then Cthulhu t-shirts and mugs and solstice carols are good for programming.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for legalizing drugs. And I don't like it one bit that my tax money goes into making victims of some harmless pot smokers.
But [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cum_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc]cum hoc ergo propter hoc[/url] is a fallacy for a reason.
Unity does this actually - all shaders are written in Cg/HLSL, then cross-compiled to GLSL for OpenGL & OGLES. It's a surprisingly pleasant workflow - especially with their Surface Shader framework.
Well, intersexed persons make a bit of a mess of that. Since you can have both sets physical features in various strengths in some people. That's been where the biggest controversies have come up in recent history.
Yes - it's basically just compiling small
Actually, utilitarianism doesn't work that way either. A fictional entity doesn't count at all when the topic is how to maximize the happiness of the people on the whole.
Whether it makes a corporation happy is just about as irrelevant as whether it makes my Skyrim archmage happy, or whether it makes my imaginary army of zombie pirate ninja vikings happy. Which is to say, not at all. The fictive entity "corporation" doesn't count even as 1 person, it counts as exactly 0 (ZERO) persons for utilitarian considerations. Which, again, is what we're really talking about in such "the good of one vs the good of the many" scenarios.
What matters is sorta whether the net sum on the total of society. Including, of course, its employees, share holders, economic effect on the whole, etc.
And then not all transactions are created equal.
E.g., very oversimplified,
- if I'm a baker and you're hungry, selling you a sandwich is working out to be better for both of us. I want money more than I want another sandwich sitting there and getting spoiled, and you obviously want the sandwich more than you want the money it costs. Or you probably wouldn't buy it.
- if I hit you upside the head with a half brick in a sock to steal 100$ from your wallet, it's a net loss. You lost more than I gained. Possibly even your life. It's the kind of transaction you don't really want. Enough of that happening around, and society gets worse on the whole.
And that's not even counting the all too common case where I'd make a loss for you without gaining anything myself, or even making a loss too. E.g., a guy who just keys cars for the heck of it, and then goes to jail for it. I.e., it's not just detrimental, but stupid too.
And just so it's not completely off topic, really, the latter is what a lot of this raping privacy six ways to Sunday is all about. I'm under the impression that a lot of data being collected, and a lot of companies collecting it, don't even come with a plan as to how to make any gain out of it.
E.g., take the trend of needing to give all your data, down to exact birthday and street number and everything, just to be allowed to download a patch for a program you bought. Most of those companies don't actually plan to sell that to spammer or scammers, and it's too much detail even for data mining. You can get some meaningful correlation by age group or general geographic area, but you're never going to get some insight as to what those living at houses numbered 15 buy more than those living in houses numbered 17. It's trivia, not data, and as good as random noise for basing anything on.
So when they inevitably get pwned by some script kiddie, or some disgruntled IT worker sells the whole client database to a spammer, they made a lot of people a loss, but they still haven't gained anything out of it. And what for? Just because basically some marketroid drone is stupid.
Sorry, utilitarianism, because that's what it's all about, works at the scale of society. You don't get to gerrymander the groups arbitrarily to justify any kind of antisocial behaviour.
For a start, if you have a hundred million people preyed upon, you count a hundred millions, you don't do something as idiotic as counting each person as one injured for the benefit of a whole corporation. Even taking the short-sighted view that ignores collateral damage, you have to count some hundreds of millions on one side, vs a corporation of... what? A few thousand employees? Tens of thousands?
To see what's wrong with it, your exact same logic can be applied to a mafia don and his gangsters, extorting a few thousand shopkeepers. And occasionally, sadly, having to kneecap someone or fit them into cement shoes, to keep the others in line. Each individual victim is one victim, and their unwilling contribution is keeping a couple dozen gangsters fed, clothed and armed. So, you know, one versus many.
Except, as I was saying, it doesn't work that way. Even the most myopic view has to count both sides as a group. You have some thousands of people preyed upon, for the benefit of some dozens of gangsters. The utilitarian conclusion is to get rid of the gangsters, not to tell the victims that they had to put up with it because, you know, the good of the one vs the good of the many.
But even that's not taking into account other effects, which negatively affect the well being of more people than the thousands of extorted shopkeepers. E.g., the negative effect on the local economy. E.g., the fact that people have to fear of ending up being in the wrong pub when some gangster decides to machinegun it because it belongs to a rival gangster family. Etc.
The point is that there is the difference between a job as a way to get something done, and a job just for the sake of paying some people. Both are a job, but one gets something done, the other is just a fancy way to redistribute wealth.
Then again, considering that half the private IT projects and probably three quarters of government ones are about as needed as the pyramids, it's probably no wonder that so many people on this site are unable to see the difference
The flow chart is a most thoroughly oversold piece of program documentation. -- Frederick Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"
