Re: promotion: it's more fun if people play your games.:)
Yeah, I thought so too.
Did you try playing? I'm more than open to suggestions.
Briefly. Lack of "pencil markings" is a problem for me, though. It's just a bit too much effort to draw it out...
But then I'd complain regardless. As I tend to use Marking up, second notation, inverted (you can use ink, and it doesn't clutter the cells), I get confused when I switch back to using subscripts...
When I was using subscripts, I'd also make notes for each row, column, and square. When using websudoku, I use open square brackets '[' to denote "numbers after this could be anywhere in this square", and forgo notation for columns and rows. I suppose that I could use '|' and '_', or similar.
I like the annotation option and javascript error highlighting on websudoku.
Yeah, me too:o)
(Slashdot should tolerate offtopic discussion or have a forum IMHO..)
Uncheck your Karma Bonus! I do. You're less likely to get hit...
Is Sudokuist your website? I thought that I'd answer an earlier post in case it was: I don't want to spoil your promotion of it by having my reply on the front page.
Myself, I go to http://www.websudoku.com/ which has four levels of difficulty, you can set the options to allow "pencil markings" (up to 5 characters per square), you can do as many as you like, keep track of your completion times, and compare them with the average...
Then is isn't Asperger's that you wish to debunk, but "geek syndrome".
Asperger's exists, but your sig is fine: it helps clarify that AS is not just geekiness.
I have a diagnosis for Aspergers which I got in the middle of a breakdown, and has been very useful in helping me to get the resources that I needed to get well. I am still prone to staying in the house for days on end, whereupon I get cabin fevour, although I can lie, and tell truth from fiction. My breakdown occurred because a therapist undermined me over a period of several years: over that time, I corrected what he was telling me, without realising the conclusions that he was drawing. I look at it now, and I am amazed: my therapist thought that I was a psycho because I told him that the golden rule doesn't work "because different people want different things", and because I valued freedom "but I'm not so much into equality"... My love of the subtle and the self-organising was taken for cunning and not caring...
Maybe Leo Strauss had a point with his concept of the Straussian text, which has an exoteric ("outward") meaning that wasn't necessarily the same as the meaning drawn by the careful thinker. I ignored the exoteric, and, like Nietzsche, enjoyed using terms against their usual emphasis. In Straussian terms, I was being irresponsible, and I paid for it with a major mental collapse.
Do I have Aspergers? Nowadays, having mostly pulled out of my breakdown, I barely suffer any social symptoms that I had. Certainly, there's still a trace, but prolongued analysis of many miscommunications, and the sequence of events that led to my breakdown have by and large prevented me from further major miscommunication as far as I can tell, and indeed it is common for Aspergans to aquire social skills (albiet late). I still have major problems with timeliness, and my ex- comes around once a week to help me to tidy my house, or else I wouldn't do it. It's not that I don't care: I love a tidy house; it's that I get trapped in routine and other activities...
I am nowhere near as incapable as the character described in the Grandparent post, but I definately have difficulties. I also have advantages: I studied maths at Cambridge, and although I failed through depression, I was seen as being very capable by my supervisor. So, corny and PC though it sounds, I do not consider AS to be a disease, but rather a case of cognitive specialisation.
In fact makes the verity of the concept in question less probable, since the presumed utility makes it more likely that that utility is the cause for belief, rather than the existance or truth of the phenomenon under question.
It is amazing how many scientifically educated individuals, or at least scientifically aware individuals in fact appear to deduce the opposite of that which is reached with a simple application of Bayesian logic.
This is what is so hateful in Darwinian evolution to religious folks. It's not just that it opposes religious teaching, but that it appears to promote a selfish, self-centred (or, if they're more sophisticated, gene-centred) teaching in its place. You don't find the same opposition to humanism, do you?
But this seems unworkable as a law. Copyright means that the right-holder has some control over how their creation is used. If they cannot be traced, how do they get to exercise that control?
Certainly secondary contributers have a claim, but that is their own, non-anonymous copyright.
French programmers could just develop their software under assumed pen-names and publish their free software on servers overseas outside of the French government's jurisdiction.
They'll need to donate the ownership of the code, or else they can't enforce copyright.
Well, he convinced me that it was a two way street. That there is no shortage of good ideas and products out there, and the ONLY reason some succeed over others is becuase people like him and Sales people make it happen. They sell products that they know aren't quite ready yet (vaporware) because the company needs the revenue. They sell products that they know are inferior to the competition because their Scientists and Engineers made a stupid mistake early on in the product development lifecycle that didn't get caught until too late and the company can't afford to start over.
The thing is that someone is going to sell the goods; the Exec. has simply succeeded in making sure that it's the person with the inferior product. They've made the marketplace less efficient!
People hate Microsoft for being more of a marketing than a technical company, and it is in part because techies could have better jobs elsewhere producing quality work, if it weren't for the Marketing behemoth.
If GPL violations aren't theft, why is it called "stolen" GPL code? The point just whooshed right over your head, didn't it?
Well, it isn't. Some people, it is true, fail to make the distinction, but I think that those that call piracy "theft" because it is a bad thing (which it is), are of probably equal in number to those who talk of GPL "stolen" code. Plenty talk of GPLed code taken from xyz source, but this is in the first instance like water taken from the tap, the moral feeling here comes from the anger at the infringement of copyright, notably that the desire to perpetuate free software is stymied. It is, however anger at the misuse of the source, rather than the removal of it, thus it is anger directed towards the act of copyright infringement.
America's morality is based, to a large extent, on the Bible, and the theory of evolution rather removes that base (if you say otherwise, don't forget Occam's Razor). Then if our basis for morality is no longer there, we must get a new one (or not have morals).
Ah. You see, I'm a Brit:o) IFAICT, we get most of out values from empathy, upbringing, and (later) generalised problem-solving. Religion gives some of us a hook for our developing values, and eases some of the issues of upbringing (bring the kids to scout/guide camp, for example). In school, play, and work, we learn to solve problems that are essentially social in nature; encourage that, and values emerge from a complex process of generalisation.
Real values that actually manifest themselves come from action, not from teaching or the pulpit; those kinds of "values" lead only to more teaching. That values are often accumulated to a religious "hook" does not mean that they would not accumulate elsewhere if it weren't for that religious hook. In my experience (I grew up an atheist, and now count myself as a Spinozian Pantheist), values accumulate to identity. Atheism can therefore be healthy in causing you to own your values, rather than ascribing them to a force outside yourself.
Also, according to the theory of evolution, we are "designed" to have as many surviving offspring as possible. In fact, that is the only purpose in life, for any living creature. I'm sure you can draw some moral conclusions from this.
Actually, according to the theory of evolution, we are not designed at all. If you're going to remove a purposer, you need to do it properly:o) Rather, those elements that make us up were naturally selected for over time. Thus historially, those genes that successfully perpetuated themselves are those that you expect to be prevalent now.
Although we are emergent from our bodies, we are not our bodies. Our standards are our own, and need not have anything to do with genetics. In fact (for example), knowing that we're pre-programmed to behave tribally (favouring those most likely to be sharing our genes), can help us to be aware of traits that we might otherwise be ignorant of, and thus to correct them.
The difference between the evolutionist and (say) the proponent of ID is that in the former case, our origins have no intrisic meaning, and have little to teach us. We have to find our meaning in culture, in humanism, in the pursuit and perpetuation of knowledge... The proponent of ID, however finds meaning in our creation, and thus feels that he owes his god something in return... Projecting similar meaning being ascribed to our origins in the mind of an evolutionist is an error on your part.
Besides, bringing up a moral dimension of evolutionary teaching is like saying that free markets cannot work because they rely upon people pursuing their perceived interests, which is morally wrong, so that they must not be believed to work.
First, your parallel is a bit off. The purpose of the free market is to use people's greed for the benefit of everyone, and I'm sure you will find that noone believes that people are all saints. What the free market does do is encourage such greedy behavior, by making it socially acceptable and outcompeting those that are not looking out for #1. This is indeed a moral issue with the free market, which should be taken into account when deciding if it is superior to the other alternatives. However, I am sure the alternatives have issues as well.
The free market has no purpose. However, free market theory predicts that in a free market, supply moves to match demand, thus harnessing our desires and needs to provide for others' desires and needs. Those desires and needs need not be selfish in the normal sense, however, they are judged by ourselves, and thus constitute our "i
Real evolutionists get their morals from their biology textbooks.
Quick question: how do you deduce anything about morality from a physical mechanism?
Knowledge of underlying mechansims can help us to solve problems, but it doesn't affect the moral standards by which we judge our solutions, surely?
Besides, bringing up a moral dimension of evolutionary teaching is like saying that free markets cannot work because they rely upon people pursuing their perceived interests, which is morally wrong, so that they must not be believed to work.
Since pages are weighted by the ascribed importance of referencing pages, and so on in an endless mesh, it's clear that there is something non-egalitarian about Google, but this is not enough to make it hierarchical. It's more like capital flow.
Here's how: the wealthy get to decide who receives their spending, and those people in turn decide how strongly to weight their suppliers' votes in the allocation of resources. This perpetuates through in a cycle that reaches a very rough, shifting equilibrium that very much resembles Google's "pagerank", IMO.
Compared with outright hierarchy, this kind of inequality is still going to appear relatively fair, but it doesn't measure up to equally weighted votes. That is, it isn't democratically fair. However, this, or at least some inequality appears to be essential to making useful discrimination, if you're going to use the "intelligence" of the web itself to do it. Ideally, the results would be based upon the quality of the content itself, no matter how obscure, but the artificial intelligence required to do that would be mind-boggling.
Besides, people often want to find something that they were surfing the other day (ie. relatively more likely to be strongly linked), or else read up on what others are talking about, so that they need the same points of reference... An objectively better site might actually be inferior for socialising with one's peers, or engaging in political tribal virtual warfare: a third point of reference in such cases leaves you out of the discussion!
"dictatorship of the proletariat" doesn't use the word "dictatorship" in the same way that those of us who know 20th century history are used to.
By intention, no, but in practice is does by necessity. Here are some reasons why central ownership must oppress. But I haven't even approached the issue of enforcement: because trade between two people is such an easy and natural thing to do, to prevent it so that the benefit of people's efforts can be directed by democratic, rather than invididual will requires extremely high degrees of enforcement.
Using the same meaning, the USA or the UK (for example) are examples of a "dictatorship of the bourgeois," because the bourgeois class is the group of people who control most of the wealth and command most of the power.
Except that at least you can change who you work for. Competition acts to regulate all employers, so that the exercise of class interest is naturally limited. I'm not claiming anything like perfection, but the lack of competition within the "democratic" economic model means that there is no mechanism by which oppression can be alleviated.
I haven't even touched upon the leverage that strongly socialist systems give to movements of mass hysteria. The diversity of true (not rightist, conformist propertarian) individualism serves to break up the formation of such social plaques. Economic Democracy disempowers individuals, and prejudice becomes dogma. To oppose such dogma is entirely seen in terms of one's own interests in such opposition, and never in terms of the underlying issues themselves.
Simply fails. Centralisation of power to a point, even if the locus of that point is democratically determined immediately destroys freedom, and not just for the rich.
Decentralisation can improve matters somewhat, but you have lost your ability to decide what you will do, moment to moment. Because of the nature of economic decision-making, arbitary decisions will be made moment-to-moment, and since there is no competition in the labour market, you cannot change jobs to deal with it.
There is however a sense that decentralisation makes things worse: although the decisions (made by other people) will be more relevant to the participants, they are more relevant by virture of micromanagement. Economic democracy would destroy freedom more surely than competition between heirachies. At least decisions that cover a larger population, by virtue of having to be more general, approximate more closely "the rule of law", so that you know in advance what you are and aren't allowed to do.
Democracy is already insufficiently sensitive to the needs of minorities (and by this term I am referring to all groups with lesser numbers, not merely those groups that are normally called minorities, although such groups are certainly included); to instill democracy into every moment of people's working lives cannot help but be oppressive. This ignores the fact that often there is no meaningful consensus, so that it is the largest minority that get their way, and the majority is oppressed.
Competition may not be perfect, and it is certainly worth making large-scale market corrections, such as a system of health-care insurance, provision of education, taxes to induce correction of economic externalities, minimum wages, minimum safety precautions... But none of these are about day-to-day economic decision making. Where they do impinge upon day-to-day decision making, the law is known in advance, and one is not faced with arbitary rule.
Voting for Florian will send a strong signal that software patents are not a popular legal innovation but are rightly seen as a threat to the free market and open capitalism.
I agree that voting for Florian is a good thing. But how the signal will be read depends very much upon the beholder. Some, for example, will see it as a victory for democracy over the doctorine of property right.
The more sophisticated amoung us see the issue of software patents as one of the artificial creation of monopolies and the unneccessary restriction of freedom, but from the pure propertarian perspective, this can look a lot like the slogan "property is theft". Lawyers know how complex a concept property is, but the average person, and it seems the average politician doesn't know this, and hear opposition as simple "rationalisation".
When I went to the site a few weeks ago, I parsed "at random" to mean "arbitarily", so that a given random decision had already been made for everyone.
Still: some of those which aren't "at random" are still political, and not a lot to do with software, such as a candidate which is not neutral with respect to the events in Israel/Palestine.
Slashdot Mirror
But then I'd complain regardless. As I tend to use Marking up, second notation, inverted (you can use ink, and it doesn't clutter the cells), I get confused when I switch back to using subscripts...
When I was using subscripts, I'd also make notes for each row, column, and square. When using websudoku, I use open square brackets '[' to denote "numbers after this could be anywhere in this square", and forgo notation for columns and rows. I suppose that I could use '|' and '_', or similar.
Yeah, me tooMyself, I go to http://www.websudoku.com/ which has four levels of difficulty, you can set the options to allow "pencil markings" (up to 5 characters per square), you can do as many as you like, keep track of your completion times, and compare them with the average...
If Sudokuist /is/ your site, good luck to you!
Asperger's exists, but your sig is fine: it helps clarify that AS is not just geekiness.
I have a diagnosis for Aspergers which I got in the middle of a breakdown, and has been very useful in helping me to get the resources that I needed to get well. I am still prone to staying in the house for days on end, whereupon I get cabin fevour, although I can lie, and tell truth from fiction. My breakdown occurred because a therapist undermined me over a period of several years: over that time, I corrected what he was telling me, without realising the conclusions that he was drawing. I look at it now, and I am amazed: my therapist thought that I was a psycho because I told him that the golden rule doesn't work "because different people want different things", and because I valued freedom "but I'm not so much into equality"... My love of the subtle and the self-organising was taken for cunning and not caring...
Maybe Leo Strauss had a point with his concept of the Straussian text, which has an exoteric ("outward") meaning that wasn't necessarily the same as the meaning drawn by the careful thinker. I ignored the exoteric, and, like Nietzsche, enjoyed using terms against their usual emphasis. In Straussian terms, I was being irresponsible, and I paid for it with a major mental collapse.
Do I have Aspergers? Nowadays, having mostly pulled out of my breakdown, I barely suffer any social symptoms that I had. Certainly, there's still a trace, but prolongued analysis of many miscommunications, and the sequence of events that led to my breakdown have by and large prevented me from further major miscommunication as far as I can tell, and indeed it is common for Aspergans to aquire social skills (albiet late). I still have major problems with timeliness, and my ex- comes around once a week to help me to tidy my house, or else I wouldn't do it. It's not that I don't care: I love a tidy house; it's that I get trapped in routine and other activities...
I am nowhere near as incapable as the character described in the Grandparent post, but I definately have difficulties. I also have advantages: I studied maths at Cambridge, and although I failed through depression, I was seen as being very capable by my supervisor. So, corny and PC though it sounds, I do not consider AS to be a disease, but rather a case of cognitive specialisation.
To belief the reverse is simple Strausian doublethink (paragraph six).
It is amazing how many scientifically educated individuals, or at least scientifically aware individuals in fact appear to deduce the opposite of that which is reached with a simple application of Bayesian logic.
You might be interested in the discussion starting from Cujo's reply to my above-mentioned JE.
This is what is so hateful in Darwinian evolution to religious folks. It's not just that it opposes religious teaching, but that it appears to promote a selfish, self-centred (or, if they're more sophisticated, gene-centred) teaching in its place. You don't find the same opposition to humanism, do you?
I wrote a JE on this.
Certainly secondary contributers have a claim, but that is their own, non-anonymous copyright.
People hate Microsoft for being more of a marketing than a technical company, and it is in part because techies could have better jobs elsewhere producing quality work, if it weren't for the Marketing behemoth.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy...
-- Not much text --
Insightful (thanks for the reminder, temojen!)
So we can be on topic :o)
Ah. You see, I'm a Brit :o) IFAICT, we get most of out values from empathy, upbringing, and (later) generalised problem-solving. Religion gives some of us a hook for our developing values, and eases some of the issues of upbringing (bring the kids to scout/guide camp, for example). In school, play, and work, we learn to solve problems that are essentially social in nature; encourage that, and values emerge from a complex process of generalisation.
Real values that actually manifest themselves come from action, not from teaching or the pulpit; those kinds of "values" lead only to more teaching. That values are often accumulated to a religious "hook" does not mean that they would not accumulate elsewhere if it weren't for that religious hook. In my experience (I grew up an atheist, and now count myself as a Spinozian Pantheist), values accumulate to identity. Atheism can therefore be healthy in causing you to own your values, rather than ascribing them to a force outside yourself.
Actually, according to the theory of evolution, we are not designed at all. If you're going to remove a purposer, you need to do it properly :o) Rather, those elements that make us up were naturally selected for over time. Thus historially, those genes that successfully perpetuated themselves are those that you expect to be prevalent now.
Although we are emergent from our bodies, we are not our bodies. Our standards are our own, and need not have anything to do with genetics. In fact (for example), knowing that we're pre-programmed to behave tribally (favouring those most likely to be sharing our genes), can help us to be aware of traits that we might otherwise be ignorant of, and thus to correct them.
The difference between the evolutionist and (say) the proponent of ID is that in the former case, our origins have no intrisic meaning, and have little to teach us. We have to find our meaning in culture, in humanism, in the pursuit and perpetuation of knowledge... The proponent of ID, however finds meaning in our creation, and thus feels that he owes his god something in return... Projecting similar meaning being ascribed to our origins in the mind of an evolutionist is an error on your part.
The free market has no purpose. However, free market theory predicts that in a free market, supply moves to match demand, thus harnessing our desires and needs to provide for others' desires and needs. Those desires and needs need not be selfish in the normal sense, however, they are judged by ourselves, and thus constitute our "i
Knowledge of underlying mechansims can help us to solve problems, but it doesn't affect the moral standards by which we judge our solutions, surely?
Besides, bringing up a moral dimension of evolutionary teaching is like saying that free markets cannot work because they rely upon people pursuing their perceived interests, which is morally wrong, so that they must not be believed to work.
Here's how: the wealthy get to decide who receives their spending, and those people in turn decide how strongly to weight their suppliers' votes in the allocation of resources. This perpetuates through in a cycle that reaches a very rough, shifting equilibrium that very much resembles Google's "pagerank", IMO.
Compared with outright hierarchy, this kind of inequality is still going to appear relatively fair, but it doesn't measure up to equally weighted votes. That is, it isn't democratically fair. However, this, or at least some inequality appears to be essential to making useful discrimination, if you're going to use the "intelligence" of the web itself to do it. Ideally, the results would be based upon the quality of the content itself, no matter how obscure, but the artificial intelligence required to do that would be mind-boggling.
Besides, people often want to find something that they were surfing the other day (ie. relatively more likely to be strongly linked), or else read up on what others are talking about, so that they need the same points of reference... An objectively better site might actually be inferior for socialising with one's peers, or engaging in political tribal virtual warfare: a third point of reference in such cases leaves you out of the discussion!
Does Shai Agassi consider charity to be "the worst kind of competition"?
The real truth about Slashdot; I stumbled upon this the other day...
I haven't even touched upon the leverage that strongly socialist systems give to movements of mass hysteria. The diversity of true (not rightist, conformist propertarian) individualism serves to break up the formation of such social plaques. Economic Democracy disempowers individuals, and prejudice becomes dogma. To oppose such dogma is entirely seen in terms of one's own interests in such opposition, and never in terms of the underlying issues themselves.
Decentralisation can improve matters somewhat, but you have lost your ability to decide what you will do, moment to moment. Because of the nature of economic decision-making, arbitary decisions will be made moment-to-moment, and since there is no competition in the labour market, you cannot change jobs to deal with it.
There is however a sense that decentralisation makes things worse: although the decisions (made by other people) will be more relevant to the participants, they are more relevant by virture of micromanagement. Economic democracy would destroy freedom more surely than competition between heirachies. At least decisions that cover a larger population, by virtue of having to be more general, approximate more closely "the rule of law", so that you know in advance what you are and aren't allowed to do.
Democracy is already insufficiently sensitive to the needs of minorities (and by this term I am referring to all groups with lesser numbers, not merely those groups that are normally called minorities, although such groups are certainly included); to instill democracy into every moment of people's working lives cannot help but be oppressive. This ignores the fact that often there is no meaningful consensus, so that it is the largest minority that get their way, and the majority is oppressed.
Competition may not be perfect, and it is certainly worth making large-scale market corrections, such as a system of health-care insurance, provision of education, taxes to induce correction of economic externalities, minimum wages, minimum safety precautions... But none of these are about day-to-day economic decision making. Where they do impinge upon day-to-day decision making, the law is known in advance, and one is not faced with arbitary rule.
If I didn't want people to vote, I'd say "don't bother", rather than "please inform yourself".
The more sophisticated amoung us see the issue of software patents as one of the artificial creation of monopolies and the unneccessary restriction of freedom, but from the pure propertarian perspective, this can look a lot like the slogan "property is theft". Lawyers know how complex a concept property is, but the average person, and it seems the average politician doesn't know this, and hear opposition as simple "rationalisation".
Still: some of those which aren't "at random" are still political, and not a lot to do with software, such as a candidate which is not neutral with respect to the events in Israel/Palestine.
Take care to make your own decision.