Yes, you're right, I'm definately in the eat to live camp.
Just as an example, in addition to the prep time your pasta sauce adds one sautee pan, one chopping board, one chopping knife and one garlic press additional washing up (about double the washing up load). It also requires presence during an additional 10 minutes - although the pasta itself takes only 10 minutes to cook it does not require presence in the kitchen except to transfer boiling water from kettle to pot.
So in total we're looking at around double the trouble or more to prepare the meal with a home prepared pasta sauce as opposed to the pre-prepared one, not counting the additional shopping time and effort in selecting and buying the ingredients. I believe the stir in sauce to be more healty than not, and is passably tasty, so my home made sauce would have to be pretty damn delicious and be noticably better for me to be wothwhile. I just don't think it is.
It's another matter altogether if you enjoy cooking, and find preparing a pasta sauce a rewarding task to undertake, I suppose.
From the other side of the argument, what I am looking for in a meal is an absolute minimum inconvenience in re-fueling. There are three types of eating, snacking, meals, and special occasions. For this argument lets ignore snacking for the moment, although there are similarities. Special Occasions are typically with others, going out for a meal in a restaurant, throwing a dinner party, dating, or so on. For special occasions, sure I'd go to a nice restaurant, or put in some time into cooking something nice, but neither are things I'd want to do every day.
For a normal, every day meal, the aims I have to balance are: Time, Effort, and Planning Required, Percieved Delta Health, Taste, and to a lesser degree, Cost.
Cooking a proper meal is just not going to cut it, the amount of time and effort involved is in no way competitive, and for fresh ingredients the planning element lets it down too. Boiling up some pasta and adding a stir in sauce scores pretty highly in all categories (and is in fact my usual meal). It's not that I can't cook, I just don't find it fun, so I don't do it unless there's a good reason to.
When in town, or away from home, fast food restaurants clearly also score very highly, with the single exception of the percieved delta health. If someone would make a fast food restaurant which served food that was percieved to be healthy, or at least not unhealthy, it could do very well. It would have to keep the other important features, though:
Quick - time to food should be less than 5 minutes (Time) Consistent - Once I'm used to the chain I should be able to know what I'm ordering before I enter the restaurant, anywhere in the world, and not have to spend effort parsing the menu and making decisions. (Effort) Ubiquitous - If I know that there will always be one of these restaurants around, I don't need to plan where I will eat (Planning) Tasty Food - Healthy food has a tendency to be unpleasent to eat, because it can afford to be less attractive in other ways if it has a strong health benefit to offset this. So for the restaurant to compete, the food would have to be tasty as well as healthy. (Taste) Easy Food - Fast food can typically be shovelled in indiscriminately, without needing any attention paid to it. (Effort) Inexpensive - If its competing against fast food restaurants, its can't be much more expensive. (Cost)
I hope this helps give you some insight into why at least some people eat in fast food places.
What you can't do is release your client under GPL v3, then prevent people from modifying it (by denying them access to the server if it is modified). This seems to be entirely reasonable to me - if you don't want people modifying your software, then GPL (and probably open-source in general) is not the license for you!
You can still ban abusive players based on their behaviour. If they are spamming some action, ban them. It doesn't matter if they are spamming it by sitting in front of the official client hitting the button, have a trained monkey hitting the button, or modified the source to make the button auto-repeat until un-clicked.
As GM or otherwise, you can kick or ban whoever you like for whatever reason you want. What you can't to is remotely attest that they are running an unmodified version of your client, if you are distributing your client under GPL3.
There is no hard identity, only fuzzy identity. There is that which is more, and less, 'you'. When you were 4 years old, were you 'you'? How about when you were drunk and can't even remember what 'you' did? Emotionally or physically traumatised people can change their personalities out of all recognition, do they remain with the same identity?
For those of us who are still quite young, how well do you identify with the mind which will inhabit your body at age 70? Will it share your tastes, your desires, your values? If you are lucky, it will remember you, and not curse you for smoking, not taking care of your joints, or whatever the complaint of the day might be.
If you are suspended and later resumed, or copied and re-implemented in a new medium, you are as much 'you' as you decide to be. If there are two of you, that isn't a problem either, except for pragmatic issues you both will have to thrash out, such as division of the previous legal identity (which is a hard identity) and creation of two new ones.
"Thank you, mysterious heros - the value of the gemerald you saved is slightly greater than the cost of the damage you caused to this mueseum. A net gain for our great city!"
Yeah, I had one of those belkin KVM's too. Had an optical mouse with the sensor taped over plugged into it to stop the beeping.
It seems that Belkin have finally realised what a silly idea it was though, and relesed a "No Keyboard" firmware which should sort the problem out. Unfortunately flashing the firmware on one of these things is a pain in the ass, but if you are getting the beeping you might be motivated enough.
Yes, I did mean the Windows version, I should have mentioned that in my post. I can't speak for the Mac version, I haven't used it.
I've looked for the option to disable the run at startup thing, but have not been able to find it anywhere in the preferences for the player or for quicktime. Perhaps it was an install option, but I am usually thorough in looking through installer choices (including managing to get QuickTime without having to install iTunes, heh), and would certainly not have enabled it if it was an option.
My point about forcing you to use a specific player is that QuickTime the player should be decoupled from QuickTime the format. If they think they can write a decent media player to compete with WMP, Winamp and others, then more power to them, but it should have to compete on its own merits.
The codec for playing QuickTime should be distributed as a codec, so QuickTime files can be played in the users preference of media player. I'm sure it isn't beyond them to write a codec that overlays or pops up nag screens if irritating their users is part of the design spec.
Exactly the same argument applies to RealPlayer, they are just as bad. Worse, in fact, as their player is even more annoying. I think Windows Media provides codecs that allow them to be played in other players? I may be wrong about this, I rarely encounter Windows Media encoded files, and am currently using WMP as my day to day player.
* Puts something in the registry to run at startup. Not sure what it is supposed to be doing, but fairly sure I don't want it to be doing it. * Shows a nag-screen offering me the exciting opportunity to "go pro", and send them some money. * Doesn't let me play in full screen. * And number one most important irritation: Isn't my player of choice. I should not be forced to use a specific player to play their media format. Quicktime video and audio should play in the player I use for playing everything else in, be that WMP, Winamp, or whatever.
Agreed that it isn't quite as annoying as RealPlayer, though.
It's only one more datapoint, but personally I hate the MacOS UI. I don't care how many studies might have shown differently, having a menu bar right up at the top of the screen rather than on the window I'm using is just awkward.
I don't like the software that stays running after I've closed its window. I don't like the oversized dock bar. I don't like the emphasis on prettiness rather than functionality.
I hate QuickTime on Windows with a passion, and having to use it to watch online content (such as film trailers) is a continual source of irritation to me.
Apple UI in general feels like those bundled apps that come with hardware like scanners, cd burners etc. with all big buttons, irritating overfamiliar friendliness and a tendancy to get in the way of doing anything even slightly outside the pre-approved paths.
Clearly YMMV, as there are demonstrably hordes of people who love this sort of UI, but as you asked how someone can be a Mac hater, here it is.
Important to whom, or what? I don't see how something can be objectively 'important' without it having a subject.
I think that, implied in your post, you mean that human beings are important to a God that created them. While this may be 'more satisfying' to you, it is circular to argue that humans must be purposefully created (through evolution or otherwise) as they are important to the thing that purposefully created them.
Your difficulty with the contingency of history stems from the assumption that there is something special about humans as an endpoint of it all. I can't see any reason to believe that there is.
Yeah, I'd love an up to date Psion too, although I preferred the Revo to the Series 5. Eventually I settled for an HTC Universal, which has the right form factor, including keyboard. Might be worth a look for you too:
It's good, but it's not good enough. You have to be skilled to set it up well to start with, and the skimming through spam subjects looking for false positives is a problem too. You requested the checkboxes, here they are:
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck (x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a fascist for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
OK, let me be a little more specific. I am agnostic about a 'god' that can have no effect on me or the world around me. Are there concious entities that exist outside the universe and could observe us? Possibly. (According to some intersting simulated reality arguments I've heard, even probably!)
But this is not what I mean when I say I don't believe god exists; the god I mean there is one that cares about what we think and do, and can interact with the world around us as it pleases. It is the experience of things happening without a supernatural entity affecting them that leads me to the conclusion that there is no supernatural entity that affects things.
The problem with having a "who cares", and "it really doesn't matter" attitude, for me, is when people start to say it does matter - "Don't do this, or god will punish you." "You must do this, God wills it." "It doesn't matter what you do to them, they are unbelievers." and so on. At that point, I care.
Interesting, I like the radio waves analogy, by the way.
About the choices, belief and disbelief, and suspension of disbelief, OK, I take your point, suspension of belief is more rational given absence of data either way.
Let me try an analogy, a friend of mine has a pot of paint, and asks me about my beliefs as to the paint within it. With no evidence as to the colour of the paint, I suspend any sort of belief as to whether it is, say matt red, or glossy blue, for example. But still lacking any evidence, I do believe it is not red and blue polka dots. If my friend were to open the pot, and it looked red and blue polka-dotted, I would *still* not believe that was truly the colour of the paint, and rather that it was a trick being played on me. If he then proceeded to dip a brush in it and paint a stroke of red and blue polka-dot pattern onto the back of my hand, I would finally need to re-evaluate my initial beliefs about paint!
Similarly, if God were to appear before me, and offer undeniable proof of his existence, then my current belief that there is no such thing, and no such event could happen, will have been proved wrong. That doesn't mean that it is an irrational or non-logical conclusion to reach at this time.
Let me have a look at the radio waves again, now. If, as an ancient, I was told that there was some magical way of nearly instantly sending pictures and voices across huge distances, then I would not believe it. This proves that it is possible to make true things sound unbelievable if you want to. If, as an ancient, television were demonstrated to me, I would believe in it. Or, if I had sufficient intelligence, I could be brought up to speed with physics through incremental steps that I could understand and believe, and believe at least in the possibility of television, even if it were not actually demonstrated to me.
By this analogy, someone saying to me currently, "There is a god, a conciousness outside nature, but which observes and interacts with it, but that you can't directly observe or interact with in any way" (as a basis. Different gods have different claims made for them, but this seems to be a fairly common ground), elicits the same disbelief as the modern man intentionally making television sound impossible to an ancient. The difference is, despite what would appear to be huge motivation, no-one has been able to either demonstrate or explain god. So, if god can be demonstrated to me, I would believe in him. If an explanation for how god could exist, I would believe in the possibility of one.
As for the scientific approach, I have been educated in physics myself, to university level. I don't believe that atheism is a scientific approach, because science has nothing to say about a hypothesis that cannot be tested. It is, however, a logical or rational approach to the question, though.
In conclusion, then, my point is that we never deal with absolute certainties, but when something is unlikely enough, it can be considered not true for all practical purposes. It is not certain that the back of my neck hasn't just turned blue, but it is unlikley enough that I can very strongly believe that it has not.
From my reading of those articles, Agnosticism would be admitting that there may be a god, or there may not, but I don't know. That's not what I was trying to describe.
Regardless of my personal position, the point I was trying to make was to answer your "no evidence one way or another" point. It seems clear to me that the logical position of not having evidence one way or another is to assume disbelief rather than belief.
If you have no evidence for it, why would you believe something so outlandish?
Now the separate question of whether there is evidence or not, that we are not touching on here, and it is this evidence that drives my personal atheism, and doubtless other's belief.
As an atheist, I do not so much believe that god doesn't exist, as not believe that god *does* exist. There is a difference. No evidence is required to not believe something exists unless it is to counter evidence that it does. There are many things I don't believe exist without evidence one way or another.
For example, I don't believe there is an invisible pixie that floats above my head, called Gerald. I have no evidence that there isn't one, but nor do I require any.
I have yet to find any convincing evidence for a god, and so find no reason to believe in one.
OK, let me try just one more time then. I was not intending to make straw men, but in every situation you presented there is more there, affecting the balance, than might be apparent at first glance.
In essence, my argument is that, with perfect knowledge about consequences, there should be an objectively overall best course of action to take. We won't ever have perfect knowledge, but should be able to use our reasonable estimates of probability to determine the course most likely to be objectively best.
So, let me revisit your situations, and comment on your objections.
1. Aliens and Infants So the orphan has no family to miss him, and is isolated in the world? In that case, the only balance remaining is the lack of happiness he would have had in his life, plus the extreme unhapiness of his demise, versus the improvement in the life of every other human being on the planet for the week his death has bought. Depends on how good the alien technology is, but given the amount of misery around the globe currently, if all that were to be aleviated and brought into happiness, why is it not a good deal?
2. Obssesive Slave Owners I'll admit, I am still trying to get my head around how someone could be happier about owning a slave than the slave is unhappy about being owned. Unhappiness has far greater extremes than happiness does.
3. Depressed People I don't believe I advocated murdering depressed people. If I did, then sorry, I expressed myself badly. Assuming that their depression is theoretically curable (brain chemical imbalance?), surely the better goal would be to cure them, rather than kill them?
4. Spreading vs. Peaks Agreed, neither of those extremes sounds good. But if the right balance between unhappiness and happiness were found, this would justify taxes and social security, and in the other direction, lotteries, for example.
5. Fireman and Bum Nobody is ever happier when the bum lives? I disagree, surely the bum will be happier? Unless his life is going to be an overall misery going forwards, and if the fireman (somehow) knew that, then sure, he shouldn't risk his life for him.
6. Dead People Dead people don't count *against* the average happiness, but the happiness that they would have had were they not dead should surely count against the overall plan? If the rest of someone's life would be an unhappy experience for them, then why not check out early?
I'm not sure what to say about personal opinions... None of this can be factually based, real people simply don't work like this, they are mostly ruled by emotion. This whole construct is an interesting way of looking at whether there could be an objective definition for 'good' or not, but what can it be other than a personal opinion?
Some very good points there, and I appreciate that it isn't a simple issue. I'll see if I can answer a few to make my thinking clearer.
1. Aliens and Infants I'm not convinced happiness is greatly increased, if one family a week is losing their infant to the government for reasons that are unexplained, or worse still, explained!
2. Slavery "Is slavery only bad when people dislike being slaves more than people enjoy owning them?" I'd say yes. If people didn't mind being slaves, it wouldn't be a problem. This is clearly not the case.
3. Killing depressed people Agreed, there is a problem here. Although many depressed people feel like they want to die, can we regard this as what they should recieve to make them happier? This perhaps enters issues of identity, can we balance the happiness of the (potentially) cured person for the remainder of their life against that of the depressed person?
4. Neutral or Peak Happiness I don't know which is better. I suspect peaks, but I can't be sure. Neither case sounds too bad to me.
5. Bums and Firemen If we are assuming that there are two options here, either the fireman or the bum dies, then I suspect that everyone will be happier all round if the bum were to die. Of course, most of the time you would not expect the fireman to go into a rescue expecting to die, so it is just a chance, not a certainty. How much of a risk the fireman should take to rescue a drunk bum is certainly a calculation he will have to make, neither absolute policy of always attempting a rescue or never attempting one are likely to be the best choice.
6. Are dead people unhappy? Now we get into the afterlife! Heh, opening a can of worms here, but my view is that dead people are not unhappy. Nor are they happy, they just aren't anything. Of course killing someone is only an increase in their happiness if the rest of their life would be net-unhappy, and under those circumstances, I haven't got a problem with murdering them (although it is more commonly called euthanasia). Problems occur because of imperfect knowledge about how happy the rest of their life would be, and as it is an irreversible change, you would have to be very certain about the future prospects of the person.
I'm not the OP, and don't necessarily agree with the argument that reducing the human population is a 'good thing'.
But as a working definition for what a good thing is, how about a thing that results in a total net gain in happiness for all entities we consider to be capabale of such? Averaged, say, over a few centuries at least, we don't want to be too short sighted here, taking a quick hit of happiness in return for years of reduced happiness.
I accept that happiness itself can be tricky to pin down, but can we agree that it is a real and objective state of a concious entity?
Well, that would be my definition for an overall 'good' thing. As I mentioned, I don't generally favour doing the overall good thing, and personally would rather weight decisions based on good for me, good for those I like, good or neutral for those I don't dislike, bad for those I do dislike, and so on.
I meant that it is not necessary to actually travel to the future and return to fix things, the future is already fixed by the simple possibility of travel to the past, even if it isn't exercised.
For example, if you aren't seeing a duplicate of yourself from the future right now, this is because you *won't* return to this time some time in the future. The future is fixed.
If it is not possible to travel into the past (either from now, or as a return from a previous trip into the future), then the future is not necessarily fixed. (My personal view is that the future is fixed, for what it's worth).
The confusion arises because people don't like the idea that they are be unable to alter the future (actually regardless of whether they go and return, if you follow the full logical path from your initial assumption).
Because this is so unacceptable to them, they will happily invoke massively torturous twists of reason and probability involving misterious forces preventing you from achieving your goals, or fountaining forks of alternative universes, or flatly deny the possibility of time travel at all.
But what possible meaning can "first time through" have when discussing time? There is no first or second time, there is only *the* time. The possibility of time travel in this seamless history way requires that there is nothing special about any particular point on the time axis called "present", other than to the concious entity percieving it.
Events in time either before or after that point of perception are just as fixed as each other, it is just that the concious entity may remember ones previous to that point, but will only be able to make vague and uncertain predictions about what will subsequent to that point. Except in the case when he sees a copy of himself from the future, of course, in which case he has specific and certain knowledge about at least one event which for (current) him is in the future: that of his use of a time travel device to return to this point.
For what it's worth, my personal view is that yes, time and the events within it are absolute fixed both in the past and the future. You can't "change" either; sentences describing changing the future or the past are semantically meaningless unless you define future or past as things that "might have" or "might" happen, rather than what did or will happen.
Absolutely. If you take imagining that you will be reincarnated as a random individual to its logical end, then you should be in favour of killing off anyone who is reasonably likely to do better next time round.
Born crippled, stupid, diseased, or whatever? Kill me as soon as practical, and let me try again with a new random re-incarnation.
If you are unconcious, or asleep, and the universe ceases to exist, where does all the information to recreate it when you awaken go?
It can't be contained within you, as the universe is defined as everything that exists, which means that it cannot be a contained within anything, as it's defenition has to include the container.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you're right, I'm definately in the eat to live camp.
Just as an example, in addition to the prep time your pasta sauce adds one sautee pan, one chopping board, one chopping knife and one garlic press additional washing up (about double the washing up load). It also requires presence during an additional 10 minutes - although the pasta itself takes only 10 minutes to cook it does not require presence in the kitchen except to transfer boiling water from kettle to pot.
So in total we're looking at around double the trouble or more to prepare the meal with a home prepared pasta sauce as opposed to the pre-prepared one, not counting the additional shopping time and effort in selecting and buying the ingredients. I believe the stir in sauce to be more healty than not, and is passably tasty, so my home made sauce would have to be pretty damn delicious and be noticably better for me to be wothwhile. I just don't think it is.
It's another matter altogether if you enjoy cooking, and find preparing a pasta sauce a rewarding task to undertake, I suppose.
From the other side of the argument, what I am looking for in a meal is an absolute minimum inconvenience in re-fueling. There are three types of eating, snacking, meals, and special occasions. For this argument lets ignore snacking for the moment, although there are similarities. Special Occasions are typically with others, going out for a meal in a restaurant, throwing a dinner party, dating, or so on. For special occasions, sure I'd go to a nice restaurant, or put in some time into cooking something nice, but neither are things I'd want to do every day.
For a normal, every day meal, the aims I have to balance are: Time, Effort, and Planning Required, Percieved Delta Health, Taste, and to a lesser degree, Cost.
Cooking a proper meal is just not going to cut it, the amount of time and effort involved is in no way competitive, and for fresh ingredients the planning element lets it down too. Boiling up some pasta and adding a stir in sauce scores pretty highly in all categories (and is in fact my usual meal). It's not that I can't cook, I just don't find it fun, so I don't do it unless there's a good reason to.
When in town, or away from home, fast food restaurants clearly also score very highly, with the single exception of the percieved delta health. If someone would make a fast food restaurant which served food that was percieved to be healthy, or at least not unhealthy, it could do very well. It would have to keep the other important features, though:
Quick - time to food should be less than 5 minutes (Time)
Consistent - Once I'm used to the chain I should be able to know what I'm ordering before I enter the restaurant, anywhere in the world, and not have to spend effort parsing the menu and making decisions. (Effort)
Ubiquitous - If I know that there will always be one of these restaurants around, I don't need to plan where I will eat (Planning)
Tasty Food - Healthy food has a tendency to be unpleasent to eat, because it can afford to be less attractive in other ways if it has a strong health benefit to offset this. So for the restaurant to compete, the food would have to be tasty as well as healthy. (Taste)
Easy Food - Fast food can typically be shovelled in indiscriminately, without needing any attention paid to it. (Effort)
Inexpensive - If its competing against fast food restaurants, its can't be much more expensive. (Cost)
I hope this helps give you some insight into why at least some people eat in fast food places.
What you can't do is release your client under GPL v3, then prevent people from modifying it (by denying them access to the server if it is modified). This seems to be entirely reasonable to me - if you don't want people modifying your software, then GPL (and probably open-source in general) is not the license for you!
You can still ban abusive players based on their behaviour. If they are spamming some action, ban them. It doesn't matter if they are spamming it by sitting in front of the official client hitting the button, have a trained monkey hitting the button, or modified the source to make the button auto-repeat until un-clicked.
As GM or otherwise, you can kick or ban whoever you like for whatever reason you want. What you can't to is remotely attest that they are running an unmodified version of your client, if you are distributing your client under GPL3.
There is no hard identity, only fuzzy identity. There is that which is more, and less, 'you'. When you were 4 years old, were you 'you'? How about when you were drunk and can't even remember what 'you' did? Emotionally or physically traumatised people can change their personalities out of all recognition, do they remain with the same identity?
For those of us who are still quite young, how well do you identify with the mind which will inhabit your body at age 70? Will it share your tastes, your desires, your values? If you are lucky, it will remember you, and not curse you for smoking, not taking care of your joints, or whatever the complaint of the day might be.
If you are suspended and later resumed, or copied and re-implemented in a new medium, you are as much 'you' as you decide to be. If there are two of you, that isn't a problem either, except for pragmatic issues you both will have to thrash out, such as division of the previous legal identity (which is a hard identity) and creation of two new ones.
"Thank you, mysterious heros - the value of the gemerald you saved is slightly greater than the cost of the damage you caused to this mueseum. A net gain for our great city!"
(Futurama)
Yeah, I had one of those belkin KVM's too. Had an optical mouse with the sensor taped over plugged into it to stop the beeping.
t ails.asp?lang=1&download=1300
It seems that Belkin have finally realised what a silly idea it was though, and relesed a "No Keyboard" firmware which should sort the problem out. Unfortunately flashing the firmware on one of these things is a pain in the ass, but if you are getting the beeping you might be motivated enough.
http://www.belkin.com/support/download/downloadde
There should have been only one!
Yes, I did mean the Windows version, I should have mentioned that in my post. I can't speak for the Mac version, I haven't used it.
I've looked for the option to disable the run at startup thing, but have not been able to find it anywhere in the preferences for the player or for quicktime. Perhaps it was an install option, but I am usually thorough in looking through installer choices (including managing to get QuickTime without having to install iTunes, heh), and would certainly not have enabled it if it was an option.
My point about forcing you to use a specific player is that QuickTime the player should be decoupled from QuickTime the format. If they think they can write a decent media player to compete with WMP, Winamp and others, then more power to them, but it should have to compete on its own merits.
The codec for playing QuickTime should be distributed as a codec, so QuickTime files can be played in the users preference of media player. I'm sure it isn't beyond them to write a codec that overlays or pops up nag screens if irritating their users is part of the design spec.
Exactly the same argument applies to RealPlayer, they are just as bad. Worse, in fact, as their player is even more annoying. I think Windows Media provides codecs that allow them to be played in other players? I may be wrong about this, I rarely encounter Windows Media encoded files, and am currently using WMP as my day to day player.
Not the OP, but another Quicktime hater here.
Quicktime:
* Puts something in the registry to run at startup. Not sure what it is supposed to be doing, but fairly sure I don't want it to be doing it.
* Shows a nag-screen offering me the exciting opportunity to "go pro", and send them some money.
* Doesn't let me play in full screen.
* And number one most important irritation: Isn't my player of choice. I should not be forced to use a specific player to play their media format. Quicktime video and audio should play in the player I use for playing everything else in, be that WMP, Winamp, or whatever.
Agreed that it isn't quite as annoying as RealPlayer, though.
It's only one more datapoint, but personally I hate the MacOS UI. I don't care how many studies might have shown differently, having a menu bar right up at the top of the screen rather than on the window I'm using is just awkward.
I don't like the software that stays running after I've closed its window. I don't like the oversized dock bar. I don't like the emphasis on prettiness rather than functionality.
I hate QuickTime on Windows with a passion, and having to use it to watch online content (such as film trailers) is a continual source of irritation to me.
Apple UI in general feels like those bundled apps that come with hardware like scanners, cd burners etc. with all big buttons, irritating overfamiliar friendliness and a tendancy to get in the way of doing anything even slightly outside the pre-approved paths.
Clearly YMMV, as there are demonstrably hordes of people who love this sort of UI, but as you asked how someone can be a Mac hater, here it is.
Important to whom, or what? I don't see how something can be objectively 'important' without it having a subject.
I think that, implied in your post, you mean that human beings are important to a God that created them. While this may be 'more satisfying' to you, it is circular to argue that humans must be purposefully created (through evolution or otherwise) as they are important to the thing that purposefully created them.
Your difficulty with the contingency of history stems from the assumption that there is something special about humans as an endpoint of it all. I can't see any reason to believe that there is.
Yeah, I'd love an up to date Psion too, although I preferred the Revo to the Series 5. Eventually I settled for an HTC Universal, which has the right form factor, including keyboard. Might be worth a look for you too:
t he-htc-universal/
http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/02/hands-on-with-
It's good, but it's not good enough. You have to be skilled to set it up well to start with, and the skimming through spam subjects looking for false positives is a problem too. You requested the checkboxes, here they are:
You Personally advocate a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a fascist for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
OK, let me be a little more specific. I am agnostic about a 'god' that can have no effect on me or the world around me. Are there concious entities that exist outside the universe and could observe us? Possibly. (According to some intersting simulated reality arguments I've heard, even probably!)
But this is not what I mean when I say I don't believe god exists; the god I mean there is one that cares about what we think and do, and can interact with the world around us as it pleases. It is the experience of things happening without a supernatural entity affecting them that leads me to the conclusion that there is no supernatural entity that affects things.
The problem with having a "who cares", and "it really doesn't matter" attitude, for me, is when people start to say it does matter - "Don't do this, or god will punish you." "You must do this, God wills it." "It doesn't matter what you do to them, they are unbelievers." and so on. At that point, I care.
Interesting, I like the radio waves analogy, by the way.
About the choices, belief and disbelief, and suspension of disbelief, OK, I take your point, suspension of belief is more rational given absence of data either way.
Let me try an analogy, a friend of mine has a pot of paint, and asks me about my beliefs as to the paint within it. With no evidence as to the colour of the paint, I suspend any sort of belief as to whether it is, say matt red, or glossy blue, for example. But still lacking any evidence, I do believe it is not red and blue polka dots. If my friend were to open the pot, and it looked red and blue polka-dotted, I would *still* not believe that was truly the colour of the paint, and rather that it was a trick being played on me. If he then proceeded to dip a brush in it and paint a stroke of red and blue polka-dot pattern onto the back of my hand, I would finally need to re-evaluate my initial beliefs about paint!
Similarly, if God were to appear before me, and offer undeniable proof of his existence, then my current belief that there is no such thing, and no such event could happen, will have been proved wrong. That doesn't mean that it is an irrational or non-logical conclusion to reach at this time.
Let me have a look at the radio waves again, now. If, as an ancient, I was told that there was some magical way of nearly instantly sending pictures and voices across huge distances, then I would not believe it. This proves that it is possible to make true things sound unbelievable if you want to. If, as an ancient, television were demonstrated to me, I would believe in it. Or, if I had sufficient intelligence, I could be brought up to speed with physics through incremental steps that I could understand and believe, and believe at least in the possibility of television, even if it were not actually demonstrated to me.
By this analogy, someone saying to me currently, "There is a god, a conciousness outside nature, but which observes and interacts with it, but that you can't directly observe or interact with in any way" (as a basis. Different gods have different claims made for them, but this seems to be a fairly common ground), elicits the same disbelief as the modern man intentionally making television sound impossible to an ancient. The difference is, despite what would appear to be huge motivation, no-one has been able to either demonstrate or explain god. So, if god can be demonstrated to me, I would believe in him. If an explanation for how god could exist, I would believe in the possibility of one.
As for the scientific approach, I have been educated in physics myself, to university level. I don't believe that atheism is a scientific approach, because science has nothing to say about a hypothesis that cannot be tested. It is, however, a logical or rational approach to the question, though.
In conclusion, then, my point is that we never deal with absolute certainties, but when something is unlikely enough, it can be considered not true for all practical purposes. It is not certain that the back of my neck hasn't just turned blue, but it is unlikley enough that I can very strongly believe that it has not.
From my reading of those articles, Agnosticism would be admitting that there may be a god, or there may not, but I don't know. That's not what I was trying to describe.
Regardless of my personal position, the point I was trying to make was to answer your "no evidence one way or another" point. It seems clear to me that the logical position of not having evidence one way or another is to assume disbelief rather than belief.
If you have no evidence for it, why would you believe something so outlandish?
Now the separate question of whether there is evidence or not, that we are not touching on here, and it is this evidence that drives my personal atheism, and doubtless other's belief.
As an atheist, I do not so much believe that god doesn't exist, as not believe that god *does* exist. There is a difference. No evidence is required to not believe something exists unless it is to counter evidence that it does. There are many things I don't believe exist without evidence one way or another.
For example, I don't believe there is an invisible pixie that floats above my head, called Gerald. I have no evidence that there isn't one, but nor do I require any.
I have yet to find any convincing evidence for a god, and so find no reason to believe in one.
OK, let me try just one more time then. I was not intending to make straw men, but in every situation you presented there is more there, affecting the balance, than might be apparent at first glance.
In essence, my argument is that, with perfect knowledge about consequences, there should be an objectively overall best course of action to take. We won't ever have perfect knowledge, but should be able to use our reasonable estimates of probability to determine the course most likely to be objectively best.
So, let me revisit your situations, and comment on your objections.
1. Aliens and Infants
So the orphan has no family to miss him, and is isolated in the world? In that case, the only balance remaining is the lack of happiness he would have had in his life, plus the extreme unhapiness of his demise, versus the improvement in the life of every other human being on the planet for the week his death has bought. Depends on how good the alien technology is, but given the amount of misery around the globe currently, if all that were to be aleviated and brought into happiness, why is it not a good deal?
2. Obssesive Slave Owners
I'll admit, I am still trying to get my head around how someone could be happier about owning a slave than the slave is unhappy about being owned. Unhappiness has far greater extremes than happiness does.
3. Depressed People
I don't believe I advocated murdering depressed people. If I did, then sorry, I expressed myself badly. Assuming that their depression is theoretically curable (brain chemical imbalance?), surely the better goal would be to cure them, rather than kill them?
4. Spreading vs. Peaks
Agreed, neither of those extremes sounds good. But if the right balance between unhappiness and happiness were found, this would justify taxes and social security, and in the other direction, lotteries, for example.
5. Fireman and Bum
Nobody is ever happier when the bum lives? I disagree, surely the bum will be happier? Unless his life is going to be an overall misery going forwards, and if the fireman (somehow) knew that, then sure, he shouldn't risk his life for him.
6. Dead People
Dead people don't count *against* the average happiness, but the happiness that they would have had were they not dead should surely count against the overall plan? If the rest of someone's life would be an unhappy experience for them, then why not check out early?
I'm not sure what to say about personal opinions... None of this can be factually based, real people simply don't work like this, they are mostly ruled by emotion. This whole construct is an interesting way of looking at whether there could be an objective definition for 'good' or not, but what can it be other than a personal opinion?
Some very good points there, and I appreciate that it isn't a simple issue. I'll see if I can answer a few to make my thinking clearer.
1. Aliens and Infants
I'm not convinced happiness is greatly increased, if one family a week is losing their infant to the government for reasons that are unexplained, or worse still, explained!
2. Slavery
"Is slavery only bad when people dislike being slaves more than people enjoy owning them?" I'd say yes. If people didn't mind being slaves, it wouldn't be a problem. This is clearly not the case.
3. Killing depressed people
Agreed, there is a problem here. Although many depressed people feel like they want to die, can we regard this as what they should recieve to make them happier? This perhaps enters issues of identity, can we balance the happiness of the (potentially) cured person for the remainder of their life against that of the depressed person?
4. Neutral or Peak Happiness
I don't know which is better. I suspect peaks, but I can't be sure. Neither case sounds too bad to me.
5. Bums and Firemen
If we are assuming that there are two options here, either the fireman or the bum dies, then I suspect that everyone will be happier all round if the bum were to die. Of course, most of the time you would not expect the fireman to go into a rescue expecting to die, so it is just a chance, not a certainty. How much of a risk the fireman should take to rescue a drunk bum is certainly a calculation he will have to make, neither absolute policy of always attempting a rescue or never attempting one are likely to be the best choice.
6. Are dead people unhappy?
Now we get into the afterlife! Heh, opening a can of worms here, but my view is that dead people are not unhappy. Nor are they happy, they just aren't anything. Of course killing someone is only an increase in their happiness if the rest of their life would be net-unhappy, and under those circumstances, I haven't got a problem with murdering them (although it is more commonly called euthanasia). Problems occur because of imperfect knowledge about how happy the rest of their life would be, and as it is an irreversible change, you would have to be very certain about the future prospects of the person.
I'm not the OP, and don't necessarily agree with the argument that reducing the human population is a 'good thing'.
But as a working definition for what a good thing is, how about a thing that results in a total net gain in happiness for all entities we consider to be capabale of such? Averaged, say, over a few centuries at least, we don't want to be too short sighted here, taking a quick hit of happiness in return for years of reduced happiness.
I accept that happiness itself can be tricky to pin down, but can we agree that it is a real and objective state of a concious entity?
Well, that would be my definition for an overall 'good' thing. As I mentioned, I don't generally favour doing the overall good thing, and personally would rather weight decisions based on good for me, good for those I like, good or neutral for those I don't dislike, bad for those I do dislike, and so on.
I meant that it is not necessary to actually travel to the future and return to fix things, the future is already fixed by the simple possibility of travel to the past, even if it isn't exercised.
For example, if you aren't seeing a duplicate of yourself from the future right now, this is because you *won't* return to this time some time in the future. The future is fixed.
If it is not possible to travel into the past (either from now, or as a return from a previous trip into the future), then the future is not necessarily fixed. (My personal view is that the future is fixed, for what it's worth).
The confusion arises because people don't like the idea that they are be unable to alter the future (actually regardless of whether they go and return, if you follow the full logical path from your initial assumption).
Because this is so unacceptable to them, they will happily invoke massively torturous twists of reason and probability involving misterious forces preventing you from achieving your goals, or fountaining forks of alternative universes, or flatly deny the possibility of time travel at all.
But what possible meaning can "first time through" have when discussing time? There is no first or second time, there is only *the* time. The possibility of time travel in this seamless history way requires that there is nothing special about any particular point on the time axis called "present", other than to the concious entity percieving it.
Events in time either before or after that point of perception are just as fixed as each other, it is just that the concious entity may remember ones previous to that point, but will only be able to make vague and uncertain predictions about what will subsequent to that point. Except in the case when he sees a copy of himself from the future, of course, in which case he has specific and certain knowledge about at least one event which for (current) him is in the future: that of his use of a time travel device to return to this point.
For what it's worth, my personal view is that yes, time and the events within it are absolute fixed both in the past and the future. You can't "change" either; sentences describing changing the future or the past are semantically meaningless unless you define future or past as things that "might have" or "might" happen, rather than what did or will happen.
Absolutely. If you take imagining that you will be reincarnated as a random individual to its logical end, then you should be in favour of killing off anyone who is reasonably likely to do better next time round.
Born crippled, stupid, diseased, or whatever? Kill me as soon as practical, and let me try again with a new random re-incarnation.
If you are unconcious, or asleep, and the universe ceases to exist, where does all the information to recreate it when you awaken go? It can't be contained within you, as the universe is defined as everything that exists, which means that it cannot be a contained within anything, as it's defenition has to include the container.