If what you're saying was right, we'd see the President selected the same way. No, the Electoral College exists because of a concern they had in those long-ago days, a concern which is still very valid today: a concern that with pure direct election of the President, metropolitan areas would overwhelm rural interests and we'd wind up with a government "by the cities, of the cities" instead of one which represented the whole nation. If we had direct popular election of the Presidency, do you think the President would ever care about what concerns citizens in Montana had?
You hear this argument a lot from people arguing in favor of the Electoral College system. I don't think it accurately reflects the Founders' intentions -- they weren't so much worried about urban vs. rural (remember that the population of the US was overwhelmingly rural then) as about large states vs. small states, which isn't exactly the same thing. But it doesn't matter in any case, because the truth of the matter is, it doesn't work. Presidential campaigns overwhelmingly focus on "swing states" that are not only close in electoral terms, but also have large populations. In the current system, Republican Montana matters not a whit; neither does Democratic Delaware or evenly split New Mexico (which you may remember had just as close a vote recount as Florida in 2000.) Florida was where the action was in 2000 for a reason: there are a lot of people there. Big coastal states like Florida, New York, Texas, and California will always get more attention for this reason; if those states aren't seriously in play (e.g., as Texas an NY weren't in 2000) then attention shifts to big Midwestern states like Ohio, Illinois, and to some degree Missouri. Everyone else might as well not exist as far as national political strategists are concerned.
Why do comments like this still get modded as "funny," or indeed anything but the trolls they are? The "Gore claimed he invented the internet" thing was bullshit propaganda two years ago; now it's just a dead horse. Give it up, people.
I work in construction... The function of IT is to provide a service that people need. If you want to impose limits on what users can do, expect to be replaced sometime by a sysadmin that doesn't have those urges.
I work in IT... The function of construction is to provide buildings that people need. If you want to impose limits on what kind of buildings people can have, expect to be replaced sometime by a construction worked that doesn't have those urges.
Have you been paying attention to the way suspects in the "War on Terrorism" are being treated? US citizens are being held indefinitely, right now, without access to an attorney, without being fully informed of the charges against them, and without any opportunity to face their accusers. This policy change is a major step toward weakening the protections of the rights of the accused so that hacking suspects can be treated the same way.
RTFA yourself. The accused retains the right to face his accuser -- if the case goes to trial. But as I understand it, a defendant could be pressured to accept a plea agreement without being informed of whom he'd allegedly hacked or what the hacking allegedly consisted of. I think the scenario goes something like this:
Defendant [angry]: "But who'd I hack? What did I do?"
Cop [toneless]: "You don't get that information until you go to trial."
D [self-righteous]: "Okay, then I'll go to trial."
C [smirking]: "You sure about that? See, if you go to trial, and you lose, you go to prison. And I hear skinny little geek boys like you are reeeaaal popular in prison..."
D [defeated]: "And what if I take the plea bargain?"
C [toneless]: "$100,000 fine, confiscation of all your computer equipment, and a court order preventing you from being gainfully employed in the computer industry for ten years."
D [outraged]: "You people want to ruin my life!"
C [smirking again]: "Okay, we'll see what your cellmate Bubba the Axe Murderer says about that..."
[sigh] I understand specialization perfectly well. I also understand that if we get too specialized, we're insects.
I also think you misunderstand what a polymath is. It's not "jack of all trades and master of none." It's "jack of many trades and master of some." This is a crucial distinction.
"Liberal Arts" is kind of an umbrella term for stuff that isn't science, engineering, business, or fine arts. History, philosophy, political science, literature, and communications (e.g., speech, foreign language) usually fall into this category. Basically, it's the stuff that one has traditionally needed to know to be considered educated. My argument is that immensely valuable, but in the modern world, by itself not enough. I have an equally negative reaction to engineers who dismiss the value of Shakespeare and English majors who dismiss the value of calculus, myself...
Understanding how computers are programmed will help people understand the usefulness of programs, what they can and can't do, and why certain laws are a bad idea. Look, I started out in math and CS with very little knowledge of how computers actually worked -- I was a computer-literate user, but the only programming I'd done in years was writing DOS batch files and AppleScripts. So if someone had said to me, "We should require everyone to use unbreakable copy-protection on CD's" I might have had some moral qualms with the idea -- but I wouldn't have made possibly the most important realization about the subject, which is that unbreakable copy-protection is impossible. OTOH, it didn't take me long at all once I started actually writing programs to realize how easy it is to get down to the bit level, to learn that a human being can get to any information that the computer can in a few lines of code. That's just one example out of many.
I chose the three examples I did for a reason. Differentiating a polynomial gives people a feel for the difference between values and rates of change of values, and if nothing else that's useful in interpreting the economic numbers that politicians love to throw around. The equations for Gibbs free energy are probably the most elegant statements of thermodynamic laws ever, and are useful for understanding why creationist propaganda like "the second law of thermodynamics makes evolution impossible" is bunk. Writing "Hello, World" teaches people what a program is, what an operating system is, what the command line is, and perhaps most importantly that computers aren't magical creatures.
Yes, I do think I'm a cultured polymath. I don't think I know it all, but I do think I know a great deal. I think this makes me a better programmer, a better citizen, and a better human being. I'd like to see the same in my fellow Americans. Do you have a problem with this?
No, you're with Snow. He thought the art/science separation was a bad thing too.
Oh, okay, I guess I didn't realize that. I thought he simply made the "two cultures" observation without making any moral judgement. Does that misconception make me uncultured?;)
I think this is exactly the types of classes needed out there.
For all the people who know nothing of issues like electronic voting, DMCA, Elrdrid v. Ashcroft, the hardest thing was to get the idea out to non-computer folk. Raising awareness of complex technical issues is usually next to impossible, and this is a great start.
It's a start, yes, but it's not enough. This is going to be a bit of rant, I'm afraid...
Why in God's name do students at Princeton -- Princeton, which at least used to be known as the greatest math school in the US! -- need to take only one course in "quantitative reasoning?" As a math major at a perfectly average state college, I had to take quite a few classes in English, communications, history, and other liberal arts subjects. I'm not complaining about this; a good liberal education is, and should be, part of what being a college graduate in any subject means.
But "liberal education" should include science as well as liberal arts. There's no reason at all why students "headed toward degrees in politics, history, English, art history, psychology and economics" shouldn't learn how to differentiate a polynomial, calculate Gibbs free energy, or write "Hello, World." Studying the effects of science and technology on our world is all well and good, but those studies will only mean something if they know what science actually looks like.
I'm with Clarke on this one, not snow: there are not two cultures. There is only one culture, and if you can't discourse on the structure of a sonnet and the second law of thermodynamics with equal ease, then you're uncultured, period.
Unions are parasitical. They do not respond to market forces, and thus they will always be corrupt. They will always try to force companies to only hire union member,s and force new employees to join the union.
Oh, bullshit. A union is, in essence, a company that sells the labor of its members for a very small commission (really -- union dues represent a much smaller cut of their workers' paycheck than, say, the percentage taken off the top by the average consulting or temp service.) Companies can, if they choose, refuse to deal with unions by laying off unionized workers and hiring scabs. If they choose not to do so, it's because they're responding to market forces -- they realize that they'll lose their best, most experienced workers. Similarly, unions can refuse to deal with companies by going on strike until the company goes out of business or lays everyone off. If they choose not to do so, they too are acting in accordance with market forces. Company-union relationships are market transactions like any other.
The amount of anti-union FUD in this topic is amazing. I'm hearing people parrot anti-union propaganda that bears as much relationship to reality as Microsoft PR about Linux. I'm honestly rather disappointed to see Slashdotters, who usually have a keen ear for bullshit propaganda, falling for that line.
Out of curiousity, I checked the link in his.sig -- apparently he's the superintendant of a community college. Which is a perfectly respectable thing to be, but I suspect that he's a marginal Ph.D. in a non-technical field who has a bug up his ass about not having climbed further up the academic ladder.
That is quite possibly the most circuitous way I have ever seen someone admit that something is impossible. Fascinating.
No, that's not "admit[ting] that something is impossible" at all. That's saying that the barrier between what we have now and what we want to have is one of engineering, not science. We understand the scientific principles; we just haven't developed the technology. Yet.
If the guys who built the foundations of the Net back in the Sixties and Seventies had said, "there's a lot of technology between here and there" -- which would have been a perfectly accurate statement at the time -- would you have told them that they were admitting that what they were trying to do was impossible?
Yep. In a couple of years, the university can start providing "dot-bomb cardboard box under the bridge" dorms to complete the students' learning experience.
Um... the "tar-ghay" pronunciation is a joke, or at least it started out as one. These days, Target is considered pretty much middle-class, but when it started out it was seen as quite low-end -- competing primarily with K-Mart, actually. IOW, it was where poor people got their clothes, and the rich kids (and middle class kids who wanted to be rich) laughed at the poor kids whose parents bought their clothes there. (Yes, I remember this keenly.) So pronouncing it in pseudo-French was a joke, a defense mechanism: "Oh, daahhhling, whereever did you find those jeans?" "Why, at Targhay, of course..." That kind of thing.
If your sister's boyfriend is young enough, it's quite possible he doesn't know this.
Except that every Imperial starship has to be built with at least one weak point where a single shot will blow the whole thing to hell. It's, like Imperial Starship Regulation 127-2, paragraph C, or something. All the Enterprise has to do is get a photon torpedo in the right place, and...;)
... that the US government tries to censor the Net at home, if they're funding research like this. The fruits of this research will spread around the world at the speed of electrons. I can easily see a situation in, say, 2006 where a) the US has developed compact, easily distributed anti-censorware tools and got them into China, b) China has realized the futility of trying to control people's Net usage when such tools are available and given up, and c) US Net usage suffers from increasing restrictions that do nothing to slow down the h4x0rz but makes everyone else's life more difficult than it has to be. And then what? Why, then, the friendly folks in China start e-mailing innocuously named files ("vacation_pics_from_Beijing.zip") to their friends and relatives in the US, and...
Exactly. The DoD is interested in sweetheart deals with major defense contractors (and yes, Microsoft now falls into that category) which are generally brokered by retired high-ranking officers who start taking gigantic salaries from said contractors the moment the ink is dry on their discharge papers. Since most of the contractors (Microsoft excluded) actually build pretty good products, "things working correctly all the time" is a happy side-effect, but there's no evidence that it's a primary goal.
As a vet, believe me, I'm not happy about this. I've seen the effects first-hand. I was a medic for eight years in the Air Force. About halfway through my second enlistment, we switched from company A's IV needles, which were very high-quality and never crimped up -- i.e., the plastic cannula over the needle, which is the part that actually stays in the patient when the needle is pulled out, always went in smoothly with the needle instead of crimping up around the needle and not going in -- to company B's IV needles, which crimped up about a third of the time -- which of course meant that the patient had an extra hole in his skin and the needle was now useless. We did this, as it turned out, because the recently retired General X, who had been quite high up in the AF medical bureaucracy, was now a member of Company B's board of directors. When I got out of the service a couple of years later, we were told that the AF was "studying the problem." Meanwhile our supply guys were cutting "gray" deals with local medical supply companies to get us needles that worked.
This may seem like a minor problem, but consider that a) the switch caused a lot of pain and suffering (even good IV sticks are painful; bad ones are worse) and wasted a lot of money, and b) this sort of thing happens all the time, all over the place, in places ranging from the base personnel office to the ER to the flightline where people are loading nuclear weapons onto bombers. And not just in the AF; there are similar stories from almost every job in every branch of the service. Your tax dollars at work, folks.
A substantial portion of those 23% and 18% probably replied to the questions with, "Huh? What? I guess so..." and the person taking the survey wrote it down as "Yes."
Yeah, but "the long run" when you're talking about the negative effects of tariffs on trade is, like, five years. Tariff wars were among the main causes of the Great Depression. I'd rather not see us go down that road again, thanks. The few countries that have success with big tariffs (e.g. China) tend to be developing countries that can sell their exports so cheap that when richer countries (e.g. the US) slap retaliatory tariffs on the poor countries' exported goods, those goods are still so cheap that the people in the richer countries will buy them. In cases where the economic situations are more nearly equal (e.g., the US and Japan) tariffs end up hurting both sides, and revenue goes down pretty fast because everyone's out of work, and bums don't pay taxes.
The other issue, of course, is that US States can't enact foreign policy. I think that there may have been a couple of times when state governments have tried to enact tariffs on foreign goods and have been shot down, though I'm not sure. And since we're talking state revenue, not federal...
Oh, yawn. You're assuming that thinking is inherently different from digestion (or whatever.) Asking "how did matter come to think" is like asking "how did matter come to break down other matter." Why aren't stomach acids content to sit back and let food exist?
Well, like the article says, the address is the Iraqi equivalent of "president@whitehouse.gov". (As opposed to "president@whitehouse.com", which is something quite different.;) So what it means, no doubt, is that a bunch of low-level employees do a first pass through it, filter out all the spam and death threats, then pass it onto their slightly less low-level superiors, who filter out most of the rest of it and write up summaries, then pass it on... [repeat n times]... until Saddam gets a one-page summary on his desk and maybe a couple of really interesting letters, like the one from an American to which he (supposedly) wrote a personal reply.
Iraq's government is very, very different from ours in a lot of ways (duh) but it's still a government, and thus a bureaucracy, and all bureaucracies have certain aspects in common. The people who read the e-mail addressed to "press@uruklink.net" and those who read the e-mail addressed to "president@whitehouse.gov" would probably be able to fit quite nicely into each other's jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do comments like this still get modded as "funny," or indeed anything but the trolls they are? The "Gore claimed he invented the internet" thing was bullshit propaganda two years ago; now it's just a dead horse. Give it up, people.
Have you been paying attention to the way suspects in the "War on Terrorism" are being treated? US citizens are being held indefinitely, right now, without access to an attorney, without being fully informed of the charges against them, and without any opportunity to face their accusers. This policy change is a major step toward weakening the protections of the rights of the accused so that hacking suspects can be treated the same way.
RTFA yourself. The accused retains the right to face his accuser -- if the case goes to trial. But as I understand it, a defendant could be pressured to accept a plea agreement without being informed of whom he'd allegedly hacked or what the hacking allegedly consisted of. I think the scenario goes something like this:
..."
..."
Defendant [angry]: "But who'd I hack? What did I do?"
Cop [toneless]: "You don't get that information until you go to trial."
D [self-righteous]: "Okay, then I'll go to trial."
C [smirking]: "You sure about that? See, if you go to trial, and you lose, you go to prison. And I hear skinny little geek boys like you are reeeaaal popular in prison
D [defeated]: "And what if I take the plea bargain?"
C [toneless]: "$100,000 fine, confiscation of all your computer equipment, and a court order preventing you from being gainfully employed in the computer industry for ten years."
D [outraged]: "You people want to ruin my life!"
C [smirking again]: "Okay, we'll see what your cellmate Bubba the Axe Murderer says about that
D [barely audible]: "I'll take the plea bargain."
[sigh] I understand specialization perfectly well. I also understand that if we get too specialized, we're insects.
I also think you misunderstand what a polymath is. It's not "jack of all trades and master of none." It's "jack of many trades and master of some." This is a crucial distinction.
"Liberal Arts" is kind of an umbrella term for stuff that isn't science, engineering, business, or fine arts. History, philosophy, political science, literature, and communications (e.g., speech, foreign language) usually fall into this category. Basically, it's the stuff that one has traditionally needed to know to be considered educated. My argument is that immensely valuable, but in the modern world, by itself not enough. I have an equally negative reaction to engineers who dismiss the value of Shakespeare and English majors who dismiss the value of calculus, myself ...
Understanding how computers are programmed will help people understand the usefulness of programs, what they can and can't do, and why certain laws are a bad idea. Look, I started out in math and CS with very little knowledge of how computers actually worked -- I was a computer-literate user, but the only programming I'd done in years was writing DOS batch files and AppleScripts. So if someone had said to me, "We should require everyone to use unbreakable copy-protection on CD's" I might have had some moral qualms with the idea -- but I wouldn't have made possibly the most important realization about the subject, which is that unbreakable copy-protection is impossible. OTOH, it didn't take me long at all once I started actually writing programs to realize how easy it is to get down to the bit level, to learn that a human being can get to any information that the computer can in a few lines of code. That's just one example out of many.
I chose the three examples I did for a reason. Differentiating a polynomial gives people a feel for the difference between values and rates of change of values, and if nothing else that's useful in interpreting the economic numbers that politicians love to throw around. The equations for Gibbs free energy are probably the most elegant statements of thermodynamic laws ever, and are useful for understanding why creationist propaganda like "the second law of thermodynamics makes evolution impossible" is bunk. Writing "Hello, World" teaches people what a program is, what an operating system is, what the command line is, and perhaps most importantly that computers aren't magical creatures.
Yes, I do think I'm a cultured polymath. I don't think I know it all, but I do think I know a great deal. I think this makes me a better programmer, a better citizen, and a better human being. I'd like to see the same in my fellow Americans. Do you have a problem with this?
It's a start, yes, but it's not enough. This is going to be a bit of rant, I'm afraid
Why in God's name do students at Princeton -- Princeton, which at least used to be known as the greatest math school in the US! -- need to take only one course in "quantitative reasoning?" As a math major at a perfectly average state college, I had to take quite a few classes in English, communications, history, and other liberal arts subjects. I'm not complaining about this; a good liberal education is, and should be, part of what being a college graduate in any subject means.
But "liberal education" should include science as well as liberal arts. There's no reason at all why students "headed toward degrees in politics, history, English, art history, psychology and economics" shouldn't learn how to differentiate a polynomial, calculate Gibbs free energy, or write "Hello, World." Studying the effects of science and technology on our world is all well and good, but those studies will only mean something if they know what science actually looks like.
I'm with Clarke on this one, not snow: there are not two cultures. There is only one culture, and if you can't discourse on the structure of a sonnet and the second law of thermodynamics with equal ease, then you're uncultured, period.
The amount of anti-union FUD in this topic is amazing. I'm hearing people parrot anti-union propaganda that bears as much relationship to reality as Microsoft PR about Linux. I'm honestly rather disappointed to see Slashdotters, who usually have a keen ear for bullshit propaganda, falling for that line.
:)
.sig -- apparently he's the superintendant of a community college. Which is a perfectly respectable thing to be, but I suspect that he's a marginal Ph.D. in a non-technical field who has a bug up his ass about not having climbed further up the academic ladder.
Out of curiousity, I checked the link in his
If the guys who built the foundations of the Net back in the Sixties and Seventies had said, "there's a lot of technology between here and there" -- which would have been a perfectly accurate statement at the time -- would you have told them that they were admitting that what they were trying to do was impossible?
Yep. In a couple of years, the university can start providing "dot-bomb cardboard box under the bridge" dorms to complete the students' learning experience.
Um ... the "tar-ghay" pronunciation is a joke, or at least it started out as one. These days, Target is considered pretty much middle-class, but when it started out it was seen as quite low-end -- competing primarily with K-Mart, actually. IOW, it was where poor people got their clothes, and the rich kids (and middle class kids who wanted to be rich) laughed at the poor kids whose parents bought their clothes there. (Yes, I remember this keenly.) So pronouncing it in pseudo-French was a joke, a defense mechanism: "Oh, daahhhling, whereever did you find those jeans?" "Why, at Targhay, of course ..." That kind of thing.
If your sister's boyfriend is young enough, it's quite possible he doesn't know this.
Power metal is hardcore punk with long hair. Except these days they don't all have long hair any more. So it's just hardcore that calls itself metal.
Except that every Imperial starship has to be built with at least one weak point where a single shot will blow the whole thing to hell. It's, like Imperial Starship Regulation 127-2, paragraph C, or something. All the Enterprise has to do is get a photon torpedo in the right place, and ... ;)
... that the US government tries to censor the Net at home, if they're funding research like this. The fruits of this research will spread around the world at the speed of electrons. I can easily see a situation in, say, 2006 where a) the US has developed compact, easily distributed anti-censorware tools and got them into China, b) China has realized the futility of trying to control people's Net usage when such tools are available and given up, and c) US Net usage suffers from increasing restrictions that do nothing to slow down the h4x0rz but makes everyone else's life more difficult than it has to be. And then what? Why, then, the friendly folks in China start e-mailing innocuously named files ("vacation_pics_from_Beijing.zip") to their friends and relatives in the US, and ...
Exactly. The DoD is interested in sweetheart deals with major defense contractors (and yes, Microsoft now falls into that category) which are generally brokered by retired high-ranking officers who start taking gigantic salaries from said contractors the moment the ink is dry on their discharge papers. Since most of the contractors (Microsoft excluded) actually build pretty good products, "things working correctly all the time" is a happy side-effect, but there's no evidence that it's a primary goal.
As a vet, believe me, I'm not happy about this. I've seen the effects first-hand. I was a medic for eight years in the Air Force. About halfway through my second enlistment, we switched from company A's IV needles, which were very high-quality and never crimped up -- i.e., the plastic cannula over the needle, which is the part that actually stays in the patient when the needle is pulled out, always went in smoothly with the needle instead of crimping up around the needle and not going in -- to company B's IV needles, which crimped up about a third of the time -- which of course meant that the patient had an extra hole in his skin and the needle was now useless. We did this, as it turned out, because the recently retired General X, who had been quite high up in the AF medical bureaucracy, was now a member of Company B's board of directors. When I got out of the service a couple of years later, we were told that the AF was "studying the problem." Meanwhile our supply guys were cutting "gray" deals with local medical supply companies to get us needles that worked.
This may seem like a minor problem, but consider that a) the switch caused a lot of pain and suffering (even good IV sticks are painful; bad ones are worse) and wasted a lot of money, and b) this sort of thing happens all the time, all over the place, in places ranging from the base personnel office to the ER to the flightline where people are loading nuclear weapons onto bombers. And not just in the AF; there are similar stories from almost every job in every branch of the service. Your tax dollars at work, folks.
A substantial portion of those 23% and 18% probably replied to the questions with, "Huh? What? I guess so ..." and the person taking the survey wrote it down as "Yes."
Yeah, but "the long run" when you're talking about the negative effects of tariffs on trade is, like, five years. Tariff wars were among the main causes of the Great Depression. I'd rather not see us go down that road again, thanks. The few countries that have success with big tariffs (e.g. China) tend to be developing countries that can sell their exports so cheap that when richer countries (e.g. the US) slap retaliatory tariffs on the poor countries' exported goods, those goods are still so cheap that the people in the richer countries will buy them. In cases where the economic situations are more nearly equal (e.g., the US and Japan) tariffs end up hurting both sides, and revenue goes down pretty fast because everyone's out of work, and bums don't pay taxes.
...
The other issue, of course, is that US States can't enact foreign policy. I think that there may have been a couple of times when state governments have tried to enact tariffs on foreign goods and have been shot down, though I'm not sure. And since we're talking state revenue, not federal
Oh, yawn. You're assuming that thinking is inherently different from digestion (or whatever.) Asking "how did matter come to think" is like asking "how did matter come to break down other matter." Why aren't stomach acids content to sit back and let food exist?
Yep.
Unions in the early part of the twentieth century had to agitate for a reduction in the 100-hour workweek. Think about that for a while.
Well, like the article says, the address is the Iraqi equivalent of "president@whitehouse.gov". (As opposed to "president@whitehouse.com", which is something quite different. ;) So what it means, no doubt, is that a bunch of low-level employees do a first pass through it, filter out all the spam and death threats, then pass it onto their slightly less low-level superiors, who filter out most of the rest of it and write up summaries, then pass it on ... [repeat n times] ... until Saddam gets a one-page summary on his desk and maybe a couple of really interesting letters, like the one from an American to which he (supposedly) wrote a personal reply.
Iraq's government is very, very different from ours in a lot of ways (duh) but it's still a government, and thus a bureaucracy, and all bureaucracies have certain aspects in common. The people who read the e-mail addressed to "press@uruklink.net" and those who read the e-mail addressed to "president@whitehouse.gov" would probably be able to fit quite nicely into each other's jobs.