The top 100 city skylines from NoodleFood.

Are there any unemployed artists/web designers who follow my blog? Click.

I often recommend free software to companies I work with, so I’ve decided to collect my recommendations in one place from now on: The Essential Free Windows Software List.

Things were bound to go haywire when the Brits banned their ancient tradition of fox hunting: the foxes are now hunting dogs.

The ongoing debate over the fate of Terri Schiavo is a revealing example of the differences between a secular and a religious world view. Those who advocate that Terry be kept alive and those supporting her right to die have two very different conceptions of the soul. The difference is crucial because differences in their metaphysical views have significant ethical and political implications.

According to the secular philosophy, the soul is the essence of who an individual is – the essence of his character, and the motive force of his actions. It is a unique trait of human beings, who are able to guide their own actions and their course in life through the exercise of their conceptual consciousness. Because the mind is a consequence of the process of the brain, the soul is also made possible by the biological processes of the human body and cannot exist without it. Life, in the secular philosophy, is a process of acting on values of one’s choosing, and happiness is the consequence of their successful accomplishment. This goes on until one cannot or does not choose to engage in the process of value-pursuit and dies.

According to the religious philosophy, the soul is a spiritual entity, separable from the body, and exists in some non-material realm apart from the material world. According to this philosophy, the soul is an immortal entity temporarily attached to a physical body by the whim of an all-powerful being. Since the soul does not “belong” to the mortal being, it comes with certain conditions, usually whatever the local mystics deem to be proper. According to the religious philosophy, a moral life consists of dutifully following the commandments of a higher being in order to make one’s soul less susceptible to misery in a future state of existence, such as heaven, Valhalla, or an afterlife. Since the choice to live is not up to mortal humans to make, the choice to die cannot be either, since their soul and thus their life does not belong to them. Furthermore, the end of mental activity does not mean the death of the soul, which remains trapped in the body as long as it is biologically alive, just as an fetus possesses a soul prior to developing a conceptual consciousness.

The vast difference and the ethical implications of these world views should be clear. In the secular philosophy, man has a “self-made soul” that he shapes and that shapes his life. In the mystic philosophy, man is granted his soul by a god and must obey that deity or expose the soul to “eternal damnation” in the beyond. Religious groups oppose the right to die for the same reason that they oppose happiness as the ultimate moral end: it represents a threat to their conception of human nature.

Terri Schiavo is not an isolated case, as lawmakers claimed when they blatantly disregarded the Constitution and federalism in an attempt to preserve her body – it is an example of the same reasoning they use to oppose the right to die and abortion. It is a reasoning that denies the essential difference between human beings and carrots on a mental and physical level and claims instead that the difference exists in some unreachable, imperceptible, and unknowable realm. It is no wonder then, why they must resort to force to bully their beliefs on those who live their lives for a this-worldly purpose.

Interesting article in the NYT about pre-packaged government propaganda passed on by network news as real journalism.

Companies shouldn’t feel obligated to “give back” to the community, because they haven’t taken anything away, the Austrian-born chief of the world’s largest food company told local executives yesterday… “What the hell have we taken away from society by being a successful company that employs people?” he said.

The following comes from a post on ObjectivismOnline. For more, see the original thread.

The protection of intellectual property requires the ability to create and apply an objective standard. Attempting to enforce intellectual property rights without the existence of an objective criteria or the ability to apply it violates real property rights, regardless of the potential benefits. Furthermore, the existence of patents must be evaluated in a cost-benefit analysis, at least if the purpose of patents is to provide a benefit to the inventor.

There are some costs common to all patents, including software patents, such as the cost of filling and protecting them, the need for patent portfolios to protect oneself against competitors patent portfolios, the disincentive to inventors and investors of violating existing but unknown patents, and the associated research costs, and the mis-incentives created by directing research into patentable areas versus non-patentable ones.

Continue reading →

My new phone. It speaks digital and analog, comes with a camera with zoom and flash, internal and external displays, speakerphone, and voice recognition for complete voice control. It weights 116g, has a talk time of 3 hours and a standby time of 150 hours. Its two-year-old ancestor seems like a dinosaur by comparison.
Since getting wireless, I’ve abandoned my wired phone company, switching to cable for data and video and cellular for calling. While the development of desktop computers has stagnated in the last four years, the massive integration of formerly disparate functions onto a single chipset combined with massive consumer demand has made rapid progress in cellular technology possible. Unfortunately, North America is still way behind Japan and Europe, where phone networks have embraced the Internet and support features such as video chat, GPS navigation, and digital wallets.

After 1&1 permanently nixed my online art gallery without any means of restoring it, I finally re-created it by re-uploading the originals, because my backup is hopelessly out of date. The new gallery needs a lot of work to restore the lost grandeur, so I am looking for volunteers to help me add the relevant hyperlinks and descriptions. There are over 1800 images to manage, so I could use all the help I can get. Just contact me if you’re interested.