tomjen.net blog

Towards a real basis for morality, part one

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 10:14:00 +0000

It used to be that it was simple to figure out what was right and wrong, you could always look it up in the bible or ask the local priest. Much more sophisticated people might not be happy with this and so had to find an new path. For most people however, the way things where was not something you questioned.

In the twenty-first century however the old systems of beliefs don't work anymore, they are (and will forever be) irreparably broken. Two things in the twentieth century, both arriving as a result of technology, conspired to kill it:

The destruction of the traditional farmer units with their close-nit family structures.
Hundreds of new technologies which gave rise to entire new ethical situations that where not something people would have considered before.

The inevitable result of this is that believers in the old faiths had to try to reinterpreted their believes in light of the new situations, with often comical (but deadly) results, such as members of the Jehovah's witnesses who refuse to accept blood transfusions because God told them not to drink the blood of animals.

But if we are to have the best future we can get, it can't be based on remnants of some of the teachings of goat-herders who wandered the plains of Judea five thousand years ago or on some carpenter with too high a supply of LSD. It has to be based on something real, and measurable.

My humble suggestion is that we based it on the same thing that has worked so well for us all these years: the intelligent pursuit of happiness, specifically our own.

Not just any happiness, but long term real happiness. Focusing on short term happiness is going to send us all to the gutter but it is in the nature of mankind to seek to better itself where such personal improvement is reasonably likely to be possible and bear the fruit that makes such pursuit worthwhile.

Such a system works, and my hope is that it will bring as much happiness to us as it did when it when we used it to turn starving peasants into middle-class families, whose biggest food related worry is how to loose weight.

Why play second fiddler in a winner takes it all market?

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:14:00 +0000

Something has been puzzling me for some time now: Microsoft, convicted for having an illegal monopoly, have desperately been assaulting Googles stronghold, by creating a new search engine (www.bing.com being their latest incarnation).

On the surface, this makes sense: the web is an important future platform so of course Microsoft don't want to be left behind. The trouble with this comes, as stuff like this often do, when you dig a little bit under the surface. Unlike the physical world, the world of bits and bytes is prone to natural monopolies — something Microsoft knows well — and if one search-engine is superior to another (even the slightest) there is no reason to not use the best. If the corner shop is slightly more expensive, you might go there anyway since it is convenient but on the Internet the distance to the shops are the same.

This leaves only three things left for Microsoft to fight over:

The price to use the search engine
The quality of the search engine
The quality of their Washington connections

I originally thought that Microsoft was going to ignore point one, as Google is free to use and that is the cheapest price possible, but I was wrong again (noticed any pattern here?) since Microsoft figured out that they could share some of the kickbacks they get for the traveling agencies when the user books their travel through Bing. I doubt that this will change much though – how many people even know that this is an option? Should this really prove to be a threat to Google they can easily do the same. I have never meet a person who objected to the adds on Google, so Microsoft can't beat them here either.

If Microsoft wants to compete with Google on the quality of their search engine, they are in for a rude wake-up-call: they will have to fight an opponent on their own turf who have a decade of experience in the field. About the only thing Microsoft has going for it in that fight would be that they don't have to make money on the service anytime soon, and they can afford to send an army to work on Bing, just like they did with Internet Explorer. That won't work, because Google is already free.

The third option is a lot more evil, but it can be very useful. Microsoft learned this the hard way when they lost the antitrust suit in the late nineties because their connections wheren't good enough, Google has yet to learn this (witness the problems they have with the Sherman Antitrust act) and so this is one area where Microsoft has an advantage.

Although such moves can lead to some interesting results, my prediction on the hole matter is that Bing will fall flat on its face and any traffic they get will be from the fact that they are the default search engine in Internet Explorer.

This leaves just one question: Why launch it in the first place?

Welcome to my simple blog

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:14:00 +0000

I finally seem to have found the perfect bloging software. Not to complicated, not bloated, no complicated admin interface.