Re: "Damn Liberals Cost Us The War!"

I wish he'd tell us what the other "New York liberal" lady said to the guy!

Overall though, a very nice article.

It's hard to resist the conclusion that MS simply bought their Ecma votes for that new format. ODF already is an XML-based format; there's no need for a competing version. Gates is fighting on too many fronts to win any of them now. Next week, Jobs--having easily won the first round of Zune vs. iPod--will begin Apple's assault on MS's dominance of the den, iTV will be out there to take market share from MS Media Center. In a few months, Leopard arrives to take another bite out of XP/Vista; and those Intel Macs have already shot Apple stock well beyond Dell.

Curiously, the only question mark for Apple's future another really stupid, Martha Stewart-style piece of greed. The Apple stock dating scandal is yet another example of how wealth can turn smart people into absolute idiots. If Steve & Co. survive that bit of folly, their products and their geekery will only grow in popularity, even--gasp--in the enterprise realm, where MS dominance is already being weakened by another UNIX-based OS, Oracle-Red Hat. Gartner is calling this one for Larry already, and the uncertainty over Vista will only make it easier for Oracle. Your average enterprise desktop lacks standalone video, sound, and sufficient RAM to run Vista, and the cash required to upgrade thousands of boxes to accommodate Vista will be nixed by most corporate bean counters.

But people like having MS-friendly hardware and software, and Red Hat might not be the best solution for many. Enter the Mac Mini running off an xserver network, with windows XP, UNIX compatibility, PERL, Apache, Java, you name it, the Mac can now run it in 64-bit mode on Intel-powered hardware.

I know it sounds kooky, and I don't pretend to claim that Apple will take significant market share away from MS next year or the year after that. But 5 years down the line, Red Hat and Apple combined could account for 40-50 per cent of the enterprise IT base; and Microsoft resorting to its old market dominance tricks will only accelerate that trend.

Norm,

What is your view regarding the AlterNet article on Sam Harris that you linked to?

I think the article is a bit of a hack job. Similar questions were raised at the Beyond Belief 2006 conference and Sam was backing away from the reincarnation etc. Sam has responded to the article here:

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2/

It's kind of funny that the leading proponents of athiesm have some problems addressing metaphysical concepts from Eastern or Asian philosophies/religions.

Up to now, I have not seen or heard any reference to the Taoist concept of enlightenment, a philosophical sect that is Asia's equivalent to alchemism with a moral and metaphysical component to it.

I can't help but feel that perhaps thought leaders from Europe and US still have the habit of thinking that any criticism, thinking or philosophy can be universal or applied anywhere on the world without fail.

That type of thinking has caused nothing but trouble, sufferings and conflict in the rest of the world.

I've just read Sam Harris criticsm on Buddhism following the link that Norm gave in his last post:

http://mambo.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2903&Itemid=247

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I'm not sure whether his piece can qualify as criticism, rather than superficial observations that is spot on in many areas.

However, I don't see him having any understanding of Buddhism as a way of life.

I heard many people here referenceing their knowledge on the Buddhism to text book style regurgitation of terms like the eight fold path.

Rote learning is not the way to understand Asian writings because a lot of things are left unsaid and you have to really read between the lines.

Dogmatism is not something this inherent in Asian philosophies for they leave ample room for individual interpretation based on the changing needs of the times.

For example, to understand what the Buddha actually said or what Buddhism is actually about, you have to first know what he said and did in his life. From that starting point, you should then read some of the Buddhist classics.

You will see something quote differently i.e. that Buddhism is not an -sim at all.

I'll give another example.

I don't think anyone really knows that the Sun Tze Art of War is an incomplete text if you don't just memorise or take it at face value as a holy bible.

I'm not going to say anymore on this as I am doing research on this as my PHD topic.

I approached the Bible in the same way and, from the missing gaps and logical/theological inconsistencies, moved on to the Gnostic writings.

And my experience is a lot more complete and fulfilling as a result.

That's why I believe that it's better to infer more and conclude less.

You'll end up seeing more of this world, not less.

No offense meant to anyone here.

But I am getting increasingly uncomfortable with the increasing dogmatic stance by some atheists as Sam Harris and Dawkins.

I hope that in the defence of their beliefs or lack of, they won't forget that they should not become like their enemies. And that they can learn to appreciate more and criticise less.

What exactly are the appropriate circumstances for torture according to Sam Harris?

Hi Daily Rev,

ODF already is an XML-based format; there's no need for a competing version.

Are you sure? If ODF doesn't support many formatting options available in Word or in Excel, would you consider it less than adequate?

Regarding your comments on RedHat, I can't see it being widely adopted for the desktop except maybe in the third-world or in tech savvy startups.

Not everyone wants to spend their evening doing PC hobbyist tasks like recompiling Gentoo and downgrading their 64-bit firefox binary packages to get Flash to work. And getting help online from someone with the signature “Unix is user friendly- it is just picky who its friends are.” Or learning about USE flags and how to cast magic spells like “emerge --unmerge coldplug && emerge --sync && emerge -uDvaN world” Or having to mount the CD-ROM with “mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt” in order to load Tetris.

The installation manual for RedHat, acclaimed for its easy installation, makes clear, familiarity with basic Unix concepts is required to make any effective use of Red Hat Linux. Page 8 of the manual even recommends purchasing a book on Unix. This is good advice -- but it's not what Windows users looking for an alternative to Microsoft want to hear.

If RedHat ever matures to rival the consistency of GUI, feature-richness and ease-of-use of Windows there is a chance that 1) Windows’ reliability and security will improve by that time (weakening the value proposition); and, 2) there’s a chance of Linux becoming a complex, bloated, windows-like kludge with just as many security issues.

Barebones Unix makes an excellent web server, but the needs of desktop users and a web server admins are very different.

Hi Daily Rev,

ODF already is an XML-based format; there's no need for a competing version.

Are you sure? If ODF doesn't support many formatting options available in Word or in Excel, would you consider it less than adequate?

Regarding your comments on RedHat, I can't see it being widely adopted for the desktop except maybe in the third-world or in tech savvy startups.

Not everyone wants to spend their evening doing PC hobbyist tasks like recompiling Gentoo and downgrading their 64-bit firefox binary packages to get Flash to work. And getting help online from someone with the signature “Unix is user friendly- it is just picky who its friends are.” Or learning about USE flags and how to cast magic spells like “emerge --unmerge coldplug && emerge --sync && emerge -uDvaN world” Or having to mount the CD-ROM with “mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt” in order to load Tetris.

The installation manual for RedHat, acclaimed for its easy installation, makes clear, familiarity with basic Unix concepts is required to make any effective use of Red Hat Linux. Page 8 of the manual even recommends purchasing a book on Unix. This is good advice -- but it's not what Windows users looking for an alternative to Microsoft want to hear.

If RedHat ever matures to rival the consistency of GUI, feature-richness and ease-of-use of Windows there is a chance that 1) Windows’ reliability and security will improve by that time (weakening the value proposition); and, 2) there’s a chance of Linux becoming a complex, bloated, windows-like kludge with just as many security issues.

Barebones Unix makes an excellent web server, but the needs of desktop users and a web server admins are very different.

Hi kes,

I think people like Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins (and myself) just see religion as causing great harm and ultimately being without any merit.

There are certain types of questions that one can spend their own life on. Like that is the meaning of life? Who created the universe? What good is good? The problem with these questions is that they are circular. For any answer regarding the purpose of life, say, to create artifical intelligence, someone can just ask: well, what is the purpose of that?

Religions provide dogmatic answers to those questions, establish authority schemes to indoctrinate people without those dogmas (Thou Shalt Not Adore False Gods), and the most successful ones include mechanisms for viral marketing (Spanish Inquisition).

So religions can spare whole populations from fruitless reasoning loops, but so can an understanding of the nature of circular questions.

Dennett compares religion to the craving for sweets. This impulse to consume anything sweet quickly and in the greatest possible amounts played an important role in the early evolutionary stages of humanity, when saving energy was important. Because today one must ordinarily no longer survive a long winter on the steppes, however, the compulsion to consume sugar injures him more than it helps.

The same is true with religion, whose greatest service over the centuries has been to deliver explanations for the inexplicable. But this function has survived too long. Today it does much more to prevent humanity from gaining knowledge.

Hi Kes,

kes wrote:

It's kind of funny that the leading proponents of athiesm have some problems addressing metaphysical concepts from Eastern or Asian philosophies/religions.

Up to now, I have not seen or heard any reference to the Taoist concept of enlightenment [end quote]

You can be sure this isn't some kind of scientific blindspot. Just search Google Scholar with keywords like "enlightenment neuroscience" or "enlightenment temporal lobe".

Regarding mystical experiences, I feel sorry for those poor nuns (Unio Mystica) who spend their lifetimes in meditation hoping for a rare mystical experience. I guess no one told them all they have to do is drink ayahuasca.

Thanks for Sam Harris's response. I disagree strongly with him on torture. I believe the 'ticking time bomb' to be such a useless hypothetical situation. To even get to where you can have someone tortured, there is so much investigative work that needed to be done to make the torture part seem almost useless. First, you need to know without any doubt that there is a ticking bomb somewhere. You then need to know exactly who has enough information to know where that bomb is. Then you have to actually find and apprehend the suspect. Then you have to have enough time to actually torture the suspect to get a usable location out of him; that's assuming your investigators are smart enough to find this guy, but aren't smart enough to keep investigating to find possible locations. You then still need more time to locate the bomb and have your bomb squad disarm the bomb. How many people set bombs with timers that last several days? I would think they'd usually be set for several minutes, several hours at most. As I hope is evident, the 'ticking time bomb' is an almost impossible situation to work out once the timer is ticking, as well as being almost impossible to actually happen in such a way to put anyone in a position where there is enough time to torture someone for information.

Torture makes us no better than the Chinese, Saudis, Egyptians and Saddam Hussein's of the world. It runs counter to the deep respect for human rights which (used to be) what America represents. The people who are responsible for these atrocities should be stoned.

;)

Kes, Perhaps if you started by stating what it is about Taoism etc, which you think is inconsistant with Atheism and needs to be explained.

Hi wabisabi, thanks for the reply.

I'm sorry but terms like "enlightenment neuroscience" or "enlightenment temporal lobe" has utterly no relevance when it comes to any philisohpy from Asia, let alone Taoism.

The enlightenment process for Taosim includes both internal cultivation to align one's meridians with the ebb and flow of the universe, along with internal alchemy to build up the internal structure of the body.

The Taichi that you see people practise worldwide is a severely diluted form of this internal cultivation process.

The real Taichi as practised by the masters is both an offensive skill and a direct way to increase your internal energy to the extent that they can use it to heal people without touching them or hurting people simply by touching their hands to the skin of the enemies while destroying their organs from within.

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Medical and biological sciences contains blindspots that we can drive a truck through.

I'm not a proponent of Intelligent Design but neither am I a fan of scientists or religious people making universal judgements for the rest of the world based on insights garnered from a few hundred years of research or debate.

I'll give you some examples to highlight my discomfort.

1] The human body is 2/3 water and 1/3 flesh. However Western Medicine is based very much on operating and treating 1/3 flesh. This mechanistic way of treating the body like an engine easily causes a lot of unecessary fatalities and strains among patients.

2] Only idiots consider the cold as ONE or A common cold.

The cold virus is common only because there are over a hundred varieties.

At the turn of the 20th century, Chinese physicians submitted their pleas to Western doctors about the mistakes they are making in their practise.

This includes treating the cold with a universal treatment when the cold virus can attack any of 36 major body organs with diverse effects.

Western doctors ignored the Chinese and continued using universal cures for the cold and other diseases.

This inadvertently led to more mutation and the evolution of drug resistant strains of the cold virus.

The killer cold virus is right around the corner. And there's nothing any one here can do about it, thanks to the hubris of Western medicine.

3] Western medicine depends on many drugs that are far too strong or damaging to children or the elderly. This sledge hammer approach to medicine, while causing unnecessary fatalities, also cultivates the appearance of increasingly resistent strains of virus and bacteria.

You all do know that you should avoid painkillers and other strong medicines because it retards your body's resistance, right?

4] Medicine is not a science.

It is a craft where a patient and his circumstances are unique and likewise deserves a unique response.

For example, the Chinese has evolved the concept of "food and medicine as one". This form of treatment is not that well known in the West but is a very credible form of treatment for many elderly diseases and is a blend of culinary arts, proper dieting and medicinal craft.

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There are a lot more examples of the incompleteness and weaknesses of modern science.

But if you think modern science is necessary, please travel to China where the Chinese has built multi-ton stone bridges with UTTERLY no understanding of architectural science or engineering about 600 years ago!!!!!

Why am I saying all this?

I do hope that the people don;t just quibble over details but try to appreciate more diverse viewpoints, especially mindsets.

I guarantee that you will see a lot of things that people miss today.

Try this.

Apply what you know about neuro-science or psycho analysis towards an examination of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work on Sherlock Holmes.

I guarantee that you will gain some insights on who Sir Arthur Conan Doyle really was.

And what he really did : >

Harris is naive about torture, to such an extent it devalues all his other positions. He's a great intellect in the same way Bill O'Reilly is a journalist.

Rick,

How exactly does that work. If someone is wrong about one thing all their other views are somehow less valuable. I call bullshit.

I couldn't agree more with Norm. We should be careful about "pensée unique".

http://darwin.core.ucl.ac.be/services/psfiles/dp00/dp2000-8.pdf

I think Harris is more about making himself famous than anything else, but then the alternet piece was a hit job where the journo was trying to get noticed too. As for one error calling everything else into question it depends on that error's magnitude and his acceptance of the completely fallacious ticking bomb scenario is atrocious. His -if you accept killing innocents to target Bin Laden-gateway to discussion of torture is so weak. Countered simply by- I don't accept killing many bystanders to kill one man. He says 'mistreatment' when it is torture, showing he has accepted the framing of the neo-cons or agrees it wasn't torture. For me, to be wrong on something as crucial to basic humanity as torture, there's something fundamentally perverted (in the analytical sense) in his thinking. But much more importantly I hope you're not suggesting that Bill O'Reilly is not a great journalist? Treason!