You designate "appealing to authority" as fallacious. This is an alias for "appealing to misleading authority." To quote the fallacy file:
Is this a matter which I can decide without appeal to expert opinion? If the answer is "yes", then do so. If "no", go to the next question:
Is this a matter upon which expert opinion is available? If not, then your opinion will be as good as anyone else's. If so, proceed to the next question
Is the authority an expert on the matter? If not, then why listen? If so, go on:
Is the authority biased towards one side? If so, the authority may be untrustworthy. At the very least, before accepting the authority's word seek a second, unbiased opinion. That is, go to the last question:
Is the authority's opinion representative of expert opinion? If not, then find out what the expert consensus is and rely on that. If so, then you may rationally rely upon the authority's opinion.
If an argument to authority cannot pass these five tests, then it commits the fallacy of appeal to misleading authority.
We're talking about appealing to the Bible, or in other words, to appealing to God's opinion on the subject. You may not hold the Bible to be the word of God, in which case you would claim that the Bible is not an authoritative opinion on the subject, and therefore appealing to it is a logical fallacy. However, if given that the Bible IS the word of God, the argument is compellingly convincing, and passes the test of authority with flying colors, thusly:
Moral issues are not easily decided given the limits of human understanding, so an appeal to authority is useful.
The Bible is available, and representative of God's opinion on the matter (this was given as a premise)
According to the Bible, God is an expert on everything
God's truthfulness is also a premise held by Christians, and that is affirmed in the Bible.
God's opinion is the only expert opinion that matters; all other opinions are fallible.
Basically, if you start with the premise that the Bible is a false authority, then you can consider an appeal to the Bible to be a logical fallacy. But the logical fallacy is a much lesser issue than your premise -- given that the Bible is false, of course it's ridiculous to appeal to it! Christians, however, are not working under that premise, so theirs is not a problem of logical fallacy, it's a problem of different premises (ever noticed that dogma and premise are synonyms? The one makes you sound smart, and the other makes you sound dumb, but they come down to nearly the same thing). To have a really cogent argument, you need to prove or disprove Biblical truthfulness, and that's a rather different kettle of fish.
I can't speak to how the state's doing it, but I do live in Utah. The schools here have been maintaining a list of blocked sites for quite a while. Apparently the list is mainly built from *complaints* -- basically, someone complains about a site and it gets added to the list.
Sometimes someone blocks something useful, and the same general complaint method can get it unblocked. Utahns are very good at complaining, so the filters are pretty thorough. I imagine the AG office would use a similar system.
This is more or less what's currently being tried with the Utopia project. A consortium of city governments are paying for the cost of running fiber optic lines to every residence and every business within their city limits. ISP's will lease the lines from the Utopia group, but will not control those lines directly. Anyone who wants to put in their own infrastructure and run it is still welcome, of course, but it's really unlikely they'll be able to compete with Utopia's economies of scale and coverage.
One big advantage of this is that Utopia doesn't have a profit motive to block certain types of traffic. There is no "Utopia" traffic to favor, so hopefully you can avoid the anti-VoIP bias that a normal ISP has.
That sounds about right. Most people from most oppressive countries live pretty well most of the time. If it were not so, the governments wouldn't last very long. Honestly, even after these countries are "liberated," you're going to get a lot of whining from people about the good old days.
A great example of this is South Africa. My family is from South Africa, and I still have many relatives there. If you'd told us twenty years ago that there were hit-squads, constant uprisings, military actions against blacks, and frequent prison torture, we would have had a tough time believing you. Even people who had just visited South Africa from abroad would have probably contradicted you. It seemed like a pretty nice place! Of course, in retrospect, all these things turned out to be true, but we didn't hear about it. We just went to work and went to school and never really crossed any of the invisible lines we didn't know were there.
Similarly, I can happily recommend that you go visit China sometime. It's a pretty nice place, most of the time, and you could probably even live there quite comfortably. Quite a few of my friends have been there and they enjoyed the trip. You'll have to look really hard for even the slightest signs of your being oppressed.
"Suspiciously good" quality is dead common when dealing with Anime. There are probably a good fifty new Anime episodes released every week, and the guys doing it have worked out the quality issues very well. If someone experienced were doing the ripping, I can believe a high-quality, completely unofficial rip is possible. This still leaves the question of how they got access to the tape.
As marketing techniques go, I think this is pretty cool, though it seems you'd only want to risk this if you're really confident in the quality of your program. If the leak generates bland or disinterested reviews, then you're probably going to hurt viewership on your pilot.
I would love to see TV stations offering their programs over the Internet. I'd even pay for it -- probably a higher rate for recent shows, with discounts if I buy an entire season at once, for example.
I guess a lot of people think that, but my reason's a little different. I'm an American, but most of the TV I watch is in Japanese. It's very hard to get Japanese TV in the U.S., and for most shows there's no way to do it without breaking copyright laws. If I had a legal way of getting shows from other countries, I would be willing to pay a premium for this.
For me, it's not a question of convenience, it's a question of being able to do legally that which I currently cannot.
Having worked on some terribly buggy code with buggy docs, I'm going to suggest that even bad docs are better than none. Sure, you get burned once or twice, but you quickly learn not to trust the docs as canon. And while the docs often don't tell you what the code does, it tells you what the developer WANTED it to do, which is golden information when you're trying to debug.
This kind of reminds me of the world's longest cheesecake record that someone set here a little while ago. I mean, sure, it's great to have a world record, but who cares? First solo, non-stop flight around the world, without refueling. Remove any one clause, and it's already been done.
All that said, it's a big engineering challenge to build planes that can do this. Improvement in aviation technology is still a Good Thing. So good luck to him.
Really? Remember I'm only talking about software that you *pay* for, here. If you buy a text editor, and find that it is so buggy that you are unable to edit text with it, wouldn't you like some legal recourse?
If it's a FOSS text editor, then quality control is already built into the system (namely, fix it yourself!). But for commercial software, you probably clicked through an EULA that said "even though you have given us money for this text editor, you are not guaranteed that it will edit text, nor will we give you your money back if it doesn't." Excuse me? If you don't believe me, do a search for 'FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE', usually in all-caps, in the next few EULA's you read.
We have minimal quality and engineering standards in nearly all constructive disciplines; why not software? I would like to see companies required to either "fix it or refund it," at a minimum.
I think the fastest, most efficient way to achieve this is by pushing the "legal liability" button. We're not sure what best practices ARE in software (and you're right, you probably don't need endless wrangling code reviews to write a text editor). But if you make companies liable for the end result, the risk- and cost-minimizing best practices will evolve on their own.
I believe that commercial software is, and should be treated as, an engineering discipline. Similarly, I think we need to accumulate some "best practices" that require commercial software to meet standards of robustness, stability, and functionality. We then need to crush, kill, and destroy anyone who fails to meet those standards.
Software's not a game teenagers play in their basements anymore; it's used on airliners, in cars, in hospitals, and all sorts of other places where a system crash is Not Acceptable. While you can find rare examples of folks who are willing to stick their companies on the line when it comes to the stability of their software, this is the exception, not the rule. Accepting financial liability for bugs in software is a good start. It's also, interestingly, something that only a commercial entity can do.
Educational doesn't have to mean that it be visually spectacular. My first exposure to computers was in a computer lab in South Africa in the 80's, where they were teaching elementary school students how to move the turtle around in Logo.
I'd suggest having some simple programming languages, like Logo or BASIC, and some games that run under those languages. Text games that require simple arithmetic or planning ahead to win are great. If the students manage to figure out how to use the languages to start modifying the games, or making their own, then that's a bonus.
Ideally, the HIVLite reproduces itself by locking onto a protein which is found in the cancer cells themselves. One of the things that's so interesting about HIV is that it's pretty specifically targeted -- it only hits one particular kind of immune cell, thus breaking the immune system's chain reaction.
So *if this is done right*, having sex with someone who has it would give you the virus, but it wouldn't cause an infection because you don't have the cancer cells so essential to its survival. And if you do have cancer, you just got treated for cheap/free!
Of course, most of that Internet Explorer market share is because it's the default browser installed on new computers. "A computer in every home" is close to reality in the developed world, and most of those computers don't have technically literate users. The huge majority of people on the Internet find it intimidating and scary to download and install new software. Attempting to grab THAT chunk of the market would require a qualitative change (i.e. Dell, Gateway, or HP installing a FOSS browser on new machines), not just continued progress in the same direction.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Having a browser with enough market share to make sites pay attention is all that's really needed to make it usable. And if that market share is small enough, and tech-savvy enough, to have the spyware authors turn up their noses at it, so much the better. I would be happy if Firefox hits about 15% and just sits there.
Free trade hurts individual workers in individual industries because it moves jobs around. These jobs can be outsourced in all sorts of ways -- either by companies directly preferring to hire overseas, or by overseas companies outcompeting local ones. No argument that free trade creates problems for individuals.
But that doesn't mean the grand-total economy is hurt. On the whole, the economy always benefits from free trade. The reason for this is that trade never occurs unless it is beneficial to both parties. Therefore, every time trade across borders occurs, the sum-total value of BOTH economies increases or at least stays the same -- were it not so, the trade would not occur.
For a more down-to-earth analogy, the problem with whining about how outsourcing destroys the US economy is that you're ignoring half the equation. The tech workers themselves are hurt, but the consumers of the products produced by tech companies benefit, mainly from lower prices. Additionally, in purely monetary terms, it can be shown that this benefit always exceeds or is at worst equal to the loss -- the reason for this is roughly based on the "trade does not occur except when mutual benefit is achieved" law.
There are cogent arguments against NAFTA, WTO, etc. Such arguments include national security (controlling critical industries within your own borders), dealing with problems of displacement, and plain old cultural tradition. But worsening of the economy is NOT a cogent argument.
My post is too short to fully explain why economies always benefit from free trade, so don't read it and assume this is the sum-total of the argument. If you want to seriously consider it, I highly suggest you Google the theory of "comparative advantage" and read some of the rants. There's a good one here
About ten years ago, I met a family from Israel who was living in the U.S. One of the girls, perhaps 19, described the military service. She said that in Israel, there are four years of compulsory military service for ALL Israelis, both men and women, and that Israeli citizens were expected to have an automatic weapon in their home and to be trained in its use.
So, the "Americans are better armed" and "Americans wouldn't put up with it" arguments are complete garbage. We are not better armed; Israelis are. And Israelis aren't putting up with it. They're blowing up Palestinians on a fairly regular basis -- The Israeli to Palestinian death ratio is heavily favoring the Israelis, intifada and all. In fact, there is a pretty strong feeling that the hard-line, refusing-to-put-up-with-it attitude of the Israelis is exactly what makes the peace process so difficult, especially since they have the military and economic upper-hand over the Palestinians.
We Americans like to think we're a tough-as-nails bunch, unlike those wimps everywhere else, but I think the cake goes to the Israelis on that one.
Bulgarian has something like that too -- all tenses (not just past tense) have witness and non-witness forms. Bulgarian also has implied pronouns on verb conjugations (i.e. you can 'hear' the conjugation for every verb, so you are allowed to leave out the I, he, she, they, etc.). And yes, there is a first-person singular non-witness conjugation. I have heard some Bulgarians call this "drunk tense," generally while giggling hysterically.
As an example, you can say "Bil sum se napil", which means I got completely drunk, and is in non-witness form. Basically, you got so drunk that you don't actually remember having done it, and heard about it afterward.
One Bulgarian grammar book pointed out that this is also a handy tense for politicians. "My opponent said that I have defrauded the voters." By placing 'I have defrauded the voters' into non-witness form, you've already denied it:-).
I work for a game company that recently attempted a humorous game. It's absolutely true that you ignore the jokes after playing it a few hundred times, although I can't imagine that anyone but a developer would have the patience to replay that game as much as I have. It usually gets a laugh out of first-time players, so that's worth something.
At any rate, I think it might be the first attempt at a humorous simulation game -- it could have been called "Space Station Tycoon," but it seemed icky and unoriginal to give it a name like that. It's a pity, it might have sold better.
Be forewarned that I wrote more than half the jokes. If you lambast my game, I will probably cry.
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- Is this a matter which I can decide without appeal to expert opinion? If the answer is "yes", then do so. If "no", go to the next question:
- Is this a matter upon which expert opinion is available? If not, then your opinion will be as good as anyone else's. If so, proceed to the next question
- Is the authority an expert on the matter? If not, then why listen? If so, go on:
- Is the authority biased towards one side? If so, the authority may be untrustworthy. At the very least, before accepting the authority's word seek a second, unbiased opinion. That is, go to the last question:
- Is the authority's opinion representative of expert opinion? If not, then find out what the expert consensus is and rely on that. If so, then you may rationally rely upon the authority's opinion.
If an argument to authority cannot pass these five tests, then it commits the fallacy of appeal to misleading authority.We're talking about appealing to the Bible, or in other words, to appealing to God's opinion on the subject. You may not hold the Bible to be the word of God, in which case you would claim that the Bible is not an authoritative opinion on the subject, and therefore appealing to it is a logical fallacy. However, if given that the Bible IS the word of God, the argument is compellingly convincing, and passes the test of authority with flying colors, thusly:
- Moral issues are not easily decided given the limits of human understanding, so an appeal to authority is useful.
- The Bible is available, and representative of God's opinion on the matter (this was given as a premise)
- According to the Bible, God is an expert on everything
- God's truthfulness is also a premise held by Christians, and that is affirmed in the Bible.
- God's opinion is the only expert opinion that matters; all other opinions are fallible.
Basically, if you start with the premise that the Bible is a false authority, then you can consider an appeal to the Bible to be a logical fallacy. But the logical fallacy is a much lesser issue than your premise -- given that the Bible is false, of course it's ridiculous to appeal to it! Christians, however, are not working under that premise, so theirs is not a problem of logical fallacy, it's a problem of different premises (ever noticed that dogma and premise are synonyms? The one makes you sound smart, and the other makes you sound dumb, but they come down to nearly the same thing). To have a really cogent argument, you need to prove or disprove Biblical truthfulness, and that's a rather different kettle of fish.I can't speak to how the state's doing it, but I do live in Utah. The schools here have been maintaining a list of blocked sites for quite a while. Apparently the list is mainly built from *complaints* -- basically, someone complains about a site and it gets added to the list.
Sometimes someone blocks something useful, and the same general complaint method can get it unblocked. Utahns are very good at complaining, so the filters are pretty thorough. I imagine the AG office would use a similar system.
This is more or less what's currently being tried with the Utopia project. A consortium of city governments are paying for the cost of running fiber optic lines to every residence and every business within their city limits. ISP's will lease the lines from the Utopia group, but will not control those lines directly. Anyone who wants to put in their own infrastructure and run it is still welcome, of course, but it's really unlikely they'll be able to compete with Utopia's economies of scale and coverage.
One big advantage of this is that Utopia doesn't have a profit motive to block certain types of traffic. There is no "Utopia" traffic to favor, so hopefully you can avoid the anti-VoIP bias that a normal ISP has.
That sounds about right. Most people from most oppressive countries live pretty well most of the time. If it were not so, the governments wouldn't last very long. Honestly, even after these countries are "liberated," you're going to get a lot of whining from people about the good old days.
A great example of this is South Africa. My family is from South Africa, and I still have many relatives there. If you'd told us twenty years ago that there were hit-squads, constant uprisings, military actions against blacks, and frequent prison torture, we would have had a tough time believing you. Even people who had just visited South Africa from abroad would have probably contradicted you. It seemed like a pretty nice place! Of course, in retrospect, all these things turned out to be true, but we didn't hear about it. We just went to work and went to school and never really crossed any of the invisible lines we didn't know were there.
Similarly, I can happily recommend that you go visit China sometime. It's a pretty nice place, most of the time, and you could probably even live there quite comfortably. Quite a few of my friends have been there and they enjoyed the trip. You'll have to look really hard for even the slightest signs of your being oppressed.
But that doesn't mean that everything's OK.
"Suspiciously good" quality is dead common when dealing with Anime. There are probably a good fifty new Anime episodes released every week, and the guys doing it have worked out the quality issues very well. If someone experienced were doing the ripping, I can believe a high-quality, completely unofficial rip is possible. This still leaves the question of how they got access to the tape.
As marketing techniques go, I think this is pretty cool, though it seems you'd only want to risk this if you're really confident in the quality of your program. If the leak generates bland or disinterested reviews, then you're probably going to hurt viewership on your pilot.
I would love to see TV stations offering their programs over the Internet. I'd even pay for it -- probably a higher rate for recent shows, with discounts if I buy an entire season at once, for example.
I guess a lot of people think that, but my reason's a little different. I'm an American, but most of the TV I watch is in Japanese. It's very hard to get Japanese TV in the U.S., and for most shows there's no way to do it without breaking copyright laws. If I had a legal way of getting shows from other countries, I would be willing to pay a premium for this.
For me, it's not a question of convenience, it's a question of being able to do legally that which I currently cannot.
Having worked on some terribly buggy code with buggy docs, I'm going to suggest that even bad docs are better than none. Sure, you get burned once or twice, but you quickly learn not to trust the docs as canon. And while the docs often don't tell you what the code does, it tells you what the developer WANTED it to do, which is golden information when you're trying to debug.
This kind of reminds me of the world's longest cheesecake record that someone set here a little while ago. I mean, sure, it's great to have a world record, but who cares? First solo, non-stop flight around the world, without refueling. Remove any one clause, and it's already been done.
All that said, it's a big engineering challenge to build planes that can do this. Improvement in aviation technology is still a Good Thing. So good luck to him.
Really? Remember I'm only talking about software that you *pay* for, here. If you buy a text editor, and find that it is so buggy that you are unable to edit text with it, wouldn't you like some legal recourse?
If it's a FOSS text editor, then quality control is already built into the system (namely, fix it yourself!). But for commercial software, you probably clicked through an EULA that said "even though you have given us money for this text editor, you are not guaranteed that it will edit text, nor will we give you your money back if it doesn't." Excuse me? If you don't believe me, do a search for 'FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE', usually in all-caps, in the next few EULA's you read.
We have minimal quality and engineering standards in nearly all constructive disciplines; why not software? I would like to see companies required to either "fix it or refund it," at a minimum. I think the fastest, most efficient way to achieve this is by pushing the "legal liability" button. We're not sure what best practices ARE in software (and you're right, you probably don't need endless wrangling code reviews to write a text editor). But if you make companies liable for the end result, the risk- and cost-minimizing best practices will evolve on their own.
I believe that commercial software is, and should be treated as, an engineering discipline. Similarly, I think we need to accumulate some "best practices" that require commercial software to meet standards of robustness, stability, and functionality. We then need to crush, kill, and destroy anyone who fails to meet those standards.
Software's not a game teenagers play in their basements anymore; it's used on airliners, in cars, in hospitals, and all sorts of other places where a system crash is Not Acceptable. While you can find rare examples of folks who are willing to stick their companies on the line when it comes to the stability of their software, this is the exception, not the rule. Accepting financial liability for bugs in software is a good start. It's also, interestingly, something that only a commercial entity can do.
Educational doesn't have to mean that it be visually spectacular. My first exposure to computers was in a computer lab in South Africa in the 80's, where they were teaching elementary school students how to move the turtle around in Logo.
I'd suggest having some simple programming languages, like Logo or BASIC, and some games that run under those languages. Text games that require simple arithmetic or planning ahead to win are great. If the students manage to figure out how to use the languages to start modifying the games, or making their own, then that's a bonus.
Ideally, the HIVLite reproduces itself by locking onto a protein which is found in the cancer cells themselves. One of the things that's so interesting about HIV is that it's pretty specifically targeted -- it only hits one particular kind of immune cell, thus breaking the immune system's chain reaction.
So *if this is done right*, having sex with someone who has it would give you the virus, but it wouldn't cause an infection because you don't have the cancer cells so essential to its survival. And if you do have cancer, you just got treated for cheap/free!
Of course, most of that Internet Explorer market share is because it's the default browser installed on new computers. "A computer in every home" is close to reality in the developed world, and most of those computers don't have technically literate users. The huge majority of people on the Internet find it intimidating and scary to download and install new software. Attempting to grab THAT chunk of the market would require a qualitative change (i.e. Dell, Gateway, or HP installing a FOSS browser on new machines), not just continued progress in the same direction.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Having a browser with enough market share to make sites pay attention is all that's really needed to make it usable. And if that market share is small enough, and tech-savvy enough, to have the spyware authors turn up their noses at it, so much the better. I would be happy if Firefox hits about 15% and just sits there.
Parent doesn't understand economics.
Free trade hurts individual workers in individual industries because it moves jobs around. These jobs can be outsourced in all sorts of ways -- either by companies directly preferring to hire overseas, or by overseas companies outcompeting local ones. No argument that free trade creates problems for individuals.
But that doesn't mean the grand-total economy is hurt. On the whole, the economy always benefits from free trade. The reason for this is that trade never occurs unless it is beneficial to both parties. Therefore, every time trade across borders occurs, the sum-total value of BOTH economies increases or at least stays the same -- were it not so, the trade would not occur.
For a more down-to-earth analogy, the problem with whining about how outsourcing destroys the US economy is that you're ignoring half the equation. The tech workers themselves are hurt, but the consumers of the products produced by tech companies benefit, mainly from lower prices. Additionally, in purely monetary terms, it can be shown that this benefit always exceeds or is at worst equal to the loss -- the reason for this is roughly based on the "trade does not occur except when mutual benefit is achieved" law.
There are cogent arguments against NAFTA, WTO, etc. Such arguments include national security (controlling critical industries within your own borders), dealing with problems of displacement, and plain old cultural tradition. But worsening of the economy is NOT a cogent argument.
My post is too short to fully explain why economies always benefit from free trade, so don't read it and assume this is the sum-total of the argument. If you want to seriously consider it, I highly suggest you Google the theory of "comparative advantage" and read some of the rants. There's a good one here
About ten years ago, I met a family from Israel who was living in the U.S. One of the girls, perhaps 19, described the military service. She said that in Israel, there are four years of compulsory military service for ALL Israelis, both men and women, and that Israeli citizens were expected to have an automatic weapon in their home and to be trained in its use.
So, the "Americans are better armed" and "Americans wouldn't put up with it" arguments are complete garbage. We are not better armed; Israelis are. And Israelis aren't putting up with it. They're blowing up Palestinians on a fairly regular basis -- The Israeli to Palestinian death ratio is heavily favoring the Israelis, intifada and all. In fact, there is a pretty strong feeling that the hard-line, refusing-to-put-up-with-it attitude of the Israelis is exactly what makes the peace process so difficult, especially since they have the military and economic upper-hand over the Palestinians.
We Americans like to think we're a tough-as-nails bunch, unlike those wimps everywhere else, but I think the cake goes to the Israelis on that one.
Bulgarian has something like that too -- all tenses (not just past tense) have witness and non-witness forms. Bulgarian also has implied pronouns on verb conjugations (i.e. you can 'hear' the conjugation for every verb, so you are allowed to leave out the I, he, she, they, etc.). And yes, there is a first-person singular non-witness conjugation. I have heard some Bulgarians call this "drunk tense," generally while giggling hysterically.
:-).
As an example, you can say "Bil sum se napil", which means I got completely drunk, and is in non-witness form. Basically, you got so drunk that you don't actually remember having done it, and heard about it afterward.
One Bulgarian grammar book pointed out that this is also a handy tense for politicians. "My opponent said that I have defrauded the voters." By placing 'I have defrauded the voters' into non-witness form, you've already denied it
I work for a game company that recently attempted a humorous game. It's absolutely true that you ignore the jokes after playing it a few hundred times, although I can't imagine that anyone but a developer would have the patience to replay that game as much as I have. It usually gets a laugh out of first-time players, so that's worth something.
At any rate, I think it might be the first attempt at a humorous simulation game -- it could have been called "Space Station Tycoon," but it seemed icky and unoriginal to give it a name like that. It's a pity, it might have sold better.
Be forewarned that I wrote more than half the jokes. If you lambast my game, I will probably cry.