Range voting sucks. I don't want my 6 vote to count less than that guy's 9 vote. Condorcet is way better, but I'd settle for runoff to simplify matters.
The best way to stop companies from using DRM is for consumers to organize and make demands of companies. It's silly that we had to pass a law in the US in order to make companies allow cell phone numbers to transfer. Boycotting is expensive, wasteful, and fails basic game theory. It should be possible to negotiate this stuff.
Consumer groups negotiate with industry groups negotiate with labor groups -- every interested party has a bargaining chip.
Your analysis completely disregards the relevance and mechanisms of meme distribution. The idea that there's some nice, neutral society that exists in the absence of any mutual interference is wishful thinking.
Correction: *A hand controlled by the right side of the brain out of view picks up a pencil, and a pen controlled by the left side of the brain writes that the person picked up a ball.
You know that guy who is 100% convinced that the MMR vaccine caused autism in his child? His belief is compatible with our understanding of the natural world, but it's still an unjustified belief.
People seem to think, "compatible with science" is an adequate threshold for believing something. It's not. Not by a long shot. The threshold is its justifiability. In fact, if you keep track of a notion's justifiability, you don't even really need the concepts of belief or certainty, but the brain isn't very good at conscious Bayesian decision-making.
The spiritual/natural dichotomy is a little thin. I mean, both affect our lives and decisions, right? The only real distinction is that one is testable and the other is not. So it sounds like what you're saying is, "I have to be more careful when making claims when you can prove me wrong." That's kinda bogus, isn't it? Really, how can you possibly justify holding objective claims about the spiritual world to a lower standard than claims about the natural world?
We know from psychological studies that the brain is very good at rationalizing. Split a brain in half, and the person seems to be normal. The brain attempts to explain away any deficiencies in behavior. A hand controlled by the right side of the brain picks up a ball and a pen controlled by the left side of the brain writes down that it was a planned, volitional act. A hand controlled by the right side of the brain out of view picks up a pencil, and a pen controlled by the left hand writes that the right hand picked up a ball.
So why trust the unjustified stories you tell yourself? Seems to me that somebody who exhibits sloppy thinking is probably a sloppy thinker.
The "why do you care" argument is a little thin. If you could fuse that guy's brain back together, wouldn't you do it in a second? (Ignoring the fact that it was probably severed intentionally to prevent severe epileptic seizures.) And like it or not, the prevalence of unjustified spiritual belief dramatically affects our society.
I hesitate to mention it because I don't want to derail the conversation, but suffice it to say that your mentioned approach to evolution would change your approach to research and affect the investigative avenues the you chose to pursue.
Why does it matter if some people choose to believe in a soul?
If you're going to make objective assertions about reality without adequate justification, I'm going to pigeonhole you as someone who is capable of and willing to make objective assertions about reality without adequate justification. I don't suffer fools gladly. Even if you're only deceiving yourself, you're still creating a negative environment.
This stale approach to thinking and life has to be shouted down at every opportunity for the benefit of those whose minds are changed, and to improve the opportunities of people both young and old to thrive in an environment of intellectual integrity.
There's another libertarian solution here that involves the organizing on the basis of mutual interests, where the organizations limit the commercial exchanges of their members to other members or to allied organizations.
There are a few ways for a company to actively popularize its content. 1) Ads. 2) Feature the content prominently on their own popular website. 3) Have respected community members recommending your product. (e.g. blogs, delicious/Democracy-Player-style peer-trust-based popularization)
If you cut off your employees' relationships with the public, you lose an important vector. Individual employees can become community rock stars. Some of my favorite technical articles come not from faceless MSDN entries, but from individual Microsoft employees who speak candidly about their work and their environment.
Of course, if you let an employee become an unofficial face for the company, you stand to lose a lot if that employee leaves or if that employee decides to say anything negative. This isn't so much a dilemma as a reflection of two different models regarding the role of companies and their employees. The relatively new existence of community-models of popularization just makes the good-company-open-employee model a little more favorable than it used to be.
Great, a well-educated Italian guy who has the expertise to understand the problem, the ability to leverage obscure community resources to find ways around the problem, and who has a lot of time on his hands can access The Pirate Bay. Nevermind that these services derive their value from having a critical mass of users. Government control is clearly not a critical factor. Nope.
If my culture thinks it's horribly rude to take pictures of my windows, I have a reasonable expectation that it won't happen. I mean, there may be some maladjusted weirdo or social maverick, but the odds aren't very high. These distinctions aren't binary, they're practical.
In this case, it's a powerful, well-moneyed entity violating the expectations of millions of people. There's an argument to be made here that this is grossly unethical. Social pressure may, in fact, change Google's policies. You've got to let the abstract pseudo-logic go and think in more practical terms.
I would encourage people who make semantic arguments to make that fact explicit in their use of language. "I would argue that the term 'life' should not apply to that" versus "I would argue that that's not alive." Only Objectivists really mean the latter, but, let's be honest, Objectivists should only be allowed to live until force-feeding makes their livers adequately tasty.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of GWT. The strength of GWT is in creating flawless UI components and in providing elegant hooks to the server. You can push as much power to the server as you want.
It would be great to have some kind of counter here on Slashdot. It will count how many times this obvious explanation is given to people. Personally I can't beleive somebody still don't get it.
Well, the explanation makes some fundamental assumptions about property rights. One might argue that you're hurting someone else by using guns/police to deprive him of access to the car that just happens to be parked outside your house.
But yeah, there's still a fundamental distinction to be made, regardless of property rights.:)
You should expect to pay $9.50 at most theaters in central/eastern Massachusetts. This is offset by the fact that we have nice theaters and good access to independent cinema.
True, but replace "user-generated content" with "independently-generated content" and you might see what the fuss is.
Viacom and the other content networks control the set of content that is seen by a mainstream audience. Not only that, but they control the revenue model of people who make television shows.
Right now, independent producers are locked out. They cannot get investors, create a show, and put it where people can and will see it. If YouTube becomes a popular place to get content (it's not hard to imagine some quality changes and mass-production of a YouTube set-top box if the market were there), the old model simply goes away.
Independent-produced content will only take off quickly if it's a peer in a system that will also show current mainstream content. Companies like Viacom can easily keep that from happening by controlling the channels of distribution.
I don't think YouTube is going to be the great Liberator of Content. Maybe NetFlix+SetTop?
Interesting. Where are you likely to find non-fundamentalist Baptists? Growing up and through my teen and college years, my family did a lot of church hunting in central Massachusetts; every Baptist church we looked at affirmed their literalism. Among both my secular and religious friends, Baptists are synonymous with biblical literalism. I mean, that's Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the union.
That's a very unusual Baptist University then. By common definition, Baptists are biblical literalists. You're not going to go to Bob Jones University or Baptist Bible College X and find a perspective that incorporates evolution to be well-tolerated.
Like when you're $10k over some limit that then causes you to pay an extra $20k in taxes.
You know progressive taxation doesn't work that way, right?
Or like when you pay $10k to a charity that then results in $20k in business for you.
Just to be clear, non-profits can't actually advertise in return for deductible contributions.
Or like when you declare the donation of a product that cost you $10k to produce as a $20k donation.
In the general case, this isn't true. IRS publication 526 makes it clear that you can't make deduct more than your basis in donated property. Your basis is essentially what you paid for it, even if that's below fair market value, even if the value of the property has increased.
Virus scenarios from most to least tragic: 1) Virus wipes out every human on earth. 2) Virus spares 9,999 survivors who can repopulate the species. 3) Virus spares 10,000 survivors, but they're all sterile. 4) Virus results in cuter kittens.
I've always been confused by this loyalty to "the species." I care about people. I don't really care about our long-term prospects. I don't want billions of descendants wiped out in some great cataclysm, but that's because I care about people, not about the species. If everybody just decided to sterilize themselves (not under duress), I wouldn't shed a tear. That won't happen, of course.
Dude, seriously. There's a perfectly serviceable point to be made about how software engineering is a deep, rich field where we've only scratched the surface. It's a field with budding communities around different schools of thought. It's got heroes like Eric Evans positing approaches to design. The field is still immature, and things will only get richer.
You know what the next step in the logical domain is? Getting people to the point where they have good reasons for thinking what they think, and have a good understanding of what constitutes such reasons. People get through highschool just developing cognitive habits that work for them. Heck, I probably didn't learn to start thinking critically until I was 20. (Having a self-consistent world view and criticizing ideas in that context isn't critical thinking.)
Your empty narrative is a clear demonstration of bad thinking.
I find your glossy, sweeping metanarrative regarding a physical and logical dichotomy as it pertains to these two disciplines to be empty and offensive. For the love of God, keep it pertinent.
Even more impressive, while the Gallup poll shows that 31% of the Americans self-identify as literalists in those very strong terms, a 2007 Princeton Survey poll for Newsweek shows that 44% believe that the earth was created within the last 10,000 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Range voting sucks. I don't want my 6 vote to count less than that guy's 9 vote. Condorcet is way better, but I'd settle for runoff to simplify matters.
True, but then the submarine patent emerges, so they get a longer lifespan on the patent and the benefit of a trade secret for as long as it lasts.
The best way to stop companies from using DRM is for consumers to organize and make demands of companies. It's silly that we had to pass a law in the US in order to make companies allow cell phone numbers to transfer. Boycotting is expensive, wasteful, and fails basic game theory. It should be possible to negotiate this stuff.
Consumer groups negotiate with industry groups negotiate with labor groups -- every interested party has a bargaining chip.
The challenge is figuring out how to organize.
Your analysis completely disregards the relevance and mechanisms of meme distribution. The idea that there's some nice, neutral society that exists in the absence of any mutual interference is wishful thinking.
I botched that a little.
Correction:
*A hand controlled by the right side of the brain out of view picks up a pencil, and a pen controlled by the left side of the brain writes that the person picked up a ball.
You know that guy who is 100% convinced that the MMR vaccine caused autism in his child? His belief is compatible with our understanding of the natural world, but it's still an unjustified belief.
People seem to think, "compatible with science" is an adequate threshold for believing something. It's not. Not by a long shot. The threshold is its justifiability. In fact, if you keep track of a notion's justifiability, you don't even really need the concepts of belief or certainty, but the brain isn't very good at conscious Bayesian decision-making.
The spiritual/natural dichotomy is a little thin. I mean, both affect our lives and decisions, right? The only real distinction is that one is testable and the other is not. So it sounds like what you're saying is, "I have to be more careful when making claims when you can prove me wrong." That's kinda bogus, isn't it? Really, how can you possibly justify holding objective claims about the spiritual world to a lower standard than claims about the natural world?
We know from psychological studies that the brain is very good at rationalizing. Split a brain in half, and the person seems to be normal. The brain attempts to explain away any deficiencies in behavior. A hand controlled by the right side of the brain picks up a ball and a pen controlled by the left side of the brain writes down that it was a planned, volitional act. A hand controlled by the right side of the brain out of view picks up a pencil, and a pen controlled by the left hand writes that the right hand picked up a ball.
So why trust the unjustified stories you tell yourself? Seems to me that somebody who exhibits sloppy thinking is probably a sloppy thinker.
The "why do you care" argument is a little thin. If you could fuse that guy's brain back together, wouldn't you do it in a second? (Ignoring the fact that it was probably severed intentionally to prevent severe epileptic seizures.) And like it or not, the prevalence of unjustified spiritual belief dramatically affects our society.
I hesitate to mention it because I don't want to derail the conversation, but suffice it to say that your mentioned approach to evolution would change your approach to research and affect the investigative avenues the you chose to pursue.
If you're going to make objective assertions about reality without adequate justification, I'm going to pigeonhole you as someone who is capable of and willing to make objective assertions about reality without adequate justification. I don't suffer fools gladly. Even if you're only deceiving yourself, you're still creating a negative environment.
This stale approach to thinking and life has to be shouted down at every opportunity for the benefit of those whose minds are changed, and to improve the opportunities of people both young and old to thrive in an environment of intellectual integrity.
There's another libertarian solution here that involves the organizing on the basis of mutual interests, where the organizations limit the commercial exchanges of their members to other members or to allied organizations.
I think this speaks to a much larger issue.
There are a few ways for a company to actively popularize its content.
1) Ads.
2) Feature the content prominently on their own popular website.
3) Have respected community members recommending your product. (e.g. blogs, delicious/Democracy-Player-style peer-trust-based popularization)
If you cut off your employees' relationships with the public, you lose an important vector. Individual employees can become community rock stars. Some of my favorite technical articles come not from faceless MSDN entries, but from individual Microsoft employees who speak candidly about their work and their environment.
Of course, if you let an employee become an unofficial face for the company, you stand to lose a lot if that employee leaves or if that employee decides to say anything negative. This isn't so much a dilemma as a reflection of two different models regarding the role of companies and their employees. The relatively new existence of community-models of popularization just makes the good-company-open-employee model a little more favorable than it used to be.
Great, a well-educated Italian guy who has the expertise to understand the problem, the ability to leverage obscure community resources to find ways around the problem, and who has a lot of time on his hands can access The Pirate Bay. Nevermind that these services derive their value from having a critical mass of users. Government control is clearly not a critical factor. Nope.
You're begging the question.
If my culture thinks it's horribly rude to take pictures of my windows, I have a reasonable expectation that it won't happen. I mean, there may be some maladjusted weirdo or social maverick, but the odds aren't very high. These distinctions aren't binary, they're practical.
In this case, it's a powerful, well-moneyed entity violating the expectations of millions of people. There's an argument to be made here that this is grossly unethical. Social pressure may, in fact, change Google's policies. You've got to let the abstract pseudo-logic go and think in more practical terms.
I would encourage people who make semantic arguments to make that fact explicit in their use of language. "I would argue that the term 'life' should not apply to that" versus "I would argue that that's not alive." Only Objectivists really mean the latter, but, let's be honest, Objectivists should only be allowed to live until force-feeding makes their livers adequately tasty.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of GWT. The strength of GWT is in creating flawless UI components and in providing elegant hooks to the server. You can push as much power to the server as you want.
Well, the explanation makes some fundamental assumptions about property rights. One might argue that you're hurting someone else by using guns/police to deprive him of access to the car that just happens to be parked outside your house.
But yeah, there's still a fundamental distinction to be made, regardless of property rights. :)
You should expect to pay $9.50 at most theaters in central/eastern Massachusetts. This is offset by the fact that we have nice theaters and good access to independent cinema.
True, but replace "user-generated content" with "independently-generated content" and you might see what the fuss is.
Viacom and the other content networks control the set of content that is seen by a mainstream audience. Not only that, but they control the revenue model of people who make television shows.
Right now, independent producers are locked out. They cannot get investors, create a show, and put it where people can and will see it. If YouTube becomes a popular place to get content (it's not hard to imagine some quality changes and mass-production of a YouTube set-top box if the market were there), the old model simply goes away.
Independent-produced content will only take off quickly if it's a peer in a system that will also show current mainstream content. Companies like Viacom can easily keep that from happening by controlling the channels of distribution.
I don't think YouTube is going to be the great Liberator of Content. Maybe NetFlix+SetTop?
Interesting. Where are you likely to find non-fundamentalist Baptists? Growing up and through my teen and college years, my family did a lot of church hunting in central Massachusetts; every Baptist church we looked at affirmed their literalism. Among both my secular and religious friends, Baptists are synonymous with biblical literalism. I mean, that's Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the union.
That's a very unusual Baptist University then. By common definition, Baptists are biblical literalists. You're not going to go to Bob Jones University or Baptist Bible College X and find a perspective that incorporates evolution to be well-tolerated.
Like when you're $10k over some limit that then causes you to pay an extra $20k in taxes.
You know progressive taxation doesn't work that way, right?
Or like when you pay $10k to a charity that then results in $20k in business for you.
Just to be clear, non-profits can't actually advertise in return for deductible contributions.
Or like when you declare the donation of a product that cost you $10k to produce as a $20k donation.
In the general case, this isn't true. IRS publication 526 makes it clear that you can't make deduct more than your basis in donated property. Your basis is essentially what you paid for it, even if that's below fair market value, even if the value of the property has increased.
Just to clarify my point.
Virus scenarios from most to least tragic:
1) Virus wipes out every human on earth.
2) Virus spares 9,999 survivors who can repopulate the species.
3) Virus spares 10,000 survivors, but they're all sterile.
4) Virus results in cuter kittens.
I've always been confused by this loyalty to "the species." I care about people. I don't really care about our long-term prospects. I don't want billions of descendants wiped out in some great cataclysm, but that's because I care about people, not about the species. If everybody just decided to sterilize themselves (not under duress), I wouldn't shed a tear. That won't happen, of course.
Dude, seriously. There's a perfectly serviceable point to be made about how software engineering is a deep, rich field where we've only scratched the surface. It's a field with budding communities around different schools of thought. It's got heroes like Eric Evans positing approaches to design. The field is still immature, and things will only get richer.
You know what the next step in the logical domain is? Getting people to the point where they have good reasons for thinking what they think, and have a good understanding of what constitutes such reasons. People get through highschool just developing cognitive habits that work for them. Heck, I probably didn't learn to start thinking critically until I was 20. (Having a self-consistent world view and criticizing ideas in that context isn't critical thinking.)
Your empty narrative is a clear demonstration of bad thinking.
I find your glossy, sweeping metanarrative regarding a physical and logical dichotomy as it pertains to these two disciplines to be empty and offensive. For the love of God, keep it pertinent.
Even more impressive, while the Gallup poll shows that 31% of the Americans self-identify as literalists in those very strong terms, a 2007 Princeton Survey poll for Newsweek shows that 44% believe that the earth was created within the last 10,000 years.
Article: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/creationists_in_the_american_c.php
Dataset: http://roperweb.ropercenter.uconn.edu/cgi-bin/hsrun.exe/Roperweb/Catalog40/Catalog40.htx;start=summary_link?archno=USPSRA2007-NW05