Well you implied that you weren't American, so maybe it's your accent? Because pronouncing the "eu" like you would in "feud" makes "Zeus" pronounced like "Zoooooos".

Except for the fact that people have studied it quite a lot, and have a pretty good idea of how it was pronounced.

Under Jobs at least, that didn't seem to be the design philosophy. The design philosophy was more to make things, simple, clean, elegant, and transparent to the user. Making a product that people can't get anywhere else? That's not that hard. Making a good product is hard, and if you make a good enough product, then people won't be able to get it anywhere else.

Yeah, I guess it's not so bad if you assume that you're going to have a case, and that the case thickness will result in a flat back to the whole thing. I hadn't really thought of that.

Still, I think it's a bad choice. It seems kind of dumb to design your product with the idea that the dumb design won't be quite so dumb if you also buy a case.

I don't know how their design people allowed a protruding lens in the first place. It really runs contrary to Apple's design sensibility, but I guess we're seeing the first evidence of what happens to Apple without Jobs. The protrusion is ugly, and it mars the flat, smooth design.

And for what? Assuming that they can't make the camera any thinner, make the phone slightly fatter, and make use of the extra space. It's not as though the iPhone 5 was obscenely thick and needed to be made thinner. Hell, just fill the rest of the thing out with additional battery, and give us more battery life.

Yeah, I think part of the mistake here is in using the term "critical thinking". It's vague. And the talk about "Liberal Arts degrees" is also a bit misplaced.

I would sooner accept your description of "expansive thinking", in that it gets closer to what I think all this talk is about.

I think what's really being said is, if someone is educated exclusively (or dominantly) in a STEM field, without other things to add to their background, there will be a inclination for that person to deal with things in factual terms. In a sense, they're being trained to think about things statistically and factually, to think that things are either true or false, to be dismissive of opinions or emotions or interpersonal relationships as valid reasons for doing things. There are realms of human life that they are not only not-trained in, but they are trained to see as "without value".

The problem is, businesses-- and other groups of people trying to accomplish things-- make heavy use of those things which are "without value". When you're trying to figure out a solution to a complex problem, it often helps to have someone in the room who educated in those things "without value". Really, you want people with a bit of a balanced background, having studied various topics, including "worthless" things like literature and philosophy.

So I think what they're really saying is, there's a need of people with broad and expansive minds, able to think intelligently about many different subjects, both technical and non-technical. Unfortunately, a lot of extremely technical minds will think that's an insane statement, since only technical knowledge is needed. Really, those people are just serving as examples of the problem.

None of this necessarily needs to be bound up with degrees. I've known people with Liberal Arts degrees who know quite a bit of math and science, and people with STEM degrees who've studied a fair amount of the humanities. And degrees often fail to be an adequate measurement of qualifications anyway.

The word "utopia" comes from the Greek "eu" + "topos", i.e. "good place". The English spelling "utopia" is supposed to preserve the pun of confusing eutopia with "ou" + "topos", "no place".

I don't know about modern Greek pronunciations, but in Attic Greek, "eu" wouldn't have been pronounced as 'oy', as in the enlish word 'joy'. At least not as far as I've ever heard. It would have been more like the "eu" in the english word "feud". My recollection is that the pun is used in Platonic dialogues, though I wouldn't be able to remember where it appears.

Well, and who decides if a fork is good or bad? I thought the ability to fork has always been held as a strength of FOSS, as long as they release the code back to the public according to the licensing terms. X.org forked from XFree86, and it was considered a good thing. What about LibreOffice forking from OpenOffice? Webkit itself was a fork of KHTML, IIRC.

It often seems like the attitude of the FOSS community is something like, "You think you can do a better job on this project? Fork it and let's see what you got!" And then some company does it, and everyone whines and complains that they should be working within the community.

I'm not sure I'm understanding this, because I have no idea what the difference is supposed to be. People are saying, "We don't want you to throttle Netflix, trying to extort extra money out of both Netflix and the consumers for faster access." And then AT&T says, "But what if we throttle Netflix first, then wait for consumers to complain, and *then* extort money out of Netflix and consumers for faster access?"

Isn't that exactly the same thing?

Yes.

I'm not a Christian. I have no religious beliefs. And yet I feel like "atheists" are often trying to claim to speak for me, and tell me what I think about things. Well fuck off, with your atheism. I'm perfectly happy to have absolutely zero affiliation with any religious alignment, not even the null alignment.

I would say that where I am (NYC), I meet people of various different mindsets on the issue of religion. Definitely a lot of people who are somehow not-religious, whether they identify as atheist or or agnostic or non-practicing Christian/Jew/whatever. I wouldn't actually call myself any of those, because I think identifying as an "atheist" requires that you first acknowledge gods as real things that you believe in or don't, and then claims, "I don't believe in any of them".

It's like think of all the things where you wouldn't call yourself an "a[oogabooga]ist", replacing "oogabooga" with various things. Are you an awizardist? An ahobbitist? An adragonist? An ajediist? An aspidermanist? Or do those titles sound silly in the backdrop of knowing that all of those things are simply stories-- and perhaps good stories. If anything, I might be a pro-spiderman-ist, since I like the character, but I wouldn't claim to "believe in him".

But when I say this, a lot of people want to say, "No, that means you're an atheist." They want me to belong to their club, so they can count me among the faithful followers of their little belief system. But I'm not part of that club. I have no desire to be.

But here's part of my point: Do all Buddhists agree that their atheists? Do atheists all agree that Buddhists are atheists? Or are we going by your definition of atheism that lots of other people wouldn't agree with? Because I've definitely met people, online and in life, who would argue that Buddhists aren't "real atheists" because they believe in some kind of mystical mumbo jumbo, and atheists know that only science is real!

That's not my argument, mind you. I've just heard that kind of thing before.

I think part of what you're pointing out is that atheism is not a belief system, and so people shouldn't expect atheists to all think the same way or believe the same things.

However, it's a nice little piece of irony that, since people who claim to be "atheists" can believe different things, they can also disagree on what it means to be an atheist. I've talked to quite a few people who identify themselves as atheists, for whom it does seem to be a belief system. For them, being an atheist includes a deep respect for science, a belief in empiricism, a responsibility to proselytize. It's not uncommon for there to be a rejection of morality outside of utilitarianism. There's usually a general belief that there's nothing to this world beyond physics, the math behind the physics, and the application of physics to build up the physical world around us. There's often an associated desire to find awe and reverence in science and physics, and to treat that as a sort of pseudo-spirituality, while talking about how stupid religion is.

I find whenever you start talking about atheism, you actually end up with a fair amount of disagreement from all sides about what atheism actually is. You're confidently saying one thing, and someone else will say something else with just as much confidence. It's pretty much impossible to have a meaningful conversation unless we can agree on our terms somehow.