Comment Re:No (Score 1) 276
Anything already slow on the desktop, and which is always being used for ever more demanding projects, isn't really moving to the web.
Autocad for example.
Anything already slow on the desktop, and which is always being used for ever more demanding projects, isn't really moving to the web.
Autocad for example.
And the big one, population growth. But another big one is also this:
An environmentalist who had travelled the world to find a job in carbon trading, explained to me that, "it doesn't matter if CO2 isn't really a problem, because by cutting CO2 you force a reduction in production and consumption; it is about reducing GREED."
As far as I know she wasn't religious, but it seems the West has inherited a monotheistic dogma about man being full of original sin, and sometimes it shows up in environmentalism.
Humans are creative intelligent creatures full of potential for empathy and freedom. But rather than champion our better qualities, some think we should persecute starving Africans for being born.
Thanks, I never quite understood what was going on in episodes of Nurse Jackie, being a UK viewer. And yeah, our 100 billion GBP NHS is pretty much the only thing that matters. That's the price of 2 coffees a day per person, by a simple estimate.
Sure, but unless you want ordinary people to revert to codes of personal honour and clan protection, the state has to be strong.
A strong state isn't a bad state. A bad strong state is a bad state.
"Bad" meaning, dictatorial, nepotistic, corrupt, abusive, etc. And people being flawed, all states have this problem in their government. But my impression is, the level of corruption in say, a Zambia or a Pakistan, is bigger than the corruption in a China, which is in turn perhaps more corrupt than a USA, which is more corrupt than say, Norway. Which is why I'd rather live in Norway than Pakistan.
So ISIL and the Islamists and all the people who are corrupt Islamic leaders, trying to use religion to gain power, rather than just help people, those people WANT the West to look weak, that's the point of terrorist attacks, a few here and a few there, which kill in relatively small numbers (compared to road deaths) but the point is, to create the illusion that the West is weak and ready to fall, and that you know, Islamists will be raising the flag above Rome any day now. It is to make you look weak.
So the state has to respond with signs of strength.
And we hope that USA is not so corrupt that this actually trashes your existing country and so becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
OK well let's say that programming is more like architectural design, ie. it involves drawing, but what you draw comes as a result of thinking over a large set of technical, aesthetic, cultural, psychological, risk, and practical issues, and being able to organise them, puzzle out the contradictions, and find a balance which is about right for the particular site and client and costs and timescales. But again, it is a certain mode of thinking involved, or a set of modes, and if they can't teach people how to get into those modes, then students can't design stuff. Actually, there was a debate about architecture back in 1890 or something, when they were proposing to formalise architectural education, and many architects/master builders of the day, argued that it wasn't something which could be taught. You either had the skills, or you didn't, and no amount of teaching or testing could give them to you. The only way to learn was by apprenticeship, where you'd soon find out if you had the right stuff or not. Personally, I tend to think they had a point. So maybe like architecture, programming isn't about simply executing a mechanical skill, like drawing or coding, but being able to handle all the other stuff. Whether that stuff can be taught, that's the question.
Yes, sorry about the poor use of tenses, that is what I had in mind.
Maybe then there is something about how to really teach programming that everyone is missing. With drawing, people are either good at drawing or awful at it, regardless of classes, until teachers figure out what drawing really is and what the mind is doing when it is drawing. The people who have been seen to do well "in class" are just the ones who happen to have already got that mind skill. So I would wonder whether education has this figured out with programming, and that you'll see bimodal until it does.
According to a book, "Adapt", the reason we're not speaking German now has a lot to do with the Spitfire, a plane which would never have been built had it not been for a few people with very unusual perspectives taking a big leap into radical ideas, despite lack of official funding or support. For example, conventional wisdom from authorities was that the Spitfire was completely impractical because... you had to turn the plane to aim it at the target, as there were no gun turrets.
No crazy people backing weird ideas; no Spitfire; no victory at the Battle of Britain; the Germans take Britain; acquiring some nuclear scientists and accelerating their acquisition of the bomb. It is kinda scary how often it seems to be weird people pursuing odd ideas combined with dumb blind luck.
I liked Soros' point that a reason for having an "open" society is that you can never be sure if the fantasy you're operating under, is actually going to do more benefit than harm, so one is always trying to remain not too sure of oneself, hence the "openness". For example, don't have a death penalty, because you can never be sure you're not making a big mistake (you might still jail the person, but basically try to be as available to correcting mistakes as possible). Try to be softer, more open, which I guess, can at the same time appear more liberal and more conservative.
I gather it is due to child survival. If one in six survive, you need to have twelve. As mothers start to see two in two survive, they start having two. It takes a while but that's the effect.
What would you update them to? Secular philosophy has zero consensus on the most basic ethical questions after trying for 2500 years.
And yes, we are applying ours current to the times. You know this. You just lie and claim we don't, and only you are advocating "1.0" for the schizophrenic purposes of attacking them. Which, is odd, since 100% of the norms you have you got from theism by cultural assimilation, which you then deny the source of, and you have no defensible objective source of your own. Atheism never has come up with anything of it's own, never will, and frankly, that's exactly what you want. You'd no more follow a non-Christian set of ethics than you would a Christian one. You want your moral code to be synonymous with whatever your whims are at the moment. I'll believe otherwise as soon as a concerted attempt is made to come up with... anything, as an alternative.
Religion, also, assimilated from other sources, and humans have, over the aeons, developed their ability, whether that individual belonged to a religion or not.
The religious often like to say that their reason led them religion, so you see, our ability to see the value in some moral teaching, is linked to our capacity to reason. And our capacity to reason has slowly developed, and it has developed over a much longer timespan, it actually predates the major religions. That's where our morality "comes from". It all arose together, and so I don't think you can just separate one area (religion) from the rest of society and claim that it was only religion which drove things.
Consider, I can't actually feel the pain another person feels, especially if they are living on the other side of the world and I have never met them. But I can perform a cognitive trick, and I can ask myself rationally, "If I was them, would I be suffering?"
That's the Golden Rule, and it is very old rule. The key is that it relies on our ability to rationally ask a question which then leads to an imaginary leap of empathy.
I can't feel what it is like to be that person, in their shoes, but I can rationally pose the question, and then consciously bring it up in my imagination, to try to see a story, about what I might be feeling if I was that other person. Cognition is key.
And cognition is hard. Over time we gradually learnt to apply that rule to more people. We didn't used to apply it to slaves, you know, the slaves who had very religious owners. Did religion stop slavery? Doesn't look like it. No, we gradually applied the golden rule, rationally, to more and more situations. Today we use it even when imaging the biosphere.
So atheists, insofar as they have a brain, can very well think about morality and ethics and come up with answers, and our answers today are better than the typical answer you got 2000 years ago. Which isn't to say that a Buddha or a Jesus or a Lao Tzu couldn't still best us today, but they were ahead of their time.
Of course, thinking rationally about ethical problems, is hard. It is hard to try to act in the interests of the whole world. And so people can and do disagree. But that doesn't mean it is hopelessly relative and self-indulgent. Humanity is gradually pulling itself up to become better. Now, this doesn't preclude an afterlife and so on, but we have almost NO evidence for such, and all the major religions disagree on this anyway, some say you have original sin, some say you have your previous karma, some say you can be saved, some say you can only save yourself, and so on, so until we get some real evidence, we are simply having to make do with not knowing.
And that's ok, because maybe, if you wonder that there is more to life, maybe us not knowing is part of the situation, and you'll be tested at the end, and maybe they'll ask, so what did you think of the golden rule, did you use it much?
For all its faults, the Catholic church had a good idea, that just letting people read the Bible themselves and interpret it their own way would lead to all kinds of bad things, so they tried to keep people from doing that
Wait, you don't really believe that shit, do you? You're crazier than the catholics if you do. Keeping people from information is always done to handicap them. True leaders create more leaders. The Catholics only want more followers.
Interesting dilemma. I guess the key is to raise people's intelligence, for whilst the "experts" might be doing a good job, the wider populace has to be able to correct their mistakes. So we hope that for every nut who makes a truly awful reading of some moral issue, there are hundreds around who can come up with a better reading and then let the best ideas compete and spread. And as more people are exposed to more ideas, they (hopefully) become smarter.
For example, many people have the notion that there is something "wrong" with life, and so they turn to religion, on that basic belief that life is "wrong", and so some end up wanting something "pure" and "holy" which, by definition, is not part of normal life, because normal life is "bad". That then leads to them coming up with ludicrous fantasies about what is "pure". So they come up with their "pure" idea, and they notice then that 99.999% of people will think they are wrong, and really, the more people say you're wrong, the more "pure" your ideas seem to be, so you must be on the right track to being the chosen one.
The idea that you have to declare life "bad" and then toil and suffer to "achieve" purity and salvation, is pernicious and a key assumption of the monotheistic religions, and some other ones also. Yet also an idea that is very easily undone:
Consider the lilies of the field...
I'm supposed to be worried about this?
Kinda know the feeling. When I was 7 I drew a picture of a dog in a space capsule. The teacher said that dogs haven't gone to space.
It was a little early in life to conclude that teachers can't be trusted. Sigh.
We're not that special - we are just another animal.
Slight quibble: you might think it is safe ground to claim that, but we have no idea what sentience is nor how it works nor which creatures have it. Is an ape sentient? Is an ant sentient?
Claiming we are "human" or "ape" or "just an animal" is about as proven as claiming we are "God's children" or "living in the matrix" whatever other claptrap. We know we are sentient of the world, but we haven't located sentience IN the world. We know that what we experience can be altered by altering the brain, but what is doing the experiencing is unknown. The brain is the TV. But what is experiencing the TV picture? This is not a trivial problem to be overlooked. We don't know what we are. Would you still feel you if you were not sentient, but otherwise a human going about behaving like any other human? Just "human" instead of "human being"?
But that aside, yes by all means let's go to space.
Would it help if the people who came up with a password policy were then tasked with thinking up 100 passwords (each one to be used for one day) ?
And then check back with them at the end and see what they chose for the last 20?
fortune: No such file or directory