> Why does that scare me?
> Why does that scare me?
Seriously, why should the actions of other open source users scare you? They can't take away the OSS you already use. They can't stop other projects working around them, or integrating their contributions into other tools. The OSS that benefits the rest of us will go on. Probably the resources available to a few projects will change; some might even fork -- but that's not something I'd call 'scary'.
With OSS there's no clear strategy for apportioning blame elsewhere if things go PEAR-shaped (heh... PHP joke, sorry). You take responsibility for yourself, and those brave enough to do so are rewarded.
But no-one rises through middle-management by bravery, they do so by political contrivance added to a certain required degree of competence, camoflauge and understanding.
The current situation is that commercial solutions are poor for many, many applications (it still shocks me how bad many 'commercial' systems are after growing up in the OSS world).
But this suits many businesses perfectly, as it gives them both a specific vendor, and a generally accepted way of doing business system that can plausibly be blamed for a wide variety of outcomes.
Therefore low-quality, closed-source software meets a systemic business need that is at the very heart of many enterprises.
We're mostly caucasian and asian where I work. (Aust. Gov't. Dept.)
There's no conscious policy, but selection is based on merit, and in western society, inequal opportunity means that those with social advantages (money, role models in family and peers, contacts, home location, etc) are able to better maximise the value they offer to employers.
So racism is the wrong way to be trying to explain this, in most cases. Social inequality is the real issue; I don't feel there's been a lot of progress in that area.
A penguin taking flight? Penguins aren't supposed to 'take flight' -- They're, um, flightless birds. Penguins NOT taking flight is normal, natural, fully expected and probably for the best. Better analogies anyone?
Maybe Australian Fairy Penguins are the problem in the battle for mindshare. What hard-hitting business-person can seriously urge their adoption in a competitive market?
> The most crucial flaw in the notion of Intelligent Design (ID) - is that the justification "life is so complicated and perfect that it must be designed" is that it raises the question "who designed this designer!".
Your understanding of Theism seems to have halted somewhere around Sunday School level. Try reading Bertrand Russell on the subject: either God OR the Universe must be eternal and uncreated. Those are the options. He thought it was the universe ("Since at least I know the universe exists"). (Sorry, I have to reference for that quote off-hand.)
The question is what ultimately exists; an infinite regress of creators is unwieldly and may indeed be mathematically impossible (depends whether infinites can exist in reality; an infinitely old universe is philosophically equivalent to an infinitely long chain of causality; neither are in my opinion possible). Occam's Razor would suggest one, though more of course might be possible. But something 'just exists' without cause or design, whichever way you look at it.
If the universe shows evidence of contingency (not being simply a brute fact) then Russell's position is invalidated, although his dichotomy remains -- that's the discussion that's going on here, whether in Hawking's 'bounded universe' which tries to escape the point-of-cosmic-origin-without-physical-cause problem, or, at a different level, the ID movement (minus the young-earth creationist fringe).
It's not a simple question of science vs. superstition, but what kind of universe science reveals, and what its implications are for philosophy.
Odds are good that some Slashdot readers are involved in producing and propagating spyware. (Lots of us, lots of it. You do the math.)
How about you fake your IP, make a new account, post as Anonymous Coward -- whatever you need to do -- and give us an insight into your world, and the attitudes of the people you work for?
Book burning theories don't add much to our understanding of antiquity: Until the second or third century CE they only had parchment. Parchment was only good for a few hundred years, unless you kept it in a *very* dry cave in the desert somewhere. (And preferably made frequent backups.) The story of ancient history is that if your ideas (or you) went out of popularity, your books didn't get actively copied, and were therefore lost -- it's completely irrespective of whether anyone was actively destroying them or not. Unless you had the requisite desert caves, you needed a chisel to have any chance.
Now, for the period you're talking about -- from late stone age to early chalcolithic (named for the discovery of copper in Anatolia, ie. Turkey) -- the defining social advance was the move from agriculture to trade. The discovery of copper meant that for the first time a commodity existed for which there was no good-enough local substitute. This created the trading class as we generally think of it today -- as a dedicated service occupation; and that in turn made large cities and thus empires possible, rather than tribal towns. (It's worth asking what the supposition of alien intervention adds to this scenario, if your seriously suggesting that.)
Otherwise, if you think about the kind of writing needs such a society would have (and this is only 5,200 years ago, not your 6,000) it's fair to ask what you would expect them to write, or what, of their writings, you would find interesting to read, even if it had survived. If you want to read something within 1500 years of that time, then try the Enuma Elish or the Laws of Hammurabi (this oldest example of the test for a witch is in there -- it's an interesting read). All these docs are available online.
I'm trying to avoid identifying my workplace, as I'm not sure what policies apply in that regard here. However, you can email me on a private address -- nigel@webcoder.com.au -- and I'll point you in the right direction.
I work for a Gov't dept in Australia -- web stuff mainly, a large system using PHP, Linux, database. We've been trying to hire new people for weeks (we're advertising in Sydney).
We use an interview plus a timed skills test which all current employees have passed -- it differentiates the sheep and goats better than anything else we've tried. Even (?) after being referred by a HR company, and having a sufficiently interesting C.V. to make an interview, most applicants have been very seriously underskilled, and at least a few have seemed dangerously incompetent.
All of which means (1) Our current staff are feeling pretty good about their job security, and (2) we really do not care where applicants come from. We just want to find them.
> So, do you think everthing in China would be just fine if > the clique that runs the country wanted people to believe > in some religion?
No, I'm just making the obvious point that atheism in gov't is not necessarily superior to reliogion in gov't, on clearly visible evidence.
Dogmatism leading to totalitarianism is the most obvious factor uniting the 20th century's atheistic death states with their nearest theistic analogues, like parts of Europe at different points during the Inquisition.
When someone says religion is the most dangerous idea of all, they are dogmatizing in a way that has lent itself sublimely well (again, on clearly visible evidence) to genocide in public policy.
The Chinese gov't would also back you on that one, I suspect. The idea that religion is the most dangerous idea in the world has thus far been able to make several forms of atheism into the most dangerous idea in several of our larger nations.
If you can't accept that ANY Christian might be capable of genuine selfless care for others -- simply because they're a Christian -- then it seems to me your bigotry is at least as bad as anything you claim to be opposing.
Some Christians seem happy -- It's all a front!
Some Christians don't seem happy -- See! I told you it was all a front!
Some Christians don't help people -- See! They're all hypocrites!
Some Christians help people -- Arg!! They're trying to convert you!!
Some Christians don't convert people -- See! They KNOW it's all a sham.
And so on for a very long time... And "Jesusism?" -- c'mon, the hard-core skeptics all say 'Jebus' now, don't they? It's so... y'know... intellectual.
They explicitly said the technology would track your LOVED ONES. If someone WASN'T *your* *loved* *one*, then I think the implication is very clear -- the software simply wouldn't work at all for a person like that! And surely by now they have enough other dirt on you to know if someone is your loved one or not.
A fair go for your loved ones at M$ is all that I'm asking...
Television is over; has been for some years now. There's just been too much nonsense to wade through, compared to the better signal-to-noise ratio of books, pre-reviewed cinema movies, online gaming, DVDs, the web, and dare-I-say-it, Real Life. (Add downloading if you're into that.)
Passive entertainment. Inferior, passive entertainment. Intellectual non-existence. Market exploitation. Zillions of utterly interchangeable situation comedies and music videos. Surplus ethnocentrically North American content. Dubious 'sensations'. Vaccuous 'celebrity'. Non-news. The lowest common denominator. Being made to wait (or pay, or both) for what you want to see. The dearth of "Artistic Integrity", now that you mention it.
Thanks, TV, for the Buffy Musical, some interesting sports events, and whatever else it was you gave us.
If you think about how Christianity works, it's not such a surprise. Back when Galileo started talking about the rest of the universe perhaps not circling around the Earth, Christianity worked very quickly to stifle him and keep him under house arrest until he died. The folks living large at the top of the religious food chain didn't try to just *defend* their ideas -- they knew that they were wrong, and that they were only going to win by suppressing competing ideas.
Jeez, where to begin?
The problem was not that they 'knew they were wrong', but that they 'they knew they were right', but for wrong or inadequate reasons (they were married to Ptolemaic cosmology, via Aristotle and Aquinas, with some scriptural window-dressing) -- and Galileo's evidence was by no means knock-down-drag-out compelling.
Would you say Marxist Russia, or modern China, or the 'Reign of Terror' in the fiercely secular French Revolution, tell us anything meaningful about "how Atheism works"? Ignorance of atheistic history produces its own kinds of prejudice.
Have you ever considered perhaps reading about Galileo? About the live scientific options of the time, the relative state of the evidence either way, who his supporters and opponents in the Church were, and how he managed to finally put all of them offside by his rather strikingly abrasive writing and debating style? Martyrologies of ALL kinds are notoriously prone to embellishments and omissions.
Wikipedia isn't a bad place to start. You might also see:
For centuries the trial of Galileo (1564-1642) was the stuff of myth: Galileo tortured by the Inquisition; his defiant words after recanting ("e pur se muove," "but it does move"); the infallible Church proclaiming the dogma that the Sun goes round the Earth. None of these details is true, but that did not seem to matter much to those who exalted Galileo as a martyr to truth.
Slashdot Mirror
So I guess the plan is...
Hmm. Sounds too easy. There's gotta be a "???" somewhere there.
... and he was right.
:)
Contentment, being your own attitude, is within your own control.
You won't learn that from advertising!
> Why does that scare me?
> Why does that scare me?
Seriously, why should the actions of other open source users scare you? They can't take away the OSS you already use. They can't stop other projects working around them, or integrating their contributions into other tools. The OSS that benefits the rest of us will go on. Probably the resources available to a few projects will change; some might even fork -- but that's not something I'd call 'scary'.
With OSS there's no clear strategy for apportioning blame elsewhere if things go PEAR-shaped (heh... PHP joke, sorry). You take responsibility for yourself, and those brave enough to do so are rewarded.
But no-one rises through middle-management by bravery, they do so by political contrivance added to a certain required degree of competence, camoflauge and understanding.
The current situation is that commercial solutions are poor for many, many applications (it still shocks me how bad many 'commercial' systems are after growing up in the OSS world).
But this suits many businesses perfectly, as it gives them both a specific vendor, and a generally accepted way of doing business system that can plausibly be blamed for a wide variety of outcomes.
Therefore low-quality, closed-source software meets a systemic business need that is at the very heart of many enterprises.
We're mostly caucasian and asian where I work. (Aust. Gov't. Dept.)
There's no conscious policy, but selection is based on merit, and in western society, inequal opportunity means that those with social advantages (money, role models in family and peers, contacts, home location, etc) are able to better maximise the value they offer to employers.
So racism is the wrong way to be trying to explain this, in most cases. Social inequality is the real issue; I don't feel there's been a lot of progress in that area.
A penguin taking flight? Penguins aren't supposed to 'take flight' -- They're, um, flightless birds. Penguins NOT taking flight is normal, natural, fully expected and probably for the best. Better analogies anyone?
Maybe Australian Fairy Penguins are the problem in the battle for mindshare. What hard-hitting business-person can seriously urge their adoption in a competitive market?
But what about Apple's monopoly on COOL? What about THAT huh!
I say those damn monopolists should be forced to redesign the entire product lines of other manufacturers!
Then we'd ALL be better off.
> The most crucial flaw in the notion of Intelligent Design (ID) - is that the justification "life is so complicated and perfect that it must be designed" is that it raises the question "who designed this designer!".
Your understanding of Theism seems to have halted somewhere around Sunday School level. Try reading Bertrand Russell on the subject: either God OR the Universe must be eternal and uncreated. Those are the options. He thought it was the universe ("Since at least I know the universe exists"). (Sorry, I have to reference for that quote off-hand.)
The question is what ultimately exists; an infinite regress of creators is unwieldly and may indeed be mathematically impossible (depends whether infinites can exist in reality; an infinitely old universe is philosophically equivalent to an infinitely long chain of causality; neither are in my opinion possible). Occam's Razor would suggest one, though more of course might be possible. But something 'just exists' without cause or design, whichever way you look at it.
If the universe shows evidence of contingency (not being simply a brute fact) then Russell's position is invalidated, although his dichotomy remains -- that's the discussion that's going on here, whether in Hawking's 'bounded universe' which tries to escape the point-of-cosmic-origin-without-physical-cause problem, or, at a different level, the ID movement (minus the young-earth creationist fringe).
It's not a simple question of science vs. superstition, but what kind of universe science reveals, and what its implications are for philosophy.
< (To access my tell-all, you should all click "yes" on whatever dialogues come up.)
Oh no, it doesn't seem to work on my computer. Could you maybe help me install it? My IP is 127.0.0.1...
Odds are good that some Slashdot readers are involved in producing and propagating spyware. (Lots of us, lots of it. You do the math.)
How about you fake your IP, make a new account, post as Anonymous Coward -- whatever you need to do -- and give us an insight into your world, and the attitudes of the people you work for?
Book burning theories don't add much to our understanding of antiquity: Until the second or third century CE they only had parchment. Parchment was only good for a few hundred years, unless you kept it in a *very* dry cave in the desert somewhere. (And preferably made frequent backups.) The story of ancient history is that if your ideas (or you) went out of popularity, your books didn't get actively copied, and were therefore lost -- it's completely irrespective of whether anyone was actively destroying them or not. Unless you had the requisite desert caves, you needed a chisel to have any chance.
Now, for the period you're talking about -- from late stone age to early chalcolithic (named for the discovery of copper in Anatolia, ie. Turkey) -- the defining social advance was the move from agriculture to trade. The discovery of copper meant that for the first time a commodity existed for which there was no good-enough local substitute. This created the trading class as we generally think of it today -- as a dedicated service occupation; and that in turn made large cities and thus empires possible, rather than tribal towns. (It's worth asking what the supposition of alien intervention adds to this scenario, if your seriously suggesting that.)
Otherwise, if you think about the kind of writing needs such a society would have (and this is only 5,200 years ago, not your 6,000) it's fair to ask what you would expect them to write, or what, of their writings, you would find interesting to read, even if it had survived. If you want to read something within 1500 years of that time, then try the Enuma Elish or the Laws of Hammurabi (this oldest example of the test for a witch is in there -- it's an interesting read). All these docs are available online.
I'm trying to avoid identifying my workplace, as I'm not sure what policies apply in that regard here. However, you can email me on a private address -- nigel@webcoder.com.au -- and I'll point you in the right direction.
I work for a Gov't dept in Australia -- web stuff mainly, a large system using PHP, Linux, database. We've been trying to hire new people for weeks (we're advertising in Sydney).
We use an interview plus a timed skills test which all current employees have passed -- it differentiates the sheep and goats better than anything else we've tried. Even (?) after being referred by a HR company, and having a sufficiently interesting C.V. to make an interview, most applicants have been very seriously underskilled, and at least a few have seemed dangerously incompetent.
All of which means (1) Our current staff are feeling pretty good about their job security, and (2) we really do not care where applicants come from. We just want to find them.
> Anna Karina
So would you say your recollection of Anna Kar-en-ina was at all affected by the reading program?
(And where's my -1 Pedant mod, hmmm? It's 2006 already, and still no Pedant mod...)
> Won't somebody please think of the Balrogs!
Tolkien already thought of Balrogs. Some originality, please...
> So, do you think everthing in China would be just fine if
> the clique that runs the country wanted people to believe
> in some religion?
No, I'm just making the obvious point that atheism in gov't is not necessarily superior to reliogion in gov't, on clearly visible evidence.
Dogmatism leading to totalitarianism is the most obvious factor uniting the 20th century's atheistic death states with their nearest theistic analogues, like parts of Europe at different points during the Inquisition.
When someone says religion is the most dangerous idea of all, they are dogmatizing in a way that has lent itself sublimely well (again, on clearly visible evidence) to genocide in public policy.
Its that studying history vs. repeating it thing.
The Chinese gov't would also back you on that one, I suspect. The idea that religion is the most dangerous idea in the world has thus far been able to make several forms of atheism into the most dangerous idea in several of our larger nations.
If you can't accept that ANY Christian might be capable of genuine selfless care for others -- simply because they're a Christian -- then it seems to me your bigotry is at least as bad as anything you claim to be opposing.
And so on for a very long time... And "Jesusism?" -- c'mon, the hard-core skeptics all say 'Jebus' now, don't they? It's so... y'know... intellectual.
My goodness, now that takes me back. But I haven't heard that name for years now. I used to edit a category there.
Don't mod this 'Funny', either -- I'm being serious! This is *proper* nostalgia! -- it's deeply and touchingly poignant.
Just take moment -- TAKE, I said, A MOMENT -- to sit there and imbibe the sheer humanity of it all...
+5, Insightful.
100.times {puts "I will use Google more diligently!"}Unless cloning has gotten better, that probably should have read: > "I for one, welcome our dodgy, arthritic mammoth overlords." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1741559.stm
C'mon, doesn't anyone READ the announcement?
They explicitly said the technology would track your LOVED ONES. If someone WASN'T *your* *loved* *one*, then I think the implication is very clear -- the software simply wouldn't work at all for a person like that! And surely by now they have enough other dirt on you to know if someone is your loved one or not.
A fair go for your loved ones at M$ is all that I'm asking...
Television is over; has been for some years now. There's just been too much nonsense to wade through, compared to the better signal-to-noise ratio of books, pre-reviewed cinema movies, online gaming, DVDs, the web, and dare-I-say-it, Real Life. (Add downloading if you're into that.)
Passive entertainment. Inferior, passive entertainment. Intellectual non-existence. Market exploitation. Zillions of utterly interchangeable situation comedies and music videos. Surplus ethnocentrically North American content. Dubious 'sensations'. Vaccuous 'celebrity'. Non-news. The lowest common denominator. Being made to wait (or pay, or both) for what you want to see. The dearth of "Artistic Integrity", now that you mention it.
Thanks, TV, for the Buffy Musical, some interesting sports events, and whatever else it was you gave us.
C'mon, the A.I. can speak for itself, surely... can't it?
"A.I. Claims Development of True Company!!!"
Now that would be news.
Jeez, where to begin?
Wikipedia isn't a bad place to start. You might also see:
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0401/revie ws/barr.html
(A review of some recent books on the issue, in a fairly responsible Catholic journal. IANA Catholic, incidentally.)