Philosophers realized this a long time ago. Much of what is called modern "analytic" philosophy is based on the idea you just expressed: that philosophical problems often arise through an inadequate grasp of logic or language.
Russell's book is also wildly outdated and heavily biased in favour of his own ideas. It's simply not possible to gain anything other than a superficial understanding of the subject from a book like that.
When people say they are interested in philosophy, they often mean different things, since it is such a diverse subject that is only unified by its tools and methods.
People who are interested in philosophy are better off approaching it through the questions that interest them. For example, are the theories of Quantum mechanics properly translatable into ordinary natural languages, or can they only be expressed in mathematical terms? If so, what consequences does this have for ordinary language?
Thinking about questions like that will carry you much further into the subject than reading "History of Philosophy for Dummies".
Most people aren't sitting horrified watching this. The majority of the population fall into one of two classes: (1) the people who don't like it, but who only vote for economic reasons; and (2) the people who don't care because they think the law only affects "bad" people. (I've deliberately left out the seriously deranged people who vote because the candidate is a "nice man", but they exist).
The idea that the majority of the populace will rise up and vote out a government that sacrifices their liberty for security is an illusion, and the political parties know it. This isn't some conspiratorial power grab, but the parties responding to the public desire for security.
If you want democracy to protect human rights, privacy and civil liberties, then I have a bridge to sell. Most voters don't care enough about those things.
When people say democracy is the least worst form of government, they forget that the least worst can still be appalling.
People in Britain don't vote against parties who threaten civil liberties. They vote against parties that threaten their mortgages. In some respects fascism is actually preferable. At least the trains would work properly.
There is no such thing as hypocrisy when it comes to your government. When they do something it is right, and when someone else does the same thing, they decide whether it is right or wrong. This is all perfectly right and fair, they have decided.
I don't know about anyone else, but I haven't been able to take anything an elected official or a business leader has said seriously for a long long time now.
"The other option is that the nobel committee has a clear bias towards what Americans view as the left,"
No.
The Nobel Prizes are Scandinavian institutions. To Scandinavians, what Americans think is "left" looks like extreme far right wing kookery, and what Americans think is "right" is simply beyond the pale.
Americans have no business talking about the left and the right in terms of their own politics which is extremely right wing, extremely religious and extremely authoritarian compared to the rest of the world's democracies. You guys need to realize that it's you that are out of step and it is your politics that is weird and kooky.
How's that then. You've made the Canadians look normal!! Hang your heads in shame.
Those who modded this post up might want to look at who Phil S is (i.e. he's not a neutral observer).
The fact is, that anyone who has seen the evidence knows that Gary Weiss had a conflict of interest broke Wikipedia's rules on numerous occasions and had the support of influential admins (up to and including the odious Wales, who is apparently willing to change one's Wiki bio in exchange for sex.) in doing so. Anyone who looks at the evidence knows that Mantanmoreland is Gary Weiss. The evidence is overwhelming.
As far as Wikipedia is concerned, it does not matter whether Weiss or Byrne was right about naked short selling. What matters is that a small group of corrupt people knowingly abused Wikipedia and still wouldn't admit they were wrong when presented with overwhelming evidence by all sorts of people.
Yeah they are. Now you know how 9/11 and such things happen.
The security services like to give the public impression of competence, but they're as useless as everyone else and lack of real public oversight probably makes them worse.
It would be nice to see what would happen if we got rid of this secrets crap. I'm willing to suffer an increased risk of terrorism if it means my own government isn't keeping secrets from its people. Funny how we never get that choice.
They really have no excuse for their secrecy if they are going to give away sensitive information on eBay, to women in bars, leave it in laptops in restaurants, etc.
Yeah, they've obviously done the sane thing and made PvP zonal.
WoW could do this very easily, by using the upper level limit of a zone as a PvP flag. You would only be flagged to those on your side of the line, so for example, Ashenvale would flag all under 30s to the other under 30s and all over 30s to the other over 30s.
This would immediately return the game to what it is in the first days of a new server - an awesome bloodbath where people of all levels actually go looking for a fight.
But Blizzard are either too stupid to do this, or have deliberately made the PvP servers as "tard self-segregation servers" to keep the real idiots away from the grown ups so that the latter don't cancel.
I suspect the latter.
I liked WoW as a game, but Blizzard are clueless when it comes to anticipating how low some people will go to ruin a game.
It's virtually meaningless. The US is so far to the right compared to other democracies (and Americans don't realize how extremely conservative their country is) that this survey may just show that some economists aren't as right wing as others. Doing a worldwide survey, or at least a survey among the industrialized countries might show that all economists are extremely right wing, or that US economists are out of step with other economists.
It would have been a lot cooler if it had been based off of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which is the best RPG I ever played. They kept some of the things from that, like the careers, but from what I can see, none of the subtlety.
My brother lived in China for two years. It was fairly simple for him to get around the censorship, so there was nothing he couldn't access on the net. Hell, he even showed me where you could see the Tiananmen square videos on Chinese Youtube. The censorship is no deterrent to a determined person.
The fact is that most Chinese do not really care. Like most people around the world, they use the internet to for mindless crap. The fact that some politically sensitive material is harder for them to get to doesn't affect most of them at all, because most of them don't care.
Although people in democratic societies rant on about how their internet is not censored, it wouldn't make much difference to most people if it was, because the kind of stuff that would be censored is interesting only to a minority.
And the AC needs to accept that most people in the world no longer like or trust the US. Get over it.
If you've already joined those sailing under the Jolly Roger, why would you care?
If the company goes out of business because it annoyed legitimate customers so much that they became pirates, then I'll count that as the market working (albeit in a perverse sense).
The whole thing is stupid. Does "full web functionality" mean having every single piece of crapware required to make every single web site function? I doubt there are many computers that have "full web functionality" in that sense. As for asking the British authorities to decide on what counts, give me a break.
And if we were to pay attention to the actual meaning of the words, then a reasonable argument could be made that including flash decreases the functionality of the web in many ways. I personally hate it, not because the technology itself is rubbish, but because site designers cover their sites with useless flash shit.
If flash is so functional, why is flashblock so popular?
I did it myself, and it was evident pretty quickly that you were full of shit. So now it's only 650 bucks and not 1250.
But the fact remains that you are comparing a declared low to mid range consumer quality machine (the studio series) with a high end professional class machine. Try it with Dell's Premium XPS machine - which they state is for professional use. I'm already up to $1800 trying to make it like the MBP. And this isn't even including the software bundle. I'll take $200 for OS X over Windows any day.
Sure, you can build a shittier Dell for less than that, but it will be just that: shittier. If you want to compare Dell machines with Apple machines, then compare machines in the same class, not some gimped cheaper version which even Dell obviously doesn't think are as good (or they'd be asking for more money for it).
Compare Apples to apples and you don't have a case.
OK. I don't normally swear on/., but this is bullshit.
First, the $2500 MacBook Pro you price has a 512MB video card, an option that is not available on any of the Dell Studio series. You should be comparing to the $2000 Macbook Pro, which has the 256MB video card.
And once you include things like Wireless-N to match the Mac and the Ultimate version of Vista to match OS X, it becomes less of a blowout. And then you have to match the software bundle, etc. And most Mac users don't buy RAM from Apple, since you can get it much cheaper from third party vendors. And then you end up paying more to Dell for a backlit keyboard, camera, etc. And then there's things like Magsafe and so on.
Worse, you are comparing the low to mid range Studio series against the high end Macbook Pro, when you should be at least comparing the XPS series, or more appropriately the Pro class laptops that Dell sells. These are more expensive because they have better components and aren't made on the cheap.
I don't doubt that you can buy an equivalent Dell for slightly cheaper than a Macbook Pro (a few hundred dollars difference). But dishonest exaggerations like yours are just stupid.
I sort of agree. It's pretty obvious to me what the next gen browsers ought to be based on, and that is RSS. The browser should be based on RSS, with smart feeds (like Apple's smart folders applied to feeds) and smarter search. NetNewsWire sort of does this, but the browser side of the app is lacking. Safari treats RSS the way I like, but doesn't allow for smart feeds. I can see many people wanting better social networking features as well.
Firefox has become for me what I tried to get away from when I first started using it (when it was Phoenix). I want a simple UI like Safari's, not some mass of buttons like IE.
Yes, but we are talking about people attending law school at an Ivy League university. Such people tend to be extremely ambitious and will often do pretty much anything to get what they want. They'll throw tantrums if anything gets in their way (because they see themselves as so deserving).
Everyone in this case seems to have a major entitlement complex. All of them should end up working as janitors to teach them some humility.
Slashdot Mirror
Philosophers realized this a long time ago. Much of what is called modern "analytic" philosophy is based on the idea you just expressed: that philosophical problems often arise through an inadequate grasp of logic or language.
Russell's book is also wildly outdated and heavily biased in favour of his own ideas. It's simply not possible to gain anything other than a superficial understanding of the subject from a book like that.
When people say they are interested in philosophy, they often mean different things, since it is such a diverse subject that is only unified by its tools and methods.
People who are interested in philosophy are better off approaching it through the questions that interest them. For example, are the theories of Quantum mechanics properly translatable into ordinary natural languages, or can they only be expressed in mathematical terms? If so, what consequences does this have for ordinary language?
Thinking about questions like that will carry you much further into the subject than reading "History of Philosophy for Dummies".
Most people aren't sitting horrified watching this. The majority of the population fall into one of two classes: (1) the people who don't like it, but who only vote for economic reasons; and (2) the people who don't care because they think the law only affects "bad" people. (I've deliberately left out the seriously deranged people who vote because the candidate is a "nice man", but they exist).
The idea that the majority of the populace will rise up and vote out a government that sacrifices their liberty for security is an illusion, and the political parties know it. This isn't some conspiratorial power grab, but the parties responding to the public desire for security.
If you want democracy to protect human rights, privacy and civil liberties, then I have a bridge to sell. Most voters don't care enough about those things.
When people say democracy is the least worst form of government, they forget that the least worst can still be appalling.
People in Britain don't vote against parties who threaten civil liberties. They vote against parties that threaten their mortgages. In some respects fascism is actually preferable. At least the trains would work properly.
There is no such thing as hypocrisy when it comes to your government. When they do something it is right, and when someone else does the same thing, they decide whether it is right or wrong. This is all perfectly right and fair, they have decided.
I don't know about anyone else, but I haven't been able to take anything an elected official or a business leader has said seriously for a long long time now.
The stupid people won.
"The other option is that the nobel committee has a clear bias towards what Americans view as the left,"
No.
The Nobel Prizes are Scandinavian institutions. To Scandinavians, what Americans think is "left" looks like extreme far right wing kookery, and what Americans think is "right" is simply beyond the pale.
Americans have no business talking about the left and the right in terms of their own politics which is extremely right wing, extremely religious and extremely authoritarian compared to the rest of the world's democracies. You guys need to realize that it's you that are out of step and it is your politics that is weird and kooky.
How's that then. You've made the Canadians look normal!! Hang your heads in shame.
Those who modded this post up might want to look at who Phil S is (i.e. he's not a neutral observer).
The fact is, that anyone who has seen the evidence knows that Gary Weiss had a conflict of interest broke Wikipedia's rules on numerous occasions and had the support of influential admins (up to and including the odious Wales, who is apparently willing to change one's Wiki bio in exchange for sex.) in doing so. Anyone who looks at the evidence knows that Mantanmoreland is Gary Weiss. The evidence is overwhelming.
As far as Wikipedia is concerned, it does not matter whether Weiss or Byrne was right about naked short selling. What matters is that a small group of corrupt people knowingly abused Wikipedia and still wouldn't admit they were wrong when presented with overwhelming evidence by all sorts of people.
That's the issue here: Wikipedia is corrupt.
Yeah they are. Now you know how 9/11 and such things happen.
The security services like to give the public impression of competence, but they're as useless as everyone else and lack of real public oversight probably makes them worse.
It would be nice to see what would happen if we got rid of this secrets crap. I'm willing to suffer an increased risk of terrorism if it means my own government isn't keeping secrets from its people. Funny how we never get that choice.
They really have no excuse for their secrecy if they are going to give away sensitive information on eBay, to women in bars, leave it in laptops in restaurants, etc.
He just wanted it to be like Fight Club.
Yeah, they've obviously done the sane thing and made PvP zonal.
WoW could do this very easily, by using the upper level limit of a zone as a PvP flag. You would only be flagged to those on your side of the line, so for example, Ashenvale would flag all under 30s to the other under 30s and all over 30s to the other over 30s.
This would immediately return the game to what it is in the first days of a new server - an awesome bloodbath where people of all levels actually go looking for a fight.
But Blizzard are either too stupid to do this, or have deliberately made the PvP servers as "tard self-segregation servers" to keep the real idiots away from the grown ups so that the latter don't cancel.
I suspect the latter.
I liked WoW as a game, but Blizzard are clueless when it comes to anticipating how low some people will go to ruin a game.
It's virtually meaningless. The US is so far to the right compared to other democracies (and Americans don't realize how extremely conservative their country is) that this survey may just show that some economists aren't as right wing as others. Doing a worldwide survey, or at least a survey among the industrialized countries might show that all economists are extremely right wing, or that US economists are out of step with other economists.
It would have been a lot cooler if it had been based off of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which is the best RPG I ever played. They kept some of the things from that, like the careers, but from what I can see, none of the subtlety.
"The point of the ad is to put a human face on the company."
And the commercial succeeded in putting a human ass on the company. How like Microsoft.
"The U.S. has about 5% of the worlds population and is separate by large amounts of water from more than 80% of the global population."
That applies to pretty much everything, and not just the internet.
Historians will look back on the previous century as an anomaly in world politics.
My brother lived in China for two years. It was fairly simple for him to get around the censorship, so there was nothing he couldn't access on the net. Hell, he even showed me where you could see the Tiananmen square videos on Chinese Youtube. The censorship is no deterrent to a determined person.
The fact is that most Chinese do not really care. Like most people around the world, they use the internet to for mindless crap. The fact that some politically sensitive material is harder for them to get to doesn't affect most of them at all, because most of them don't care.
Although people in democratic societies rant on about how their internet is not censored, it wouldn't make much difference to most people if it was, because the kind of stuff that would be censored is interesting only to a minority.
And the AC needs to accept that most people in the world no longer like or trust the US. Get over it.
If you've already joined those sailing under the Jolly Roger, why would you care?
If the company goes out of business because it annoyed legitimate customers so much that they became pirates, then I'll count that as the market working (albeit in a perverse sense).
Judging by the number of posts like this on slashdot, Apple is so great that they even have their own brand of homophobia now.
It needs it's own name.
A shame it doesn't have an extension to clean flecks of spit off of screens. :-(
The whole thing is stupid. Does "full web functionality" mean having every single piece of crapware required to make every single web site function? I doubt there are many computers that have "full web functionality" in that sense. As for asking the British authorities to decide on what counts, give me a break.
And if we were to pay attention to the actual meaning of the words, then a reasonable argument could be made that including flash decreases the functionality of the web in many ways. I personally hate it, not because the technology itself is rubbish, but because site designers cover their sites with useless flash shit.
If flash is so functional, why is flashblock so popular?
I think you have the words mixed up. Give Al a break for being a guy. The truth is obvious to any experienced observer.
"Threatened by his wife with a ban on shoving it up her ass Al Gore tacitly endorsed her pet project, the PMRC."
Let him who is without sin...
I did it myself, and it was evident pretty quickly that you were full of shit. So now it's only 650 bucks and not 1250.
But the fact remains that you are comparing a declared low to mid range consumer quality machine (the studio series) with a high end professional class machine. Try it with Dell's Premium XPS machine - which they state is for professional use. I'm already up to $1800 trying to make it like the MBP. And this isn't even including the software bundle. I'll take $200 for OS X over Windows any day.
Sure, you can build a shittier Dell for less than that, but it will be just that: shittier. If you want to compare Dell machines with Apple machines, then compare machines in the same class, not some gimped cheaper version which even Dell obviously doesn't think are as good (or they'd be asking for more money for it).
Compare Apples to apples and you don't have a case.
OK. I don't normally swear on /., but this is bullshit.
First, the $2500 MacBook Pro you price has a 512MB video card, an option that is not available on any of the Dell Studio series. You should be comparing to the $2000 Macbook Pro, which has the 256MB video card.
And once you include things like Wireless-N to match the Mac and the Ultimate version of Vista to match OS X, it becomes less of a blowout. And then you have to match the software bundle, etc. And most Mac users don't buy RAM from Apple, since you can get it much cheaper from third party vendors. And then you end up paying more to Dell for a backlit keyboard, camera, etc. And then there's things like Magsafe and so on.
Worse, you are comparing the low to mid range Studio series against the high end Macbook Pro, when you should be at least comparing the XPS series, or more appropriately the Pro class laptops that Dell sells. These are more expensive because they have better components and aren't made on the cheap.
I don't doubt that you can buy an equivalent Dell for slightly cheaper than a Macbook Pro (a few hundred dollars difference). But dishonest exaggerations like yours are just stupid.
I sort of agree. It's pretty obvious to me what the next gen browsers ought to be based on, and that is RSS. The browser should be based on RSS, with smart feeds (like Apple's smart folders applied to feeds) and smarter search. NetNewsWire sort of does this, but the browser side of the app is lacking. Safari treats RSS the way I like, but doesn't allow for smart feeds. I can see many people wanting better social networking features as well.
Firefox has become for me what I tried to get away from when I first started using it (when it was Phoenix). I want a simple UI like Safari's, not some mass of buttons like IE.
Yes, but we are talking about people attending law school at an Ivy League university. Such people tend to be extremely ambitious and will often do pretty much anything to get what they want. They'll throw tantrums if anything gets in their way (because they see themselves as so deserving).
Everyone in this case seems to have a major entitlement complex. All of them should end up working as janitors to teach them some humility.
It's a normal move for them. They have very little in the way of savoir faire when it comes to dealing with consumers.
Exhibit A is the Zune software screen that looks like group sex. I mean, WTF is this trying to say...
http://www.ryanblock.com/wp/files/zune-error.jpg
I bet you voted for Reagan.