Comments for Green Goo

Comment on Logic is Hard by Charles

Charles — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:13:23 +0000

The website makes much of the idea that if society determines morality, it is meaningless to say that anything is "right" or "wrong"; morality is reduced to whatever society deems to be currently acceptable. Therefore, the website argues, we have no real right to condemn the likes of Hitler, since Nazi society believed the Holocaust was simply the right thing to do.

But the author of the website doesn't seem to realize that the same argument could be applied to God, (and in fact was, 2300 years ago by Plato, c.f. the Euthyphro dilemma). Suppose God was malevolent and commanded everyone to rape and torture children. In a theistic universe, "right" and "wrong" would simply be reduced to whatever God says. Strangely, the website doesn't seem to notice this problem.

The point is, it's impossible to escape the relative, subjective, nature of morality, without reducing the meaning of morality to essentially "whatever some powerful entity thinks is right."

Comment on Developing .NET without an IDE by Frank

Frank — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:20:29 +0000

MonoDevelop on the Mac has full intellisense. Pretty much as good as VS. Also, they have all the basic refactorings.

Still, no WinForms designer, but its a pretty good IDE.

Comment on Developing .NET without an IDE by Konrad Ludwig Moritz

Konrad Ludwig Moritz — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:33:51 +0000

Hi Spence, a VM would be a solution, right. In fact, I’ve used Parallels for quite some time and it’s true that this works remarkably well. However, it is still a crutch. I have to maintain (at least partly) two separate (file) systems and there are a lot of minor problems, beginning with the fact that Windows uses different keyboard bindings, culminating in the realization that Windows an OS X are just different, and that I chose OS X for specific reasons and I don’t want to give up on its user experience, even when using Visual Studio. For me personally, the biggest problem is probably that I work a lot on the console, something which simply doesn’t work on Windows any more.

Comment on Developing .NET without an IDE by Spence

Spence — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:45:40 +0000

Why not put XP/Vista/Win7 into a VM. If you use paralells then you should even be able to have visual studio open onto the desktop just like an application?

If you're platform is a Mac, then this might be the best solution. I wholeheartedly agree with you regarding the designers for the gui's, that is what makes C# development simple, not the language per se.

Comment on Java and the Joys of Serializing Objects into RandomAccessFiles by xedef

xedef — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:22:09 +0000

using .NET’s streamreader, streamwriter, filestream classes can be just as counter-intuitive. LINQ helps ease the pain of xmlreader.

Comment on On Twitter and Classical Media by Martin Böhm

Martin Böhm — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 02:20:22 +0000

I'm constantly surprised (read: disappointed and shocked) just how many of the young people (< 30) I know that have no intersection with the Internet at all.

They read mail, and then (if they're really modern) they read mail on StudiVZ and that's about it. They go to spiegel.de for news or if they are bored, and that's about it as well.

The image you perceive through Twitter statistics is highly biased towards your personal view of the world.

Comment on Logic is Hard by andy-held

andy-held — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:39:27 +0000

I was also stopped when hitting the “Moral law is not unchanging” button. But it really isn’t! I once read a translation of an ancient greek text in which the author described, how disgusting celtic people were, because of their homosexual habbits. Not because the celtic men HAD sex with other men, but because HOW they had it. With men of the same age. This was unthinkable for a greek, where homosexual relationships were only allowed between grown men and youngsters who had not yet started growing a beard. That leaves me asking Mr.Myers, which moral law is unchanging…the greek or the celtic?