Given some of your points, I could see how you would conclude that it's best to wait for a game to mature before you invest your time. On the other hand, i could also see how a person might argue that you should get involved as quickly as possible so as to get some time in while it's a good game, before it's ruined.
More than any other reason, this is why your IT team should be well paid and why duties should be segregated.
And also "trustworthiness" really has to be high on your priority list of job-qualifications for IT people. I always tell people, if you can't trust your IT people, you're in trouble.
You might ask why. "Why can't you put security in place that prevents your IT people from accessing the information you don't want them to see?" Well, I'll answer that with another question: who will put that security in place? Inevitably, there will have to be people who put security in place, and whoever that is could leave back-doors for themselves. There will be people who maintain the systems and security, people with powerful logins and passwords, and those people can override your security.
And ultimately, there are accidents. At one company, we can a common spam database for the whole company (years ago). Every piece of spam went into the same place. While looking for false positives in order to see whether the filter needed adjusting, you'd see every e-mail that had a swear word in it. If someone wrote about "f*%king", it was in the spam filter. Every mention of "penis" went in the spam filter. A lot of it was spam, but there was plenty of employee e-mail going around, talking about things they probably didn't want anyone to see.
Also, there were plenty of times where someone invited me to look at their desktop or e-mail in order to help them with something. Like, "hey, can you help me find this e-mail I'm looking for?" I say "yeah," and the e-mail up on the screen is an e-mail about having an affair and an Excel file containing everyone's salaries. It happens!
My point is, even if your IT personnel are honest, they'll probably see sensitive information somehow, even if by accident. Trustworthiness is an important trait. My advice: If you're hiring IT people, it might be good to hire the person you'd feel most comfortable telling all your dirty secrets. If you're just another employee, keep any information on your work computer or pass information through your work systems unless you'd be comfortable with your IT people seeing it. If you must send information from work that you don't want your IT people to see, use a Gmail account, and don't leave your browser open while you're away from your computer.
Make sure it's a recruiter first though! I knew a guy who started doing that sort of thing to tele-marketers, and then one day did it to what he thought was a tele-marketer, but who was in fact a misdirected customer.
It seems like it could be frustrating, but more likely it'll just be imprecise. Parallax will only throw the thing off by so much, so the smart thing to do would be to design all the controls to be big enough that an approximation would be sufficient. After all, you're supposed to control this thing with your fingers, and not with an ultra-precise stylus.
You really think it's about the money? These guys made so much money that they both could have walked away years ago and never looked back. Why do they keep coming back?
Two options: ego and pleasure. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if each guy got some level of enjoyment from their respective work, but I'm absolutely sure they both have huge egos that need feeding. I'm sure Microsoft's dominance bothers Steve, and everyone constantly praising Apple bothers Bill.
Do they hate each other? Maybe not. But I bet they both want to show up the other and then rub his nose in it.
Would we see death camps and Stalinesque tactics? No, I don't think so. Michael Moore and Rosie wouldn't be rounded up and imprisoned, much less shot
Rosie who? The only person I can think of who has ever been referred to as just "Rosie" is Rosie O'Donnell, and... well, I just can't imagine how she could be relevant to the discussion...
Oh, wait, did Stalin execute obnoxious fat people?
Here's a suggestion: no, it could not have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door
I agree, specifically because no one on the plane was anticipating that the hijackers wanted to use the planes as missiles. On the one plane where the passengers did suspect it, they overwhelmed the terrorists and stopped the attack (though at the expense of their own lives).
I'd bet that, even if the cockpits were locked and impregnable, the pilots would have opened the door if the hijackers threatened to kill passengers if the door were not opened.
Essentially, we don't need to prevent another 9/11, because 9/11 won't happen again. No one will allow a hijacker to get direct control of a plane and steer it into a heavily populated area. Not anymore.
So forget protecting against the same attack, figure out what the next attack will be. It's a common strategic mistake-- to guard against past attacks when future attacks will probably come from a different vector.
OBL's aim, as expressed repeatedly, is to create an Arab superstate, overthrowing the local governments there, and creating instead a single Islamic nation.
And more specifically, an superstate where OBL is in charge. He's looking for power, and he's using other people's religious fervor to accomplish this goal.
On the other hand, it seems like he'd have less likelihood finding help if the people in that area didn't hate/resent the West (and US specifically) as much as they do. They resentment comes from a variety of causes, and some of the reasons they resent the West are valid (though they don't justify acts of terrorism IMO).
Yeah, but aren't those still intended to be used from within a browser? I was suggesting that you could return "web browsers" to the work of rendering basically static pages, and create a new program intended to simplify the creation and enhance the feature-set of "web applications". However, it seems to me that people are working on various ways to turn the "web browser" into the latter, since static pages are becoming less of the focus of internet usage/development.
Web applications are inherently cross-platform-- the OS doesn't matter, only the browser. Also, they don't really require that you install anything or have admin privileges to install things, and they're accessible from any computer with an internet connection and web browser.
The downside of web apps is that you can't take them with you. Unplug from the network and you can't use them. I guess this might be a good step towards solving that problem.
Of course, whether this should all be built into web browsers, which were originally intended to store static pages, is an issue you could debate. Sometimes I think it might make more sense to make a browser-like framework for programs, but built from the ground up for applications instead of static pages. But then, I guess that more and more, that's what browsers are becoming.
First, why would you have to prove that you did not put them there? Your name on them is not proof that you did, and if you can show that a device that may have had the files was stolen you'll walk unscathed from even a civil suit.
This is a good point-- that you purchased the files doesn't necessarily mean you committed copyright infringement. It seems to me that, legally, this should be comparable to police finding your fingerprints at the scene of a robbery. It's circumstantial. It wouldn't be sufficient evidence to convict you of anything, even though it might be enough for them to investigate you.
It's not even fingerprinting (at least not as far as anyone knows yet). What's been reported is that Apple tags the files with the username of the person who bought it. It's similar to the tag they put in for the song title and artist name, except that the purchaser name isn't able to be edited within the iTunes interface. It can be edited, just not through iTunes.
This isn't "hidden", it's not a secret, it's not anything new (Apple's been doing this all along), and it's not sneaky. It could just as easily be claimed that Apple did this for the user's convenience. iTunes notes which songs in your library were purchased from iTunes, as well as telling you who purchased them. If you have multiple users purchasing music on your system, that could be useful information. The only way it's going to hurt you is if your purchases hit the P2P networks without stripping the tags first. In that case, I'd have to ask: are you stupid or something?
It's too big to be a PDA, too small to be a laptop. This thing looks like a solution looking for a problem.
I don't know... I think the basic idea is interesting. There is a problem in need of a solution. As smart phones get more storage space and processing power, they really should be able to replace desktops for basic functionality like word processing, e-mail, web. What smart phones lack are the screen and keyboard.
So I'm with Palm on that much. So what do you do? The obvious idea in my mind is to set up a docking station, so you drop your phone into it and it connects out to a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and whatever else. Make the thing have one interface for the small screen, and a real desktop layout for when it's connected to the docking station.
Palm went another way with it. Apparently, they're thinking that you'd really want to have a separate machine with enough power that all you really need is a bluetooth connection to the smartphone, and the new unit will handle the video and everything. And they think you're going to want to carry this machine around, so they build it to be like a laptop.
I see two problems with the idea. First, by building it into a separate computer, it's not clear why I should buy Palm's computer rather than a normal computer. I guess it's relatively small and cheap, but I think I'd rather take on the extra expense and bulk to have a real laptop with a full set of features.
The second problem I see is that I think they've forgotten that the PDA is supposed to be the portable computer that you carry when you don't want to carry a laptop. In other words, the whole appeal of a Treo (in my mind) is that you can have very basic computing functionality during times where I don't want to carry anything bigger than a phone. If I'm content to carry something laptop-sized, then I'd prefer to keep my phone as a plain phone while I carry my laptop. But with this device, it's like I'm supposed to have a smart phone, my laptop, and an in-between-PDA-and-laptop-device? Really, who's going to bother?
On the other hand, I do agree with the general notion PDAs could stand to have more full desktop functionality. Imagine if you could plug your iPhone into a dock, have keyboard/mouse/display, and be presented with a (perhaps scaled-back) version of their desktop OSX UI. Wouldn't that be worth something? I doubt we're really that far from being able to accomplish that.
What you're saying sounds right. Apple is coming out with the iPhone soon, Palm is supposed to be releasing some new device today that runs Linux (who knows whether it'll live up to the hype circulating around). Meanwhile, Microsoft has Windows Vista and the Zune, so they really want to hype something.
So they come out with a touch-screen device that really isn't a consumer device, have some cool-looking demos of how it theoretically could work, and try to make it look like they've invented something. Maybe there are people who will hear about this who hadn't seen multi-touch stuff will be really impressed and think Microsoft has invented a really great device. However, I'd bet that you won't see very many of these until a couple years have passed, the price has come down, and Microsoft is on revision 2 or 3. Meanwhile, they'll probably make it so the device only runs Windows, the portable-device connectivity only works with the Zune and cameras that have paid MS some licensing fee, and just generally it won't work properly with any non-Microsoft products.
I don't think it's an urban/rural thing, but more of a mass-media/real-life thing. Even in most big cities that I've been in, everyday people are usually friendly (and I live in NYC!). However, watch the news, TV, or movies, and you'll get a different picture. MSM culture tells us things that the majority of sensible people don't really follow, but the majority of people aren't that sensible.
I'm surprised by your problems with NeoOffice. I remember it being a bit rough around the edges a while ago, during the 1.x versions, but since 2.0, it's been pretty rock-solid for me. I wonder if you're using some particular feature that I'm not.
I've tried OpenOffice w/ X11, but find it a bit jarring to use X11 applications in OSX. MS Office for OSX is pretty good, except for Entourage, and for the fact that it's a PPC application running under emulation, which makes it run a bit slow.
I've decided not to go the emulation route because I don't really want to have to have a full copy of Windows to run my office suite. It means I need to buy a copy, have several extra gigabytes of data on my hard drive, boot the VM image, and deal with running Windows. I'd just rather not.
I keep hoping for some progress on iWork. It's a good program, but Pages feels to aimed at design for me, and not enough at text entry. Also, I need a spreadsheet application. I'd also like to see Sun release their own OpenOffice Aqua port, but they've been slow to make any progress there.
In the end, NeoOffice and MS Office 2004 are the only apps that work for me, and NeoOffice is slightly faster, and doesn't load the entourage database into memory whenever I try to edit a spreadsheet. It's the winner. I'm sure it would meet many people's needs (though not everyones), and it's free to boot.
Yeah, that was my thought. If you're plugging the ethernet into your computer and relying on software to route traffic to this device in the first place, how is this better than software firewalls?
Interestingly, according to some theories of intelligence, some degree of faith, concern for others, and emotion is necessary for there to be intelligence at all. Regarding "others", the general idea is that development of communication with and anticipation of other thinking beings is a necessary component of intelligence (or any intelligence resembling what we understand as intelligence), which means that you must encounter these "others" as either friends/allies or enemies/opponents (and also there may be those who fall in between and are neutral).
This is somewhat connected to your description of evolutionary theory in that the interaction with "allies" (which may likely be others carrying the same genes), our concern for allies takes shape as a desire to aid.
Seriously, haven't people heard cheesy speeches around Christmas time, saying things like, "It's better to give than to receive"? The idea that people receive pleasure from performing generous/altruistic actions is far from new.
I guess the breakthrough is supposed to be that it's "hardwired", but I don't know what that's supposed to mean. Inborn? Well duh, it isn't learned. That they've found activity in the brain that seems connected to this "pleasure"? That doesn't impress me too much-- I've been under the impression that they could detect pleasure for some time.
If they've found a mechanism sufficient that they can disable it, that's pretty neat, but I really hope they don't disable it for anyone. The results could be terrifying. If they can enhance it for psychopaths (or whomever) for treatment, that might be interesting. Still, let's not be too eager to go mucking around people's brains.
So, if altruism creates pleasure in the brain, is it still considered altruism? You ARE getting something out of it, after all.
Quite a few philosophic thinkers refuse the idea that "good behavior" is every truly to the detriment of the actor. There's a lot of discussion that can begin at the question you pose, but to be productive, you might rephrase it like this: is it possible that being "good" could be worse for a person than being "bad"?
Right away some issues fall out of this. If being "bad" is truly better, then there is little incentive for people to be good. Why would anyone be good of being bad was better? What would it mean to be good if the outcome of being good were bad?
Many people come around to a way of thinking similar to this: there may be some advantages to being bad, but being good is somehow absolutely better. Some derive this idea of good being "absolutely better" from the idea of an afterlife which provides either eternal punishment or eternal reward. Some view it as an issue of guilt-- that being "good" allows you to live with an easy conscience which provides a life that it ultimately better. Some have other explanations as to why it all works out.
Of course, this also presents other issues. If you rely on the afterlife, then "good behavior" becomes whatever provides you with eternal reward. If you rely on conscience, then being good means "whatever keeps me from feeling guilty". This problem raises the question as to whether there's a more transcendent good which does not allow itself it be defined in such petty terms, i.e. could you perform a good deed that would result in your own damnation?
Like i said, there's a lot of discussion to be had here, but very few philosophers (and really no good ones) believe that "goodness" and "selflessness" require that no good is returned upon the good and selfless actor.
So even if the moral compass is in-built, it only activates in the presence of others.
Well what would it mean to be altruistic outside the presence of others? Someone else needs to be involved somehow, or else there can be no object of the altruism. What I mean is that the object of altruism must always be "others", so without "others", there's no possibility of altruism or selfishness.
It compared it to the pleasure of food and sex. We don't eat and screw all day long every day, and if we did, it would cause problems. I don't just mean the society problems of no one working, either, but-- you know, things get sore and over-stuffed. We also have other pleasures to compete with these. We derive satisfaction from accomplishing, we receive pleasure from dominating, and sometimes even sore muscles from a hard day's work feel like a reward when your head hits the pillows.
Besides, our society tells us not to engage in altruistic behavior. When you're nice to people for no reward, you're a sucker. Failing to screw everyone over in pursuit of even the smallest gain makes you "inefficient". It's insufficient to like things or like people, but you must always be ready to explain why you like them, or people will think you're soft in the head.
On top of all that, altruism isn't as rare as you might think. Sometimes you just don't noticing it going on. Also, sometimes people are ashamed (really! think about it!) of their own altruistic tendencies and cover them up by inventing selfish motives to excuse their altruism.
I've not used NeoOffice, but to me, this sounds like the software is in the stage Firefox was in just before hitting 1.0 -- stable enough for everyday use; maybe there are a few bugs...
I have been using NeoOffice for some time now, though my usage is pretty normal. I use it to type things up, view/edit Excel and Word documents. In the past six months, I haven't had a problem with it crashing or doing something unexpected such that I would call it a "bug".
My only complaint would be that it's a little sluggish-feeling at times. Far from unusable, but slow enough that I feel like it's slower than it should be. I'm running it on an Intel machine, and at least for me, the Intel NeoOffice isn't any slower than the PPC MS Office 2004. (I have both, and never really use 2004)
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Given some of your points, I could see how you would conclude that it's best to wait for a game to mature before you invest your time. On the other hand, i could also see how a person might argue that you should get involved as quickly as possible so as to get some time in while it's a good game, before it's ruined.
More than any other reason, this is why your IT team should be well paid and why duties should be segregated.
And also "trustworthiness" really has to be high on your priority list of job-qualifications for IT people. I always tell people, if you can't trust your IT people, you're in trouble.
You might ask why. "Why can't you put security in place that prevents your IT people from accessing the information you don't want them to see?" Well, I'll answer that with another question: who will put that security in place? Inevitably, there will have to be people who put security in place, and whoever that is could leave back-doors for themselves. There will be people who maintain the systems and security, people with powerful logins and passwords, and those people can override your security.
And ultimately, there are accidents. At one company, we can a common spam database for the whole company (years ago). Every piece of spam went into the same place. While looking for false positives in order to see whether the filter needed adjusting, you'd see every e-mail that had a swear word in it. If someone wrote about "f*%king", it was in the spam filter. Every mention of "penis" went in the spam filter. A lot of it was spam, but there was plenty of employee e-mail going around, talking about things they probably didn't want anyone to see.
Also, there were plenty of times where someone invited me to look at their desktop or e-mail in order to help them with something. Like, "hey, can you help me find this e-mail I'm looking for?" I say "yeah," and the e-mail up on the screen is an e-mail about having an affair and an Excel file containing everyone's salaries. It happens!
My point is, even if your IT personnel are honest, they'll probably see sensitive information somehow, even if by accident. Trustworthiness is an important trait. My advice: If you're hiring IT people, it might be good to hire the person you'd feel most comfortable telling all your dirty secrets. If you're just another employee, keep any information on your work computer or pass information through your work systems unless you'd be comfortable with your IT people seeing it. If you must send information from work that you don't want your IT people to see, use a Gmail account, and don't leave your browser open while you're away from your computer.
Make sure it's a recruiter first though! I knew a guy who started doing that sort of thing to tele-marketers, and then one day did it to what he thought was a tele-marketer, but who was in fact a misdirected customer.
It did not go over well.
Maybe those people derive pleasure from the ego-boost that comes with knowing you've improved the world.
It seems like it could be frustrating, but more likely it'll just be imprecise. Parallax will only throw the thing off by so much, so the smart thing to do would be to design all the controls to be big enough that an approximation would be sufficient. After all, you're supposed to control this thing with your fingers, and not with an ultra-precise stylus.
You really think it's about the money? These guys made so much money that they both could have walked away years ago and never looked back. Why do they keep coming back?
Two options: ego and pleasure. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if each guy got some level of enjoyment from their respective work, but I'm absolutely sure they both have huge egos that need feeding. I'm sure Microsoft's dominance bothers Steve, and everyone constantly praising Apple bothers Bill.
Do they hate each other? Maybe not. But I bet they both want to show up the other and then rub his nose in it.
Would we see death camps and Stalinesque tactics? No, I don't think so. Michael Moore and Rosie wouldn't be rounded up and imprisoned, much less shot
Rosie who? The only person I can think of who has ever been referred to as just "Rosie" is Rosie O'Donnell, and... well, I just can't imagine how she could be relevant to the discussion...
Oh, wait, did Stalin execute obnoxious fat people?
Here's a suggestion: no, it could not have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door
I agree, specifically because no one on the plane was anticipating that the hijackers wanted to use the planes as missiles. On the one plane where the passengers did suspect it, they overwhelmed the terrorists and stopped the attack (though at the expense of their own lives).
I'd bet that, even if the cockpits were locked and impregnable, the pilots would have opened the door if the hijackers threatened to kill passengers if the door were not opened.
Essentially, we don't need to prevent another 9/11, because 9/11 won't happen again. No one will allow a hijacker to get direct control of a plane and steer it into a heavily populated area. Not anymore.
So forget protecting against the same attack, figure out what the next attack will be. It's a common strategic mistake-- to guard against past attacks when future attacks will probably come from a different vector.
And more specifically, an superstate where OBL is in charge. He's looking for power, and he's using other people's religious fervor to accomplish this goal.
On the other hand, it seems like he'd have less likelihood finding help if the people in that area didn't hate/resent the West (and US specifically) as much as they do. They resentment comes from a variety of causes, and some of the reasons they resent the West are valid (though they don't justify acts of terrorism IMO).
Yeah, but aren't those still intended to be used from within a browser? I was suggesting that you could return "web browsers" to the work of rendering basically static pages, and create a new program intended to simplify the creation and enhance the feature-set of "web applications". However, it seems to me that people are working on various ways to turn the "web browser" into the latter, since static pages are becoming less of the focus of internet usage/development.
Think more of applications like Google's Docs and Spreadsheet.
Web applications are inherently cross-platform-- the OS doesn't matter, only the browser. Also, they don't really require that you install anything or have admin privileges to install things, and they're accessible from any computer with an internet connection and web browser.
The downside of web apps is that you can't take them with you. Unplug from the network and you can't use them. I guess this might be a good step towards solving that problem.
Of course, whether this should all be built into web browsers, which were originally intended to store static pages, is an issue you could debate. Sometimes I think it might make more sense to make a browser-like framework for programs, but built from the ground up for applications instead of static pages. But then, I guess that more and more, that's what browsers are becoming.
This is a good point-- that you purchased the files doesn't necessarily mean you committed copyright infringement. It seems to me that, legally, this should be comparable to police finding your fingerprints at the scene of a robbery. It's circumstantial. It wouldn't be sufficient evidence to convict you of anything, even though it might be enough for them to investigate you.
It's not even fingerprinting (at least not as far as anyone knows yet). What's been reported is that Apple tags the files with the username of the person who bought it. It's similar to the tag they put in for the song title and artist name, except that the purchaser name isn't able to be edited within the iTunes interface. It can be edited, just not through iTunes.
This isn't "hidden", it's not a secret, it's not anything new (Apple's been doing this all along), and it's not sneaky. It could just as easily be claimed that Apple did this for the user's convenience. iTunes notes which songs in your library were purchased from iTunes, as well as telling you who purchased them. If you have multiple users purchasing music on your system, that could be useful information. The only way it's going to hurt you is if your purchases hit the P2P networks without stripping the tags first. In that case, I'd have to ask: are you stupid or something?
It's too big to be a PDA, too small to be a laptop. This thing looks like a solution looking for a problem.
I don't know... I think the basic idea is interesting. There is a problem in need of a solution. As smart phones get more storage space and processing power, they really should be able to replace desktops for basic functionality like word processing, e-mail, web. What smart phones lack are the screen and keyboard.
So I'm with Palm on that much. So what do you do? The obvious idea in my mind is to set up a docking station, so you drop your phone into it and it connects out to a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and whatever else. Make the thing have one interface for the small screen, and a real desktop layout for when it's connected to the docking station.
Palm went another way with it. Apparently, they're thinking that you'd really want to have a separate machine with enough power that all you really need is a bluetooth connection to the smartphone, and the new unit will handle the video and everything. And they think you're going to want to carry this machine around, so they build it to be like a laptop.
I see two problems with the idea. First, by building it into a separate computer, it's not clear why I should buy Palm's computer rather than a normal computer. I guess it's relatively small and cheap, but I think I'd rather take on the extra expense and bulk to have a real laptop with a full set of features.
The second problem I see is that I think they've forgotten that the PDA is supposed to be the portable computer that you carry when you don't want to carry a laptop. In other words, the whole appeal of a Treo (in my mind) is that you can have very basic computing functionality during times where I don't want to carry anything bigger than a phone. If I'm content to carry something laptop-sized, then I'd prefer to keep my phone as a plain phone while I carry my laptop. But with this device, it's like I'm supposed to have a smart phone, my laptop, and an in-between-PDA-and-laptop-device? Really, who's going to bother?
On the other hand, I do agree with the general notion PDAs could stand to have more full desktop functionality. Imagine if you could plug your iPhone into a dock, have keyboard/mouse/display, and be presented with a (perhaps scaled-back) version of their desktop OSX UI. Wouldn't that be worth something? I doubt we're really that far from being able to accomplish that.
What you're saying sounds right. Apple is coming out with the iPhone soon, Palm is supposed to be releasing some new device today that runs Linux (who knows whether it'll live up to the hype circulating around). Meanwhile, Microsoft has Windows Vista and the Zune, so they really want to hype something.
So they come out with a touch-screen device that really isn't a consumer device, have some cool-looking demos of how it theoretically could work, and try to make it look like they've invented something. Maybe there are people who will hear about this who hadn't seen multi-touch stuff will be really impressed and think Microsoft has invented a really great device. However, I'd bet that you won't see very many of these until a couple years have passed, the price has come down, and Microsoft is on revision 2 or 3. Meanwhile, they'll probably make it so the device only runs Windows, the portable-device connectivity only works with the Zune and cameras that have paid MS some licensing fee, and just generally it won't work properly with any non-Microsoft products.
I don't think it's an urban/rural thing, but more of a mass-media/real-life thing. Even in most big cities that I've been in, everyday people are usually friendly (and I live in NYC!). However, watch the news, TV, or movies, and you'll get a different picture. MSM culture tells us things that the majority of sensible people don't really follow, but the majority of people aren't that sensible.
I'm surprised by your problems with NeoOffice. I remember it being a bit rough around the edges a while ago, during the 1.x versions, but since 2.0, it's been pretty rock-solid for me. I wonder if you're using some particular feature that I'm not.
I've tried OpenOffice w/ X11, but find it a bit jarring to use X11 applications in OSX. MS Office for OSX is pretty good, except for Entourage, and for the fact that it's a PPC application running under emulation, which makes it run a bit slow.
I've decided not to go the emulation route because I don't really want to have to have a full copy of Windows to run my office suite. It means I need to buy a copy, have several extra gigabytes of data on my hard drive, boot the VM image, and deal with running Windows. I'd just rather not.
I keep hoping for some progress on iWork. It's a good program, but Pages feels to aimed at design for me, and not enough at text entry. Also, I need a spreadsheet application. I'd also like to see Sun release their own OpenOffice Aqua port, but they've been slow to make any progress there.
In the end, NeoOffice and MS Office 2004 are the only apps that work for me, and NeoOffice is slightly faster, and doesn't load the entourage database into memory whenever I try to edit a spreadsheet. It's the winner. I'm sure it would meet many people's needs (though not everyones), and it's free to boot.
Yeah, that was my thought. If you're plugging the ethernet into your computer and relying on software to route traffic to this device in the first place, how is this better than software firewalls?
Interestingly, according to some theories of intelligence, some degree of faith, concern for others, and emotion is necessary for there to be intelligence at all. Regarding "others", the general idea is that development of communication with and anticipation of other thinking beings is a necessary component of intelligence (or any intelligence resembling what we understand as intelligence), which means that you must encounter these "others" as either friends/allies or enemies/opponents (and also there may be those who fall in between and are neutral).
This is somewhat connected to your description of evolutionary theory in that the interaction with "allies" (which may likely be others carrying the same genes), our concern for allies takes shape as a desire to aid.
Seriously, haven't people heard cheesy speeches around Christmas time, saying things like, "It's better to give than to receive"? The idea that people receive pleasure from performing generous/altruistic actions is far from new.
I guess the breakthrough is supposed to be that it's "hardwired", but I don't know what that's supposed to mean. Inborn? Well duh, it isn't learned. That they've found activity in the brain that seems connected to this "pleasure"? That doesn't impress me too much-- I've been under the impression that they could detect pleasure for some time.
If they've found a mechanism sufficient that they can disable it, that's pretty neat, but I really hope they don't disable it for anyone. The results could be terrifying. If they can enhance it for psychopaths (or whomever) for treatment, that might be interesting. Still, let's not be too eager to go mucking around people's brains.
So, if altruism creates pleasure in the brain, is it still considered altruism? You ARE getting something out of it, after all.
Quite a few philosophic thinkers refuse the idea that "good behavior" is every truly to the detriment of the actor. There's a lot of discussion that can begin at the question you pose, but to be productive, you might rephrase it like this: is it possible that being "good" could be worse for a person than being "bad"?
Right away some issues fall out of this. If being "bad" is truly better, then there is little incentive for people to be good. Why would anyone be good of being bad was better? What would it mean to be good if the outcome of being good were bad?
Many people come around to a way of thinking similar to this: there may be some advantages to being bad, but being good is somehow absolutely better. Some derive this idea of good being "absolutely better" from the idea of an afterlife which provides either eternal punishment or eternal reward. Some view it as an issue of guilt-- that being "good" allows you to live with an easy conscience which provides a life that it ultimately better. Some have other explanations as to why it all works out.
Of course, this also presents other issues. If you rely on the afterlife, then "good behavior" becomes whatever provides you with eternal reward. If you rely on conscience, then being good means "whatever keeps me from feeling guilty". This problem raises the question as to whether there's a more transcendent good which does not allow itself it be defined in such petty terms, i.e. could you perform a good deed that would result in your own damnation?
Like i said, there's a lot of discussion to be had here, but very few philosophers (and really no good ones) believe that "goodness" and "selflessness" require that no good is returned upon the good and selfless actor.
So even if the moral compass is in-built, it only activates in the presence of others.
Well what would it mean to be altruistic outside the presence of others? Someone else needs to be involved somehow, or else there can be no object of the altruism. What I mean is that the object of altruism must always be "others", so without "others", there's no possibility of altruism or selfishness.
It compared it to the pleasure of food and sex. We don't eat and screw all day long every day, and if we did, it would cause problems. I don't just mean the society problems of no one working, either, but-- you know, things get sore and over-stuffed. We also have other pleasures to compete with these. We derive satisfaction from accomplishing, we receive pleasure from dominating, and sometimes even sore muscles from a hard day's work feel like a reward when your head hits the pillows.
Besides, our society tells us not to engage in altruistic behavior. When you're nice to people for no reward, you're a sucker. Failing to screw everyone over in pursuit of even the smallest gain makes you "inefficient". It's insufficient to like things or like people, but you must always be ready to explain why you like them, or people will think you're soft in the head.
On top of all that, altruism isn't as rare as you might think. Sometimes you just don't noticing it going on. Also, sometimes people are ashamed (really! think about it!) of their own altruistic tendencies and cover them up by inventing selfish motives to excuse their altruism.
I've not used NeoOffice, but to me, this sounds like the software is in the stage Firefox was in just before hitting 1.0 -- stable enough for everyday use; maybe there are a few bugs...
I have been using NeoOffice for some time now, though my usage is pretty normal. I use it to type things up, view/edit Excel and Word documents. In the past six months, I haven't had a problem with it crashing or doing something unexpected such that I would call it a "bug".
My only complaint would be that it's a little sluggish-feeling at times. Far from unusable, but slow enough that I feel like it's slower than it should be. I'm running it on an Intel machine, and at least for me, the Intel NeoOffice isn't any slower than the PPC MS Office 2004. (I have both, and never really use 2004)