _stupid_ penny-pincher when they see one. Being shafted when the company is in dire straits is one thing, but being shafted for such a completely idiotic reason tends to leave a very bad aftertaste. Even if number 2 hadn't already done more harm than good, we're talking a loss of morale that'll span many months and for some people it will even stay around for ever. And it won't even affect only those shafted, but also the people who got to see their co-workers shafted by a dumb PHB. This alone is more than enough to cause more harm than any cost-savings he might have made.
So basically we're not even talking about a regular penny-pincher, we're talking about the dumbest kind of a PHB. The kind that makes the original PHB from Dilbert actually seem smart and competent by comparison. And the dumbest kind of decision one can do at a company.
And yet Wall Street loves him for it and likes the idea of him as a CEO...
I don't know... I really don't know... Are these people even focused on profit, or share value, or whatever, or are they just getting their jollies from shafting the workers and using profit as just an excuse?
Very true and insightful. I had forgotten about that one. Thanks for your contribution.
"Is this some sort of natural outgrowth of MP3 downloading and software piracy? What are we going to pretend is "victimless" next?"
AFAIK, at least one psychopath has already argued that raping children is a victimless crime. It should be pretty hard to beat that, but I have no doubt that someone will try to.
Anyway, it's nothing new. The software pirates certainly didn't start it, they just found a niche where it's easier to convince someone that since a copy of the original was made, nothing had really been lost. But, as you can see, it doesn't prevent people from claiming the exact same when some demonstrable harm _did_ get done. (E.g., money from someone's account aren't duplicated, they actually disappear from person A to enter the possession of person B.)
And honestly seeing some of the arguments made, I can't help notice a common theme of handwaving someone else's loss, time, suffering, even pain, as unimportant and not enough to make anyone a victim or to make the act a crime. In effect, the gross disregard for other people. It's beyond individualism, and outright in the realm of sociopathy.
Actually, Wall Street would love to do the standard rise-the-stock-value-so-we-can-sell-even-if-it-kil ls-the-company dance:
- bring in a new CEO who promises radical cost-saving changes all over the place (watch stock value invariably rise)
- have him fire half the workforce, accompanied by giving interviews all over the place about trimming the fat and returning to good ol' capitalism values (ditto)
- make it an official policy to only hire re-trained ex-burger-flippers and transfer half the remaining jobs to Elbonia and East Bumfuckistan in the next years (look at all those money we were wasting on paying highly-qualified people. Stock price rises some more.)
- "motivate" the remaining employees with mottos like "your job could be the next one that goes to India", and unrealistic productivity demands. Accompany it with some speeches showing that you see them as a bunch of slackers, just to be sure they have no illusions left that their contribution is appreciated in any form or shape. (Hell, yeah, high productivity here we come. Watch everyone buy MS stock, driving the share value even higher.)
- drop half the products, on account that they weren't directly making that much money. Never mind that they help form the interlocking whole that makes MS almost impossible to displace in the market. (Ditto.)
- sell the relevant IP and know-how to competitors for some quick cash (yeehaw, MS income was above estimates this quarter. Let's all rush to buy their shares.)
- spin off and sell half the acquisitions that MS ever made. Preferrably for less than half the price originally paid for those companies. (Ditto.)
- reshuffle departments and internal policies for no good reason, just to seem like you're doing something new and radical (ok, by this point it only adds a few more cents per share, but it's better than nothing, you know?)
- announce some hare-brained new products, but miss the mark or the market by a mile because of having no fucking clue about the technology involved
- rape the brand recognition, as much as MS does have of it, for some quick buck for the next quarter, at the expense of annoying and losing existing customers
- take some more flashy measures that'll get lots of press like suddenly rebranding to a new name (and losing most of the brand recognition the old name had), moving to another town, "reinventing oneself" by moving completely into a new market, or whatever
At this point the big Wall Street names sell their own stock, making a quick profit. The company starts a long and painful downward spiral, a la SGI, except MS has cash reserves to last much longer. The CEO soon moves to another company, with Wall Street's full backing, to do the same again. A few years down the line, MS is as relevant to the OS market as SGI now is to the computer graphics market, but Wall Street have gotten their quick buck already.
Think I'm exaggerating? Look at what happened to SGI, for example, and then tell me I'm exaggerating. It only took one bright new CEO to do more than half of what I wrote above, and set SGI on a downwards spiral from which it never recovered. Where SGI is now, you already know.
The Huns' or Mongolians' composite (short) bow, for example, was good enough to conquer half of Europe. And they faced Roman legions in chain armour (lorica hamata) and even banded armour (lorica segmentata.) Now it may be useless against the gothic plate of the late medieval era, but to kill a stupid city guard in a chain vest, they're perfectly good.
I find it the easiest to use a MMO or, back in the 90's, a MUD. Otherwise you run into answers of the "well, duh, if the universe is everything, a deity or anything else can't be outside the universe" kind. It can be a long uphill battle from there. A computer game provides a readily available example of a creator that's completely outside the universe he's created.
Heh. You assume too much. I'm not even religious, but I can give a nod to an answer that is scientiffically and logically correct, even if it comes from the late Pope. But I digress.
"Actually, morality can be measured my measuring the success of the cultures with the moral precepts you are interested in. Morality is after all nothing more than game theory."
The problem is that you can't, or not that easily:
1. Read some anthropology first. Between a culture having a moral precept, even professing it in polls or whatever, and actually applying it in practice, there's a _huge_ difference. People invariably answer how they'd like to be, not how they really are.
There was no culture ever that actually practiced "love thy neighbour" or "thou shalt not kill". And conversely, you have no culture which was signifficantly more psychopathic on the whole, as to cover for the other variables there. So how can you compare two ideals, if you don't actually have an example where they were the dominant factor? (Or for that matter where they were applied to any signifficant degree.)
2. You have a _lot_ of other variables there. You'd have to find two cultures which had equal access to resources and information, equal natural and human threats to overcome, equally good or bad decisions of their rulers, etc, and know exactly how much they applied those precepts at all points in their history. Because otherwise you're not comparing apples to apples.
E.g., you can't go and say "China was confucianist, England was protestant, ergo, looking at where they're now, protestantism's precepts are better than confucianism's." But when you factor in access to colonies (England didn't discover America on its own either, but was close enough to Spain to get the idea), different internal pressures (England's overpopulation and some religion frictions _forced_ it to expand it colonially faster than anyone else), revolts (China was wrecked by some waves of massive internal problems starting in the 1600's, England wasn't), external invasions and bad leadership (the Manchu pretty much pushed China back into the middle ages, while England didn't have anything similar), etc, it's hard to argue with a straight face that religious precepts were what made the most difference there.
"Science can and does contradict their claims."
And here in one fell swoop you proved that you don't know that much about how science works, nor understand Occam's Razor. But I'll get back to that later.
"And as far is Blizzard is concerned, who made the Titans? How do we know the Christian God isn't a fiction invented by the *real* creator?"
You don't know that either, obviously. In fact, you've just described the medieval Cathar sect, so it's not even a new idea. And yes, that too can't be proved or disproved, so they too wouldn't have had to answer anything else to Sagan't question.
"I don't understand why the religious nuts aren't the most ardent aderhents of the scientific method. [...] Otherwise you're calling your own ignorance a form of knowledge."
What I find funny is that the most rabid christian-bashers don't know their science either. They may be able to google "cell division", but don't actually understand how science itself works. A lot are, in fact, exactly as close-minded as the "religious nuts" they troll. A lot have, in fact, discovered just religion in another guise.
I'm sorry, anyone who can see science as some truth set in stone, able to _prove_ or disprove anything and everything, even things they don't even have the data about... just doesn't know jack squat about its being a process or how that process works. Science doesn't even have "proofs" for the most part, it "just" has a set of hypotheses that (A) explain the available data, (B) are the simplest to that end (see Occam's Razor), and (C) that noone managed to disprove yet. That's the
And on the other hand, JPII's answer is also pretty valid for a scientist too.
You can ask someone who designs a rocket or missile, "And what would you do if the world really is flat and on the back of a turtle?" Or, "And what would you do if we're on the inside of a hollow sphere?" The question isn't trivial, because the ballistic and Coriolis effect corrections would be _massively_ different. I see it as a perfectly valid answer to say, "wtf, I already know that that's not the case." _Especially_ if he's been bombarded to death with that kinda nonsense every day, ever since he was in college. (Don't underestimate the kind of national sport it can be for some people to bait and troll the christians.)
Yes, he knows that he'd have to recalculate it all if that were even possible, but I see no real need to restate the obvious. Again. Especially for a nonsense question. At some point it's entirely legitimate to say, basically, "no need, here's how I know that that isn't the case." Or, "RTFM." Or, basically, "I have enough real scientific issues to ponder if I'm bored, thank you very much. I don't have the time or inclination to start designing a missile for a concave Earth, just in case it suddenly deforms that way."
And since everyone is so focused on the Dalai Lama's answer, may I point out that it's equally a purely PR answer? Just as JPII wouldn't have risen to be Pope without being able to answer anything like a true believer, the Dalai Lama wouldn't have risen to be Dalai Lama without being able to sound all enlightened by buddhist standards. You don't really know what he'd actually do if you could really pull the rug from under him like that, but if he has more than two braincells he too knows that you can't ever prove something like that. So he can answer any bullshit that makes him sound good, because it's something he'll never have to prove that he'll actually do it.
Scientifically disproving Buddhist precepts is even more impossible (if that's possible) than the Christian ones, because Buddhism is even heavier on purely moral judgments and lighter on claiming historical events and miracles on demand. How do you scientiffically disprove the idea that people should be nice, do good deeds and do their duty, for example? Build a copy of Earth where everyone is a psychopath and can't care less about the others? Even if you could do that (but you can't, because even then you can't prove that you cloned the "souls" too), it would degenerate into chaos and massive crimes so fast, that it would rather prove their point, rather than disprove it.
So if he's not completely brain-dead -- and he probably isn't -- he too knows that you can't ever do that. So he's free to say anything. So he gave the one that polishes his image as a wise enlightened eastern guru.
In a sense, I find that JPII's answer was at least a honest one, even if it plays right into the christian-bashers' hands.
Kinda makes me wonder how would you explain that kind of things to a Tauren. Or, heck, to a human living 5000 years ago. I can just see it :P
God: "So I saw that the database was corrupt and..."
Moses: "What's a database, Lord?"
God: "uhh... how do I explain this... uhh, you know there's this data representing your world..."
Moses: "I don't understand, Lord? Like a map or painting?"
God: "No, in a sense it _is_ your world, and everything in it."
Moses: "So the world was corrupt?"
God: "*sigh* Yeah, whatever, the world was corrupt. You all were more corrupt than a senator... err... than a Grand Vizier. Anyway, so our database admin Noah saved the game files on tape and I did a full format."
Moses: "I don't understand, Lord? Database admin? Game files?"
God: "*sigh* Uh, you know, the models and all for these animals and... *sigh* He put one of each animal in a big ark, ok? And then I formatted... (gah, how do I explain a format to this guy)... right, I _flooded_ it all to get rid of the old animals and people."
Nothing against all that, and it's even insightful and all. I'm not discussing the probability of God existing, nor the utility of a God, nor saying you should pray to a God that may have buggered off on vacation. I'm just saying that it's impossible for someone to _prove_ that God doesn't exist, which is what Sagan asked and what JPII answered. I.e., that technically speaking JPII was right.
Mind you, it's the kind of "right" which, as you've noted, doesn't have any further practical uses. Still, it's a perfectly logical answer. That's all I'm saying.
In a sense, JPII is actually right there: it's impossible for science to prove anything about an entity outside the observable universe.
Let me use WoW as an example. Let's say the observable universe is WoW. Even the wisest scholar living _in_ the WoW universe, even with the best gnomish instruments, can only observe and measure things that are _inside_ this universe.
What it _can't_ observe is the universe's creator: Blizzard.
Can such a scholar prove, with only the data in his universe, that Blizzard doesn't exist? No. He just doesn't have the data on which to base such a proof. The best his science can do is state that the universe can be explained well enough without this mystical "Blizzard" entity at the helm.
Same is it with RL science and God. Science _can't_ prove that God doesn't exist. All science can do is explain the universe well enough without needing some "God" entity. But that's all.
No, seriously, I know that we all love to troll and bait the christians. But put your thinking cap for a second and you'll realize the same: if a "creator" exists _outside_ the universe he created (just like Blizzard exists outside the WoW universe), science can't prove or disprove this creator in any form or shape. It just can't get any data from there. At all. Ever.
Not to mention that it's not even possible to prove a negative like that. As long as science can't know every single atom in the universe, _and_ go back in time and observe what happened at every single moment since Big Bang, you simply can't have enough proof that something _doesn't_ exist even _inside_ your universe. It's like proposing to prove that a green three-legged rabbit doesn't exist and never existed. You only need one specimen to prove that it does exist, but it's simply unfeasible to prove that nowhere in the universe such a creature ever existed.
The best science can do is apply Occam's Razor. Basically to say "well, we can explain the universe perfectly well even without some 'God' hypothesis, so we don't need such a hypothesis." But that's all.
Plus, some of the precepts of Christianity are pretty much notions, ideals or moral judgments. How do you scientifically disprove "love thy neighbour"? How would you scientifically disprove "thou shalt not kill"? No, seriously. They're moral precepts that reflect a certain set of values, not something you can run through a spectrograph or whatever other instrument.
So basically, yes, JPII was right: it's not even possible. So while it makes for some good christian-bashing material to compare the answers there, in practice it's about as relevant as asking "what would you do if gravity just suddenly disappeared?" It seems to me like "it's not even possible" is a perfectly valid answer there. Sure, it's not the most interesting or imaginative kind of an answer, but nevertheless it is a valid one.
Actually, we're both right, since we're talking about different talks at different moments.
The civilized discussion I've mentioned and letting Galileo go was _before_ Galileo published that book.
The trial and imprisonment that you mention were _after_ he published the book.
I don't know, I'm not even religious, but it seems the kind of deity I could _really_ respect.
I mean, seriously, _if_ the universe has a creator, then its creation is _the_ ultimately elegant hack. The guy didn't edit each map by hand, so to speak, he just gave it a set of simple rules and enough energy and let the whole thing build _itself_.
And look at how neatly it all fits together. E.g., nuclei having resonances at just the right places so anything can be built by fusion from hydrogen. It may seem trivial, but move, say, Carbon's excited states just a tiny bit and you couldn't get Carbon any more in a star fusing Helium. Yes, that Carbon's states are those is the result of other rules, but that's the whole point. Everything fits together just perfectly, and a small set of rules combine just right to form a whole universe, galaxies, sentient life, etc.
_If_ some "creator" came up with all the constants involved, the guy is a fucking genius. No, seriously. I'm humbled. I can honestly say I can't even imagine coming even close to achieving something so grandiose with so little "code". It's like writing a page of code and watching it combine and arrange everything by itself to form a MMO from scratch, _including_ all the skins, maps, physics, races, classes, quests, and everything. Only many many orders of magnitude bigger than WoW.
"Galileo got in trouble for saying that the earth moves... in a book that irreverently satirized the current pope."
/. So Galileo proceeds to publish a book in which he thoroughly flames the Pope, and puts the Pope's words, in some cases distorted or taken out of context, in the mouth of a character whose name is just one letter away from "Stupid"... and is pronounced almost the same as "Stupid." In effect it's the kinda flamebait post that goes on and on about how the opponent is just too stupid to understand, only in print.
Read again the part after the "..." and there you have the real problem.
AFAIK, Galileo had had a pretty civilized talk with the Pope, and while the Pope wasn't convinced by Galileo's argumentation, he let Galileo go.
Before you blame the Pope of being too fanatical to accept science, remember that it wasn't just faith, but they did have their own explanations (derived from Aristotles) about how the world works. It may have been wrong in retrospect, but as far as any wise man at the time was concerned, they already had a science of sorts. Something that comes and turns the whole cosmic model on its head, damn better be convincing, and at any rate the Pope wasn't convinced. And remember that the Pope had been willing to hear Galileo's arguments, which doesn't strike me as too closed-minded.
Unfortunately, Galileo seems to have had the same kind of personality one can see often on
Now also bear in mind that the Pope at the time was debatably the biggest political figure. A king above kings, if you will. They weren't big on democracy and freedom of speech back then...
And Galileo goes and flames him in public and calls him stupid...
I don't know, seems to me like science-vs-religion had _nothing_ to do with what happened from there. You get in a public pissing contest with the dictator of the realm, you get roughed up in return. It's that simple.
No, it just basically means "If you're an OEM that sells computers, you can only put the Windows logo on your computers if every single component in it is certified." This isn't even something new. I'm sure this is already the status quo.
Will those computers stop working? Nope.
All that will happen is that the OEM has to start using a different card in their future computers, or stop putting the logo on those computers.
E.g., if, say, Creative's drivers are proved to crash lots and Creative doesn't fix it ASAP, then Creative loses the certification. So now when Random J User to Dell's web site to buy a high end gaming rig (hey, Dell sells such rigs, so someone must buy them), now Dell must either sell it without a SoundBlaster or without a Windows logo.