I applaud Radiohead for what they did here, but I don't think that their approach will scale: ultimately, I think that music fans would give a lot less if they were giving more frequently.
You know, I'm as exogamous as they get: my fiance is English, and my dating card reads like a UN delegate roster (except that they're, um, women) - but bashing American women is misguided.
The most undersexed country in the world: Japan. Despite being number two to Japan in workaholic tendencies, despite the puritanical tradition, the most sexually active country: the US.
As a long-standing anti-nationalist and critic of American policy and culture, I never thought I'd say it, but: Go, USA!
(It turns out that New Zealand women are the most promiscuous, according to a report from... um, I think it was the New Zealand Ministry of Tourism.)
You'll get hits on everything. What's lacking is generally solid comparative reviews and evaluations of problems. Trust me, I've tried to screen out ahead of time: you end up only finding the dirt when you search for specific things, like "Skype Logitech compatibility problems", rather than "Logitech quickcam failure."
The problem I have is that it's all hindsight. I find the chorus of complaints about a product when I go onto a support forum and find out the my issue (here's a short list of my most recent issues: poor interoperability between Skype and Logitech QuickCams, resulting in hung video... this one is a favorite, because my $90 QuickCam was advertised and sold by Skype, and in turn boasts of Skype compatibility on its packaging; the response from both vendors is torpid - shoddy software for the Nintendo Wii USB Wi-Fi Adaptor - flaky behavior on a Linksys Wi-Fi router in WPA2-PSK mode - poor reception/lack of precision for WiiMote on Wii - wonky USB 2.0 support on a Dell laptop) has been the topic of a chorus of unanswered complaints to technical support, often tagged as "known issues" that go for over a year with no solutions.
The thing is, where is the place I can go to ahead of time and identify these problems before they occur? So often, these issues involve software interoperability, which is a difficult thing to check for in advance. It doesn't seem like the market is really holding companies accountable for their screw ups.
A friend of a friend (OK, so this is probably just a joke...) is entering Australia for an extended work contract, and the immigration official asks him if he has ever been convicted of a crime in his country of origin. He replied, "I didn't realize that was still a requirement for entry."
Academic conferences have already taken a hit in the US. I know of a few international conferences that were held in Canada instead of the US just because of the hassle involved in coming into the US, due to "post-9/11" (guh, I hate that phrase) restrictions on visitors.
They will produce the sequels. You will buy them, compulsively, because you remembered the original title so fondly. It will be similar to the original, and you will ask yourself, "why aren't they making innovative games?" Game companies that make innovative games will go out of business, or get gobbled up by EA. Who will produce the sequels...
You can have a model that isn't the game, but is still exhaustive.
You can model tic-tac-toe as a problem of exclusive selecting numbers from 1 to 9 until one has selected 3 numbers that add up to 15, and then remap the solution to that problem back onto a tic-tac-toe board. However, we do not play that game: we play a game of spatial relationships, which we, generally, have also solved, even if we don't have a 3x3 "magic square" in our heads. Tic-Tac-Toe is neither the "material" representation on paper, nor is it simply the branching tree of possible game-states: it is a conceptual game of spatial relationships.
Well... everything can be boiled down to a mathematical model. But all models are wrong (though some are useful).
The models for "solved" games like tic-tac-toe and checkers aren't wrong. They exhaustively map out all possible game states. There is no difference between the model and the game.
I used Outlook for calendaring and contact management, actually, and was using it with Thunderbird as the mail client. At a certain point, I realized that was one more executable more than I needed running, and migrated to Outlook for mail, as well. Outlook's IMAP performance is, in my experience, smoother than T-bird's (which often seems to "forget" that it copied messages to my offline store, making them unavailable when I'm offline.)
Once you start dragging and dropping from your inbox to your to-do list, contact list, and calendar, it's hard to give that up.
I haven't spent more than $30 on a ticket for as long as I can remember, and I see new acts all the time. Maybe your tastes should become a little more adventurous.
Alcohol, cocaine, the various flavors of valium and its relatives, and barbiturates all cause various types of physiological dependence.
Most addictions are at least partially "physiological," even behavioral ones, and most drug addictions have significant neurological components to them.
Money spent on welfare goes back immediately into the domestic economy, as its recipients spend it on housing, food, and entertainment. Money spent on defense involves an added step of "waste", the construction of technologies that are not the product of consumer demand.
The consumer sector should be a better judge of consumer needs than military spending. Sony can pay for Sony's R&D - justifying military expenses on the basis that innovation will 'trickle down' to the civilian sector is absurd.
At best, your argument is one in favor of pure research. Very well then: give more money to university research.
While T-Mobile is the other major US based character, those of us who travel a lot often have a number of SIM cards for different countries: I have one for the UK and one for Mexico. I swap them around all the time.
The GP wrote something modest, fair, reported that his own background colored his experience, and still gave balanced advice. The anti-Microsoft chorus follows up with mean-spirited and cranky responses.
Do you realize how unattractive this makes Microsoft alternatives? It leads some to believe that it is vendetta, rather than facts, that motivate them. Microsoft has some excellent technologies, and their Live Map technology has been stewing in the Microsoft Research Labs before Google even existed. There is much good to say about Google Maps, but it gets lost in your noise.
I'm afraid that your grasp of the concepts suggests an undergraduate level of philosophical education. I don't think you even know what phenomenology is, nor do you understand the critique of the scientific production of "truth" (which is not the same as empiricism - many of the contintentals, including Deleuze, locate themselves in the empiricist tradition.) It has nothing to do with the denial of the real.
The world has been transformed several times by human practices that were not "science." I don't deny that contemporary scientific practice is particularly effective in producing models that are useful for the production of technological change. That doesn't change the epistemological status of scientific knowledge.
I recommend, as a start, the text "What is philosophy" by Gilles Deleuze, perhaps followed by his work on Hume.
I don't think there's that large a difference between Murray Gell-Mann and my aunt, outside of a couple very restricted domains (my aunt happens to be a very successful poet and hell of a cook, by the way - and her cooking is a form of "grasping how things work.") Even scientific knowledge doesn't scale very well: an understanding of physics contributes little to an understanding of computational neuroscience (yes, I am aware of some crossover, but it isn't organic), epidemiology, linguistics, etc. Each of these is a kind of grasping about how a rather small range of "things" works, and all of these omit social, economic, and political fields of knowledge, as well. Expertise comes with significant opportunity costs.
"Intellectual" isn't the same as intelligent. The real differences in cognitive ability between the smartest and (non-disabled, "normal" range) dumbest of us is very, very small. The fact that we can grasp moving objects, use multiple tenses when speaking, drive vehicles, and learn how to shop represents an enormous cognitive achievement. The kind of intellectual activity you are talking about is highly specialized, of low value to most people, is often dependent on affective and social factors, is variable over time, and context-dependent.
It isn't solipsism to observe that most of our individual scientific "knowledge" is unverified. They are discourse acts which purport to represent some pristine moment in which an unsullied epistemic event, the moment of empirical confirmation, occurred.
Additionally, there's the practical fact that most scientific research is fraught with problems and seldom adheres to the standards its proclaims: there was a story here on Slashdot about this very subject.
Who is one of the first thinkers that blended a sociological study of science with a critique of scientific epistemology? Why, that would have been French (continental) thinker Bruno Latour.
I am a researcher at an institution widely regarded as the home of the finest cognitive science program in the world (I'm not in cog. sci. anymore - that was just my undergrad degree - but my work occasionally touches on cognitive issues.) The contemporary trend, on the West Coast in particular, is based on a dynamic-systems approach which criticizes modularist and innatist theories (crudely, you could call it post-connectivist.) And the researchers who study the phenomena of linguistic development and distributed cognition have found much in the phenomenological tradition in particular which was relevant to their work.
What you call "subjective opinion" (a ridiculous category) is probably what we might call simple introspection as a philosophical method, which has its origins in the very birth of philosophy. The analytic anxiety about introspection, to me, creates an artificial constraint on thinking that has hampered the discipline and turned it, as I said, into something of a subset of logic.
Of course, if one has the skills, then the fact that one studied "subjective" continental philosophy or ancient philosophy doesn't matter, does it?
I went to school for which much of what you studied is really a subset of mathematics parading as philosophy. (I studied cognitive science, as well, and found that the phenomenological tradition does a better job of accounting for the vagaries of human cognition than analytical philosophers do.)
Slashdot Mirror
I applaud Radiohead for what they did here, but I don't think that their approach will scale: ultimately, I think that music fans would give a lot less if they were giving more frequently.
You know, I'm as exogamous as they get: my fiance is English, and my dating card reads like a UN delegate roster (except that they're, um, women) - but bashing American women is misguided.
The most undersexed country in the world: Japan. Despite being number two to Japan in workaholic tendencies, despite the puritanical tradition, the most sexually active country: the US.
As a long-standing anti-nationalist and critic of American policy and culture, I never thought I'd say it, but: Go, USA!
(It turns out that New Zealand women are the most promiscuous, according to a report from... um, I think it was the New Zealand Ministry of Tourism.)
Yep. Life's brutal, isn't it?
Don't worry, many humorless oafs such as yourself still manage to find productive work as immigration officers.
You'll get hits on everything. What's lacking is generally solid comparative reviews and evaluations of problems. Trust me, I've tried to screen out ahead of time: you end up only finding the dirt when you search for specific things, like "Skype Logitech compatibility problems", rather than "Logitech quickcam failure."
The problem I have is that it's all hindsight. I find the chorus of complaints about a product when I go onto a support forum and find out the my issue (here's a short list of my most recent issues: poor interoperability between Skype and Logitech QuickCams, resulting in hung video... this one is a favorite, because my $90 QuickCam was advertised and sold by Skype, and in turn boasts of Skype compatibility on its packaging; the response from both vendors is torpid - shoddy software for the Nintendo Wii USB Wi-Fi Adaptor - flaky behavior on a Linksys Wi-Fi router in WPA2-PSK mode - poor reception/lack of precision for WiiMote on Wii - wonky USB 2.0 support on a Dell laptop) has been the topic of a chorus of unanswered complaints to technical support, often tagged as "known issues" that go for over a year with no solutions.
The thing is, where is the place I can go to ahead of time and identify these problems before they occur? So often, these issues involve software interoperability, which is a difficult thing to check for in advance. It doesn't seem like the market is really holding companies accountable for their screw ups.
A friend of a friend (OK, so this is probably just a joke...) is entering Australia for an extended work contract, and the immigration official asks him if he has ever been convicted of a crime in his country of origin. He replied, "I didn't realize that was still a requirement for entry."
If it's not a true story, it should be.
Academic conferences have already taken a hit in the US. I know of a few international conferences that were held in Canada instead of the US just because of the hassle involved in coming into the US, due to "post-9/11" (guh, I hate that phrase) restrictions on visitors.
They will produce the sequels. You will buy them, compulsively, because you remembered the original title so fondly. It will be similar to the original, and you will ask yourself, "why aren't they making innovative games?" Game companies that make innovative games will go out of business, or get gobbled up by EA. Who will produce the sequels...
You can have a model that isn't the game, but is still exhaustive.
You can model tic-tac-toe as a problem of exclusive selecting numbers from 1 to 9 until one has selected 3 numbers that add up to 15, and then remap the solution to that problem back onto a tic-tac-toe board. However, we do not play that game: we play a game of spatial relationships, which we, generally, have also solved, even if we don't have a 3x3 "magic square" in our heads. Tic-Tac-Toe is neither the "material" representation on paper, nor is it simply the branching tree of possible game-states: it is a conceptual game of spatial relationships.
Well ... everything can be boiled down to a mathematical model. But all models are wrong (though some are useful).
The models for "solved" games like tic-tac-toe and checkers aren't wrong. They exhaustively map out all possible game states. There is no difference between the model and the game.
Germany and Holland were not nearly leveled to the extent that Japan was. You can still find a decent number of medieval cities in both.
In Japan, outside of Nara and Kyoto, anything on Honshu or Kyushu older than 1945 is a rarity.
I used Outlook for calendaring and contact management, actually, and was using it with Thunderbird as the mail client. At a certain point, I realized that was one more executable more than I needed running, and migrated to Outlook for mail, as well. Outlook's IMAP performance is, in my experience, smoother than T-bird's (which often seems to "forget" that it copied messages to my offline store, making them unavailable when I'm offline.)
Once you start dragging and dropping from your inbox to your to-do list, contact list, and calendar, it's hard to give that up.
I haven't spent more than $30 on a ticket for as long as I can remember, and I see new acts all the time. Maybe your tastes should become a little more adventurous.
Alcohol, cocaine, the various flavors of valium and its relatives, and barbiturates all cause various types of physiological dependence.
Most addictions are at least partially "physiological," even behavioral ones, and most drug addictions have significant neurological components to them.
Money spent on welfare goes back immediately into the domestic economy, as its recipients spend it on housing, food, and entertainment. Money spent on defense involves an added step of "waste", the construction of technologies that are not the product of consumer demand.
The consumer sector should be a better judge of consumer needs than military spending. Sony can pay for Sony's R&D - justifying military expenses on the basis that innovation will 'trickle down' to the civilian sector is absurd.
At best, your argument is one in favor of pure research. Very well then: give more money to university research.
Nothing wrong with a BA. All that it means is that you don't eat with your mouth open and you don't smell of wee.
While T-Mobile is the other major US based character, those of us who travel a lot often have a number of SIM cards for different countries: I have one for the UK and one for Mexico. I swap them around all the time.
The GP wrote something modest, fair, reported that his own background colored his experience, and still gave balanced advice. The anti-Microsoft chorus follows up with mean-spirited and cranky responses.
Do you realize how unattractive this makes Microsoft alternatives? It leads some to believe that it is vendetta, rather than facts, that motivate them. Microsoft has some excellent technologies, and their Live Map technology has been stewing in the Microsoft Research Labs before Google even existed. There is much good to say about Google Maps, but it gets lost in your noise.
Timbers? Girders? I don't think there's a load-bearing wall to be found here...
What's holding up yours?
I'm afraid that your grasp of the concepts suggests an undergraduate level of philosophical education. I don't think you even know what phenomenology is, nor do you understand the critique of the scientific production of "truth" (which is not the same as empiricism - many of the contintentals, including Deleuze, locate themselves in the empiricist tradition.) It has nothing to do with the denial of the real.
The world has been transformed several times by human practices that were not "science." I don't deny that contemporary scientific practice is particularly effective in producing models that are useful for the production of technological change. That doesn't change the epistemological status of scientific knowledge.
I recommend, as a start, the text "What is philosophy" by Gilles Deleuze, perhaps followed by his work on Hume.
I don't think there's that large a difference between Murray Gell-Mann and my aunt, outside of a couple very restricted domains (my aunt happens to be a very successful poet and hell of a cook, by the way - and her cooking is a form of "grasping how things work.") Even scientific knowledge doesn't scale very well: an understanding of physics contributes little to an understanding of computational neuroscience (yes, I am aware of some crossover, but it isn't organic), epidemiology, linguistics, etc. Each of these is a kind of grasping about how a rather small range of "things" works, and all of these omit social, economic, and political fields of knowledge, as well. Expertise comes with significant opportunity costs.
"Intellectual" isn't the same as intelligent. The real differences in cognitive ability between the smartest and (non-disabled, "normal" range) dumbest of us is very, very small. The fact that we can grasp moving objects, use multiple tenses when speaking, drive vehicles, and learn how to shop represents an enormous cognitive achievement. The kind of intellectual activity you are talking about is highly specialized, of low value to most people, is often dependent on affective and social factors, is variable over time, and context-dependent.
It isn't solipsism to observe that most of our individual scientific "knowledge" is unverified. They are discourse acts which purport to represent some pristine moment in which an unsullied epistemic event, the moment of empirical confirmation, occurred.
Additionally, there's the practical fact that most scientific research is fraught with problems and seldom adheres to the standards its proclaims: there was a story here on Slashdot about this very subject.
Who is one of the first thinkers that blended a sociological study of science with a critique of scientific epistemology? Why, that would have been French (continental) thinker Bruno Latour.
I am a researcher at an institution widely regarded as the home of the finest cognitive science program in the world (I'm not in cog. sci. anymore - that was just my undergrad degree - but my work occasionally touches on cognitive issues.) The contemporary trend, on the West Coast in particular, is based on a dynamic-systems approach which criticizes modularist and innatist theories (crudely, you could call it post-connectivist.) And the researchers who study the phenomena of linguistic development and distributed cognition have found much in the phenomenological tradition in particular which was relevant to their work.
What you call "subjective opinion" (a ridiculous category) is probably what we might call simple introspection as a philosophical method, which has its origins in the very birth of philosophy. The analytic anxiety about introspection, to me, creates an artificial constraint on thinking that has hampered the discipline and turned it, as I said, into something of a subset of logic.
The myth of rigorous scientific analysis... you mean your subjective perception of discourse claims to be rigorous scientific analysis?
You have a straw man characterization of continental philosophy paired with a naive view of science. It's worrisome.
Of course, if one has the skills, then the fact that one studied "subjective" continental philosophy or ancient philosophy doesn't matter, does it?
I went to school for which much of what you studied is really a subset of mathematics parading as philosophy. (I studied cognitive science, as well, and found that the phenomenological tradition does a better job of accounting for the vagaries of human cognition than analytical philosophers do.)