Less realistic religion = piss off less people
on
Game with God
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The reason games don't have real religions modeled in them is just that it would divide their potential userbase. I really think that's all there is to it. Instead of getting people mad, since it is literally impossible to have a portrayal of religion that looks balanced and evenhanded to every potential consumer, they either make the religion realy comic-book-like and fakey, or they shift it off to something else entirely so it doesn't look like anything on earth (like the Hammerites from Thief).
Even the preachy Ultima IV mentioned in the article had to do that sort of thing - making up a new religion that is based on eight virtues, and stays well away from anything like a belief in a god. (It was a good game, although having a computer program enforce rules of morality had problems in that it only cared about the letter of the law, and not the spirit of the law. For example, you could lose an 'eigth' for lack of bravery when your main character doesn't stay behind to be the last person to leave a map in a fight. That was severly flawed when sometimes the congestion of characters on the mapboard made it necessary for you to leave with your main character first just to make the room for the rest to fit out the exit. Sometimes the computer's random placement of figures on the map made it such that your only two choices were 1 - lose the virtue of bravery because the leader is in the way and has to leave first, or 2 - reload the game.)
Re:uh,, Black and White anyone?
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Game with God
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· Score: 1
The hill in question was an analogy for "how to live your life" - something everyone has to deal with somehow. It's just that some of us realize that a car is useless when the established roads don't actually go all the way to the top.
Re:uh,, Black and White anyone?
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Game with God
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· Score: 3, Insightful
(re: religion is like a car you use to get to the top of a hill of life.) To make the analogy work, you need to also point out that the only people saying you *need* a vehicle are the ones who are currently using them. The statement that the hill is too tall and steep to walk up it is false, and although there aren't many who chose to go on foot, those that do end up getting a little bit miffed at those who keep telling them they can't make it that way - especially when the trail is filled with out-of-gas cars, stalled on the side and filled with people who have managed to convince themsleves they are actually at the top when they aren't even halfway up, and the hikers trod past them and keep going.
(On the subject of rejecting religion without knowing it's not true) It is unnecessary to know for sure some belief system is false in order to reject it. It is merely sufficient to know that it is unable to back up the claims it has made for itself. The one who is proposing the belief is the one with the burden of proof.
One doesn't need to ignore administration costs to see that Windows is more expensive. In fact, it HELPS to include administration costs, provided the study doesn't lie about them. One Windows admin is typically cheaper than one linux admin, this is true. But Linux doesn't need as much admin time as Windows, so it doesn't have the same servers-to-admins ratio.
Here's the real truth of TCO:
If the business is not computer-related, and thus the people in the company are not computer literate and shouldn't be expected to become computer literate, then Windows has lower TCO because it lets you do the simple things simply. If the business is computer-related, or large enough that it is expected to grow some in-house expertise, then Windows has higher TCO because it ONLY lets you do the simple things simply, at the expense of making the complex things really painful to deal with.
Wake me up when there's a legitimate threat to my rights, or real technology news. Not teenage "I wanna swap music" teenage angst.
They're trying, but apparently you would rather roll over and keep on sleeping comfortably. Whether you realize it or not, suppression of a technology medium because of the way it is being abused by some (instead of suppressing JUST the abusive usage alone), is real technology news, and is a suppression of rights.
You missed the point entirely. The point is that the typical American has to travel a lot further to get somewhere where his native tounge is not the most common lanaguage than a lot of other people do. I'd be fluent in other langauges too if there was more of a need. For most others, learning a second language isn't just an elective thing - it's a necessary thing.
In the alternate universe where DRM was not designed to be utterly impossible to implement on open source (for legal reasons, not technical ones), I'd agree with you. As it is, I see it as a tool for keeping open source solutions out of the media business, and doing it in a way that is deceptive to the consumer. If you advocate DRM, you disparage open source. For DRM software to get approval, ALL levels of software must be closed and proprietary all the way down to the DRM in the hardware. That means you can't even legally have a closed source program running on top of an open source OS play DRM content. The entire vertical stack of software must all be approved, which means it has to be closed.
I look down on people who (try to) steal from me. I look down on people who try to make criminality an acceptable alternative.
And you group them together with people who just want to use something they purchased, but can't without breaking an unrelated law that seeks to keep people ignorant about technology. You look down on people who dislike DRM, regardless of whether it's because they are stealing your work or if it's because they'd like to actually purchase your work and be able to view it without having that decision dictate the OS they have to use.
Re:Sorry. No way.
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TMBG on DRM
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· Score: 2, Informative
It is self-contradictory to claim you are simultaneously in favor of DRM and in favor of open software. If DRM becomes ubiquitous, then open source software falls behind because it cannot be made to legally play DRM content (to be an approved DRM playing program, the program is going to have to be closed) - ubiquitous DRM would mean open source becomes useless for multimedia. And thus supporting DRM means being against open source, and furthermore, being against what open source is all about - that people should be allowed to learn how their technology they own actually works. Being technologically competent should not be a crime.
People claim bad music is the reason for increased piracy, which doesn't make sense.
It's true that this doesn't make sense. That's why it's a good thing you were wrong when you claimed this scenario is what's happening.
What people *are* saying isn't "piracy is caused by bad music", as you falsely claim. What people are saying is that the recording industry's claim, that poor sales are caused by piracy, is wrong. The quality of their music is crap, and *that* is wny the sales are bad. The existence of piracy is irrelevant to their bad sales. The existence of yet another Britney Spears album, on the other hand, is. It's not "people are turning to piracy to get their Britney piece of crap". It's "people are turning away from that Britney piece of crap and going for stuff that the RIAA doesn't have under their umbrella."
Re:Bad music?
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TMBG on DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The fact that DRM is a bad idea has nothing whatsoever to do with piracy. DRM is a tool for making sure only "approved" software is allowed to participate in computerized media, and one of the qualifications for approval is going to be that it must be closed source. Open source ends up dissemating information on the technique used and thus the DMCA says that an open-source DeCSS algorithm is illegal. The same thing is going to happen with DRM technology. Even though I too prefer to pay for the material, and I don't like the current mentality of "I don't have to pay for it", I also don't want to promote a system that makes it illegal to teach people about technology, and therefore ensures that only our corporate masters are allowed to make use of new technology, and ignorance of the masses is considered a worthwhile ethical goal. Therefore the day DRM becomes ubiquitous is the day I *start* pirating things since that will be the only option that lets me keep using open source tools to read the media.
I will not pirate anything - UNTIL DRM is everywhere. For me it will have the opposite of the alleged intended effect.
the RIAA claims their business is being wrecked by this. That's all that matters. The only counter-argument that would have any traction would be that the RIAA is lying
People don't have a right to be given money automatically. They have a right to *try* to make money if they can find a way that works. If a particular type of business model is failing because the technology is making it obsolete, it's not the government's job to prop it up. Therefore, your claim is bogus. (That claim being that the only counterargument that would matter would be if the RIAA is lying about their business being wrecked. No - even if their business IS being wrecked by this - so f-ing what? It's their fault they didn't work on making the switch themselves to keep up with the new technology and therefore they now don't have a away to make money with it.)
I wasn't trying to defend the practice that the states do (Being someone who often votes third-party, I don't like seeing my vote get deleted by the winner-take-all system). I was just trying to explain that it is NOT the federal system that is making this happen. The states are choosing to do it themselves, and so if you want to fight it, THAT is where the fight has to occur. Trying to fight it at the federal level is a mistake of jurisdiction.
While I do support proportionment of electors for a state, I still don't support a raw popular vote. I still think the "rounding" to the electors is useful and important (although the idea of them being physical people sent to cast their vote is obsolete and is just asking for a coup - they should just be numbers on a page.) The electoral college has the effect of ensuring that even remote geographical areas get a little bit of relevance to their opinions. With a raw popular vote, if a president ran on a platform of "Let's give all the money in the federal budget to the ten most populous states and screw everyone else", and win on that platform. Yes, the electoral college gives a disproportionately higher voting power to people in rural states. But it *should* be doing that.
Amen! This guy's been using this sig for a long time (long enough that he had to edit it to make it say 2004 instead of 2003). And he's heard the counterarguments repeatedly. Yet he continues to make the implication over and over that the reason the feature is missing is because slashdot is obsolete, instead of the truth that the feature is unimplimented ON PURPOSE because a lot of people don't actually think it's a good idea. Now, he can disagree whether it's a good idea or not, and plead that it should be added in his opinion, but it's still a lie to imply that it's being left out purely because of obsolescence.
Your analogy fails: Being beaten takes effort on the part of others. Not being beaten takes no effort on the part of others. This is the inverse of the case for having easy user interfaces. This guy isn't complaining that people stop doing something detrimental to him - he's complaining that they spend MORE time doing something beneficial than they already are. That's why the 'being beaten' analogy is completely inappropriate.
Sometimes making things backward compatable is mutually exclusive with making the OS better. For example, self-modifying code - an idea that used to be common, but is now taboo because it makes it nearly impossible to write an OS that guarantees any sort of stability or security. An old program using self-modifying code cannot be compatable with a newer system unless it is being run through a machine emulator like VMware.
Actually, the user interface for a car is a good counterexample to what Sowell is complaining about. The intuitive way to drive would be with a control that you push where you want to go - forward to accellerate, backward to brake, left to turn left, and right to turn right. Basically a big control joystick. Simple. A heck of a lot easier to learn than 'pedal on the right is faster, pedal on the left is slower, clockwise rotation is right, counterclockwise is left'. The joystick interface takes no time to explain....and is completely and totally WRONG for the task at hand. Firstly the gearing is wrong - for steering safety you need a mechanical linkage that even a relatively weak human has the strength to keep control over even when the hydrolics go out. Therefore you need a lower gearing from control motion down to wheel motion, and thus you need something with a lot of travel distance - hence the steering wheel - it's safer even though it's more of a pain to learn how to use it properly. For accelleration and braking, the joystick is a bad idea because the momentum of the car would add forces to the stick that would have to be countered by you the driver. So basically, the interface that would actually be intuitive is an incredibly bad, bad, bad idea.
The steering wheel is not intuitive in the slightest. The notion that the pedal on the right is for "faster" and the one on the left is for slower is also not intuitive. It's learned - it's just that you learn it as a child from watching your parents drive, so by the time you start driving yourself you've forgotten that it's a learned behaviour.
The OS nows that the command was issued interactively from a shell
Actually, it does NOT know that. That's the problem. (And the shell would be the right place to implement this if you were going to - not the OS itself.)
While a program behaving non-interactively when it shouldn't is a small problem, the opposite case (which would crop up if someone implemented your suggestion) of a program behaving interactively when it shouldn't, is a bigger problem. A program waiting for interactive TTY input to finish, in a case where it doesn't really have a true TTY to use, is going to fall over big time. The trick is how to make sure the shell doesn't run $PAGER when it is part of a pipe, or part of a redirection, or part of a shell script, or using a pseudo-tty that a program set up explicitly for the purpose of faking out the program. (That last one is the hard one. There are times when you want to make a fake tty and run a program in it - like when shelling out to a telnet session - the whole *point* of those fake ttys is that they *do* look like the real thing in every way to any program running inside them.)
Secret hidden triggers are more annoying than explicit ones.
Whenever picking a default the question of "how do I prevent the default from happening and instead do something else" must be answered, and it must be easy for the user to discover how to do it, and it must be east for the user to discover that it is even possible to do it.
This is why I dislike the c-shell, despite it allegedly being 'easier' than bourne. The only reason it was traditionally thought of as easier is that it got terminal key functionality first. But it's syntax contains too many horrible 'hide from the user what we're really doing' activities. Now that bourne shells with terminal key capatilities exist (like bash) there is no reason to bother with the c-shell anymore, really.
Re:This immediately brought to mind Pascal's Wager
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Matrix Decision Making
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I can't make myself believe something merely by *wanting* to believe it. People who *can* do that are not entirely sane.
And this is the biggest flaw in Pascal's Wager. Even if it succeeded at convincing me that I should want to believe in god (it has other flaws that make it fail to do that, but even if it did succeed at that...) then I'm still stuck with the fact that my mind can still differentiate between me wanting something to be true and me believing something to be true. They are not the same thing and I simply cannot help it - I can tell they aren't the same thing, and that means I'm not really believing it even if I'd like to pretend I am. What I believe to be true is not entirely under my will to control. And that's a *good* thing. The alternative is insanity.
My slashdot.sig (when they used to be allowed to be longer) used to say: "Niklaus Wirth invented a language that was acclaimed in theory, but utterly useless in practice. I therefore find it quite appropriate that he chose to name it after the guy who invented Pascal's Wager."
The fallacy of Pascal's Wager is the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the subject of this article.
(On the subject of belief in god giving one hope.)
It's hard for me to remember when I became an atheist, because it is something that happened slowly throughout my childhood. And it wasn't so much a case of changing my mind as it was a case of learning that there exists a label to describe what I was thinking all along but couldn't put into words very well. I remember the day I first found out that most other people took religious stories as factual. I didn't figure that one out until the sixth grade. It was an eye-opening revelation. You see, I was a good little religious kid - learned the stories - learned the lessons - went to religious classes on Sundays... But what my parents didn't realize - what the other people in the religion didn't realize - was that I didn't really believe any of it was factual. You might wonder how it is possible for someone to go that long without this becoming apparent, but it really happened. You see, there is a tradition of speaking about fictional stories as if they were true, within the context of the story. For example, Let's say I overheard two people having a conversation at a table arguing about the "facts" in The Fellowship of the Ring movie - about how it was wrong to leave out the scene with the barrow downs because that's how the hobbits got their swords. That conversation, taken out of context by someone ignorant of world history and ignorant of the Lord of the Rings, would be ambiguous as to whether it was two historians arguing about a depiction of a real historical event, or two fans arguing about a depiction of a fictional story.
Or, if a fable is told about a talking tortise and a talking rabbit holding a race to see who is faster, and the rabbit is lazy and loses because of his overconfidence and laziness, even though he has the better natural talent, that story is obviously just a fictional fable meant to illustrate a point. But people talking about it would speak of it as if it was real, in terms like "The rabbit did such and such", and "The tortise said to the rabbit, I can beat you in a race.". They wouldn't use the overly cumbersome phrasings like "The hypothetical rabbit within the context of the story, took the turtle up on his offer, but not really, this is just a story. Rabbits and turtles don't really talk - please just suspend your disbelief for the sake of this story." No - that's not the way people speak about fictional stories. The understood common context between everyone talking about it is that the story is fiction, without having to explicitly say so over and over. Starting with my earliest memories of religious classes, I honestly believed that this is the way people were talking when they spoke of these "heroes of myth and legend" - like Jesus and Moses and Mohhummed and so on. It never dawned on me at first that they really honestly meant what they were saying, and so I responded within the "context" of the fictional stories I was hearing - talking about the moral lessons taught by the stories and whatnot.
Through this misunderstanding, I was able to function for a very long time within the religion, and nobody had any clue that I was thinking differently from everyone else - not even me.
So, what this long rambling post was meant to get to was that for me, belief in god doesn't give me any more or less hope than not beliving in god - because the "hope" is really the same whether the stories of this god are real or fables.
I do, however, think that some damage does come from believing in this god when obedience to god is elevated to a level above purely human concerns - some people go so far with their conviction of correctness that they are willing to do things that are detrimental in a mundane way to their fellow humans, in order to "buy" an improvement in the spiritual side of their fellow humans. If that spiritual side doesn't actualy exist, then sacrificing the mundane to improve the spirtual is a horrible, horrible mistake (I am referring here not to the mainstream religious practices,
as long as broadcasters get my fricking tax money to broadcast content ...as long as that is happening, you aren't living in the USA. There is no TV tax here. PBS is donation-supported. Where is this taxes-to-airplay connection you are yammering on about?
This article reminds me of a very scary thing I heard from a friend many years ago:
Me: "I really liked the book Farenheight 451. Especially the description of how the world got that way. The censorship didn't come from the leaders - it came from the masses. They wanted everyone to be as vacuous as they were, so they started pushing their leaders to outlaw various intellectual things."
Him: "Wow. That's kind of deep. Who wrote it?"
Me: "Bradbury". You should see the film version too - it's done fairly well.
Him: "Oh, there's a movie of it ? I think I'll just save time and watch that. Reading the book takes too much time..."
Slashdot Mirror
The reason games don't have real religions modeled in them is just that it would divide their potential userbase. I really think that's all there is to it. Instead of getting people mad, since it is literally impossible to have a portrayal of religion that looks balanced and evenhanded to every potential consumer, they either make the religion realy comic-book-like and fakey, or they shift it off to something else entirely so it doesn't look like anything on earth (like the Hammerites from Thief).
Even the preachy Ultima IV mentioned in the article had to do that sort of thing - making up a new religion that is based on eight virtues, and stays well away from anything like a belief in a god. (It was a good game, although having a computer program enforce rules of morality had problems in that it only cared about the letter of the law, and not the spirit of the law. For example, you could lose an 'eigth' for lack of bravery when your main character doesn't stay behind to be the last person to leave a map in a fight. That was severly flawed when sometimes the congestion of characters on the mapboard made it necessary for you to leave with your main character first just to make the room for the rest to fit out the exit. Sometimes the computer's random placement of figures on the map made it such that your only two choices were 1 - lose the virtue of bravery because the leader is in the way and has to leave first, or 2 - reload the game.)
The hill in question was an analogy for "how to live your life" - something everyone has to deal with somehow. It's just that some of us realize that a car is useless when the established roads don't actually go all the way to the top.
(re: religion is like a car you use to get to the top of a hill of life.)
To make the analogy work, you need to also point out that the only people saying you *need* a vehicle are the ones who are currently using them. The statement that the hill is too tall and steep to walk up it is false, and although there aren't many who chose to go on foot, those that do end up getting a little bit miffed at those who keep telling them they can't make it that way - especially when the trail is filled with out-of-gas cars, stalled on the side and filled with people who have managed to convince themsleves they are actually at the top when they aren't even halfway up, and the hikers trod past them and keep going.
(On the subject of rejecting religion without knowing it's not true)
It is unnecessary to know for sure some belief system is false in order to reject it. It is merely sufficient to know that it is unable to back up the claims it has made for itself. The one who is proposing the belief is the one with the burden of proof.
One doesn't need to ignore administration costs to see that Windows is more expensive. In fact, it HELPS to include administration costs, provided the study doesn't lie about them. One Windows admin is typically cheaper than one linux admin, this is true. But Linux doesn't need as much admin time as Windows, so it doesn't have the same servers-to-admins ratio.
Here's the real truth of TCO:
If the business is not computer-related, and thus the people in the company are not computer literate and shouldn't be expected to become computer literate, then Windows has lower TCO because it lets you do the simple things simply. If the business is computer-related, or large enough that it is expected to grow some in-house expertise, then Windows has higher TCO because it ONLY lets you do the simple things simply, at the expense of making the complex things really painful to deal with.
The problem with you Americans is that you simply don't care about your education.
I stopped reading at this point. I don't tolerate lying. You will not get a polite response until you learn to make a polite statement.
Wake me up when there's a legitimate threat to my rights, or real technology news. Not teenage "I wanna swap music" teenage angst.
They're trying, but apparently you would rather roll over and keep on sleeping comfortably. Whether you realize it or not, suppression of a technology medium because of the way it is being abused by some (instead of suppressing JUST the abusive usage alone), is real technology news, and is a suppression of rights.
You missed the point entirely. The point is that the typical American has to travel a lot further to get somewhere where his native tounge is not the most common lanaguage than a lot of other people do. I'd be fluent in other langauges too if there was more of a need. For most others, learning a second language isn't just an elective thing - it's a necessary thing.
In the alternate universe where DRM was not designed to be utterly impossible to implement on open source (for legal reasons, not technical ones), I'd agree with you. As it is, I see it as a tool for keeping open source solutions out of the media business, and doing it in a way that is deceptive to the consumer. If you advocate DRM, you disparage open source. For DRM software to get approval, ALL levels of software must be closed and proprietary all the way down to the DRM in the hardware. That means you can't even legally have a closed source program running on top of an open source OS play DRM content. The entire vertical stack of software must all be approved, which means it has to be closed.
I look down on people who (try to) steal from me. I look down on people who try to make criminality an acceptable alternative.
And you group them together with people who just want to use something they purchased, but can't without breaking an unrelated law that seeks to keep people ignorant about technology. You look down on people who dislike DRM, regardless of whether it's because they are stealing your work or if it's because they'd like to actually purchase your work and be able to view it without having that decision dictate the OS they have to use.
It is self-contradictory to claim you are simultaneously in favor of DRM and in favor of open software. If DRM becomes ubiquitous, then open source software falls behind because it cannot be made to legally play DRM content (to be an approved DRM playing program, the program is going to have to be closed) - ubiquitous DRM would mean open source becomes useless for multimedia. And thus supporting DRM means being against open source, and furthermore, being against what open source is all about - that people should be allowed to learn how their technology they own actually works. Being technologically competent should not be a crime.
People claim bad music is the reason for increased piracy, which doesn't make sense.
It's true that this doesn't make sense. That's why it's a good thing you were wrong when you claimed this scenario is what's happening.
What people *are* saying isn't "piracy is caused by bad music", as you falsely claim. What people are saying is that the recording industry's claim, that poor sales are caused by piracy, is wrong. The quality of their music is crap, and *that* is wny the sales are bad. The existence of piracy is irrelevant to their bad sales. The existence of yet another Britney Spears album, on the other hand, is. It's not "people are turning to piracy to get their Britney piece of crap". It's "people are turning away from that Britney piece of crap and going for stuff that the RIAA doesn't have under their umbrella."
The fact that DRM is a bad idea has nothing whatsoever to do with piracy. DRM is a tool for making sure only "approved" software is allowed to participate in computerized media, and one of the qualifications for approval is going to be that it must be closed source. Open source ends up dissemating information on the technique used and thus the DMCA says that an open-source DeCSS algorithm is illegal. The same thing is going to happen with DRM technology. Even though I too prefer to pay for the material, and I don't like the current mentality of "I don't have to pay for it", I also don't want to promote a system that makes it illegal to teach people about technology, and therefore ensures that only our corporate masters are allowed to make use of new technology, and ignorance of the masses is considered a worthwhile ethical goal. Therefore the day DRM becomes ubiquitous is the day I *start* pirating things since that will be the only option that lets me keep using open source tools to read the media.
I will not pirate anything - UNTIL DRM is everywhere. For me it will have the opposite of the alleged intended effect.
the RIAA claims their business is being wrecked by this. That's all that matters. The only counter-argument that would have any traction would be that the RIAA is lying
People don't have a right to be given money automatically. They have a right to *try* to make money if they can find a way that works. If a particular type of business model is failing because the technology is making it obsolete, it's not the government's job to prop it up. Therefore, your claim is bogus. (That claim being that the only counterargument that would matter would be if the RIAA is lying about their business being wrecked. No - even if their business IS being wrecked by this - so f-ing what? It's their fault they didn't work on making the switch themselves to keep up with the new technology and therefore they now don't have a away to make money with it.)
I wasn't trying to defend the practice that the states do (Being someone who often votes third-party, I don't like seeing my vote get deleted by the winner-take-all system). I was just trying to explain that it is NOT the federal system that is making this happen. The states are choosing to do it themselves, and so if you want to fight it, THAT is where the fight has to occur. Trying to fight it at the federal level is a mistake of jurisdiction.
While I do support proportionment of electors for a state, I still don't support a raw popular vote. I still think the "rounding" to the electors is useful and important (although the idea of them being physical people sent to cast their vote is obsolete and is just asking for a coup - they should just be numbers on a page.) The electoral college has the effect of ensuring that even remote geographical areas get a little bit of relevance to their opinions. With a raw popular vote, if a president ran on a platform of "Let's give all the money in the federal budget to the ten most populous states and screw everyone else", and win on that platform. Yes, the electoral college gives a disproportionately higher voting power to people in rural states. But it *should* be doing that.
Amen! This guy's been using this sig for a long time (long enough that he had to edit it to make it say 2004 instead of 2003). And he's heard the counterarguments repeatedly. Yet he continues to make the implication over and over that the reason the feature is missing is because slashdot is obsolete, instead of the truth that the feature is unimplimented ON PURPOSE because a lot of people don't actually think it's a good idea. Now, he can disagree whether it's a good idea or not, and plead that it should be added in his opinion, but it's still a lie to imply that it's being left out purely because of obsolescence.
Your analogy fails: Being beaten takes effort on the part of others. Not being beaten takes no effort on the part of others. This is the inverse of the case for having easy user interfaces. This guy isn't complaining that people stop doing something detrimental to him - he's complaining that they spend MORE time doing something beneficial than they already are. That's why the 'being beaten' analogy is completely inappropriate.
Sometimes making things backward compatable is mutually exclusive with making the OS better. For example, self-modifying code - an idea that used to be common, but is now taboo because it makes it nearly impossible to write an OS that guarantees any sort of stability or security. An old program using self-modifying code cannot be compatable with a newer system unless it is being run through a machine emulator like VMware.
Actually, the user interface for a car is a good counterexample to what Sowell is complaining about. The intuitive way to drive would be with a control that you push where you want to go - forward to accellerate, backward to brake, left to turn left, and right to turn right. Basically a big control joystick. Simple. A heck of a lot easier to learn than 'pedal on the right is faster, pedal on the left is slower, clockwise rotation is right, counterclockwise is left'. The joystick interface takes no time to explain....and is completely and totally WRONG for the task at hand. Firstly the gearing is wrong - for steering safety you need a mechanical linkage that even a relatively weak human has the strength to keep control over even when the hydrolics go out. Therefore you need a lower gearing from control motion down to wheel motion, and thus you need something with a lot of travel distance - hence the steering wheel - it's safer even though it's more of a pain to learn how to use it properly. For accelleration and braking, the joystick is a bad idea because the momentum of the car would add forces to the stick that would have to be countered by you the driver. So basically, the interface that would actually be intuitive is an incredibly bad, bad, bad idea.
The steering wheel is not intuitive in the slightest. The notion that the pedal on the right is for "faster" and the one on the left is for slower is also not intuitive. It's learned - it's just that you learn it as a child from watching your parents drive, so by the time you start driving yourself you've forgotten that it's a learned behaviour.
Just because people think *your* idea is not an improvement doesn't mean they think there aren't any possible improvements at all.
The OS nows that the command was issued interactively from a shell
Actually, it does NOT know that. That's the problem. (And the shell would be the right place to implement this if you were going to - not the OS itself.)
While a program behaving non-interactively when it shouldn't is a small problem, the opposite case (which would crop up if someone implemented your suggestion) of a program behaving interactively when it shouldn't, is a bigger problem. A program waiting for interactive TTY input to finish, in a case where it doesn't really have a true TTY to use, is going to fall over big time. The trick is how to make sure the shell doesn't run $PAGER when it is part of a pipe, or part of a redirection, or part of a shell script, or using a pseudo-tty that a program set up explicitly for the purpose of faking out the program. (That last one is the hard one. There are times when you want to make a fake tty and run a program in it - like when shelling out to a telnet session - the whole *point* of those fake ttys is that they *do* look like the real thing in every way to any program running inside them.)
Secret hidden triggers are more annoying than explicit ones.
Whenever picking a default the question of "how do I prevent the default from happening and instead do something else" must be answered, and it must be easy for the user to discover how to do it, and it must be east for the user to discover that it is even possible to do it.
This is why I dislike the c-shell, despite it allegedly being 'easier' than bourne. The only reason it was traditionally thought of as easier is that it got terminal key functionality first. But it's syntax contains too many horrible 'hide from the user what we're really doing' activities. Now that bourne shells with terminal key capatilities exist (like bash) there is no reason to bother with the c-shell anymore, really.
I can't make myself believe something merely by *wanting* to believe it. People who *can* do that are not entirely sane.
And this is the biggest flaw in Pascal's Wager. Even if it succeeded at convincing me that I should want to believe in god (it has other flaws that make it fail to do that, but even if it did succeed at that...) then I'm still stuck with the fact that my mind can still differentiate between me wanting something to be true and me believing something to be true. They are not the same thing and I simply cannot help it - I can tell they aren't the same thing, and that means I'm not really believing it even if I'd like to pretend I am. What I believe to be true is not entirely under my will to control. And that's a *good* thing. The alternative is insanity.
My slashdot .sig (when they used to be allowed to be longer) used to say: "Niklaus Wirth invented a language that was acclaimed in theory, but utterly useless in practice. I therefore find it quite appropriate that he chose to name it after the guy who invented Pascal's Wager."
The fallacy of Pascal's Wager is the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the subject of this article.
(On the subject of belief in god giving one hope.)
It's hard for me to remember when I became an atheist, because it is something that happened slowly throughout my childhood. And it wasn't so much a case of changing my mind as it was a case of learning that there exists a label to describe what I was thinking all along but couldn't put into words very well. I remember the day I first found out that most other people took religious stories as factual. I didn't figure that one out until the sixth grade. It was an eye-opening revelation. You see, I was a good little religious kid - learned the stories - learned the lessons - went to religious classes on Sundays... But what my parents didn't realize - what the other people in the religion didn't realize - was that I didn't really believe any of it was factual. You might wonder how it is possible for someone to go that long without this becoming apparent, but it really happened. You see, there is a tradition of speaking about fictional stories as if they were true, within the context of the story. For example, Let's say I overheard two people having a conversation at a table arguing about the "facts" in The Fellowship of the Ring movie - about how it was wrong to leave out the scene with the barrow downs because that's how the hobbits got their swords. That conversation, taken out of context by someone ignorant of world history and ignorant of the Lord of the Rings, would be ambiguous as to whether it was two historians arguing about a depiction of a real historical event, or two fans arguing about a depiction of a fictional story.
Or, if a fable is told about a talking tortise and a talking rabbit holding a race to see who is faster, and the rabbit is lazy and loses because of his overconfidence and laziness, even though he has the better natural talent, that story is obviously just a fictional fable meant to illustrate a point. But people talking about it would speak of it as if it was real, in terms like "The rabbit did such and such", and "The tortise said to the rabbit, I can beat you in a race.". They wouldn't use the overly cumbersome phrasings like "The hypothetical rabbit within the context of the story, took the turtle up on his offer, but not really, this is just a story. Rabbits and turtles don't really talk - please just suspend your disbelief for the sake of this story." No - that's not the way people speak about fictional stories. The understood common context between everyone talking about it is that the story is fiction, without having to explicitly say so over and over. Starting with my earliest memories of religious classes, I honestly believed that this is the way people were talking when they spoke of these "heroes of myth and legend" - like Jesus and Moses and Mohhummed and so on. It never dawned on me at first that they really honestly meant what they were saying, and so I responded within the "context" of the fictional stories I was hearing - talking about the moral lessons taught by the stories and whatnot.
Through this misunderstanding, I was able to function for a very long time within the religion, and nobody had any clue that I was thinking differently from everyone else - not even me.
So, what this long rambling post was meant to get to was that for me, belief in god doesn't give me any more or less hope than not beliving in god - because the "hope" is really the same whether the stories of this god are real or fables.
I do, however, think that some damage does come from believing in this god when obedience to god is elevated to a level above purely human concerns - some people go so far with their conviction of correctness that they are willing to do things that are detrimental in a mundane way to their fellow humans, in order to "buy" an improvement in the spiritual side of their fellow humans. If that spiritual side doesn't actualy exist, then sacrificing the mundane to improve the spirtual is a horrible, horrible mistake (I am referring here not to the mainstream religious practices,
as long as broadcasters get my fricking tax money to broadcast content
This article reminds me of a very scary thing I heard from a friend many years ago:
Me: "I really liked the book Farenheight 451. Especially the description of how the world got that way. The censorship didn't come from the leaders - it came from the masses. They wanted everyone to be as vacuous as they were, so they started pushing their leaders to outlaw various intellectual things."
Him: "Wow. That's kind of deep. Who wrote it?"
Me: "Bradbury". You should see the film version too - it's done fairly well.
Him: "Oh, there's a movie of it ? I think I'll just save time and watch that. Reading the book takes too much time..."
Me: "uhh. that's pretty funny - good one.:
Him: "What? What did I say that was funny?"
Me: "Oh...never mind."