"I'm more worried about the people that go to, say, local planning commission meetings"
Sorry, but um.. wasn't that the point?
Tons of people will go to the football games anyway. Stop paying someone to do what many will voluntarily do. I suspect the person being paid for that is someone who would be going anyway, and since she's the editor's niece or whatever she gets to draw a check.
Skip all that. Use the savings to pay people to attend the city council
I think you missed my point, there. Of course there are things you can compare and contrast about the two badgers in your example. For example, one of them is ceramic.
Being-ceramic is an attribute you can define, because ceramic things exist and things that aren't ceramic exist as well.
Being-real/existing is a more difficult attribute to define, and logically impossible to define by empirical science. By *definition, the "control group" for the analysis of existing-things doesn't exist and thus its members' attributes are unknown.
Incidentally, this is why the Thomistic proof that you referenced is fundamentally flawed. It treats "existence" as a perfection/improvement alongside other attributes like "beautiful" or "intelligent". Which it isn't.
I'm no mathematician, but from a layman's perspective mathematic "proof" is always quasi-tautological. All you're doing is unpacking the meaning of known mathematical or numeric terms. Which isn't just a waste of time, 'cause sometimes one of the things you unpack is another known term that you didn't realize would come out of the original one(s).
"there's nothing more to life that what you can analyze scientifically" seems like an overreach to me, like saying that the terms of mathematical system X are the "real" or "only" ones. Mathematics never says this; it only ever says "Euclidean starting axioms imply x,y, and z. Noneuclidean ones imply, x,y, j, and w, etc."
'Cause that would seem to be an important preliminary to your definition of science?
The problem: existence is the thing that *everything that *exists has in common, and scientific articulation of its meaning would require a comparison between the things that do and don't exist. Which comparison it cannot make, because as you rightly point out scientific inquiry cannot be made into non-existent things.
btw the 'which' in "things which don't exist" is a funny word misusage in this context -- do you see why?
Software is free if it respects the four freedoms. They're clear and, in my opinion, not the slightest bit narrow.
Nine times out of ten this comes from someone who prefers "permissive" licenses to copyleft ones. But these *are considered free by the FSF.
Are you just tweaked that rms and others *prefer that copyleft licenses be used? That's nothing to do with how "narrow" their definition of free is. It's a pragmatic argument about which intelligent people can disagree.
But this "extremely narrow" business serves no purpose vis-a-vis intelligent disagreement. It's a rhetorical whack meant to associate principled advocates of free software with limitations,restrictions & unfreedom.
They're totally spoiling my launch party! After I spent all day organizing my "Activities" and picking my favorite "Features" to share with everyone! Now they'll all go to someone else's launch party the day before.
"...a balance struck between the rights of creators and users"
A nice idea; maybe start by listing these?
Be careful, as soon as you say "creators have a right to get paid" you've left the free-market camp. Not that the free-market camp is the only good and true and noble one, but that's beside the point.
When being-paid is thought of as a *right, rather than a hit-or-miss result of free market activity, you have to turn in your libertarian badge.
I'll start with an actual right I believe creators have: attribution.
"give IE users the finger and tell them that their browser, and by extension (usually) the organization that forces them to use that browser and doesn't give them the ability to install anything else, is/are obsolete."
I don't necessarily agree with giving anyone the finger, as it's impolite. But telling them the truth is, overall, a good thing.
"what is the likelyhood that every community will have some citizen blogger covering the courthouse, the city council meetings, the school board meetings, etc. These are all things that local papers cover quite well."
Dude, what city do you live in? I'm moving. Here, without alteration or editing, are the Top News Stories in my local paper as of right now: "Adopted Children's Trips to Homeland Helps Affirm Heritage" "Veteran Recalls A-Bomb, Enola Gay" "3 GCISD Schools Advance in Ratings" "Muhm: Community Involvement Key to Victory"
Meanwhile, in my city, several multimillion-dollar development projects are underway which will impact the political balance of power and the economic texture of the whole place.
All I see is a bunch of bubbles with "@"s sprinkled all over them. To really get off the ground, this "HTML5" doohickey needs a real video tag with a real codec and plugin from MacroMedia, and good, effective DRM.
A lot of this idiocy comes from the use of the metaphor "content". If music and other artistic works were called what they are -- *expressions of human creativity -- a lot of this would go away.
It's obvious, of course, that people generally don't make objects, products, "contents" (of containers, presumably) and hand them over to others without getting paid for them.
But the idea that people will not express themselves creatively -- will not write, sing, and talk about the things that are important to them -- without getting paid for it is.. um.. less obvious*
"Why buy 2nd best or the oddball, when Microsoft sold you everything you needed, AND EVERYONE else used MS products (compatibility)?"
Just a quick note: you're dangerously close to saying "nobody chose 1-2-3 because nobody chose 1-2-3"
Compatibility with the dominant platform doesn't become an issue until a vendor becomes dominant. In my opinion, it was by introducing cheap plastic crap that barely worked when the prevailing software sales strategy was to introduce expensive whizbang stuff that worked well.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm more worried about the people that go to, say, local planning commission meetings"
Sorry, but um.. wasn't that the point?
Tons of people will go to the football games anyway. Stop paying someone to do what many will voluntarily do. I suspect the person being paid for that is someone who would be going anyway, and since she's the editor's niece or whatever she gets to draw a check.
Skip all that. Use the savings to pay people to attend the city council
I think you missed my point, there.
Of course there are things you can compare and contrast about the two badgers in your example. For example, one of them is ceramic.
Being-ceramic is an attribute you can define, because ceramic things exist and things that aren't ceramic exist as well.
Being-real/existing is a more difficult attribute to define, and logically impossible to define by empirical science. By *definition, the "control group" for the analysis of existing-things doesn't exist and thus its members' attributes are unknown.
Incidentally, this is why the Thomistic proof that you referenced is fundamentally flawed. It treats "existence" as a perfection/improvement alongside other attributes like "beautiful" or "intelligent". Which it isn't.
I'm no mathematician, but from a layman's perspective mathematic "proof" is always quasi-tautological. All you're doing is unpacking the meaning of known mathematical or numeric terms. Which isn't just a waste of time, 'cause sometimes one of the things you unpack is another known term that you didn't realize would come out of the original one(s).
"there's nothing more to life that what you can analyze scientifically" seems like an overreach to me, like saying that the terms of mathematical system X are the "real" or "only" ones. Mathematics never says this; it only ever says "Euclidean starting axioms imply x,y, and z. Noneuclidean ones imply, x,y, j, and w, etc."
'Cause that would seem to be an important preliminary to your definition of science?
The problem: existence is the thing that *everything that *exists has in common, and scientific articulation of its meaning would require a comparison between the things that do and don't exist. Which comparison it cannot make, because as you rightly point out scientific inquiry cannot be made into non-existent things.
btw the 'which' in "things which don't exist" is a funny word misusage in this context -- do you see why?
Turns out "the cloud" is just another name for "datacenter". Who knew?
Every time rms is brought up, someone hauls out this phrase "extremely narrow definition of free"
Really? Narrow? *Extremely narrow?!?? How many licenses are considered free?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html
Software is free if it respects the four freedoms. They're clear and, in my opinion, not the slightest bit narrow.
Nine times out of ten this comes from someone who prefers "permissive" licenses to copyleft ones. But these *are considered free by the FSF.
Are you just tweaked that rms and others *prefer that copyleft licenses be used? That's nothing to do with how "narrow" their definition of free is. It's a pragmatic argument about which intelligent people can disagree.
But this "extremely narrow" business serves no purpose vis-a-vis intelligent disagreement. It's a rhetorical whack meant to associate principled advocates of free software with limitations,restrictions & unfreedom.
In between the two assertions
1) [GGP] The R&D is worth $40B
and
2) [your synopsis of slashdotjunker] The R&D is worth $0
Stand 39,999,999,999 non-straw-men.
This is one of those rare recursive offenses:
The penalty for singing or thinking a product jungle is singing or thinking a product jungle
They're totally spoiling my launch party! After I spent all day organizing my "Activities" and picking my favorite "Features" to share with everyone! Now they'll all go to someone else's launch party the day before.
The hell with them, I'm installing FreeBSD then.
"As soon as I got rid of PulseAudio? It started working."
You lucky bastad!
As soon as *I* got rid of pulseaudio, my sounds stopped working entirely. And my wireless. Headscratcher there:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1258063
"...a balance struck between the rights of creators and users"
A nice idea; maybe start by listing these?
Be careful, as soon as you say "creators have a right to get paid" you've left the free-market camp. Not that the free-market camp is the only good and true and noble one, but that's beside the point.
When being-paid is thought of as a *right, rather than a hit-or-miss result of free market activity, you have to turn in your libertarian badge.
I'll start with an actual right I believe creators have: attribution.
I would say that the current POTUS is nominated by *someone every year, as a matter of course.
In this day and age are there still people who think that the laws apply equally to everyone?
Bzzt. Wrong answer, sorry. People get drunk together because they are comfortable with each other, not the other way 'round.
I stop reading any of these posts when I get to the word "zealot". Saves a lot of time.
One is not a zealot for thinkng that copyleft is a good mechanism for making sure that software remains free.
Parent is the best and most succinct encapsulation of the sensible-people-vs-"zealots" confusion I'v seen in awhile.
Great-great-great granparent, which I stopped reading at the word "zealot", is dead wrong about
"the fact that the GPL wasn't written with commercialization in mind certainly seems like it fails to be useful to a business"
Sounds so logical but is false. Usefulness-to-business is an unintended conquence of thousands of things, including lots of free software.
"give IE users the finger and tell them that their browser, and by extension (usually) the organization that forces them to use that browser and doesn't give them the ability to install anything else, is/are obsolete."
I don't necessarily agree with giving anyone the finger, as it's impolite. But telling them the truth is, overall, a good thing.
"what is the likelyhood that every community will have some citizen blogger covering the courthouse, the city council meetings, the school board meetings, etc. These are all things that local papers cover quite well."
Dude, what city do you live in? I'm moving. Here, without alteration or editing, are the Top News Stories in my local paper as of right now:
"Adopted Children's Trips to Homeland Helps Affirm Heritage"
"Veteran Recalls A-Bomb, Enola Gay"
"3 GCISD Schools Advance in Ratings"
"Muhm: Community Involvement Key to Victory"
Meanwhile, in my city, several multimillion-dollar development projects are underway which will impact the political balance of power and the economic texture of the whole place.
All I see is a bunch of bubbles with "@"s sprinkled all over them. To really get off the ground, this "HTML5" doohickey needs a real video tag with a real codec and plugin from MacroMedia, and good, effective DRM.
"Diller predicted there will be three revenue streams: advertising, subscriptions and transactions. "
Uh-huh. And the things funded through these methods will continue to account for about 0.2% of the things people do and look at on the web.
A lot of this idiocy comes from the use of the metaphor "content". If music and other artistic works were called what they are -- *expressions of human creativity -- a lot of this would go away.
It's obvious, of course, that people generally don't make objects, products, "contents" (of containers, presumably) and hand them over to others without getting paid for them.
But the idea that people will not express themselves creatively -- will not write, sing, and talk about the things that are important to them -- without getting paid for it is .. um.. less obvious*
*i.e. false
Is Vista the Ferrari in your analogy?
google for "London Stock Exchange site:microsoft.com" and fiddle around a bit looking at current vs. cached pages.
I bet if you interviewed Ballmer, he'd say something like "London has a Stock Exchane?!? I sure as fsck never heard of it"
I'm sure the LSE has no idea who's actually to blame, and is just dumping Windows/.NET because it's so easy to migrate off of.
I don't know, but I'm sure Steve does so i better get it...
"Why buy 2nd best or the oddball, when Microsoft sold you everything you needed, AND EVERYONE else used MS products (compatibility)?"
Just a quick note: you're dangerously close to saying "nobody chose 1-2-3 because nobody chose 1-2-3"
Compatibility with the dominant platform doesn't become an issue until a vendor becomes dominant. In my opinion, it was by introducing cheap plastic crap that barely worked when the prevailing software sales strategy was to introduce expensive whizbang stuff that worked well.