Now you are confusing the message with the truth- or propositional-value of the message. Stories can consist of truths and lies, but not be a truth or a lie (it can fail as a reliable documentary because of specific falsehoods and omission, but that's entirely different.) Very, very, very little communication is disinterested exchanges of propositions for evaluation for truth-value, and even most of that is structured by its delivery and accompanies other information (the reliability of the teller, the motive for the exchange, etc.)
Additionally, any story or film that is entirely reduceable to one polemic is ridiculously trivial - and probably doesn't exist.
And using narratives to tell "truths" can create lies. I can tell a based-on-fact true story about a compassionate, thoughtful Nazi. Outside of any context, that true story contributes to a lie. The easy answer to that problem is that it is a lie of omission, but every narrative makes a virtually infinite number of lies of omission - there are no complete stories.
The meaning of a novel about the evils of vivisection *is* largely different than a movie about the evils of vivisection. For one thing, no movie or novel has as its meaning just "vivisection is evil." It will have as its meaning "vivisection is evil because," and then the "because" will be followed by textual complications or information that are largely unique to the literary form, or probably graphic imagery that is unique to the filmic form. The 2 media will work at entirely different levels. The framing information that comes in to the viewer is so different in either case - the clothing of each character, facial expressions, the ability of a novel to make digressions in a way that film cannot, the fact that it is far easier to separate a discourse from the character that delivers it in a textual medium than in a visual one, that even a quick glib and succint "moral" like the one you described will be essentially different in each case.
Well, no and yes. You can't understand any Slashdot post without understanding it as a post, with the context and assumptions and implicit understanding that frames the activity of writing and reading Slashdot posts. This includes the ability to include hyperlinks, the understanding of the (lack of) demonstrated credentials of the participants, the essentially anonymous nature of the exchange, the structure of the post by which we are in a threaded discussion under the rubric of a posted article, etc. etc. The "meaning" of the act of making the post is circumscribed by all the conventions that build the medium in which it occurs.
My post was a quote from once-spurned by later-rehabilitated media theorist Marshall McLuhan (of Annie Hall fame). It shouldn't be taken as absolutist or reductionist.
Of the hard science-fiction versions of what life in very different environments might look like, my favorite is the one put forth by physicist Robert Forward in the books Dragon's Egg and Starquake.
The books posit life evolving on the surface of a neutron star. Some of the consequences include an almost unimaginable difference in timescales - a few minutes in our perception are equivalent to centuries of time on the surface of the neutron star, and the very process of studying the evolving intelligent life their ends up motivating that life's progress into high technology and space travel. I won't give away much more of the books, but I'll suggest it as some of the best Mind Candy I've read in a while.
It's too easy to invoke the Islamicist fanatics who flew planes into buildings, but I'll do it anyway:
Ultimately, you must judge your religion by your common sense, decency and inherent sense of fairness, rather than the other way around, or you just become another fanatic sociopath.
The fact that you state that "it is reasonable to be careful not to force one's beliefs on others" already shows that you have a meta-religious criterion for behavior and for evaluating "good" religious belief from "bad". (After all, if your religion says that it's good to force your beliefs on others, to what can you refer to justify *not* doing so?)
I only drive my car forward. I never use reverse. As a result, a defect which causes my car to explode only when it goes in reverse doesn't effect me. If you drive the way I do, that defect isn't a big deal.
When the so-called "lazy admin" is a grandpa running a supposedly plug-in-and-drop system in his little store, or someoone else who bought their hyperbolic nephew's line about how easy and wonderful Linux is, it really makes no sense to go about bashing them. For so many systems, the "admin" is just a regular schmoe. And attacking them for the vulnerability of their systems conveniently leaves the worm authors off the hook. Maybe we should blame geeks who got beaten up in high school for being too lazy to learn self-defense.
Not to diminish the impact or point of your figures, but the number of Chinese killed by Japan - combatants and civilians combined - numbered around 11 million, by pretty much everyone's reckoning except the Chinese government's.
You don't get it. It's not about fixing the browsers, it's about understanding the behaviour of the browsers that are already out there - and the limits of "just writing to the standards."
The best source of raw data for comparative income studies is the Luxemburg Income Study project. Here is a working paper with data about poverty and income levels in the US and Canada.
Personal experience is a very unreliable source of information. You may be associating with wealthier Americans and poorer Europeans; you may be judging wealth by home and car size.
One statistic you should bear in mind is that 8 of the 10 wealthiest people in the world are American (4 of them are members of the Walton family). The combined wealth of those 8 alone is $230 billion - that kind of concentrated wealth really throws off the averages.
Keep the statistics of US wealth in perspective: if you removed the wealthiest half of a percent from the picture, the US population would have about the same income and standard of living as much of Europe and Japan (and you can remove the top half of one percent from Europe and Japan and maintain that parity - the super-rich in the US are simply far super-richer than the super-rich elsewhere, and that distorts the picture of American wealth.)
So, theoretically, each of those super-wealthy types could buy higher tech gadgets than the rest, but in terms of consumer electronics, the hyperluxury set really don't set the pace for economies of scale.
You also may have a lower gross income than the typical American, but your discretionary spending money is probably comparable. The rest of your comment largely holds - that it's a matter of spending priorities.
During my last trip through Mexico's interior, and recently in Peru, I noticed that a lot of cybercafes that had previously been using pirated copies of Windows were now using Linux. Apparently a recent crackdown on piracy scared a lot of the cybercafe owners, and they installed Linux on their (usually low-end, first gen Pentium) machines.
These people, who expect a good 5 years of use out of their computer at least, are not likely to move to MacOS, indeed are probably not likely to spend much money at all if they can help it. It's not a big stretch for me to think of these sorts of places as a good part of the expanding Linux desktop sector.
However, Denmark has a higher density than the US, which means that the space that is used to produce wind-energy is more valuable. With the huge amounts of empty space in the US, wind power should be even more viable.
Perhaps I have faith in other things. But my faith obeys my moral instincts. A faith that told me to consider all who do not claim a certain belief as damned, would not pass the filter of my moral intuition. A faith that I would live forever if I drank the blood of virgins would also fail to circumvent my sense of fairness. A faith that contradicts evidence, likewise.
Not just in that epoch, but even today miracles are frequently reported and believed in many traditional societies, and ascribed to a number of religious or other supernatural origins. People aren't lying, they are percieving things imaginatively.
I don't agree with your implicit claim that a valuable moral and psychological perspective demands sound underlying physics and epistemology. While wildly deviant metaphysics can have moral/psychological implications, that's hardly the claim here.
Ultimately, in whatever religious and philosophical perspective you take, you are the ultimate authority for what you believe and what you claim to be true, even if the only action you take with your ultimate authority is to cede to a single text or doctrine.
I think you understate the vast differences in actual doctrine that separate different Protestant denominations. They include differences not only in the doctrine of redemption, but in predetermination and free will, the nature of the trinity, the nature of the incarnation, that status of scripture. There are even a large and growing number of Anglican vicars who believe in neither the divinity nor the resurrection of Christ.
My criticisms are focused on the emerging strain of evangelism in the US, the convergence of born-again, Bible literalist/creationist/fundamentalist, and dispensationalist views, that I think have become the plularity of Christian belief in the US.
How about they were thoughtful individuals, but he mistook a profound religious experience for a messianic mission? A sort of philosophical error springing from an authentic religious experience. It's something that happens often even today.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I would be happy playing Regular Guy. His amazing ability: he can send a memo. During times of duress, he'll write a letter to the editor!
Don't tell it to me, tell it to Robert Forward, physicist and science-fiction author.
Additionally, any story or film that is entirely reduceable to one polemic is ridiculously trivial - and probably doesn't exist.
And using narratives to tell "truths" can create lies. I can tell a based-on-fact true story about a compassionate, thoughtful Nazi. Outside of any context, that true story contributes to a lie. The easy answer to that problem is that it is a lie of omission, but every narrative makes a virtually infinite number of lies of omission - there are no complete stories.
The meaning of a novel about the evils of vivisection *is* largely different than a movie about the evils of vivisection. For one thing, no movie or novel has as its meaning just "vivisection is evil." It will have as its meaning "vivisection is evil because," and then the "because" will be followed by textual complications or information that are largely unique to the literary form, or probably graphic imagery that is unique to the filmic form. The 2 media will work at entirely different levels. The framing information that comes in to the viewer is so different in either case - the clothing of each character, facial expressions, the ability of a novel to make digressions in a way that film cannot, the fact that it is far easier to separate a discourse from the character that delivers it in a textual medium than in a visual one, that even a quick glib and succint "moral" like the one you described will be essentially different in each case.
My post was a quote from once-spurned by later-rehabilitated media theorist Marshall McLuhan (of Annie Hall fame). It shouldn't be taken as absolutist or reductionist.
Compressed post: the medium is the message.
The books posit life evolving on the surface of a neutron star. Some of the consequences include an almost unimaginable difference in timescales - a few minutes in our perception are equivalent to centuries of time on the surface of the neutron star, and the very process of studying the evolving intelligent life their ends up motivating that life's progress into high technology and space travel. I won't give away much more of the books, but I'll suggest it as some of the best Mind Candy I've read in a while.
Ultimately, you must judge your religion by your common sense, decency and inherent sense of fairness, rather than the other way around, or you just become another fanatic sociopath.
The fact that you state that "it is reasonable to be careful not to force one's beliefs on others" already shows that you have a meta-religious criterion for behavior and for evaluating "good" religious belief from "bad". (After all, if your religion says that it's good to force your beliefs on others, to what can you refer to justify *not* doing so?)
I only drive my car forward. I never use reverse. As a result, a defect which causes my car to explode only when it goes in reverse doesn't effect me. If you drive the way I do, that defect isn't a big deal.
When the so-called "lazy admin" is a grandpa running a supposedly plug-in-and-drop system in his little store, or someoone else who bought their hyperbolic nephew's line about how easy and wonderful Linux is, it really makes no sense to go about bashing them. For so many systems, the "admin" is just a regular schmoe. And attacking them for the vulnerability of their systems conveniently leaves the worm authors off the hook. Maybe we should blame geeks who got beaten up in high school for being too lazy to learn self-defense.
You can't navigate by sound while riding. The tunes don't really matter.
Everyone has a long history of aggression against Korea.
Not to diminish the impact or point of your figures, but the number of Chinese killed by Japan - combatants and civilians combined - numbered around 11 million, by pretty much everyone's reckoning except the Chinese government's.
You don't get it. It's not about fixing the browsers, it's about understanding the behaviour of the browsers that are already out there - and the limits of "just writing to the standards."
Personal experience is a very unreliable source of information. You may be associating with wealthier Americans and poorer Europeans; you may be judging wealth by home and car size.
One statistic you should bear in mind is that 8 of the 10 wealthiest people in the world are American (4 of them are members of the Walton family). The combined wealth of those 8 alone is $230 billion - that kind of concentrated wealth really throws off the averages.
So, theoretically, each of those super-wealthy types could buy higher tech gadgets than the rest, but in terms of consumer electronics, the hyperluxury set really don't set the pace for economies of scale.
You also may have a lower gross income than the typical American, but your discretionary spending money is probably comparable. The rest of your comment largely holds - that it's a matter of spending priorities.
These people, who expect a good 5 years of use out of their computer at least, are not likely to move to MacOS, indeed are probably not likely to spend much money at all if they can help it. It's not a big stretch for me to think of these sorts of places as a good part of the expanding Linux desktop sector.
However, Denmark has a higher density than the US, which means that the space that is used to produce wind-energy is more valuable. With the huge amounts of empty space in the US, wind power should be even more viable.
"So, do you know who the mother is?"
Perhaps I have faith in other things. But my faith obeys my moral instincts. A faith that told me to consider all who do not claim a certain belief as damned, would not pass the filter of my moral intuition. A faith that I would live forever if I drank the blood of virgins would also fail to circumvent my sense of fairness. A faith that contradicts evidence, likewise.
And I'm not sure about the tautologies.
I don't agree with your implicit claim that a valuable moral and psychological perspective demands sound underlying physics and epistemology. While wildly deviant metaphysics can have moral/psychological implications, that's hardly the claim here.
Ultimately, in whatever religious and philosophical perspective you take, you are the ultimate authority for what you believe and what you claim to be true, even if the only action you take with your ultimate authority is to cede to a single text or doctrine.
But most parents don't lock their kids in the garage for the rest of their lives if the kids say "I don't think you're really my parents."
My criticisms are focused on the emerging strain of evangelism in the US, the convergence of born-again, Bible literalist/creationist/fundamentalist, and dispensationalist views, that I think have become the plularity of Christian belief in the US.
How about they were thoughtful individuals, but he mistook a profound religious experience for a messianic mission? A sort of philosophical error springing from an authentic religious experience. It's something that happens often even today.