The reason some people, myself included, do not like C++ is because it's *dissapointing*. It doesn't solve any of the real problems with C or other programming languages. So why *bother*?
On the topic of what motivates me, I work for a company that's gotten a lot of venture capital, has a lot of potential, and is beginning to show some signs of doing well. What motivates me is the hope of producing enough value to (a) repay the investors and let them show some happy profit, (b) keep my fellow group of employees, who I think are great, employed, and (c) keep me in fudgsicles, Buffy DVDs and shade (living in Arizona, one learns to value shade).
What does not motivate me is that idea that my work is significant - it's not. If I don't do it, someone else will. Or that my work is going to make the world a better place. My work earns me the money so that I can go out after work and try to make the world a better place. Some people are lucky enough to be able to do both at the same time, but it's fairly rare, and my experience has generally been that I can easily fool myself into thinking that my work is the most important thing in my life, and when I do that, the result is that I don't have a life. Something to avoid, obviously.
Right, 'cuz knowing this is _really_ going to help you to get along better with your wife. TBF, I think your best bet is to just proactively organize things in a way that's neat, but that may well be too much trouble.
Anyway, what does this have to do with the DNS?
BTW, Nominum's CNS product is a caching name server, so of course it's going to hose the averages - it's always going to be authoritative for zero zones. And I think it mostly lives behind firewalls, so you wouldn't be able to get a good count on the installed base, unfortunately. And one of ANS' real strengths is its ability to serve _really_ large domains efficiently. So once again, not going to look good when you're judging the product based on the deployed number of domains for which it's authoritative.
Er, people are _already_ filing patents on patches. In fact, that's the backbone of the patent system - most patents filed are on small tweaks to existing mechanisms.
It sounds like a total of two people are questioning this decision, which is a small number given how many people use savannah. I have rarely seen a controversy about GNU end so quickly - there were a total of about ten messages in the thread. There is always someone for whom any change is a big tragedy.
As to losing track of roots, maybe RMS is getting a little bit more pragmatic in his old age. It's all very well and good to say "we should do X" when you have the resources to do X, but if you don't have the resources to do X, then saying "we should do X" is just stupid.
After all, the teacher could just require that the student submit the paper electronically, and then submit the paper to the website him- or herself. And then, if it turned out that it was plagiarized, the teacher would have to initiate disciplinary action against the student.
Whereas, if the student submits the paper, and it turns out to be plagiarized, the student has an opportunity to rewrite it without any negative sanctions. If you _are_ a cheater, this sounds like a better deal. If you're _not_, I can see where it would be more than a little bit offensive.
So, a system that prevents people from cheating is good for you if it works, and if you are not cheating. Why? Because the people who cheated won't be counted in the average, and so your score will go up. It's bad for you if the people who cheated would have gotten good grades if they hadn't cheated, but how likely is that?
And in what sense is the site making money off this fellow's work? Are they selling it to other students to plagiarize? I'm guessing that what they're doing is making sure nobody else plagiarizes *his* work.
I don't want to belittle this fellow's feelings, but this really sounds like a case of angry testosterone syndrome - he's identified something, decided that it's an insult, and decided to fight it no matter what. Been there, done that. Hell, I did it yesterday when someone backed a change I made out of CVS. Getting pissed off didn't help. I'd feel more sympathy if, e.g., he'd submitted his paper and been falsely accused of plagiarizing.
It will be interesting to see what happens if this system sees wide use. At some point, at the level of undergraduate papers, it seems like it will inevitably start reporting false positives simply because there isn't really that much to say about any given topic, so once you have a couple of hundred papers on that topic, there's always going to be one paper that's enough like another that it will show up as plagiarism even though it's not.
Well, yes, but having a tiger by the tail is a lot more painful than having a penguin by the tail, unless the penguin's friends dogpile on you. Which, I suppose, is not a bad simile for what's happening. Nevermind.:')
...is the Motley Fool article. A lot of people on Wall Street pay attention to them, or pay attention to people who pay attention to them. And they've said, pretty unequivocally, that things are looking very bad for SCO. That's not going to do nice things to SCO's stock price.
Well, we'll see, of course. Past performance does not guarantee future results, et cetera...
No one sits down and plans this stuff out. It just happens because one person does their small little job and the next person takes their work and adds their small little job, and after a lot of people work together something bigger happens.
Exactly. It's a systemic problem. So thinking of it as if there's someone conspiring to make it happen cripples your ability to respond to it - you go looking for a scapegoat, and there are plenty of likely suspects, and you bog down on that and never actually solve or even address the real problem.
Funding for welfare, etc, isn't designed to wipe out poverty or mitigate its effects. It's designed to perpetuate poverty, because a permanent underclass of non-producing food tubes dependent upon the government to steal wealth from the producing food-tubes can be relied upon to always support the government.
Conspiracy theories are great fun, of course, but I'm skeptical that there's any cohesive force acting to make anything like this happen. It sounds like there is from time to time, and I'm sure there are people who do actually make it their goal to make this happen. But they're isolated idiots, not a vast global conspiracy.
No, it's designed to purchase some people's votes with other people's money. The art of governmet consists of taking money from those who aren't going to vote for you anyway, and using those fund to purchase votes.
Actually, the current political system suggests that it's more cost effective to buy votes using disinformation than it is to buy votes using bread and circuses. The evidence for this is that the current administration is sucking up to the people who can give them money to buy disinformation, not the people who can give them votes (assuming, as you imply, that the poor are a sufficiently large percentage of the population to win a popular vote, which I'm not convinced is the case).
Funding for welfare, etc., isn't designed to wipe out poverty. You can't wipe out poverty. It's designed to mitigate the damage caused by poverty, to wit, lawlessness, public health (poverty makes life dangerous for everybody) and human suffering (and it's no fun).
Taking money away from those programs to pay to go to space is dangerous. That's not to say we shouldn't pay to go to space - the question is which budget to cut, and my point is that cutting public service and public assistance budgets isn't likely to be cost effective.
The place to cut is in military spending. The war in Iraq would have paid for a lot of space travel, unfortunately it paid for blowing up buildings instead. We have lots of highly specialized weapons that are very expensive - millions of dollars per explosion. Military aircraft are not built using standard parts. Everything is custom. So everything is brutally expensive. Cut back on the custom nature of this hardware, and you'd save a lot of money. Cut back on unilateral foreign wars, and you'd save even more.
We could also eliminate a lot of special-interest tax loopholes that Bush introduced in his "tax cut." But for some reason, it's always public services and public aid that get cut, not corporate welfare, and not military spending.
I'll tell you how I feel about it. I feel like I get to pay about one two-hundred-and-fiftieth of my salary every year for some really nice software that Just Works (that's MacOS X + iLife). This is software that I use literally every day. Software that's a joy to use. Software that *works*.
The latest iLife solves one of my big gripes about the previous version (not enough compression options), gives me a new app that I think will be very useful to me (GarageBand), and costs less than just about any other software package I've ever purchased.
Those bastards! How dare they actually charge me money for this stuff?!?
That's a little bit of a slur against the Amish - for better or for worse, their restrictions are carefully thought out, and never done as a full employment act that takes from one person and gives to another.
A better example might be a railway union lawyer, although personally I love trains and am sorry that so many railway jobs were lost over the course of the previous century.
IPv6 has working link-local addresses. Right now this probably doesn't mean much, but I think it will as time goes on and people get tired of IPv4 link local addresses.
IPv6 allows you to have more than one public IP address on your home network. You can go through an IPv6 tunnel broker to make your IPv6 network visible to the world.
IPv6 isn't necessarily that far in the future in the U.S. For example, Speakeasy is claiming that they'll have IPv6 rolled out sometime in the March timeframe. I don't know how realistic that is, but it's certainly one of the reasons I'm sticking with Speakeasy - they seem to really have a clue.:']
The ability to say that something is true is too useful to give up just because we can't know the objective truth. And that's really my entire point. We will make mistakes... but that's what we humans do. We shouldn't seek to make no mistakes, but rather to make few of them.
My point is not that we shouldn't say that things are true. It's that we should understand what we mean when we say it.
I agree. It is wrong to kill. But it isn't an objective truth. Indeed, it is sometimes even necessary to kill. "Wrong", like "good", doesn't really exist except as a concept in our minds, so it can't be one.
Right, you are able to come up with an excuse for why it's okay to kill in some cases.:') You're avoiding the extreme of believing in objective truth, but you've fallen into the other extreme of believing that because there is no objective truth, there is no right and wrong. This extreme is just as absurd as the other.
BTW, in case you hadn't figured it out by now, I'm also an atheist. The lack of a God to take care of us means we're ultimately responsible for what we do - it doesn't absolve us of responsibility.
I know that wasn't your point - I'm just encouraging you to go deeper, and not just discount this kind of thinking as useless and sophomoric.
If your definition of "objectively true" is "agreed upon by the majority", then it is objectively true. It's just that that's not what I mean when I say "objectively true".
What I mean when I say objectively true is that a thing is the way it is in a way that does not depend on the observer to agree that it is a certain way. So you might say that the law of gravity is objective in that sense - whether or not the brick falls doesn't depend on who's looking at it.
Well, then I'll point out another fallacy. It does matter whether or not we understand what we mean when we say that something is good. If we don't understand, we make mistakes. It's very simple. In the case of McDonalds, if I think that it is an objective, provable fact that their hamburgers are good food, that is going to result in me reacting in a certain way to anybody who says something that contradicts this fact.
Maybe a better example is religious fundamentalism. The idea with religious fundamentalism is that what's written in the book is the literal truth, which anybody can see to be true, and which is not subject to interpretation. So the idea is that the book codifies objective truth. But of course it doesn't, as witness the multiple, contradictory books that are claimed to have this quality. People kill other people using these contradictions as justification. So you see it's not just an academic issue.
Yet at the same time, these books do codify truths. It really is wrong to kill, for example. I don't know if I'd say that's an objective truth, but it's certainly hard to argue it as a general principle, even if you can come up with examples that appear to be exceptions (the conquistadors were nominally Christians, for example, and came up with excuses not to follow the Ten Commandments because they wanted gold in addition to salvation).
So the question of objective versus subjective truth is not just an academic question, if we want to live out our lives without getting any bamboo stuck under our fingernails. Your way of looking at things is great if you're lucky and nobody wants to stick bamboo under your fingernails, of course.
Objective means not dependent on the observation of a subject. Subjective means dependent on the observation of a subject. "Good" is subjective, because it depends on the observation of a subject - a thing is neither good nor bad except in relationship to an observer who sees it as good or bad.
To look at something objectively is to try to see it without it being colored by our judgement - to see the things about it that about which any competent observer would agree.
"Good" is a judgement. So yes, as I said in my previous message, it's nonsensical to say "McDonalds' hamburgers are objectively good" because "good" and "objective" are mutually contradictory. But this was your assertion, not mine.
As for "looking at the facts objectively", by the definitions I'm using, you can do that. Presumably any competent observer would see the same facts. So you can make an objective statistical argument, in that sense.
To say that "since the majority of people who try McDonald's hamburgers like them, then everyone should" is not a fair statement. To say that, "since the majority of people who try McDonald's hamburgers like them, then the possibility you will like them too, is very good." That's an objective statement bore out of concrete facts.
I think I see where we are disagreeing. McDonalds' hamburgers are not objectively good. That's just nonsensical. You could make the argument that the statement "based on these statistics we have collected, there is a 75% chance that you will like a McDonalds' hamburger" is an objective statement. But that's not the same thing as saying "McDonalds' hamburgers are objectively good."
You're confusing good with perfect. Opionion is ever divided, and not black and white. That doesn't mean that some things are not objectively and universally true.
Here you're claiming that there is an objective piece of music. This may be true, but it is a piece of music that neither observer experiences. Each observer experiences a piece of music that is colored by things like where they are sitting relative to the performers, how good their hearing is, and, perhaps most importantly, their state of mind.
So you can argue that the objective piece of music exists, but I challenge you to affirmatively prove that it exists, other than by the implication that both observers experience a piece of music related to it.
Then it sounds like you're saying that McDonald's hamburgers are objectively good. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a rather outrageous statement?
If what you are really saying is that a lot of people are having a common subjective experience that McDonalds' hamburgers are good, then you still haven't described objective reality - you've just described a subjective reality about which a lot of individual observers happen to agree.
That is, you are not disagreeing that the experience of McDonalds hamburgers is subjective. You're just collecting data on how many people have one experience, and how many have another. Which is certainly interesting, but basically irrelevent to the discussion at hand.
The whole point of presenting the paradox is that you can then attack it logically and learn stuff from it, which you have done. However, I think you've arrived at too pat of an answer.
The problem is really with the idea of objectivity, not with the idea of communication. Objectivity is a theoretical ideal, but there's really no way to confirm that there is such a thing as an objective truth - the best we can do is to claim that there is, because there is no evidence to contradict its existence.
So then the question about communication is, when I have an idea and I want to communicate it to you, and I in fact try to communicate it to you, and I get back some confirmation that you've understood the idea, what has happened?
Was it the case that there was some kind of objective idea that I understood, and then I undertook to make you understand it, and then both my mind and yours had a referent to the same objective idea? Or was it the case that I had a subjective idea, and I attempted to describe it to you, and you understood an idea based on what I described, and that my idea and your idea were not in fact the same idea?
I'm not claiming to answer that question - I'm just raising it. I'm not convinced that it's even important to answer the question. The point is to consider the question, and to let that consideration color your understanding of the nature of communication. If you do not consider the question, you are likely to make the default assumption, which is that communication is about objective truths.
This is likely to cause trouble - if I think that I am talking about an objective truth with you, and you don't experience this truth the way I do, then at least for truths that matter, it's likely that our failure to agree, in combination with my misunderstanding of what has happened, is going to result in me being pissed off at you, or discounting what you say, or the like, with greater or lesser harmful results coming from that.
Subjective means dependent on the observer. Objective means not dependent on the observer. In order for something to be objectively true, *every* observer that experienced it would have to experience it the same way.
What you are saying is that it is possible to learn how to appreciate something, and that having learned to appreciate it, you will be able to tell good examples of the thing from bad examples of the thing, and you will tend to agree with others who also understand how to appreciate things of that class. That doesn't mean the thing is objectively a certain way - it just means that you and the other people have all learned a common way of experiencing the thing.
In order for, e.g., Bach to be objectively good, it would have to be the case that every person who heard a good example of his music would immediately be transported by it. But even among true aficianados of baroque music, I think you would be hard pressed to find a Bach composition that they all agreed was good, much less one that they would all agree was his best composition. This, Bach's compositions are subjectively good, not objectively good.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason some people, myself included, do not like C++ is because it's *dissapointing*. It doesn't solve any of the real problems with C or other programming languages. So why *bother*?
On the topic of what motivates me, I work for a company that's gotten a lot of venture capital, has a lot of potential, and is beginning to show some signs of doing well. What motivates me is the hope of producing enough value to (a) repay the investors and let them show some happy profit, (b) keep my fellow group of employees, who I think are great, employed, and (c) keep me in fudgsicles, Buffy DVDs and shade (living in Arizona, one learns to value shade).
What does not motivate me is that idea that my work is significant - it's not. If I don't do it, someone else will. Or that my work is going to make the world a better place. My work earns me the money so that I can go out after work and try to make the world a better place. Some people are lucky enough to be able to do both at the same time, but it's fairly rare, and my experience has generally been that I can easily fool myself into thinking that my work is the most important thing in my life, and when I do that, the result is that I don't have a life. Something to avoid, obviously.
Right, 'cuz knowing this is _really_ going to help you to get along better with your wife. TBF, I think your best bet is to just proactively organize things in a way that's neat, but that may well be too much trouble.
Anyway, what does this have to do with the DNS?
BTW, Nominum's CNS product is a caching name server, so of course it's going to hose the averages - it's always going to be authoritative for zero zones. And I think it mostly lives behind firewalls, so you wouldn't be able to get a good count on the installed base, unfortunately. And one of ANS' real strengths is its ability to serve _really_ large domains efficiently. So once again, not going to look good when you're judging the product based on the deployed number of domains for which it's authoritative.
Er, people are _already_ filing patents on patches. In fact, that's the backbone of the patent system - most patents filed are on small tweaks to existing mechanisms.
It sounds like a total of two people are questioning this decision, which is a small number given how many people use savannah. I have rarely seen a controversy about GNU end so quickly - there were a total of about ten messages in the thread. There is always someone for whom any change is a big tragedy.
As to losing track of roots, maybe RMS is getting a little bit more pragmatic in his old age. It's all very well and good to say "we should do X" when you have the resources to do X, but if you don't have the resources to do X, then saying "we should do X" is just stupid.
71077345, d00d!
Remember when the HP-41C came out and ruined all our fun?
After all, the teacher could just require that the student submit the paper electronically, and then submit the paper to the website him- or herself. And then, if it turned out that it was plagiarized, the teacher would have to initiate disciplinary action against the student.
Whereas, if the student submits the paper, and it turns out to be plagiarized, the student has an opportunity to rewrite it without any negative sanctions. If you _are_ a cheater, this sounds like a better deal. If you're _not_, I can see where it would be more than a little bit offensive.
So, a system that prevents people from cheating is good for you if it works, and if you are not cheating. Why? Because the people who cheated won't be counted in the average, and so your score will go up. It's bad for you if the people who cheated would have gotten good grades if they hadn't cheated, but how likely is that?
And in what sense is the site making money off this fellow's work? Are they selling it to other students to plagiarize? I'm guessing that what they're doing is making sure nobody else plagiarizes *his* work.
I don't want to belittle this fellow's feelings, but this really sounds like a case of angry testosterone syndrome - he's identified something, decided that it's an insult, and decided to fight it no matter what. Been there, done that. Hell, I did it yesterday when someone backed a change I made out of CVS. Getting pissed off didn't help. I'd feel more sympathy if, e.g., he'd submitted his paper and been falsely accused of plagiarizing.
It will be interesting to see what happens if this system sees wide use. At some point, at the level of undergraduate papers, it seems like it will inevitably start reporting false positives simply because there isn't really that much to say about any given topic, so once you have a couple of hundred papers on that topic, there's always going to be one paper that's enough like another that it will show up as plagiarism even though it's not.
> Linux is a Penguin, not a tiger!
:')
Well, yes, but having a tiger by the tail is a lot more painful than having a penguin by the tail, unless the penguin's friends dogpile on you. Which, I suppose, is not a bad simile for what's happening. Nevermind.
...is the Motley Fool article. A lot of people on Wall Street pay attention to them, or pay attention to people who pay attention to them. And they've said, pretty unequivocally, that things are looking very bad for SCO. That's not going to do nice things to SCO's stock price.
Well, we'll see, of course. Past performance does not guarantee future results, et cetera...
Conspiracy theories are great fun, of course, but I'm skeptical that there's any cohesive force acting to make anything like this happen. It sounds like there is from time to time, and I'm sure there are people who do actually make it their goal to make this happen. But they're isolated idiots, not a vast global conspiracy.
Actually, the current political system suggests that it's more cost effective to buy votes using disinformation than it is to buy votes using bread and circuses. The evidence for this is that the current administration is sucking up to the people who can give them money to buy disinformation, not the people who can give them votes (assuming, as you imply, that the poor are a sufficiently large percentage of the population to win a popular vote, which I'm not convinced is the case).
Funding for welfare, etc., isn't designed to wipe out poverty. You can't wipe out poverty. It's designed to mitigate the damage caused by poverty, to wit, lawlessness, public health (poverty makes life dangerous for everybody) and human suffering (and it's no fun).
Taking money away from those programs to pay to go to space is dangerous. That's not to say we shouldn't pay to go to space - the question is which budget to cut, and my point is that cutting public service and public assistance budgets isn't likely to be cost effective.
The place to cut is in military spending. The war in Iraq would have paid for a lot of space travel, unfortunately it paid for blowing up buildings instead. We have lots of highly specialized weapons that are very expensive - millions of dollars per explosion. Military aircraft are not built using standard parts. Everything is custom. So everything is brutally expensive. Cut back on the custom nature of this hardware, and you'd save a lot of money. Cut back on unilateral foreign wars, and you'd save even more.
We could also eliminate a lot of special-interest tax loopholes that Bush introduced in his "tax cut." But for some reason, it's always public services and public aid that get cut, not corporate welfare, and not military spending.
Sigh.
I'll tell you how I feel about it. I feel like I get to pay about one two-hundred-and-fiftieth of my salary every year for some really nice software that Just Works (that's MacOS X + iLife). This is software that I use literally every day. Software that's a joy to use. Software that *works*.
The latest iLife solves one of my big gripes about the previous version (not enough compression options), gives me a new app that I think will be very useful to me (GarageBand), and costs less than just about any other software package I've ever purchased.
Those bastards! How dare they actually charge me money for this stuff?!?
That's a little bit of a slur against the Amish - for better or for worse, their restrictions are carefully thought out, and never done as a full employment act that takes from one person and gives to another.
A better example might be a railway union lawyer, although personally I love trains and am sorry that so many railway jobs were lost over the course of the previous century.
IPv6 has working link-local addresses. Right now this probably doesn't mean much, but I think it will as time goes on and people get tired of IPv4 link local addresses.
:']
IPv6 allows you to have more than one public IP address on your home network. You can go through an IPv6 tunnel broker to make your IPv6 network visible to the world.
IPv6 isn't necessarily that far in the future in the U.S. For example, Speakeasy is claiming that they'll have IPv6 rolled out sometime in the March timeframe. I don't know how realistic that is, but it's certainly one of the reasons I'm sticking with Speakeasy - they seem to really have a clue.
My point is not that we shouldn't say that things are true. It's that we should understand what we mean when we say it.Right, you are able to come up with an excuse for why it's okay to kill in some cases.
BTW, in case you hadn't figured it out by now, I'm also an atheist. The lack of a God to take care of us means we're ultimately responsible for what we do - it doesn't absolve us of responsibility.
I know that wasn't your point - I'm just encouraging you to go deeper, and not just discount this kind of thinking as useless and sophomoric.
If your definition of "objectively true" is "agreed upon by the majority", then it is objectively true. It's just that that's not what I mean when I say "objectively true".
What I mean when I say objectively true is that a thing is the way it is in a way that does not depend on the observer to agree that it is a certain way. So you might say that the law of gravity is objective in that sense - whether or not the brick falls doesn't depend on who's looking at it.
Well, then I'll point out another fallacy. It does matter whether or not we understand what we mean when we say that something is good. If we don't understand, we make mistakes. It's very simple. In the case of McDonalds, if I think that it is an objective, provable fact that their hamburgers are good food, that is going to result in me reacting in a certain way to anybody who says something that contradicts this fact.
Maybe a better example is religious fundamentalism. The idea with religious fundamentalism is that what's written in the book is the literal truth, which anybody can see to be true, and which is not subject to interpretation. So the idea is that the book codifies objective truth. But of course it doesn't, as witness the multiple, contradictory books that are claimed to have this quality. People kill other people using these contradictions as justification. So you see it's not just an academic issue.
Yet at the same time, these books do codify truths. It really is wrong to kill, for example. I don't know if I'd say that's an objective truth, but it's certainly hard to argue it as a general principle, even if you can come up with examples that appear to be exceptions (the conquistadors were nominally Christians, for example, and came up with excuses not to follow the Ten Commandments because they wanted gold in addition to salvation).
So the question of objective versus subjective truth is not just an academic question, if we want to live out our lives without getting any bamboo stuck under our fingernails. Your way of looking at things is great if you're lucky and nobody wants to stick bamboo under your fingernails, of course.
Objective means not dependent on the observation of a subject. Subjective means dependent on the observation of a subject. "Good" is subjective, because it depends on the observation of a subject - a thing is neither good nor bad except in relationship to an observer who sees it as good or bad.
To look at something objectively is to try to see it without it being colored by our judgement - to see the things about it that about which any competent observer would agree.
"Good" is a judgement. So yes, as I said in my previous message, it's nonsensical to say "McDonalds' hamburgers are objectively good" because "good" and "objective" are mutually contradictory. But this was your assertion, not mine.
As for "looking at the facts objectively", by the definitions I'm using, you can do that. Presumably any competent observer would see the same facts. So you can make an objective statistical argument, in that sense.
I think I see where we are disagreeing. McDonalds' hamburgers are not objectively good. That's just nonsensical. You could make the argument that the statement "based on these statistics we have collected, there is a 75% chance that you will like a McDonalds' hamburger" is an objective statement. But that's not the same thing as saying "McDonalds' hamburgers are objectively good."
Here you're claiming that there is an objective piece of music. This may be true, but it is a piece of music that neither observer experiences. Each observer experiences a piece of music that is colored by things like where they are sitting relative to the performers, how good their hearing is, and, perhaps most importantly, their state of mind.
So you can argue that the objective piece of music exists, but I challenge you to affirmatively prove that it exists, other than by the implication that both observers experience a piece of music related to it.
Then it sounds like you're saying that McDonald's hamburgers are objectively good. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a rather outrageous statement?
If what you are really saying is that a lot of people are having a common subjective experience that McDonalds' hamburgers are good, then you still haven't described objective reality - you've just described a subjective reality about which a lot of individual observers happen to agree.
That is, you are not disagreeing that the experience of McDonalds hamburgers is subjective. You're just collecting data on how many people have one experience, and how many have another. Which is certainly interesting, but basically irrelevent to the discussion at hand.
The whole point of presenting the paradox is that you can then attack it logically and learn stuff from it, which you have done. However, I think you've arrived at too pat of an answer.
The problem is really with the idea of objectivity, not with the idea of communication. Objectivity is a theoretical ideal, but there's really no way to confirm that there is such a thing as an objective truth - the best we can do is to claim that there is, because there is no evidence to contradict its existence.
So then the question about communication is, when I have an idea and I want to communicate it to you, and I in fact try to communicate it to you, and I get back some confirmation that you've understood the idea, what has happened?
Was it the case that there was some kind of objective idea that I understood, and then I undertook to make you understand it, and then both my mind and yours had a referent to the same objective idea? Or was it the case that I had a subjective idea, and I attempted to describe it to you, and you understood an idea based on what I described, and that my idea and your idea were not in fact the same idea?
I'm not claiming to answer that question - I'm just raising it. I'm not convinced that it's even important to answer the question. The point is to consider the question, and to let that consideration color your understanding of the nature of communication. If you do not consider the question, you are likely to make the default assumption, which is that communication is about objective truths.
This is likely to cause trouble - if I think that I am talking about an objective truth with you, and you don't experience this truth the way I do, then at least for truths that matter, it's likely that our failure to agree, in combination with my misunderstanding of what has happened, is going to result in me being pissed off at you, or discounting what you say, or the like, with greater or lesser harmful results coming from that.
Subjective means dependent on the observer. Objective means not dependent on the observer. In order for something to be objectively true, *every* observer that experienced it would have to experience it the same way.
What you are saying is that it is possible to learn how to appreciate something, and that having learned to appreciate it, you will be able to tell good examples of the thing from bad examples of the thing, and you will tend to agree with others who also understand how to appreciate things of that class. That doesn't mean the thing is objectively a certain way - it just means that you and the other people have all learned a common way of experiencing the thing.
In order for, e.g., Bach to be objectively good, it would have to be the case that every person who heard a good example of his music would immediately be transported by it. But even among true aficianados of baroque music, I think you would be hard pressed to find a Bach composition that they all agreed was good, much less one that they would all agree was his best composition. This, Bach's compositions are subjectively good, not objectively good.