Don't confuse a representation with the underlying idea that is being represented.
I still don't follow. "3", the symbol, is a representation of 3, the number, which is manifest in any material occurrence of 3 anythings. Which of these 3 (see what I did?:-) ) doesn't exist?
Mathematical concepts don't exist in the natural or supernatural sense. They manifest. One doesn't observe the number, "three". One observes three objects.
I don't see how something can manifest without such manifestation existing.
You are close to stating the ontological argument for the existence of god, namely that because god is perfect, he must exist, because one of the qualities of perfection is that it exists. It's rubbish.
Nope, it works quite well and continues being refuted, and these refutations refuted, and these further defenses refuted, and so on and so forth even now. In fact I enjoy seeing the back and forth about it, although I myself have no position on the subject. It doesn't interest me much.
The first motor argument, on the other hand, seems to me perfectly plausible. I don't mind explicitly affirming it, although I do mind pretty much deducing from or associating to it a mythological deity.
And the "idea" of a triangle doesn't exist in any but the most trivially true sense that it is a good description of any 3-sided object we can see or draw. There are no Platonic ideals that exist in some higher sphere of existence than our own.
And yet our Universe, from the very first instant, went around following all of these neat little axioms in settling down our "laws of nature" as if said axioms were indeed the laws governing such a settling down.
But I agree with it not being a higher sphere. It's an immanent one in the Aristotelian fashion. There are all these things that express natural laws, and by way of those laws, the mathematical axioms that govern them all. Nothing in such an ontology requires transcendence. Although, to be perfectly precise, nothing in it goes to the extreme of preventing some form of transcendence either, whatever it might be.
One can say that it is true only while there is someone who somehow perceives the concepts of "triangle" and even "property". So unless you can say that all Psyche is supernatural, properties of a triangle is not a supernatural entity, it's just a psychical object - as natural as any physical object, just of the other nature (pun not intended).
If this were the case 3-body orbital mechanics wouldn't work before there were human beings around to think of them. Not to mention nothing with a trigonometric nature in whatever quantum-something went around in the Big Bang. And other universes, potentially or even actually existing, would be utterly devoid of them.
No, the necessary consequence is that we cannot rely on "human inventions" as being 100% accurate or complete descriptions of the universe.
But math isn't that. It's a description of all possible universes. What we do with it in science is to try to find where, among the full set of possible universes, ours "fit". Now and then it happens that we notice something that wasn't in the originally identified mathematical set of possibilities, but then what happens? Math expands to cover not only this particular case of ours but also all the extra possible ones, expanding exponentially, covering a much greater set, and helping us better find our fit.
When you want to paint a house and you measure it, does nature specifically "make" the house and paint fit a "multiply to get the area" rule and an "add up the sides" rule? Or do you choose to multiply some numbers and add others because following that model gets you a useful answer, even though nature doesn't 'know' what "house", "paint", "add", or "area" means?
The former. Our Universe isn't special. It happens to follow one among the many possible 4d geometries we currently know about, which geometry in turn happens to be "simplifiable" down to the basic Euclidean one in small enough scales. It's a particular case of a general case, other particular cases of which can very well govern infinitely many other Universes. So, no "choice". You happen to use the geometrical rules you yourself (including your brain) are built with to deal with within the Universe you live in. You cannot not do it.
If you think that's absurd, and given you're anti-realist I guess you probably do, then I ask: what of the rigorous anti-realist alternative? There's input information you receive from something you perceive as senses perceiving an external world. Your mind happen to be able to interpret this input in certain ways, one of which is math/logic. Therefore, any mathematical and/or logical conclusion you reach, i.e., any scientific conclusion about anything, is no more and no less than a certain processing of certain inputs, and no matter how much you do it, you'll never know whether said inputs correspond to something or to nothing at all, and whether said processing provides any valid conclusion about said input, much less about the perceived external world.
There are other alternatives beyond those two sure, but they all "work" by hand-waving the problem away. Not much of an improvement, IMHO.
You're asking me to rewrite something without using one of the basic concepts people use to think about things. Are words human inventions? Can you rewrite your post without them?
Words are governed by physics in multiple ways, from sound waves down to neuron activity. Physics is a special case of math. As I see it, your refutation counts as agreeing with my original argument.:-)
While strictly true, that is entirely unhelpful. A rock is different from a worm or a human being, however much you try to reduce them all to being just collections of atoms (or quantum events, or whatever).
True, but what I'm pointing at is that this kind of discussion has two kinds of reductionism at work. On the one hand, creationists saying, insofar as their mythology can be translated into proper philosophical reasoning, that all the natural phenomena (the bits and pieces that interest them at least) are to be understood only in terms of their mathematical arrangements, from which position arises profoundly nonsensical attacks on natural selection such as the notion of "irreducible complexity". On the other hand, the typical philosophically naive scientist saying, idem, that all natural phenomena are to be understood only in terms of the mechanism leading from one configuration to the other. The former has the technical name of "formal causality", the later of "efficient causality". The truth of the matter however is that any phenomenon has both causalities playing at once (plus the one you pointed out, of considering things only from the point of view of their basic components, namely, "material causality"). Try to reduce any phenomenon to be the result of only one of those, or to reduce two of them to a mere expressions of the third, and you'll get at best a partial description, at worst nonsense.
PS.: There's a fourth kind of causality, the so called "final" one, that works quite differently in that it explains a sequence of causes and effects based on their future consequences. Trying to apply it to the natural world usually results in nonsense such as interpreting mythology literally, the reason why I didn't mention it above. But it has its place when discussing many things humans ourselves do, as we indeed do lots of stuff based on expected results. So: natural world, three concurrent causalities; technology, art etc., four.
umm....you are confusing "abstract"/"idea"/"thought" with "Supernatural"
Nope, that's the correct usage, although I know in popular culture it gets regularly confused with, say, supposedly ESP phenomena, magic, UFOs, ghosts and the like, none of which, if they happened to exist, would be "super" (above) nature, but rather well confined by it given they'd all be most definitely material. Contrast the properties of a triangle for example: they're unaffected by matter or energy, don't degrade in the face of entropy, remain the same with or without an Universe present, and for all effects and purposes fit quite nicely in the concept of immateriality. What could be more "above nature" than that?
I mean, being able to have more than two windows on the same screen? That is revolutionary!
LOL, which is why I said Metro is a bad TWM. But I've read somewhere Microsoft would be planning on expanding the number of tiles in future versions. Maybe 8.1 will already provide something like that.
By the way, you at least can run two Metro programs side-by-side. I still use a 1280x1024 screen, meaning for me Metro is a single window environment. Beat that, DOS!
Which makes sense, they're invented by human beings.
With the necessary consequence, by reductio ad absurdum, that we know nothing about nothing, and all our technology just happens to work by pure luck.
I fail to see how one can hold such a notion that math, logic and related fields are human inventions and simultaneously that they hold true. What it implies is quite literally that when I say "there is one apple over there", in reality "mumble-mumble mumble-mumble apple mumble-mumble". Cut out math and logic and you're left with nothing. And what for? Just because that makes it "easier" in to pretend each and every kind of supernatural doesn't exist, no matter how agnostic or atheistic it is?
Try rewriting all you said removing the law of non-contradiction and see how far you go. It might be fun as an exercise in surrealism, but when dealing with anything that matters it's at best useless hair splitting.
Change can be translated into static relation and the other way around, so the distinction is meaningless. It makes no difference to consider f(x) = x^2 as something whose output changes following changes to 'x', or to consider it a static set of pairs of value F = {..., (-2,4), (-1,1), (0,0), (1,1), (2,4),... }.
Thus, taking the, ahem, "eternal species" to mean the set P = { A, AC, AG, AT, CG, CT, GT, AAC, AAG,... } but subjecting each element to a "change" function so that f(env,P(x)) = P(something-something-x) so it "moves" from one element to another, or taking said "movement" itself as just part of a larger set of pairs B = { (env1, A), (env2, A), (env3, A),..., (env1, AC), (env2, AC),..., (env1, AAG),... }, makes no difference.
I see no reason to privilege math over English in this regard.
But you certainly see much reason to privilege reason, i.e., logic and all it implies.
There's no running around the fact that if you refuse the framework you're left with no knowledge at all. Either you accept some kind of basic realism or you give up and go with the methodological anarchism of a Feyerabend, who sees no difference at all between modern Physics and Astrology, or some kind of skepticism, be it classical skepticism, which affirms no possibility of knowledge of anything at all, or the Kantian alternative, which says science can be at best a very precise knowledge of our sensory input, but incapable of saying anything at all about this maybe existing thing that maybe multiple humans (supposing there are more than one) perceive as "the external world".
I tend to switch between realism and kantism, but I concede the later is more rigorous. Too bad it causes everything we say about anything to necessarily become surrounded by double quotes.
But if you think like Wolfram, it's all an algorithm, and this reductionist algorithm is the basis in the post.
I think these kinds of discussion suffer from lack of philosophical literacy. Creationists are clearly wrong in whatever they think about the mechanisms of speciation. They don't pop out of nowhere "just because", and replacing "just because" with "because god so wished" doesn't improve the notion a bit. On the other hand evolutionists rarely notice that a process of natural selection doesn't create something "new", it only causes a (mathematically preexisting) potential arrangement of atoms, one of an infinite set, to actually appear. The set of all possible carbon-based DNAs hasn't changed since the Big Bang, or even before it. Natural selection only makes some of them appear as actual combinations of carbon atoms, it neither adds nor subtracts from the full set.
It depends on how you delimit natural. Math and logic laws aren't natural, at least in the sense that they're causal results from some physical/material/energetic/whatever process. In fact it can be argued it's the other way around, and nature as a whole "follows" the principle of non-contradiction, arithmetic, generalized geometry. That's pretty supernatural for me, in the strict sense of "beyond nature".
Still no literal "bearded man in the sky"-style deity though.
The kicker is the book was a scholarly look at the peaceful proliferation of Buddhism in the world..........
Would you have some good suggestion on this or related topics? And if possible available for Kindle (shipping of physical books to Brazil is expensive) and not costing a fortune? I've read several books by actually representative Buddhist practitioners thus from Buddhists' own perspectives, but not much by academic scholars.
The point wasn't about kernel technology, but about popularity of consumer versions. Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, NT 3.x, NT 4 and 2000 weren't consumer versions, they were business versions. XP was the first NT-based consumer version, and also coincidentally the first popular NT-based consumer version.
All Microsoft needed to do with the UI is *nothing*.
Justice be told, there's one good thing about the Metro UI in that behind all the flashiness it's a move towards the geekiest of GUI paradigms: a tiling window manager. Hard core command-line programmers usually love those, but in this case they're all hating it, and deservedly so. I think the actual problem with Metro then isn't that it's a TWM, but just that it's a bad TWM. In a few iterations it might become good but so far it's Microsoft's equivalent to Windows 1.0 (which also was a TWM) in terms of refinement and ease of use, i.e., altogether lacking in both.
Only thing I would suggest as an upgrade to that computer is an SSD.
The thing however is that Windows 8 actually feels faster than 7, so it counts as a worthy upgrade for me once I got some minor tools to remove most of Metro from my sight, namely, Stardock's Start8 for the menu and ModernMix to make those few Metro apps I might want to run work within standard windows that appear in the taskbar. That's the one good side of this whole tabletization business: since OS vendors must optimize for low performance mobile CPUs actual middle to high performance desktop users end up benefiting, even though indirectly.
I guess at some point Microsoft might make such UI hacks unworkable. If that happens I won't upgrade to such a crippled future Windows 8.x+ OS. But for as long as these or similar tools keep working I don't mind upgrading. The performance alone is reason enough.
they forget to mention that the nuclear industry will continue to kill people for thousands of years
No, it won't. In a few decades gene therapy will have advanced and become cheap enough to fix any biological damage resulting from exposure to leaked radiation. Leakages, if/when they happen, will be minor footnotes in the news when a visit to the physician and a minor virus-based treatment is all it takes to undo the damage.
it's all minority report. every place you look, google glass will pop up a virtual billboard for you to see.
I don't get this kind of reaction. So what if the one out of the box does this? We'll just learn to jailbreak it (if needed) and install an adblocker, or how to install Linux on it or whatever.
Sometimes I have the impression technophiles' "think of the privacy implications!" is their own version of technophobes' "think of the children!" Me, I can't wait for this kind of think to come fast enough. I've grown reading and watching science fiction showing wearable computing, bionic implants, predictive smart assistants, 24/7 in-brain HUDs etc., and dreaming of it all. Now that part of it is becoming reality, and much earlier than I thought would happen thanks to Moore's Law, all I see in technology forums is FUD, FUD, FUD. What happened that caused technologists to becomes so damn cynical since just a few years ago? Is that just old age kicking in? *sigh*
The Man is not me. The Man is the 1% who are turning the world into a giant Panopticon and looting my pockets.
It depends. Globally, if you own about $500k in stuff you're in the top 1%. A house counts, a car, a TV etc. all count. Do you? If not, about $60k will put you on the top 10%. And even if you aren't there yet, if you're in a first world country, absent a catastrophe there's a very high probability at some point you will.
I assure you, I'll hate them every bit as much no matter how old I get, and pity those who don't for suffering from a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome.
Every single older person out there will tell you they thought so at the same point in their lives. You're human. You're a typical human at that. You follow the exact same psychobiological patterns of human development the other 7 billion people currently living and the 40+ billion who lived before went, are going and their descendants will go through. Just wait and see.
What is it with Slashdot's (and other geek sites) support for criminals when they are geeks?
Partly a bias the name of which I forgot, in which you require extraordinary amounts of proof against a member from your own group compared to what you'd require against someone from another group; partly the fact we like their tech and are worried further developments will be disrupted; and partly because technologists are usually on the anarchic side of things and don't see much (but not all) of what these people are accused of as morally wrong even if it's illegal (the "law isn't justice" dichotomy).
That said, there are certain technologies that are themselves disruptive to other technologies, spam being the prime example, and thus those who defend it are seen as doing something morally wrong, precisely the case here. But there's a nuance in there. Technologists, although mostly anarchic, are also meritocratic, valuing technological prowess. Thus, if a highly skilled hackers manages to invade a system managed by a low skilled system administrator, that isn't seen as a simple invasion, but as a master teaching an apprentice a hard lesson so that he can figure out his deficiencies and improve (that the apprentice's boss doesn't see things this way is of no consequence). In any case, brute force techniques such as spammer delivery systems, DDoS via botnets and the like aren't themselves displays of skill, they're just displays of brute force. Developing such a system sure, is a clear display of skill. Using it, not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't confuse a representation with the underlying idea that is being represented.
I still don't follow. "3", the symbol, is a representation of 3, the number, which is manifest in any material occurrence of 3 anythings. Which of these 3 (see what I did? :-) ) doesn't exist?
Mathematical concepts don't exist in the natural or supernatural sense. They manifest. One doesn't observe the number, "three". One observes three objects.
I don't see how something can manifest without such manifestation existing.
You are close to stating the ontological argument for the existence of god, namely that because god is perfect, he must exist, because one of the qualities of perfection is that it exists. It's rubbish.
Nope, it works quite well and continues being refuted, and these refutations refuted, and these further defenses refuted, and so on and so forth even now. In fact I enjoy seeing the back and forth about it, although I myself have no position on the subject. It doesn't interest me much.
The first motor argument, on the other hand, seems to me perfectly plausible. I don't mind explicitly affirming it, although I do mind pretty much deducing from or associating to it a mythological deity.
And the "idea" of a triangle doesn't exist in any but the most trivially true sense that it is a good description of any 3-sided object we can see or draw. There are no Platonic ideals that exist in some higher sphere of existence than our own.
And yet our Universe, from the very first instant, went around following all of these neat little axioms in settling down our "laws of nature" as if said axioms were indeed the laws governing such a settling down.
But I agree with it not being a higher sphere. It's an immanent one in the Aristotelian fashion. There are all these things that express natural laws, and by way of those laws, the mathematical axioms that govern them all. Nothing in such an ontology requires transcendence. Although, to be perfectly precise, nothing in it goes to the extreme of preventing some form of transcendence either, whatever it might be.
One can say that it is true only while there is someone who somehow perceives the concepts of "triangle" and even "property". So unless you can say that all Psyche is supernatural, properties of a triangle is not a supernatural entity, it's just a psychical object - as natural as any physical object, just of the other nature (pun not intended).
If this were the case 3-body orbital mechanics wouldn't work before there were human beings around to think of them. Not to mention nothing with a trigonometric nature in whatever quantum-something went around in the Big Bang. And other universes, potentially or even actually existing, would be utterly devoid of them.
No, the necessary consequence is that we cannot rely on "human inventions" as being 100% accurate or complete descriptions of the universe.
But math isn't that. It's a description of all possible universes. What we do with it in science is to try to find where, among the full set of possible universes, ours "fit". Now and then it happens that we notice something that wasn't in the originally identified mathematical set of possibilities, but then what happens? Math expands to cover not only this particular case of ours but also all the extra possible ones, expanding exponentially, covering a much greater set, and helping us better find our fit.
No invention then, but actual discovery.
When you want to paint a house and you measure it, does nature specifically "make" the house and paint fit a "multiply to get the area" rule and an "add up the sides" rule? Or do you choose to multiply some numbers and add others because following that model gets you a useful answer, even though nature doesn't 'know' what "house", "paint", "add", or "area" means?
The former. Our Universe isn't special. It happens to follow one among the many possible 4d geometries we currently know about, which geometry in turn happens to be "simplifiable" down to the basic Euclidean one in small enough scales. It's a particular case of a general case, other particular cases of which can very well govern infinitely many other Universes. So, no "choice". You happen to use the geometrical rules you yourself (including your brain) are built with to deal with within the Universe you live in. You cannot not do it.
If you think that's absurd, and given you're anti-realist I guess you probably do, then I ask: what of the rigorous anti-realist alternative? There's input information you receive from something you perceive as senses perceiving an external world. Your mind happen to be able to interpret this input in certain ways, one of which is math/logic. Therefore, any mathematical and/or logical conclusion you reach, i.e., any scientific conclusion about anything, is no more and no less than a certain processing of certain inputs, and no matter how much you do it, you'll never know whether said inputs correspond to something or to nothing at all, and whether said processing provides any valid conclusion about said input, much less about the perceived external world.
There are other alternatives beyond those two sure, but they all "work" by hand-waving the problem away. Not much of an improvement, IMHO.
You're asking me to rewrite something without using one of the basic concepts people use to think about things. Are words human inventions? Can you rewrite your post without them?
Words are governed by physics in multiple ways, from sound waves down to neuron activity. Physics is a special case of math. As I see it, your refutation counts as agreeing with my original argument. :-)
While strictly true, that is entirely unhelpful. A rock is different from a worm or a human being, however much you try to reduce them all to being just collections of atoms (or quantum events, or whatever).
True, but what I'm pointing at is that this kind of discussion has two kinds of reductionism at work. On the one hand, creationists saying, insofar as their mythology can be translated into proper philosophical reasoning, that all the natural phenomena (the bits and pieces that interest them at least) are to be understood only in terms of their mathematical arrangements, from which position arises profoundly nonsensical attacks on natural selection such as the notion of "irreducible complexity". On the other hand, the typical philosophically naive scientist saying, idem, that all natural phenomena are to be understood only in terms of the mechanism leading from one configuration to the other. The former has the technical name of "formal causality", the later of "efficient causality". The truth of the matter however is that any phenomenon has both causalities playing at once (plus the one you pointed out, of considering things only from the point of view of their basic components, namely, "material causality"). Try to reduce any phenomenon to be the result of only one of those, or to reduce two of them to a mere expressions of the third, and you'll get at best a partial description, at worst nonsense.
PS.: There's a fourth kind of causality, the so called "final" one, that works quite differently in that it explains a sequence of causes and effects based on their future consequences. Trying to apply it to the natural world usually results in nonsense such as interpreting mythology literally, the reason why I didn't mention it above. But it has its place when discussing many things humans ourselves do, as we indeed do lots of stuff based on expected results. So: natural world, three concurrent causalities; technology, art etc., four.
umm....you are confusing "abstract"/"idea"/"thought" with "Supernatural"
Nope, that's the correct usage, although I know in popular culture it gets regularly confused with, say, supposedly ESP phenomena, magic, UFOs, ghosts and the like, none of which, if they happened to exist, would be "super" (above) nature, but rather well confined by it given they'd all be most definitely material. Contrast the properties of a triangle for example: they're unaffected by matter or energy, don't degrade in the face of entropy, remain the same with or without an Universe present, and for all effects and purposes fit quite nicely in the concept of immateriality. What could be more "above nature" than that?
I mean, being able to have more than two windows on the same screen? That is revolutionary!
LOL, which is why I said Metro is a bad TWM. But I've read somewhere Microsoft would be planning on expanding the number of tiles in future versions. Maybe 8.1 will already provide something like that.
By the way, you at least can run two Metro programs side-by-side. I still use a 1280x1024 screen, meaning for me Metro is a single window environment. Beat that, DOS!
Which makes sense, they're invented by human beings.
With the necessary consequence, by reductio ad absurdum, that we know nothing about nothing, and all our technology just happens to work by pure luck.
I fail to see how one can hold such a notion that math, logic and related fields are human inventions and simultaneously that they hold true. What it implies is quite literally that when I say "there is one apple over there", in reality "mumble-mumble mumble-mumble apple mumble-mumble". Cut out math and logic and you're left with nothing. And what for? Just because that makes it "easier" in to pretend each and every kind of supernatural doesn't exist, no matter how agnostic or atheistic it is?
Try rewriting all you said removing the law of non-contradiction and see how far you go. It might be fun as an exercise in surrealism, but when dealing with anything that matters it's at best useless hair splitting.
There is a propensity, and there is change.
Change can be translated into static relation and the other way around, so the distinction is meaningless. It makes no difference to consider f(x) = x^2 as something whose output changes following changes to 'x', or to consider it a static set of pairs of value F = { ..., (-2,4), (-1,1), (0,0), (1,1), (2,4), ... }.
Thus, taking the, ahem, "eternal species" to mean the set P = { A, AC, AG, AT, CG, CT, GT, AAC, AAG, ... } but subjecting each element to a "change" function so that f(env,P(x)) = P(something-something-x) so it "moves" from one element to another, or taking said "movement" itself as just part of a larger set of pairs B = { (env1, A), (env2, A), (env3, A), ..., (env1, AC), (env2, AC), ..., (env1, AAG), ... }, makes no difference.
I see no reason to privilege math over English in this regard.
But you certainly see much reason to privilege reason, i.e., logic and all it implies.
There's no running around the fact that if you refuse the framework you're left with no knowledge at all. Either you accept some kind of basic realism or you give up and go with the methodological anarchism of a Feyerabend, who sees no difference at all between modern Physics and Astrology, or some kind of skepticism, be it classical skepticism, which affirms no possibility of knowledge of anything at all, or the Kantian alternative, which says science can be at best a very precise knowledge of our sensory input, but incapable of saying anything at all about this maybe existing thing that maybe multiple humans (supposing there are more than one) perceive as "the external world".
I tend to switch between realism and kantism, but I concede the later is more rigorous. Too bad it causes everything we say about anything to necessarily become surrounded by double quotes.
But if you think like Wolfram, it's all an algorithm, and this reductionist algorithm is the basis in the post.
I think these kinds of discussion suffer from lack of philosophical literacy. Creationists are clearly wrong in whatever they think about the mechanisms of speciation. They don't pop out of nowhere "just because", and replacing "just because" with "because god so wished" doesn't improve the notion a bit. On the other hand evolutionists rarely notice that a process of natural selection doesn't create something "new", it only causes a (mathematically preexisting) potential arrangement of atoms, one of an infinite set, to actually appear. The set of all possible carbon-based DNAs hasn't changed since the Big Bang, or even before it. Natural selection only makes some of them appear as actual combinations of carbon atoms, it neither adds nor subtracts from the full set.
Since the supernatural is completely imaginary
It depends on how you delimit natural. Math and logic laws aren't natural, at least in the sense that they're causal results from some physical/material/energetic/whatever process. In fact it can be argued it's the other way around, and nature as a whole "follows" the principle of non-contradiction, arithmetic, generalized geometry. That's pretty supernatural for me, in the strict sense of "beyond nature".
Still no literal "bearded man in the sky"-style deity though.
The kicker is the book was a scholarly look at the peaceful proliferation of Buddhism in the world..........
Would you have some good suggestion on this or related topics? And if possible available for Kindle (shipping of physical books to Brazil is expensive) and not costing a fortune? I've read several books by actually representative Buddhist practitioners thus from Buddhists' own perspectives, but not much by academic scholars.
The point wasn't about kernel technology, but about popularity of consumer versions. Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, NT 3.x, NT 4 and 2000 weren't consumer versions, they were business versions. XP was the first NT-based consumer version, and also coincidentally the first popular NT-based consumer version.
All Microsoft needed to do with the UI is *nothing*.
Justice be told, there's one good thing about the Metro UI in that behind all the flashiness it's a move towards the geekiest of GUI paradigms: a tiling window manager. Hard core command-line programmers usually love those, but in this case they're all hating it, and deservedly so. I think the actual problem with Metro then isn't that it's a TWM, but just that it's a bad TWM. In a few iterations it might become good but so far it's Microsoft's equivalent to Windows 1.0 (which also was a TWM) in terms of refinement and ease of use, i.e., altogether lacking in both.
Also, you forgot ME, surely it has earned it's place in any Windows line-up?
He didn't. He said "when it became popular". Although, to be fair, the correct sequence then would be something like this:
Windows 3 / 3.11
Windows 95
Windows 98 / 98SE
Windows XP
Windows 7
biological DRM
Wouldn't that be BRM? Although "bio-digital" (biogital?, bigital?) sounds awesome. Not the RM part though.
Only thing I would suggest as an upgrade to that computer is an SSD.
The thing however is that Windows 8 actually feels faster than 7, so it counts as a worthy upgrade for me once I got some minor tools to remove most of Metro from my sight, namely, Stardock's Start8 for the menu and ModernMix to make those few Metro apps I might want to run work within standard windows that appear in the taskbar. That's the one good side of this whole tabletization business: since OS vendors must optimize for low performance mobile CPUs actual middle to high performance desktop users end up benefiting, even though indirectly.
I guess at some point Microsoft might make such UI hacks unworkable. If that happens I won't upgrade to such a crippled future Windows 8.x+ OS. But for as long as these or similar tools keep working I don't mind upgrading. The performance alone is reason enough.
they forget to mention that the nuclear industry will continue to kill people for thousands of years
No, it won't. In a few decades gene therapy will have advanced and become cheap enough to fix any biological damage resulting from exposure to leaked radiation. Leakages, if/when they happen, will be minor footnotes in the news when a visit to the physician and a minor virus-based treatment is all it takes to undo the damage.
it's all minority report. every place you look, google glass will pop up a virtual billboard for you to see.
I don't get this kind of reaction. So what if the one out of the box does this? We'll just learn to jailbreak it (if needed) and install an adblocker, or how to install Linux on it or whatever.
Sometimes I have the impression technophiles' "think of the privacy implications!" is their own version of technophobes' "think of the children!" Me, I can't wait for this kind of think to come fast enough. I've grown reading and watching science fiction showing wearable computing, bionic implants, predictive smart assistants, 24/7 in-brain HUDs etc., and dreaming of it all. Now that part of it is becoming reality, and much earlier than I thought would happen thanks to Moore's Law, all I see in technology forums is FUD, FUD, FUD. What happened that caused technologists to becomes so damn cynical since just a few years ago? Is that just old age kicking in? *sigh*
Is "In-group favoritism" the name you are looking for? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism
Yep! Thanks!
The Man is not me. The Man is the 1% who are turning the world into a giant Panopticon and looting my pockets.
It depends. Globally, if you own about $500k in stuff you're in the top 1%. A house counts, a car, a TV etc. all count. Do you? If not, about $60k will put you on the top 10%. And even if you aren't there yet, if you're in a first world country, absent a catastrophe there's a very high probability at some point you will.
I assure you, I'll hate them every bit as much no matter how old I get, and pity those who don't for suffering from a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome.
Every single older person out there will tell you they thought so at the same point in their lives. You're human. You're a typical human at that. You follow the exact same psychobiological patterns of human development the other 7 billion people currently living and the 40+ billion who lived before went, are going and their descendants will go through. Just wait and see.
What is it with Slashdot's (and other geek sites) support for criminals when they are geeks?
Partly a bias the name of which I forgot, in which you require extraordinary amounts of proof against a member from your own group compared to what you'd require against someone from another group; partly the fact we like their tech and are worried further developments will be disrupted; and partly because technologists are usually on the anarchic side of things and don't see much (but not all) of what these people are accused of as morally wrong even if it's illegal (the "law isn't justice" dichotomy).
That said, there are certain technologies that are themselves disruptive to other technologies, spam being the prime example, and thus those who defend it are seen as doing something morally wrong, precisely the case here. But there's a nuance in there. Technologists, although mostly anarchic, are also meritocratic, valuing technological prowess. Thus, if a highly skilled hackers manages to invade a system managed by a low skilled system administrator, that isn't seen as a simple invasion, but as a master teaching an apprentice a hard lesson so that he can figure out his deficiencies and improve (that the apprentice's boss doesn't see things this way is of no consequence). In any case, brute force techniques such as spammer delivery systems, DDoS via botnets and the like aren't themselves displays of skill, they're just displays of brute force. Developing such a system sure, is a clear display of skill. Using it, not so much.