The "Rat Park" experiment showed that addictive behavior results from stress. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park """ Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980), by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.
Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself. [1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can." [2]
To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, a 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16-20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters. [3] The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment." [1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.
The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no response. [4] Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding. """
Many people in today's industrialized society are under a lot of stress. Creating healthier communities may help reduce addictive behavior. One example of how to do that is here:
"About the AARP/Bluezones Vitality Project" http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
I want to wholeheartedly agree with this, even as I posted another comment about compulsory school being bad for most kids in many ways. With my own child, since and early age, and following some of John Holt's suggestions, and those of other "unschoolers", I've been making numbers part of our every day existence, counting things we handle and so on. As a computer programmer, I point out recursion whenever we see it as nested items (like tow trucks towing tow trucks, or cups inside cups). I agree that parents need to have an awareness of this and can contribute very much (in a non-forced off-hand way). Another point Holt makes is to see that something like 2 + 2 = 4 is essentially the same "fact" as 4 = 2 = 2 and 2 * 2 = 4 and 4 / 2 = 2, something not taught or understood in many schools' approach to math education, where different operations are taught in different years. Also, there are a lot of resources now on the internet to learn math in fun way or at your own pace. For younger kids, here is one: http://www.poissonrouge.com/ For older kids, another: http://www.khanacademy.org/
NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says the whole point of schooling is to dumb most people down: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm "Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."
The whole point of those early lessons is to waste kids' time and dumb them down. As Gatto says elsewhere, it was all worked out in public to create and industrial utopia and powerful nation-states with strong armies. He calls it a "conspiracy against ourselves": http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."
With the internet, we could have "learning on demand", not "learning just in case". My essay on that:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools" http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html """ Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the
Magic bullets like this RNA-loaded nanoparticle stuff are potentially great (if they have no side effects), but how about just encouraging (and making easy) the simple things first?
We don't have to wait for magic bullets to cure most ill health. Why not put a few trillion US dollars into these things? It would be enormously cost effective. One link above suggests curing vitamin D deficiency alone in Western Europe would save US$4.4 trillion dollars in health care expense over a decade (the USA might see a comparable amount in savings). Of course, in our current economic and sick
Many people have written on the causes of war from various points of view: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War#Motivations Often wars result from some back and forth of economic and military aggression (when they are not about policital power or some notion honor).
While what you say about the first Gulf war was what the media portrayed, what it leaves out is that Kuwait had started using slant drilling techiques to take Iraqi oil: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA%20Hits/Iraq_CIAHits.html """ The whole dispute started because Kuwait was slant-drilling. Using equipment bought from National Security Council chief Brent Scowcroft's old company, Kuwait was pumping out some $14-billion worth of oil from underneath Iraqi territory. Even the territory they were drilling from had originally been Iraq's. Slant-drilling is enough to get you shot in Texas, and it's certainly enough to start a war in the Mideast.
Even so, this dispute could have been negotiated. But it's hard to avoid a war when what you're actually doing is trying to provoke a war.
The most famous example of that is the meeting between Saddam and the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, five days before Iraq invaded Kuwait. As CIA satellite photos showed an Iraqi invasion force massing on the Kuwaiti border, Glaspie told Hussein that "the US takes no position" on Iraq's dispute with Kuwait.
A few days later, during last-minute negotiations, Kuwait's foreign minister said: "We are not going to respond to [Iraq]....If they don't like it, let them occupy our territory....We are going to bring in the Americans." The US reportedly encouraged Kuwait's attitude. """
There is more there.
So, with the first Gulf War, we had a ping-pong effect. Kuwait committed economic aggression against Iraq, but the US accepted that (having sold them the equipment). Iraq retaliated with violence, and the US moved in. But, the US media painted this in the way you just did -- as a sudden violent attack by Iraq on Kuwait with no reason other than greed for the Kuwaiti's oil -- ironically, the total opposite of what started it (Kuwait's greed for Iraqi oil).
Aspects of that also happened with WWII, economic agression by the USA leading to military agression by Japan at Pearl Harbor (this is not to defend Japan's attack, or its invasion of French Indo-China that the US retaliated for, just to show this ping-pong effect again of economic aggression begetting military aggression, and it being painted as out-of-the-blue violence): http://askville.amazon.com/WW2-government-restrict-trade-Japan-blockade-countries-Pearl-Harbor/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=5936557 "The U.S. stopped selling oil to Japan in July of 1941, which was part of the motivation for the attack from Japan's perspective. We were their major oil supplier, and the shipments were stopped in protest of Japan's invasion of French Indo-China. This embargo would've ground their economy to a halt in fairly short order, forcing them to find oil elsewhere. But before they could do that, they had to make sure we wouldn't be able to interfere with their expansion."
Still, ultimately it is all foolishness. While liquid fuels are convenient, it takes more energy from electricity and natural gas to create a gallon of gas than an electric car would require to go the same distance as a car that uses that gallon of gas. http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
So much ignorance, shortsightedness, narrow selfishness, and so on out there.
"A Christmas Carol -- Ignorance & Want"
On people never having enough, Maslow's hierarchy of needs suggests otherwise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs "Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy." Maslow also studied the healthiest 1% of the college student population."
The needs near the top of the pyramid, like self-actualization, often don't take much material goods to realize them. They are often even about creating a surplus of goods for everyone. The problem is that between schooling and advertising, US Americans have been kept from maturing and growing in other than consumerist ways... Consider how Hans Rosling talks here about how many other non-US societies have managed to increase social equity and health without so much material stuff: http://www.gapminder.org/videos/ted-talks/hans-rosling-ted-talk-2007-seemingly-impossible-is-possible
And good community get togethers make better neighbors... By the way, many Native American societies worked quite well without fences between community members. So, fences to enforce private property rights are a product of a certain scarcity-oriented world view...
To echo your point on religion, here is another thing Albert Einstein wrote: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm """ For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. """
You might like the rest there too.
As I mention here: http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1937-unnatural-acts-breaking-the-fever-of-militarism.html#comment-2450 We the People, based on deeply held humanistic and spiritual values, need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. In order to end arms races, promote world peace, and also save money we can direct to civilian needs, we need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430 and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working").
And as you suggest, today's prisons in the USA create criminals. The USA has many times more people in prison than other industrialized countries, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States in large part because the sentences are way longer (part of that is that the prison industry is profitable to many who lobby for harsher laws or prevent removing harsh laws). For example, in New York State: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032702834.html "Then in November, Democrats captured the state Senate for the first time in years. The State Assembly in the past had proposed repealing the drug laws, but the effort was always blocked by Senate Republicans, many of whom represent largely rural, Upstate districts where most of the state's prisons are located." And consider what was recently discovered in Pennsylvania:
"Pennsylvania rocked by 'jailing kids for cash' scandal" http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/23/pennsylvania.corrupt.judges/index.html Where else in the USA does this happen?
Being non-violent does not mean being passive. We can actively work to create a better society that works for most everybody as an active process, especially in a democracy:
"Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence" http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
The same as with terrorists, you may not be able to prevent individuals from planning to do harmful things, but what you can do is take away their social support network that enables them and provides cover for them to plan large scale harm. That goes for whether the terrorists are alienated fundamentalist extremists pursuing some radical cause, or ostensibly mainstream elected government officials invading other countries to remain in power and to create business opportunities for their friends.
How is there a natural scarcity of materials when the Earth is so big, and the solar system is even bigger?
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions" http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
How is there a scarcity of energy when the Earth receives 10,000 times what the human race uses from sunlight (and there are also vast geothermal energy reserves)? Nuclear missiles to fight over oil fields and land are so ironic, because the same technologies would let us build habitats in space or build solar panels (or nuclear power systems). For half of one year's US defense budget, the USA could move to entirely renewable energy sources with energy efficiency, and be way more intrinsically secure than depending on long supply lines that need to be guarded by soldiers. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
So, I'd suggest that when people fight over land and raw materials, it is mainly either through ignorance, lack of imagination, http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/ or through some sort of racket. http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm "WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
I'll agree with you that power over other people is a motivator for some people, but maybe we have to stop worshiping such people and start labelling that as mental illness? Another vision of an abundant society where that does not happen is James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
Whether "people" are on top of the food chain is a matter of opinion. Bacteria and fungi eat humans in the end. And humans are roughly 90% bacterial cells by numbers and 10% by weight (mostly in the colon).
Maybe rather than create mind reprogramming technology, what we need to do is stop using the kind we invented already, which is present in compulsory schools, which were designed to create obedient soldiers and robot-like workers who would do whatever they were told, no matter how vile or boring: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm """ The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte--one of the influential documents of modern history leading dire
It is ironic that the technology that goes into such a missile, from the computers and materials to the social networks that plan and test such things could instead bring abundance to everyone in the world. Yet people still build such things from a scarcity-based mindset, not recognizing the total irony. The tools of abundance all around us now (robotics, computers, networks, biotech, chemistry, nanontech, nuclear technology, and so on) are so powerful -- we will destroy ourselves if we use them from a scarcity mindset. If used from an abundance mindset, we could instead make the world into a much happier place.
As Albert Einstein said, "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind."
We need to change our hearts towards providing abundance for all, before we all die of the unrecognized irony.
A lot of these issues are relative to your priorities and also technical change. What does "minimal footprint" mean these days on eight core Mac Pro with tens of Gigabytes of memory, and where most of the memory is used by cached pages of a web browser, not the application itself? There is a value to Firefox being in C++ from the standpoint of it being embedded somehow in other C++ applications (including embedded software) -- although, on the flip side, it makes it difficult to embed it in Java applications (and there are embedded JVMs with small footprints, and you can even compile Java code to run without a JVM). Years ago, when Java was not free-as-in-freedom, it would have been a problematical issue to use Java (and that would have been a tough choice, to plan for the future, making guesses); there were Java browsers, but they were never developed fully (Sun has a widget with limited functionality as part of the Java SDK, and they also had the "HotJava" browser, though that was slow at the time (1994) due probably mostly to JVM issues and also memory limits on older machines). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava
Many years ago, Lisp with some domain specific languages on it might have been a better choice back then (compiled Lisp can sometimes even be faster than C is some dynamic applications, and many web pages are very dynamic), or a Smalltalk like VisualWorks (though that was commercial, but there was a moment when it was sold for a song, and there was also a moment when Squeak might have become a popular free system). Still, even years ago there were free-as-in-freedom JVMs from other sources that could have been improved as part of the Mozilla effort.
But that is all rewriting history. Mozilla is in C++, and that's what the people who maintain it are most comfortable with.
The issue is that going forward, does security trump some issue of run-time performance or comfort of the maintainers? I'd say yes, security is more important at this point, especially since something like the JVM can also run multiple languages (like Scala or Jython) which allows a diversity of coding styles for add in modules, and the JVM (as with Android) can be tailored to provide firewalls between different web pages (sort of like Google is doing with Chrome having a different process for ever web page). Is Mozilla going to switch to using the JVM at this point? Unlikely. But this does suggest that Firefox's days are numbered... Maybe in years, but still one can see the train at the end of the tunnel.:-) Ultimately, someone could translate the core algorithms of FireFox to something like Java (perhaps even with a one click tool someday:-), and then for the average desktop user, it would be foolish to use the C++ version because of the security issues. Yes, there would be terrible social issues about forking and so on. Still, Java code can have security issues, as can the JVM, so nothing is going to replace testing and vigilance.
Here is the first Google result right now for a Java Web Browser: http://lobobrowser.org/java-browser.jsp "Lobo [download] is an open source web browser that is written completely in Java. Lobo is being actively developed with the aim to fully support HTML 4, Javascript and CSS2. Lobo also supports direct JavaFX rendering. The general goal of the Lobo browser effort is to produce a browser that is fast, complete, easy to extend, feature-rich and secure."
So people are doing it... It's only a matter of time...
As they write there: """ Why a Pure Java Browser? There are a number of advantages to be derived from a browser that is written in Java as opposed to a language compiled into native code, namely:
* Security.- In principle, a Java program is less suceptible to certain types of vulnerabilities such as a buffer overflow attack. Java's security model ca
I can't believe my first comment got modded down twice as flamebait; slashdot has really descended technically, apparently, to judge so poorly what is a serious technical comment by someone who has been programming for about thirty years (and who even taught C at the university level and has used C++ extensively in the past, including at IBM Research).
So sad to put a little performance (and questionably) these days ahead of security as well as ease of programming, extendability, and maintainability.
While I agree with the wish that more programmers cared about better code, I also wish most programmers had a passion for better tools.:-)
This is why Mozilla should be implemented in Java, Smalltalk, Lisp, OCaml or a similar system. I don't know enough about this particular vulnerability to say if it would make a difference, but in general any garbage-collected language without obvious pointer indexing and with built-in array index checking is going to have a lot fewer low level security problems like buffer overruns or duplicate deallocations and so on that can lead to malicious code execution... Is the slight speed boost from a language like C++ worth all the extra security issues at this point, now that we have such fast computers? And with manual memory allocation and deallocation, sometimes code written in C++ can be slower than a language that takes care of it for the programmer in an optimal way... As a reminder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_Tenth_Rule "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." (or Smalltalk or some other languages...)
From: http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ "The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies. Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal computers. The use of ontologies, metadata annotations, and semantic web protocols on desktop computers will allow the integration of desktop applications and the web, enabling a much more focused and integrated personal information management as well as focused information distribution and collaboration on the Web beyond sending emails. The vision of the Semantic Desktop for personal information management and collaboration has been around for a long time: visionaries like Vanevar Bush and Doug Engelbart have formulated and partially realized these ideas. However, for the largest part their ideas remained a vision for far too long since the foundational technologies necessary to render their ideas into reality were not yet invented ? these ideas were proposing jet planes, where the rest of the world had just invented the parts to build a bicycle. However, recently the computer science community has developed the means to make this vision a reality:..."
And a way to limit the concentration of wealth and power that can destroy the free market by regulatory capture (as happens all too often in the USA...)
Note that Friedrich Hayek said he was not against government intervention if it was based on "a clear set of principles", and a basic income as a human right (which also might smooth out business cycles), as well as concerns about externalities and concentration of wealth and power, might fit that definition:
"The road to serfdom: text and documents" http://books.google.com/books?id=qg61T_I1mwsC&pg=PA20 "... he repeatedly emphasized in his talks before business groups that he was not against government intervention per se: "I think what is needed is a clear set of principles which enables us to distinguish between the legitimate fields of government activities and the illegitimate fields of government activity.""
Otherwise, without a human right to make a claim on the fruits of the industrial commons, what are you going to do if robots, AI, better design, and saturated demand take your job? Marshall Brain painted that picture, and it is not pretty: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
And Frances Moore Lappé has already pointed out how starvation is quite possible around plenty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Moore_Lapp%C3%A9 "Throughout her works Lappé has argued that world hunger is caused not by the lack of food but rather by the inability of hungry people to gain access to the abundant amount of food that exists in the world and/or food-producing resources because they are simply too poor. She has posited that our current "thin democracy" creates a maldistribution of power and resources that inevitably creates waste and an artificial scarcity of the essentials for sustainable living."
Some other ideas about freedom, if you are interested:
"Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality and the possibilities for informal education and lifelong learning" http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
And from Ivan Illich's deschooling society, that echoes some of Hayek's points: http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html """ The choice is between two radically opposed institutional types, both of which are exemplified in certain existing institutions, although one type so characterizes the contemporary period. as to almost define it. This dominant type I would propose to call the manipulative institution. The other type also exists, but only precariously. The institutions which
Robots, AI, better design, and limited demand are probably going to take your job eventually; see Marshall Brain's "Manna" story for what it might look like: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
You can worship the "free market" abstraction all you want, and by extension the big companies that dominate it,
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation" http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm but enlightened self-interest (let alone morality) suggests you should be more on the side of the humans than an abstract concept about exchange, one that ignores externalities as well as the negative side of the concentration of wealth by using huge immortal amoral corporations that would treat any human like a piece of discardable machinery if it is profitable.
With a 21st century technosphere capable of producing so much abundance for all, for humanity to survive, we need fundamental change in our basic economic paradigms like a basic income (which works with the market but is a human right saying everyone has a right to some fruits of the industrial commons), http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html Or going further, we need some mix of a basic income and a gift economy, improved local subsistence, making work into play, resource based planning, and other things...
By the way, if we moved to a basic income (a check from the government that is enough to live on each month, with no means test, funded by taxes or some other means), then it might be justified to do away with some of those other employee protections you decry, because engineers would have the freedom to say "No" and walk away. That might do a lot more to make the US competitive than the race to the bottom for US engineers that you propose.
"Freedom as the Power to Say No" http://www.basicincome.org/bien/pdf/2004Widerquist.pdf
China will be where the US is soon enough (twenty years?), with a jobless recovery with economic growth but no new jobs, as China's productivity per worker continues to grow and then demand gets saturated when people there realize there is a law of diminishing returns to more goods and services (especially as people move up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to want to do more of their own self-directed stuff). What then?
The best things in life are cheap or free, and if they were not, what kind of world would that be anyway? Someday the Chinese will realize that, hopefully before they finish trashing their environment. At least there is some good news about improvement on Chinese environmental policy lately, so I can hope the Chinese are moving up that curve... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_of_China
By the way, as for why all those US worker protections are so important in the "free market", try reading "The China Price". http://thechinaprice.org/home.html "The book exposes a system of unregistered factories that cut corners on safety and working conditions to meet multinational companies' demands for ever-lower prices. It documents how China's export manufacturing industry allows millions of workers to move slowly out of poverty - even as they pay a price in terms of their own health. How the country's coal mining sector continues to thrive - even as it produces a stunning 70 percent of the world's coal mining deaths. And how a growing number of younger wo
I predict within twenty years or so, you can do this kind of separation in your backyard. Rare Earths are actually pretty common. Some people who realize that may not want to put in all the money for a conventional plant?
Meanwhile, the US spends a trillion dollars a year of "defense". But can't be bothered to have a plant in the country to produce strategic materials... What an odd notion of "security".
If you're going to bother to set up such a complex extraction facility, why not go all the way, for exactly the reasons you outline? This sort of process talked about around 1980 can extract and separate anything in there from regular old rock or seawater:
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions" http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
"Flowsheet and process equations for the HF acid-leach process" http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASM5E.html#f541
The chemistry was thought doable even then. Look at the things they worried about being infeasible back then: "If each of the 13 sector components is as complex as the HF acid leach system (certainly a gross overestimate), then the total computer control capability required is about 6 megabytes or 9.4X10e7 bits using 16-bit words."
I have far more than that capacity on my cell phone...
The problem is that in the USA, all these industrial processes are separated due to the logic of the "free market", so no one can plan comprehensive materials extraction, production, and recycling facilities of the sort NASA was envisioning thirty years ago...
But no, the USA has to make plans to attack China (to the cost of trillions if the USA was so foolish) to keep them in line because there are not enough "rare earths" around... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element "The term "rare earth" arises from the rare earth minerals from which they were first isolated, which were uncommon oxide-type minerals (earths) found in Gadolinite extracted from one mine in the village of Ytterby, Sweden. However, with the exception of the highly-unstable promethium, rare earth elements are found in relatively high concentrations in the earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element in the earth's crust at 68 parts per million."
Do you ever get the feeling somebody is just laughing at us?
Thanks for the reply, and it's an interesting analogy with the human body and cancer. Still, the human body is about 90% bacterial cells by number, and about 10% bacteria by weight, so it that sense the human immune system is in that sense mostly a legal constitution about getting some bacteria to work well together.:-)
Also, note that populations of living things tend to change over time, so some dissenting cells (mutations) may lead to a very different next generation (though that is rare).
Also, note that classically entropy is about a "closed system". In an "open system" with an energy flux, like the Earth getting thousands of times what our industry uses from solar energy, and with an infinite cosmos for material expansion, different laws or different perspectives may apply, since the energy flux and endless matter can be used to rebuild systems (or duplicate systems, or spread duplicates). http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=entropy+closed+system http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=entropy+open+system
Anyway, the most fundamental issue, as told to me by the late professor Larry Slobodkin (very wise guy) in a course on Philosophy and Ecology, is that even if every organism in the universe behaved a certain way, human still have moral choices to make, and could decide to do things differently. I think the same is true for physics. Whatever we see when we look at the physics of the world, people still make moral choices. Although another way to look at that, as a variant on Einstein's point, is to look at the idea of Memetics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
Again, science can tell you what is, what was, and even the theoretical limits of what might be possible, but it can't tell you what should be. Only emotion (or some sort of religion) can tell you that. Or, taken to another level, politics.
Although, as is pointed out here: http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ it seems the biggest political issue is often that professions (including science) usually deny they have politics built in to them, so, stating they actually do have politics of various sorts is a political issue...:-) So, what we have now is a poverty crisis in the USA related to jobs, but people claim it has nothing to do with politics (or religion, or emotion), it is just "economics". Or we have an illness crisis in the US, but people claim it has nothing to do with politics (or religion, or emotion), but again, it is just about professional choices, economics, health science, and so on.
Also related:
"ivan illich: deschooling, conviviality and the possibilities for informal education and lifelong learning" http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm "Known for his critique of modernization and the corrupting impact of institutions, Ivan Illich's concern with deschooling, learning webs and the disabling effect of professions has struck a chord among m
Yes, you have a great point about Self (which would have been licensing cost free in theory...) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language) "The first public release was in 1990, and the next year the team moved to Sun Microsystems where they continued work on the language. Several new releases followed until falling largely dormant in 1995 with the 4.0 version. The latest 4.3 version was released in 2006 and runs on Mac OS X and Solaris."
I don't know why Sun did not choose that. I'd be curious what David Ungar would say about that?
I met David Ungar once, at OOPSLA-97, but he had a bad cold and so was not that chatty then... I hope he is getting enough vitamin D, as vitamin D deficiency is an occupational hazard of the indoor worker, though I did not know that then either, and it is connected with colds and influenza, as well as many other health issues: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_influenza "A study published in the February 2009 Archives of Internal Medicine involving 1900 adults and children done by the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Children's Hospital Boston, found that people with the lowest blood vitamin D levels reported having significantly more recent colds or cases of the flu. The risks were even higher for those with chronic respiratory disorders, such as asthma and emphysema. They reported that asthma patients with the lowest vitamin D levels were five times more likely to have had a recent respiratory infection; while among COPD patients, respiratory infections were twice as common among those with vitamin D deficiency. However, the authors stress that the study's results need to be confirmed in clinical trials before vitamin D can be recommended to prevent colds and flu..[4][5]"
Could vitamin D deficiency syndrome explain why we got Java instead of Self?:-(
Beyond the opposite of Not-Invented-Here (A prophet is without honor in his or her own country), perhaps Sun's choice is because Self used an enormous amount of memory for the time, whereas Smalltalk could run on smaller systems (part of that is about the implementation efficiencies of using classes)? VisualWorks was already used in embedded stuff (running Fabs as "ControlWorks") so it would have been a much safer bet in that sense.
And then, if you are going to do a home-brew system, the C syntax is commonplace...
I also have some comments about my own attempts at prototype-based systems, and why classes have some big advantages practically:
"PataPata critique: the good, the bad, the ugly" http://patapata.sourceforge.net/critique.html
Again though, you still have a great point. And NewtonScript, say, was a prototype-based system designed for low memory environments like the Newton, so it was not impossible...
I think most people just don't understand how problematical the C-style syntax is for creating self-documenting easy-to-read code compared to Smalltalk's.
And that references my post from 12/28/96 (I'll put here since it is only at archive.org probably):
"Squeak and the Babel of programming languages" http://web.archive.org/web/19980121002624/http://www.create.ucsb.edu/squeak/9612.html#Letter94 """ Date: 96 Dec 27 8:13:49 pm From: Paul Fernhout [old email snipped] To: squeak@create.ucsb.edu Subject: Squeak and the Babel of programming languages
Here are some things that could be done with Squeak. Will I do any of them myself? I don't know. At this point, I'm still figuring out what use I want to make of Squeak, and more generally, what Squeak could be all about.
* The main idea
In general, I'd say the world has too many programming languages (and development systems) and too few standard comprehensive libraries (along with their accompanying architectures and program interfaces). So how can Squeak fit into this Babel of programming languages?
* Squeak as a repository of algorithms
One thing I'd like to see in Squeak is a complete set of algorithms and patterns drawn from the published literature. That would possibly encourage Squeak's use in programming education, in rapid prototyping, and as a repository of programming knowledge. Even if people didn't deliver in Squeak, they could begin to rely on it as a source of inspiration and algorithm templates.
* Squeak as the interpreter of choice
The world also has too few tools (like LEX & YACC) for supporting developing application specific languages. I=92d also like to see Squeak with good tools for parsing, interpreting, compiling, and translating - like a TGEN port. If Squeak had such tools, one could consider doing the following.
* Squeak emulating & being emulated in other languages
Squeak is one of only a very few well done, reasonably stable, and completely open development environments in a language that appears to have a strong future (maybe it is the only one?). The fact that Squeak is implemented in Smalltalk is important, because Smalltalk is a self-reflective system. However, this does not mean the Squeak tools (debugger, inspector, class browser) might not be useful for developing in other languages (NewtonScript, Lisp, Basic, C++, Forth, Python, Object Cobol) since languages are something other than their most efficient implementation.
Two Smalltalk companies have moved a bit in this direction. OTI has a product that lets one use their ENVY tools to browse, modify, and recompile C++. ParcPlace has a language parser in its advanced tools kit that lets you create classes which have their methods parsed in another language you define using a simple language specification grammar.
The other side of this language coin is that Squeak has an open VM that does not have to be tied to C. It could theoretically generate a VM in Lisp, Delphi, Forth, NewtonScript, or Assembler.
C is a very common language. So having Squeak make C development easier through browsers, as well as allowing methods with embedded C (like SmalltalkX) is one place to start.
Yes, a fundamental issue in a high-tech world becomes not so much how to produce more, but how to distribute what is produced. Marshall Brain wrote a sci-fi story about that here, with both a dystopian and a utopian ending depending on whether things produced by robots are distributed unequally or equally (as everyone loses their "jobs"). http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Slashdot Mirror
Related to mental illness: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Also lack of community:
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
Also poor diet:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime
The "Rat Park" experiment showed that addictive behavior results from stress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
"""
Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980), by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.
Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself. [1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can." [2]
To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, a 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16-20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters. [3] The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment." [1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.
The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no response. [4] Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding.
"""
Many people in today's industrialized society are under a lot of stress. Creating healthier communities may help reduce addictive behavior. One example of how to do that is here:
"About the AARP/Bluezones Vitality Project"
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
Another is here:
"Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy"
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
Vitamin D deficiency from being indoors too much also contributes to obesity and depression.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
For more on breaking out of a "pleasure trap" leading to obesity, see these:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
I want to wholeheartedly agree with this, even as I posted another comment about compulsory school being bad for most kids in many ways. With my own child, since and early age, and following some of John Holt's suggestions, and those of other "unschoolers", I've been making numbers part of our every day existence, counting things we handle and so on. As a computer programmer, I point out recursion whenever we see it as nested items (like tow trucks towing tow trucks, or cups inside cups). I agree that parents need to have an awareness of this and can contribute very much (in a non-forced off-hand way). Another point Holt makes is to see that something like 2 + 2 = 4 is essentially the same "fact" as 4 = 2 = 2 and 2 * 2 = 4 and 4 / 2 = 2, something not taught or understood in many schools' approach to math education, where different operations are taught in different years. Also, there are a lot of resources now on the internet to learn math in fun way or at your own pace. For younger kids, here is one:
http://www.poissonrouge.com/
For older kids, another:
http://www.khanacademy.org/
See John Holt's books here (he was a long time school teacher):
http://www.holtgws.com/
NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says the whole point of schooling is to dumb most people down:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."
The whole point of those early lessons is to waste kids' time and dumb them down. As Gatto says elsewhere, it was all worked out in public to create and industrial utopia and powerful nation-states with strong armies. He calls it a "conspiracy against ourselves":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."
With the internet, we could have "learning on demand", not "learning just in case". My essay on that: ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"""
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
Most cancer can be prevented or sometimes cured with the right amount of vitamin D3 (5000 IU daily as a base for most adults with a few exceptions, but you need a blood test periodically to be sure), a diet of mostly organic natural foods (whole grains, fruits, vegetables), occasional fasting, and moderate exercise -- along with quitting smoking and some other lifestyle changes, and living in a cleaner environment (especially clean water), and some positive emotions, spirituality, and community helps too. These things (especially the right amount of vitamin D) will also sometimes prevent or sometimes cure a good amount of the many other chronic diseases of our modern society as well like heart disease, diabetes, depression, -- and maybe even autism which may result in part from inadequate vitamin D by parents before conception, during pregnancy, and while nursing (as dermatologists have told us all to fear the sun and we also live indoors more at screens). For references to all this, see:
Vitamin D:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/cancerMain.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/new-harvard-paper-on-autism.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2008-october.shtml
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
Fasting and better diet:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://books.google.com/books?id=nRurn6C142YC
Lifestyle and cancer:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elaine-schattner/we-are-all-fat-and-have-c_b_506247.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html
Exercise:
http://www.letsmove.gov/
Community infrastructure:
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
Positive emotions, community, and spirituality:
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
Magic bullets like this RNA-loaded nanoparticle stuff are potentially great (if they have no side effects), but how about just encouraging (and making easy) the simple things first?
We don't have to wait for magic bullets to cure most ill health. Why not put a few trillion US dollars into these things? It would be enormously cost effective. One link above suggests curing vitamin D deficiency alone in Western Europe would save US$4.4 trillion dollars in health care expense over a decade (the USA might see a comparable amount in savings). Of course, in our current economic and sick
Many people have written on the causes of war from various points of view:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War#Motivations
Often wars result from some back and forth of economic and military aggression (when they are not about policital power or some notion honor).
While what you say about the first Gulf war was what the media portrayed, what it leaves out is that Kuwait had started using slant drilling techiques to take Iraqi oil:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA%20Hits/Iraq_CIAHits.html
"""
The whole dispute started because Kuwait was slant-drilling. Using equipment bought from National Security Council chief Brent Scowcroft's old company, Kuwait was pumping out some $14-billion worth of oil from underneath Iraqi territory. Even the territory they were drilling from had originally been Iraq's. Slant-drilling is enough to get you shot in Texas, and it's certainly enough to start a war in the Mideast.
Even so, this dispute could have been negotiated. But it's hard to avoid a war when what you're actually doing is trying to provoke a war.
The most famous example of that is the meeting between Saddam and the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, five days before Iraq invaded Kuwait. As CIA satellite photos showed an Iraqi invasion force massing on the Kuwaiti border, Glaspie told Hussein that "the US takes no position" on Iraq's dispute with Kuwait.
A few days later, during last-minute negotiations, Kuwait's foreign minister said: "We are not going to respond to [Iraq]....If they don't like it, let them occupy our territory....We are going to bring in the Americans." The US reportedly encouraged Kuwait's attitude.
"""
There is more there.
So, with the first Gulf War, we had a ping-pong effect. Kuwait committed economic aggression against Iraq, but the US accepted that (having sold them the equipment). Iraq retaliated with violence, and the US moved in. But, the US media painted this in the way you just did -- as a sudden violent attack by Iraq on Kuwait with no reason other than greed for the Kuwaiti's oil -- ironically, the total opposite of what started it (Kuwait's greed for Iraqi oil).
Aspects of that also happened with WWII, economic agression by the USA leading to military agression by Japan at Pearl Harbor (this is not to defend Japan's attack, or its invasion of French Indo-China that the US retaliated for, just to show this ping-pong effect again of economic aggression begetting military aggression, and it being painted as out-of-the-blue violence):
http://askville.amazon.com/WW2-government-restrict-trade-Japan-blockade-countries-Pearl-Harbor/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=5936557
"The U.S. stopped selling oil to Japan in July of 1941, which was part of the motivation for the attack from Japan's perspective. We were their major oil supplier, and the shipments were stopped in protest of Japan's invasion of French Indo-China. This embargo would've ground their economy to a halt in fairly short order, forcing them to find oil elsewhere. But before they could do that, they had to make sure we wouldn't be able to interfere with their expansion."
Still, ultimately it is all foolishness. While liquid fuels are convenient, it takes more energy from electricity and natural gas to create a gallon of gas than an electric car would require to go the same distance as a car that uses that gallon of gas.
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
So much ignorance, shortsightedness, narrow selfishness, and so on out there.
"A Christmas Carol -- Ignorance & Want"
On people never having enough, Maslow's hierarchy of needs suggests otherwise:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
"Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy." Maslow also studied the healthiest 1% of the college student population."
The needs near the top of the pyramid, like self-actualization, often don't take much material goods to realize them. They are often even about creating a surplus of goods for everyone. The problem is that between schooling and advertising, US Americans have been kept from maturing and growing in other than consumerist ways... Consider how Hans Rosling talks here about how many other non-US societies have managed to increase social equity and health without so much material stuff:
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/ted-talks/hans-rosling-ted-talk-2007-seemingly-impossible-is-possible
And good community get togethers make better neighbors... By the way, many Native American societies worked quite well without fences between community members. So, fences to enforce private property rights are a product of a certain scarcity-oriented world view...
To echo your point on religion, here is another thing Albert Einstein wrote:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"""
For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
"""
You might like the rest there too.
As I mention here:
http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1937-unnatural-acts-breaking-the-fever-of-militarism.html#comment-2450
We the People, based on deeply held humanistic and spiritual values, need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. In order to end arms races, promote world peace, and also save money we can direct to civilian needs, we need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety")
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working").
Human behavior is a product of many things, genetics, parenting, history, nutrition, community, environment, and others...
As I see it, you are asking, what do we do about psychopaths, and their lesser cousins, bullies?
"[p2p-research] The psychopath as peer?"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005499.html
As Jacque Fresco suggests in the following two videos, you can change the physical and social environment, and that will change a lot of human behavior in a healthier way, which is much better than passing laws:
http://www.youtube.com/user/jacquefresco#p/a/u/2/pbtbGcKiLiM
http://www.youtube.com/user/jacquefresco#p/a/u/1/PSbKfdOTRpY
And as you suggest, today's prisons in the USA create criminals. The USA has many times more people in prison than other industrialized countries,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
in large part because the sentences are way longer (part of that is that the prison industry is profitable to many who lobby for harsher laws or prevent removing harsh laws). For example, in New York State:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032702834.html
"Then in November, Democrats captured the state Senate for the first time in years. The State Assembly in the past had proposed repealing the drug laws, but the effort was always blocked by Senate Republicans, many of whom represent largely rural, Upstate districts where most of the state's prisons are located."
And consider what was recently discovered in Pennsylvania:
"Pennsylvania rocked by 'jailing kids for cash' scandal"
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/23/pennsylvania.corrupt.judges/index.html
Where else in the USA does this happen?
A basic income could remove much petty theft and physical crimes of mugging and armed robbery:
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Being non-violent does not mean being passive. We can actively work to create a better society that works for most everybody as an active process, especially in a democracy:
"Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence"
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
The same as with terrorists, you may not be able to prevent individuals from planning to do harmful things, but what you can do is take away their social support network that enables them and provides cover for them to plan large scale harm. That goes for whether the terrorists are alienated fundamentalist extremists pursuing some radical cause, or ostensibly mainstream elected government officials invading other countries to remain in power and to create business opportunities for their friends.
Again, Voyage from Yesteryear is one picture of such an alternative society (even if it is not the only possible one).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
Because we live in such a schooled society, where most people have been broken and trained
Thanks for the reply.
How is there a natural scarcity of materials when the Earth is so big, and the solar system is even bigger?
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions"
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
How is there a scarcity of energy when the Earth receives 10,000 times what the human race uses from sunlight (and there are also vast geothermal energy reserves)? Nuclear missiles to fight over oil fields and land are so ironic, because the same technologies would let us build habitats in space or build solar panels (or nuclear power systems). For half of one year's US defense budget, the USA could move to entirely renewable energy sources with energy efficiency, and be way more intrinsically secure than depending on long supply lines that need to be guarded by soldiers.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
So, I'd suggest that when people fight over land and raw materials, it is mainly either through ignorance, lack of imagination,
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
or through some sort of racket.
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
I'll agree with you that power over other people is a motivator for some people, but maybe we have to stop worshiping such people and start labelling that as mental illness? Another vision of an abundant society where that does not happen is James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
Whether "people" are on top of the food chain is a matter of opinion. Bacteria and fungi eat humans in the end. And humans are roughly 90% bacterial cells by numbers and 10% by weight (mostly in the colon).
Maybe rather than create mind reprogramming technology, what we need to do is stop using the kind we invented already, which is present in compulsory schools, which were designed to create obedient soldiers and robot-like workers who would do whatever they were told, no matter how vile or boring:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
"""
The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte--one of the influential documents of modern history leading dire
It is ironic that the technology that goes into such a missile, from the computers and materials to the social networks that plan and test such things could instead bring abundance to everyone in the world. Yet people still build such things from a scarcity-based mindset, not recognizing the total irony. The tools of abundance all around us now (robotics, computers, networks, biotech, chemistry, nanontech, nuclear technology, and so on) are so powerful -- we will destroy ourselves if we use them from a scarcity mindset. If used from an abundance mindset, we could instead make the world into a much happier place.
As Albert Einstein said, "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind."
We need to change our hearts towards providing abundance for all, before we all die of the unrecognized irony.
A lot of these issues are relative to your priorities and also technical change. What does "minimal footprint" mean these days on eight core Mac Pro with tens of Gigabytes of memory, and where most of the memory is used by cached pages of a web browser, not the application itself? There is a value to Firefox being in C++ from the standpoint of it being embedded somehow in other C++ applications (including embedded software) -- although, on the flip side, it makes it difficult to embed it in Java applications (and there are embedded JVMs with small footprints, and you can even compile Java code to run without a JVM). Years ago, when Java was not free-as-in-freedom, it would have been a problematical issue to use Java (and that would have been a tough choice, to plan for the future, making guesses); there were Java browsers, but they were never developed fully (Sun has a widget with limited functionality as part of the Java SDK, and they also had the "HotJava" browser, though that was slow at the time (1994) due probably mostly to JVM issues and also memory limits on older machines).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava
Many years ago, Lisp with some domain specific languages on it might have been a better choice back then (compiled Lisp can sometimes even be faster than C is some dynamic applications, and many web pages are very dynamic), or a Smalltalk like VisualWorks (though that was commercial, but there was a moment when it was sold for a song, and there was also a moment when Squeak might have become a popular free system). Still, even years ago there were free-as-in-freedom JVMs from other sources that could have been improved as part of the Mozilla effort.
But that is all rewriting history. Mozilla is in C++, and that's what the people who maintain it are most comfortable with.
The issue is that going forward, does security trump some issue of run-time performance or comfort of the maintainers? I'd say yes, security is more important at this point, especially since something like the JVM can also run multiple languages (like Scala or Jython) which allows a diversity of coding styles for add in modules, and the JVM (as with Android) can be tailored to provide firewalls between different web pages (sort of like Google is doing with Chrome having a different process for ever web page). Is Mozilla going to switch to using the JVM at this point? Unlikely. But this does suggest that Firefox's days are numbered... Maybe in years, but still one can see the train at the end of the tunnel. :-) Ultimately, someone could translate the core algorithms of FireFox to something like Java (perhaps even with a one click tool someday :-), and then for the average desktop user, it would be foolish to use the C++ version because of the security issues. Yes, there would be terrible social issues about forking and so on. Still, Java code can have security issues, as can the JVM, so nothing is going to replace testing and vigilance.
Here is the first Google result right now for a Java Web Browser:
http://lobobrowser.org/java-browser.jsp
"Lobo [download] is an open source web browser that is written completely in Java. Lobo is being actively developed with the aim to fully support HTML 4, Javascript and CSS2. Lobo also supports direct JavaFX rendering. The general goal of the Lobo browser effort is to produce a browser that is fast, complete, easy to extend, feature-rich and secure."
So people are doing it... It's only a matter of time...
As they write there:
"""
Why a Pure Java Browser?
There are a number of advantages to be derived from a browser that is written in Java as opposed to a language compiled into native code, namely:
* Security.- In principle, a Java program is less suceptible to certain types of vulnerabilities such as a buffer overflow attack. Java's security model ca
I can't believe my first comment got modded down twice as flamebait; slashdot has really descended technically, apparently, to judge so poorly what is a serious technical comment by someone who has been programming for about thirty years (and who even taught C at the university level and has used C++ extensively in the past, including at IBM Research).
So sad to put a little performance (and questionably) these days ahead of security as well as ease of programming, extendability, and maintainability.
While I agree with the wish that more programmers cared about better code, I also wish most programmers had a passion for better tools. :-)
This is why Mozilla should be implemented in Java, Smalltalk, Lisp, OCaml or a similar system. I don't know enough about this particular vulnerability to say if it would make a difference, but in general any garbage-collected language without obvious pointer indexing and with built-in array index checking is going to have a lot fewer low level security problems like buffer overruns or duplicate deallocations and so on that can lead to malicious code execution... Is the slight speed boost from a language like C++ worth all the extra security issues at this point, now that we have such fast computers? And with manual memory allocation and deallocation, sometimes code written in C++ can be slower than a language that takes care of it for the programmer in an optimal way... As a reminder:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_Tenth_Rule
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." (or Smalltalk or some other languages...)
From: http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ ..."
"The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies. Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal computers. The use of ontologies, metadata annotations, and semantic web protocols on desktop computers will allow the integration of desktop applications and the web, enabling a much more focused and integrated personal information management as well as focused information distribution and collaboration on the Web beyond sending emails. The vision of the Semantic Desktop for personal information management and collaboration has been around for a long time: visionaries like Vanevar Bush and Doug Engelbart have formulated and partially realized these ideas. However, for the largest part their ideas remained a vision for far too long since the foundational technologies necessary to render their ideas into reality were not yet invented ? these ideas were proposing jet planes, where the rest of the world had just invented the parts to build a bicycle. However, recently the computer science community has developed the means to make this vision a reality:
What about when consumers can buy nanotech 3D printers? :-)
http://www.reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_printing
And then print their own solar cells, 3D printers, and matter extractors and recyclers? :-)
Mainstream economics, if it ever made any sense, is on its way out...
That said, totally free global markets might not be that bad if there was a global basic income as a human right for every person to regularly claim some part of the fruits of the industrial commons:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/papers.html
And of course some way to account for externalities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
And a way to limit the concentration of wealth and power that can destroy the free market by regulatory capture (as happens all too often in the USA...)
Note that Friedrich Hayek said he was not against government intervention if it was based on "a clear set of principles", and a basic income as a human right (which also might smooth out business cycles), as well as concerns about externalities and concentration of wealth and power, might fit that definition:
"The road to serfdom: text and documents"
http://books.google.com/books?id=qg61T_I1mwsC&pg=PA20
"... he repeatedly emphasized in his talks before business groups that he was not against government intervention per se: "I think what is needed is a clear set of principles which enables us to distinguish between the legitimate fields of government activities and the illegitimate fields of government activity.""
Otherwise, without a human right to make a claim on the fruits of the industrial commons, what are you going to do if robots, AI, better design, and saturated demand take your job? Marshall Brain painted that picture, and it is not pretty:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
And Frances Moore Lappé has already pointed out how starvation is quite possible around plenty:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Moore_Lapp%C3%A9
"Throughout her works Lappé has argued that world hunger is caused not by the lack of food but rather by the inability of hungry people to gain access to the abundant amount of food that exists in the world and/or food-producing resources because they are simply too poor. She has posited that our current "thin democracy" creates a maldistribution of power and resources that inevitably creates waste and an artificial scarcity of the essentials for sustainable living."
Some other ideas about freedom, if you are interested:
"Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality and the possibilities for informal education and lifelong learning"
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
And from Ivan Illich's deschooling society, that echoes some of Hayek's points:
http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html
"""
The choice is between two radically opposed institutional types, both of which are exemplified in certain existing institutions, although one type so characterizes the contemporary period. as to almost define it. This dominant type I would propose to call the manipulative institution. The other type also exists, but only precariously. The institutions which
Robots, AI, better design, and limited demand are probably going to take your job eventually; see Marshall Brain's "Manna" story for what it might look like:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
You can worship the "free market" abstraction all you want, and by extension the big companies that dominate it,
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
but enlightened self-interest (let alone morality) suggests you should be more on the side of the humans than an abstract concept about exchange, one that ignores externalities as well as the negative side of the concentration of wealth by using huge immortal amoral corporations that would treat any human like a piece of discardable machinery if it is profitable.
With a 21st century technosphere capable of producing so much abundance for all, for humanity to survive, we need fundamental change in our basic economic paradigms like a basic income (which works with the market but is a human right saying everyone has a right to some fruits of the industrial commons),
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Or going further, we need some mix of a basic income and a gift economy, improved local subsistence, making work into play, resource based planning, and other things...
Something related I helped organize:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
By the way, if we moved to a basic income (a check from the government that is enough to live on each month, with no means test, funded by taxes or some other means), then it might be justified to do away with some of those other employee protections you decry, because engineers would have the freedom to say "No" and walk away. That might do a lot more to make the US competitive than the race to the bottom for US engineers that you propose.
"Freedom as the Power to Say No"
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/pdf/2004Widerquist.pdf
China will be where the US is soon enough (twenty years?), with a jobless recovery with economic growth but no new jobs, as China's productivity per worker continues to grow and then demand gets saturated when people there realize there is a law of diminishing returns to more goods and services (especially as people move up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to want to do more of their own self-directed stuff). What then?
The best things in life are cheap or free, and if they were not, what kind of world would that be anyway? Someday the Chinese will realize that, hopefully before they finish trashing their environment. At least there is some good news about improvement on Chinese environmental policy lately, so I can hope the Chinese are moving up that curve...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_of_China
By the way, as for why all those US worker protections are so important in the "free market", try reading "The China Price".
http://thechinaprice.org/home.html
"The book exposes a system of unregistered factories that cut corners on safety and working conditions to meet multinational companies' demands for ever-lower prices. It documents how China's export manufacturing industry allows millions of workers to move slowly out of poverty - even as they pay a price in terms of their own health. How the country's coal mining sector continues to thrive - even as it produces a stunning 70 percent of the world's coal mining deaths. And how a growing number of younger wo
I predict within twenty years or so, you can do this kind of separation in your backyard. Rare Earths are actually pretty common. Some people who realize that may not want to put in all the money for a conventional plant?
Meanwhile, the US spends a trillion dollars a year of "defense". But can't be bothered to have a plant in the country to produce strategic materials... What an odd notion of "security".
If you're going to bother to set up such a complex extraction facility, why not go all the way, for exactly the reasons you outline? This sort of process talked about around 1980 can extract and separate anything in there from regular old rock or seawater:
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions"
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
"Flowsheet and process equations for the HF acid-leach process"
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASM5E.html#f541
The chemistry was thought doable even then. Look at the things they worried about being infeasible back then: "If each of the 13 sector components is as complex as the HF acid leach system (certainly a gross overestimate), then the total computer control capability required is about 6 megabytes or 9.4X10e7 bits using 16-bit words."
I have far more than that capacity on my cell phone...
The problem is that in the USA, all these industrial processes are separated due to the logic of the "free market", so no one can plan comprehensive materials extraction, production, and recycling facilities of the sort NASA was envisioning thirty years ago...
But no, the USA has to make plans to attack China (to the cost of trillions if the USA was so foolish) to keep them in line because there are not enough "rare earths" around...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element
"The term "rare earth" arises from the rare earth minerals from which they were first isolated, which were uncommon oxide-type minerals (earths) found in Gadolinite extracted from one mine in the village of Ytterby, Sweden. However, with the exception of the highly-unstable promethium, rare earth elements are found in relatively high concentrations in the earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element in the earth's crust at 68 parts per million."
Do you ever get the feeling somebody is just laughing at us?
Well said. Wish I had mod points right now.
Thanks for the reply, and it's an interesting analogy with the human body and cancer. Still, the human body is about 90% bacterial cells by number, and about 10% bacteria by weight, so it that sense the human immune system is in that sense mostly a legal constitution about getting some bacteria to work well together. :-)
Also, note that populations of living things tend to change over time, so some dissenting cells (mutations) may lead to a very different next generation (though that is rare).
Also, note that classically entropy is about a "closed system". In an "open system" with an energy flux, like the Earth getting thousands of times what our industry uses from solar energy, and with an infinite cosmos for material expansion, different laws or different perspectives may apply, since the energy flux and endless matter can be used to rebuild systems (or duplicate systems, or spread duplicates).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=entropy+closed+system
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=entropy+open+system
Anyway, the most fundamental issue, as told to me by the late professor Larry Slobodkin (very wise guy) in a course on Philosophy and Ecology, is that even if every organism in the universe behaved a certain way, human still have moral choices to make, and could decide to do things differently. I think the same is true for physics. Whatever we see when we look at the physics of the world, people still make moral choices. Although another way to look at that, as a variant on Einstein's point, is to look at the idea of Memetics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
But, even with that idea, ultimately human reason still rests on emotion (or religion) as Einstein suggest.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
Or, George Lakoff saying that:
http://blog.buzzflash.com/contributors/3014
Or, Antonio R. Damasio saying that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error
Or, E.F. Schumacher saying that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed
Again, science can tell you what is, what was, and even the theoretical limits of what might be possible, but it can't tell you what should be. Only emotion (or some sort of religion) can tell you that. Or, taken to another level, politics.
Although, as is pointed out here: :-) So, what we have now is a poverty crisis in the USA related to jobs, but people claim it has nothing to do with politics (or religion, or emotion), it is just "economics". Or we have an illness crisis in the US, but people claim it has nothing to do with politics (or religion, or emotion), but again, it is just about professional choices, economics, health science, and so on.
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
it seems the biggest political issue is often that professions (including science) usually deny they have politics built in to them, so, stating they actually do have politics of various sorts is a political issue...
Also related:
"ivan illich: deschooling, conviviality and the possibilities for informal education and lifelong learning"
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
"Known for his critique of modernization and the corrupting impact of institutions, Ivan Illich's concern with deschooling, learning webs and the disabling effect of professions has struck a chord among m
Great point.
Yes, you have a great point about Self (which would have been licensing cost free in theory...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language)
"The first public release was in 1990, and the next year the team moved to Sun Microsystems where they continued work on the language. Several new releases followed until falling largely dormant in 1995 with the 4.0 version. The latest 4.3 version was released in 2006 and runs on Mac OS X and Solaris."
I don't know why Sun did not choose that. I'd be curious what David Ungar would say about that?
I met David Ungar once, at OOPSLA-97, but he had a bad cold and so was not that chatty then... I hope he is getting enough vitamin D, as vitamin D deficiency is an occupational hazard of the indoor worker, though I did not know that then either, and it is connected with colds and influenza, as well as many other health issues:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_influenza
"A study published in the February 2009 Archives of Internal Medicine involving 1900 adults and children done by the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Children's Hospital Boston, found that people with the lowest blood vitamin D levels reported having significantly more recent colds or cases of the flu. The risks were even higher for those with chronic respiratory disorders, such as asthma and emphysema. They reported that asthma patients with the lowest vitamin D levels were five times more likely to have had a recent respiratory infection; while among COPD patients, respiratory infections were twice as common among those with vitamin D deficiency. However, the authors stress that the study's results need to be confirmed in clinical trials before vitamin D can be recommended to prevent colds and flu..[4][5]"
Could vitamin D deficiency syndrome explain why we got Java instead of Self? :-(
Beyond the opposite of Not-Invented-Here (A prophet is without honor in his or her own country), perhaps Sun's choice is because Self used an enormous amount of memory for the time, whereas Smalltalk could run on smaller systems (part of that is about the implementation efficiencies of using classes)? VisualWorks was already used in embedded stuff (running Fabs as "ControlWorks") so it would have been a much safer bet in that sense.
And then, if you are going to do a home-brew system, the C syntax is commonplace...
I also have some comments about my own attempts at prototype-based systems, and why classes have some big advantages practically:
"PataPata critique: the good, the bad, the ugly"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/critique.html
Again though, you still have a great point. And NewtonScript, say, was a prototype-based system designed for low memory environments like the Newton, so it was not impossible...
I think most people just don't understand how problematical the C-style syntax is for creating self-documenting easy-to-read code compared to Smalltalk's.
I agree, Scala is a great step forward, as are many other JVM languages, Jython, JRuby, Kawa, Clojure, and so on...
http://www.is-research.de/info/vmlanguages/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages
It's too bad Sun did not focus on making a universal VM from the start... Or that the Smalltalk people did not embrace other languages...
More more comments by me on that general issue:
"[Edu-sig] Freedom: some Smalltalk history and Python implications"
http://www.mail-archive.com/edu-sig@python.org/msg02717.html
And that references my post from 12/28/96 (I'll put here since it is only at archive.org probably):
"Squeak and the Babel of programming languages"
http://web.archive.org/web/19980121002624/http://www.create.ucsb.edu/squeak/9612.html#Letter94
"""
Date: 96 Dec 27 8:13:49 pm
From: Paul Fernhout [old email snipped]
To: squeak@create.ucsb.edu
Subject: Squeak and the Babel of programming languages
Here are some things that could be done with Squeak. Will I do any of them myself? I don't know. At this point, I'm still figuring out what use I want to make of Squeak, and more generally, what Squeak could be all about.
* The main idea
In general, I'd say the world has too many programming languages (and development systems) and too few standard comprehensive libraries (along with their accompanying architectures and program interfaces). So how can Squeak fit into this Babel of programming languages?
* Squeak as a repository of algorithms
One thing I'd like to see in Squeak is a complete set of algorithms and patterns drawn from the published literature. That would possibly encourage Squeak's use in programming education, in rapid prototyping, and as a repository of programming knowledge. Even if people didn't deliver in Squeak, they could begin to rely on it as a source of inspiration and algorithm templates.
* Squeak as the interpreter of choice
The world also has too few tools (like LEX & YACC) for supporting developing application specific languages. I=92d also like to see Squeak with good tools for parsing, interpreting, compiling, and translating - like a TGEN port. If Squeak had such tools, one could consider doing the following.
* Squeak emulating & being emulated in other languages
Squeak is one of only a very few well done, reasonably stable, and completely open development environments in a language that appears to have a strong future (maybe it is the only one?). The fact that Squeak is implemented in Smalltalk is important, because Smalltalk is a self-reflective system. However, this does not mean the Squeak tools (debugger, inspector, class browser) might not be useful for developing in other languages (NewtonScript, Lisp, Basic, C++, Forth, Python, Object Cobol) since languages are something other than their most efficient implementation.
Two Smalltalk companies have moved a bit in this direction. OTI has a product that lets one use their ENVY tools to browse, modify, and recompile C++. ParcPlace has a language parser in its advanced tools kit that lets you create classes which have their methods parsed in another language you define using a simple language specification grammar.
The other side of this language coin is that Squeak has an open VM that does not have to be tied to C. It could theoretically generate a VM in Lisp, Delphi, Forth, NewtonScript, or Assembler.
C is a very common language. So having Squeak make C development easier through browsers, as well as allowing methods with embedded C (like SmalltalkX) is one place to start.
Ideally, one could imagine Sque
Yes, a fundamental issue in a high-tech world becomes not so much how to produce more, but how to distribute what is produced. Marshall Brain wrote a sci-fi story about that here, with both a dystopian and a utopian ending depending on whether things produced by robots are distributed unequally or equally (as everyone loses their "jobs").
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Thanks for that reference to "Making Money".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_Money