If you had read even the small fragment of the article I linked to, you would read that "... most brands of anarchism... believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else".
So it is strange you then call me an anarchist.
Read the linked article (if you dare to allow your worldview to be challenged a teensy bit) and you will see answers to the issues you raise.
And if you poke at the issue of money or conventional economics even the tiniest bit, you will see it is now widely agreed they are very poor yardsticks for measuring anything meaningful to humans or the biosphere (health, safety, community, sustainability, joy, hope, justice, diversity).
If you look at the history of the adoption of programming languages you'll see how much business decisions and advertising has to do with what the masses of programmers end up using (especially in the case of Java and XML).
In hindsight, it is obvious that these [money, stock, loans, corporations] should be protected just as physical property, to foster economic activity and capitalism.
Why is that "obvious"?
Capitalism as an ideology has been widely discredited worldwide (although the media doesn't reflect that) through its end results in practice (colonialism and its aftermath, slavery and its aftermath, increasing rich/poor divide, pollution, inappropriate technological solutions, human suffering, mindless work) as opposed to claims in theory, see for example: Millionaire Wannabes.
If Capitalism worked, we'd all be using Smalltalk or Lisp (developed thirty years ago) instead of Java and XML.
Money (in terms of Federal Reserve Notes) and loans (in terms of usury with interest and a fractional reserve banking system) are also equally problematical. In fact, the American Revolution was fought mainly over the right for the colonies to print their own paper money (a fact long forgotten or suppressed). See:
The World's Alternative Trading Network for some more details. Or google on "Fractional Reserve". Alan Greenspan isn't busy setting interest rates to help everyone out -- he is trying to be an optimum parasite to get the most blood out of everyone he can by balancing drawing blood (interest) against how big the economy is.
Corporations? They are the biggest marauders around in many ways. Why should they have more than human rights in the USA? Effectively their charters are no longer revoked and if they commit a crime they just get fined and maybe some employees (disposable cells, like your skin cells) go to prison, while nothing about the corporation really changes. Why should investors have limited liability? If people support a bad cause, shouldn't they too go to jail? It is happening now with people who supposedly support "terrorism", so why should corporate investors get a free pass when they support pollution, habitat destruction, sweatshop practices, employee boredom, and so on?
In fact, the whole notion of "Work" underlying all that stuff is itself bogus. For alternatives to capitalism, consider:
Buddhist Economics
or:
The End of Work.
From that last:
"Curiously --- maybe not --- all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else. Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work--and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs--they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and
If there was any value to what you suggest, how did we get this far without copyright at all prior to about 300 years ago (starting with the Statutes of Anne etc.). Are you suggesting no one painted before 1700AD, or wrote books, or came up with new ideas and so on? Why cling to such a scarcity worldview? See James P. Hogan's sci-fi novels (like Voyage from Yesteryear) for another perspective.
I was pleased to see someone else post this idea to slashdot. Great minds think alike!
I posted something earlier to slashdot quite a while back on this, inspired vaguely if I recall correctly from another person's slashdot sig comment (which I could not track down again -- but was something like, "if IP is so valuable, why isn't it taxed?"). Can't seem to find my older posts -- I guess slashdot loses links to them as they get rolled together into archives?
I later posted to Lessig's blog on it in Jan 2003, where it was discussed some such as here
The essential post there is: "Copyrights should be taxed annually at 3% of a self-assessed buyout value, similar to real estate, to make up for the external costs copyrights impose on society. Watch Disney squirm as they are forced to argue the mouse is like a piece of real estate but they should not pay property tax on it. We might see an immediate increase in the public domain as rights holders decide not to pay the tax for some works and those works immediately move into the PD as a consequence. Other works that are self-assessed at low amounts to avoid taxes might be bought into the public domain by individuals paying the assessed amount directly to the rights holders. If implemented internationally, developing nations might make a tidy sum by such taxes for defending specific copyrights while at the same time having immediate access to all other materials for which rights holders decide not to pay the tax for that country. The tax payments by default reinstitute the notion of formal registration, making it easy to find rights holders and the current status of previously copyrighted works. This is an Aikido approach -- rather than oppose the strong force, redirect it for your benefit. With looming defecits, this gives the US government a new revenue stream."
I think Lessig is trying to do a good job, but in my opinion, he proposes half measures which receive only lukewarm support (and strong opposition).
This anime grapples somewhat with the issue of the tension between the elderly needing complete care and automation being cheaper but impersonal. It made me think about the moral and social dimensions of the issue -- especially as, after all, even an elderly feeble senile person augmented by being hooked up to an internet connected AI nursebot is part of Vinge's singularity and could perhaps outthink and outcompete a normal unaugmented person. See: Roujin Z From that page: Roujin Z Plot Synopsis: "In the very near future in Japan, the number of elderly people is steadily rising, and it is becoming more and more difficult to care for them. This is of concern to the student nurse Haruko. You see, there is a government experiment with the goal of completely automated care of the elderly going on, and it just so happens that the test subject for the project is going to be Haruko's patient. The project, a bed that can do anything from bathe a patient to have a conversation with him, is a miracle of modern automation. Things get a little weird when the old man starts calling for help--using the bed's built in Internet connection. Well, Haruko and friends have no choice but to help the old man escape, but they're having a number of problems with that process. After a couple of failed attempts, the bed (yes, the bed) decides to take matters into it's own hands. You see, the bed starts thinking that it's the old man's dead wife, and doesnt like the way he's being treated. Yes, you read that right. To make matters worse, the bed was also a secret military experiment, and has capabilities to match. So we've got an automated elder care bed that thinks it's an old man's wife running away from the Ministry of Health and the military and wreaking havoc in the process, all the while carrying around an out of it old guy and being chased by some overzealous nursing students who are in turn being monitored by a crew of elderly hackers. Then things start getting really weird..."
Good point, and I had indeed skipped over his first paranthetical comment in my eagerness to say something pithy (sorry), though it's not clear from the poster that for the one (of two) points he tried to change that the change got lost, or that it got undone. Clearly the second point is one he had not tried to change. Looking at the Wikipedia article and other comments, it does seem like his points are somewhat controversial issues, from Wikipedia Controversial_issue "The primary characteristic of a controversial issue is that the article is constantly being edited in a circular manner, or even worse provoking edit wars. This page is conceived as a location for articles that regularly become biased and need to be fixed, or articles that were once the subject of an NPOV dispute and are likely to suffer future disputes", so perhaps his one change was undone? Still, there is a facility in the Wikipedia (discussions) to approach these problems if he has faith in the process.
What I hear you (or more the original poster) are saying is that you have a desire you want satisfied without paying for it someway; I am specifically critizing that perceived attitude (and also the notion that there is a single valid perspective on knowledge agreed on by "experts") -- one reason why I referenced Lafferty. Again you miss my point, so I'll be a little more direct in making it again.
Essentially, whatever your supposed need to have the "product" of an "expert reviewed" free encyclopaedia, you are essentially proposing what can be thought of as immoral slacking in your reply to my reply -- by proposing the primacy of your desire to be a "user" with rights to free stuff and not the need to also be a "citizen" with obligations to help with quality and quantity of free stuff. So, you appear to claim rights without responsibilities. That is just not a defensible moral position (obviously it might be defensible, say, militarily for a time, if you can use the threat of force to get people to work for you for free as slaves). The net needs more "citizens" (or netizens) and less "users", IMHO. Look at, say, James P. Hogan's sci-fi novel _Voyage From Yesteryear_ to see the difference in attitude and what it means for humanity. Or, look at the culture of some of the Native People of the Americas who believed in universal abundance and a gift economy (before Western militarism and bioterorrism and corporatism took its toll).
To soften this criticism, I'll say I am guilty of it too sometimes -- I haven't added anything to Wikipedia though I use it sometimes (although I have occasionally been thinking about how to make it peer to peer). You or the original poster may well make wonderful contributions to other projects like FreeBSD and have a fair argument to expect high quality in others free work in exchange for yours.
Another deeper point is that the notion of an "encyclopedia" is to an extent a farce anyway -- it is just a sampling of all human knowledge and experience based on what the editors given their own biases could pay for and fit into a few dozen printed volumes. Wikipedia is one example of something so much greater. Beyond some basics, and even there sometimes, "accurate information" is a very subjective and problematical concept, at the very least because all information is subject to interpretation and context and selection (e.g. will an article on "red shift" discuss Halton Arp?), whereas collaboration is almost universally a good thing. A lot of experts have econmic reasons to give out poor answers and not challenge the academic status-quo and related dogmas. See for example Kicking the Sacred Cow: Questioning the Unquestionable and Thinking the Impermissible. He makes the point that engineering (like a bridge) ultimately works to fill a need or doesn't -- but science itself (or expert opinion) can end up becoming self-perpetuating dogma.
We may just have to agree to disagree here. Also, a better overall net system (or Google) woudl make it easy to find the original poster's criticism of the Puerto Rico article, making this argument moot as the new information might in the future be integrated by the original act of posting the ciriticism on a web site like Slashdot.
That was quite likely his point, but your reply misses mine. My point is that putting out useful information on the web is now a collaborative process made possible by technologies like Wikis. All you are suggesting is that the public may take on the role of free rider (and somehow wants to do that); I'm suggesting it is becoming the netizens civic reponsbility to give back -- and in this case, correct information they think it factually in error. Just like a free country doesn't stay that way unless everyone use their freedom to preserve it, so too we won't have free information sources if everyone takes the attitude of let someone else fix it. The original poster obviously cares enough about Puerto Rico's history to complain here -- it wouldn't take that much more effort to just fix the problem as they see it. Frankly, drawing upon typical conventionally produced texbook-style information sources (see _Lies My Teacher Told Me_), "Emily's fifth grade report on Puerto Rico" is probably already a bunch of malarky (ignoring for example aspects of imperialism and probably a puff piece, say, on how great it is the US government supposedly looks out for the best interests of people in the Carribean and has their best interests at heart). What is possible now through the internet provides a chance to make this better. And in any case, isn't it more important Emily learn about Wikis and the importance of multiple perspectives and collaboration than being taught to just simply sit down, shut up, do what she is told, and regurgitate the party line?
(vaguely paraphrased from "Polity and Custom of the Camiroi", by RA Lafferty, where any citizen noticing a substandard work of art or landscaping or so on was obligated by custom to fix or improve it by their own effort).
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ [Windows only still, sorry, but source on the web site under GPL.]
The Garden with Insight garden simulator is an educational simulation that uses weather, soil, and plant growth models to simulate a simple garden in an open-ended microworld setting. You can plant vegetables and grow them to learn more about plants, the soil, the weather, gardening, and science.
First, turn off your broadcast television, exercise or do something physical at least three times a week, and eat healthier such as by drinking more clean water instead of soda or juice and eating organic food in reasonable proportions (especially organic meats if not a vegetarian).
But you'll be positioned to make the best of it and yet still see how the world can be a madebetter place to for the bulk of humanity and other creatures.
Always remember in your darker hours to at least ask yourself the question, "Can life be made worth living?" And in your brighter hours, remember to ask yourself if you are playing a finite (to win) game or an infinite (to play) game?
Now go out and take some educated risks to try to make life worth living -- despite your future happiness possibilities already almost being ruined by being convinced you that you are "bright" just because you know some technical things (same thing almost happened to me).
David Goodstein, Vice Provost of CalTech on the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme which drives science education in the USA and started to fail in the 1970s and, in his words: http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm [house.gov]
" In the course of a career, a professor in a research university turns out, on the average, about 15 Ph.D.'s. Many of these would like, themselves, to become in turn professors in research universities and turn out 15 more Ph.D.'s. After all, these were the gems that were selected at each stage of the mining and sorting operation. Becoming a professor seems to many of them the natural culmination of their successful educations. That is obviously one of the principal engines of the exponential growth that lasted for a hundred years in America. Those students are bitterly disappointed when they find out the jobs they want aren't there, and their disappointment seeps down through the ranks, turning younger students away from science.... The problem, to reiterate, is that science education in America is designed to select a small group of elite scientists. An unintended but inevitable side effect is that everyone else is left out. As a consequence of that, 20,000 American high schools lack a single qualified physics teacher, half the math classes in American schools are taught by people who lack the qualifications to teach them, and companies will increasingly find themselves without the technical competence they need at all levels from the shop floor to the executive suite."
One of the things I got from Infinite in All Directions
- it was a delight to me, and I've been quoting it ever since
- is that you honor inventors as much as scientists.
It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things
as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist,
but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him,
and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.
Is it the scientists who are putting them down?
Yes. There is this snobbism among scientists, especially the
academic types.
Are there other kinds?
There are scientists in industry who are a bit more broad
minded. The academics look down on them, too.
Is that a weird British hangover?
It's even worse in Germany. Intellectual snobbery is a worldwide
disease. It certainly was very bad in China and probably held
back development there by 2,000 years.
How would you stop this intellectual snobbery?
I would abolish the PhD system. The PhD system is the real
root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider
themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.
Are those getting PhDs rewarded in any other way than as
an honor?
It's much more than an honor. It's a ticket to a job.
So is anybody buying this? Are PhDs being abolished or
disregarded?
No. The stranglehold has gotten even tighter over the years.
It's become essentially like the MD - with much less justification.
It's simply a barrier you have to climb over before you can make
a career, and it's being imposed on more and more jobs. At even
the smallest liberal arts college, nowadays, they say with pride,
All of our faculty have PhDs. Many of the best teachers
are thrown out because they don't have a PhD. It's a paper qualification
that poisons the whole field.
What you're saying reminds me of a situation a couple of
years ago when my colleague at GBN, Peter Schwartz, and I tried to
do a book called Biofutures. When we started to research
the future of biotechnology, we found an interesting contrast
with the computer world. You can't get computer people to shut
up about the future. They go on and on about it. In biotech we
couldn't find anybody who would talk about the future.
There are a couple of interesting components to this. First
is the government regulation you speak of, which has good reason
for being in place because of the life-critical issues, deep
cultural issues, and so on. The result is, of course, that when
any of the researchers start talking out of school, saying, Well,
maybe we'll cure death, that's it - they don't get the
money, because they're obviously irresponsible.
The second component of this idea brings me on to your
point about PhDs. Because of the whole realm of government permissions
and grants surrounding biotech, it's attracting more PhD types
and fewer amateur types, whereas computer technology tremendously
enables amateurs.
What also strikes me is that the culture we see here [at the
PC Forum,
the annual computer conference run by Dyson's daughter Esther] is far friendlier to women
than the academic world I come from; it's largely because you
don't have to have a PhD. You don't even have to have an MBA
to run a company. Many of these women,
Why not speech? Answers...
on
OQO Examined
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> Voice recognition keeps being touted as the holy grail and end of all these problems but where is it? I remember VR demos from the 486 days, you can't tell me a 200-400mhz PDA can't manage that much horsepower.
Having worked on such systems, a few reasons (not to say it isn't coming someday...): 1. Audio systems on most PCs, especially portables, have historically been of poor quality so accuracy suffers. 2. You have to wear a properly configured and positioned microfphone, or accuracy again suffers. 3. Accuracy of 99% (unrealistic) still means correcting one word in 100 -- and corrections may take a lot of time and interrupt a flow of thought. And, since corrections are usually real words and not typos, they may be hard to spot. 4. Algorithm work on the PC moved towards floating point; many portable processors lack floating point. 5. Speech is very useful in interactive conversation between two people -- transcribing dictation when you don't know the problem domain and can't ask questions is a hard problem even for human transcriptionists. 6. Speech gives up some privacy (although cell phones do too). 7. The killer in portability -- SR takes a lot of CPU, which translates into a lot of battery power, which means short lived handhelds.
Personally, I would like to see the older discrete (pause between words) stuff used because it can be quite good when trained -- but the market seems to want continuous. Also, people are trying things like using wireless phones to offload speech processing to network servers (but wireless uses battery power too!)
Also, having said all that, I think conversational interfaces will be more and more important as time goes on in a variety of situations (although they will work alongside other modalities).
Thanks for the link from the 1998 paper (which suggests energy payback time in a four to eight years when including batteries for then (1998) current hardware, and perhaps 1.2 to 2.4 years for future systems).
Still, while six year old papers can help prove faster payback, citing them can't really prove slower payback in an exponentially increasing field like PV production and research (like a glance at the SolarBuzz site whould show). That would be like saying today's new CAD or game software should expect to be running on Pentium 100MHz with 640 X 480 X 256 colors with 32MB main memory and that you can't expect anything higher end to ever be available.
Currently, solar companies are moving to producing their own silicon because of the exponential growth in the solar market. Additionally, newer approaches, such as making PV cells out of plastic, may reduce energy costs very much.
> There really is no such thing as a free lunch.
Just look outside your window. Trees are solar collectors that are self replicating, produce their own power, and use solar panels so cheap they may throw them away annually and make new ones each spring. They may even produce fruit free for the lunch-time picking! So there is plenty of proof of concept here for cheap solar collectors.
While it is true current production techniques for meat or power may be wasteful for various reaons, remember the Native Peoples living with Buffalo on the Great Plains didn't require oil to make meat. It all depends on how you make things and what resources you use for that. The statistics you site are probably for feedlot grain fed beef. Grass fed beef on appropriate range land may require much less resources. So too, newer solar panels may require much less energy to produce then older designs.
One flaw in your argument is you ignore the exteranl costs of fossil fuels and nukes (pollution, militarism, monopolies, usa on hook for liability, etc.) which the tax code might seek to redress. So, one can manipulate the tax code to balance people being forced to live with acid rain or large defense layouts for the middle east so someone else can get power. So perhaps the deeper moral flaw lies in an economic system that ignores external costs?
Your information was true about fifty years ago with the first crystalline solar cells (which are still working by the way!). However, depending on how you estimate it (e.g. whether you include energy cost related to advertising and shipping etc.) the energy payback is typically anywhere from around one to four years depending on the type of solar cell and where it is used. See for example: http://www.nrel.gov/ncpv/pdfs/24596.pdf
and http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf
From the second PDF:
"Energy payback estimates for rooftop PV systems are 4, 3, 2, and 1 years: 4 years for systems using current multicrystalline-silicon PV modules, 3 years for current thin-film modules, 2 years for anticipated multicrystalline modules, and 1 year for anticipated thin-film modules (see Figure 1).With energy paybacks of 1 to 4 years and assumed life expectancies of 30 years, 87% to 97% of the energy that PV systems generate won't be plagued by pollution, greenhouse gases, and depletion of resources.... Based on models and real data, the idea that PV cannot pay back its energy investment is simply a myth. Indeed, researchers Dones and Frischknecht found that PV-systems fabrication and fossil-fuel energy production have similar energy payback periods (including costs for mining, transportation, refining, and construction)."
Future versions of PV may of course payback their embodied energy in even shorter times.
And nothing meant personally by this, but perhaps you might ask why you have been misinformed on such a crucial issue? Perhaps somebody stands to make money by keeping you in the dark?
PV panels will win in the end (barring another breakthrough like cold fusion). Standard arguments against PV and rebuttals:
Doesn't making solar panels pollute? Not so true now, and if we don't solve the pollution problem for all manufacturing, nuclear power, solar space satellites, or any other energy source will still bury us in waste from consumer goods produced using that energy. So zero emissions manufacturing and recycling needs to be solved in any case.
Isn't PV is expensive? It is cost competitive in many situations right now, and it would be just about everywhere right now if the end user had to pay the true cost of fossil fuels (pollution, militarism, centralization, etc. which would mean the true cost of oil is now over $200 per barrel) And the costs continue to drop -- with no theoretical reason PV panels should ultimately cost much more than glass, shingles, or sheet plastic.
What about producing and storing power in nothern climates? No one says people have to be a purists at the start. Liquid fuels like ethanol or gaseous fuels like hydrogen can be produced in a variety of ways from PV in some centralized facilities and transported by truck or pipelines to be used for about 10% of a northern home's total energy use (mainly winter use) for northern climates which don't get much sun in the winter (as an alternative to solar arrays that are ten times larger to supply all power needs in the least sun winter months). These systems can also be used to cogenerate heat and power. Eventually energy storage techniques will continue to improve (better batteries, better hydrogen storage, PV systems that produce ethanol or other liquid fuels directly) and then even this minimal centralized assistance can be reduced.
Overall, decentralized power will be the future, just like we now have decentralized computing and decentralized printing. There may still be some use for centralized big power plants, despite various social costs of centralization (such as for making aluminum from ore), just the equivalent of the mainframe of today is still useful for big data crunching tasks. Still, as nanotech proliferates (leading up to the StarTrek replicator), decentralized power from PV will be able to handle more and more material production needs (including enabling people to make their own PV solar panels at home as they need them -- and probably enabling them to recycle PV systems locally as well).
So, no need for nukes! Don't underestimate what thirty or so years of continued innovation on PV and materials science and nanotech will produce.
Excerpt from the first:
So anyway, what do people think? Would such a license management
approach with tools, protocols, and standards (ensuring every work
received or sent comes with a legally binding machine-readable license
and related audit trails for derived works) promote more clearly titled
(in a legal sense) free software or would it be the slippery slope to
the "right-to-read" future? Without explicit licensing handling, are we
just setting the free software or open content communities up for legal
challenges down the road as people just try to do their best without
such tools? Is trying to automate license handling really that much
different (in a bad way) from the current situation of often
distributing zip files including both content and license?
Excerpt from the second:
This need for a license is especially true for making derived works you
plan to redistribute, because here your liability seems highest. If we
are to have a lot of free software and free content, based on fine grain
collaboration made possible by the internet allowing us to rapidly
modify each others works, that is a lot of licenses citing a lot of
authors. If these licenses get lost (as in the midi file download
example I cited), the content can no longer be considered free. Handling
lots of papers is what computers are good at. The less time people need
to spend thinking about, negotiating, and managing paperwork and extra
files related to free licenses, the more time they can spend making free
software and free content.
Ray Bradbury is a great writer. But, like many sci-fi writers, he misses two things. One is the fact that self-replicating space habitats using sunlight and asteroidal ore could create thousands of times the surface area of the Earth and Mars in total across trillions of O'Neill, Bernal, and Savage style habitats (forming a sort of loose Dyson shell around the sun).
The other is a basic rah-rah view of US history. Consider his statement in the light of books like _A People's History of the United States_ or _Lies My Teacher Told Me_:
So on the way to India, all three of them bumped into a huge obstruction. An obstruction that was empty, that was uncivilized, that was cold, and rejected them.... Four hundred years before Kitty Hawk, an Italian lands on an empty shore, and four hundred years later the Wright Brothers take off into the air above the Earth.
Uncivilized? Then why was the Iroquis Confederacy an inspiration for the US constitution? Many aspects of several native cultures surpasses what the US has now. (Not all, but many).
Empty? Tell that to the ten to twenty north american natives who were mostly wiped out by disease brought by such visitors.
Unfriendly? Who kept up forest trails, made the praries, offered food, guides, and other assistance? Again, the natives.
Cold? The continent has a wonderful climate in many parts.
400 years? Just think what such wise people as many of the American Native Peoples (such as documented in the book _The Walking People_) could have accomplished without terrorist occupiers using biological warfare and other brutal military methods against them. Perhaps they would have reached Mars and even the stars a century ago.
David Goodstein, Vice Provost of CalTech on the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme which drives science education in the USA and started to fail in the 1970s and, in his words: http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm
" In the course of a career, a professor in a research university turns out, on the average, about 15 Ph.D.'s. Many of these would like, themselves, to become in turn professors in research universities and turn out 15 more Ph.D.'s. After all, these were the gems that were selected at each stage of the mining and sorting operation. Becoming a professor seems to many of them the natural culmination of their successful educations. That is obviously one of the principal engines of the exponential growth that lasted for a hundred years in America. Those students are bitterly disappointed when they find out the jobs they want aren't there, and their disappointment seeps down through the ranks, turning younger students away from science.... The problem, to reiterate, is that science education in America is designed to select a small group of elite scientists. An unintended but inevitable side effect is that everyone else is left out. As a consequence of that, 20,000 American high schools lack a single qualified physics teacher, half the math classes in American schools are taught by people who lack the qualifications to teach them, and companies will increasingly find themselves without the technical competence they need at all levels from the shop floor to the executive suite."
Lisp and Smalltalk possibly in the 70s & certainly in the 80s (when I used ZetaLisp on a Symbolics and Smalltalk on various hardware -- Mac, TI, etc.).
How much has been forgotten. Time and time again I hear people claiming Java invented something when it was just the place they first saw it compared to programming in C or TurboPascal or whatever. Java does have some ideas it popularized -- but they are things like interfaces. Much of its class design like for Swing was taken from ParcPlace Smatallk's VisualWorks. Hotspot profiling came from Smalltalk. MVC came from Smalltalk. etc. etc. Between Forth, Smalltalk, and Lisp (and a few other languages and libraries) most of the innovations people see now were invented a long time ago. VMs came from Smalltalk and IBM mainframes (first) and Pascal and Forth. Another example -- XML is a stupid version of Lisp s-expressions. And so it goes...
Slashdot Mirror
If you had read even the small fragment of the article I linked to, you would read that "... most brands of anarchism ... believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else".
So it is strange you then call me an anarchist.
Read the linked article (if you dare to allow your worldview to be challenged a teensy bit) and you will see answers to the issues you raise.
And if you poke at the issue of money or conventional economics even the tiniest bit, you will see it is now widely agreed they are very poor yardsticks for measuring anything meaningful to humans or the biosphere (health, safety, community, sustainability, joy, hope, justice, diversity).
If you look at the history of the adoption of programming languages you'll see how much business decisions and advertising has to do with what the masses of programmers end up using (especially in the case of Java and XML).
Why is that "obvious"? Capitalism as an ideology has been widely discredited worldwide (although the media doesn't reflect that) through its end results in practice (colonialism and its aftermath, slavery and its aftermath, increasing rich/poor divide, pollution, inappropriate technological solutions, human suffering, mindless work) as opposed to claims in theory, see for example: Millionaire Wannabes. If Capitalism worked, we'd all be using Smalltalk or Lisp (developed thirty years ago) instead of Java and XML.
Money (in terms of Federal Reserve Notes) and loans (in terms of usury with interest and a fractional reserve banking system) are also equally problematical. In fact, the American Revolution was fought mainly over the right for the colonies to print their own paper money (a fact long forgotten or suppressed). See: The World's Alternative Trading Network for some more details. Or google on "Fractional Reserve". Alan Greenspan isn't busy setting interest rates to help everyone out -- he is trying to be an optimum parasite to get the most blood out of everyone he can by balancing drawing blood (interest) against how big the economy is.
Corporations? They are the biggest marauders around in many ways. Why should they have more than human rights in the USA? Effectively their charters are no longer revoked and if they commit a crime they just get fined and maybe some employees (disposable cells, like your skin cells) go to prison, while nothing about the corporation really changes. Why should investors have limited liability? If people support a bad cause, shouldn't they too go to jail? It is happening now with people who supposedly support "terrorism", so why should corporate investors get a free pass when they support pollution, habitat destruction, sweatshop practices, employee boredom, and so on?
In fact, the whole notion of "Work" underlying all that stuff is itself bogus. For alternatives to capitalism, consider: Buddhist Economics or: The End of Work. From that last: "Curiously --- maybe not --- all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else. Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work--and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs--they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and
If there was any value to what you suggest, how did we get this far without copyright at all prior to about 300 years ago (starting with the Statutes of Anne etc.). Are you suggesting no one painted before 1700AD, or wrote books, or came up with new ideas and so on? Why cling to such a scarcity worldview? See James P. Hogan's sci-fi novels (like Voyage from Yesteryear) for another perspective.
I posted something earlier to slashdot quite a while back on this, inspired vaguely if I recall correctly from another person's slashdot sig comment (which I could not track down again -- but was something like, "if IP is so valuable, why isn't it taxed?"). Can't seem to find my older posts -- I guess slashdot loses links to them as they get rolled together into archives?
I later posted to Lessig's blog on it in Jan 2003, where it was discussed some such as here The essential post there is: "Copyrights should be taxed annually at 3% of a self-assessed buyout value, similar to real estate, to make up for the external costs copyrights impose on society. Watch Disney squirm as they are forced to argue the mouse is like a piece of real estate but they should not pay property tax on it. We might see an immediate increase in the public domain as rights holders decide not to pay the tax for some works and those works immediately move into the PD as a consequence. Other works that are self-assessed at low amounts to avoid taxes might be bought into the public domain by individuals paying the assessed amount directly to the rights holders. If implemented internationally, developing nations might make a tidy sum by such taxes for defending specific copyrights while at the same time having immediate access to all other materials for which rights holders decide not to pay the tax for that country. The tax payments by default reinstitute the notion of formal registration, making it easy to find rights holders and the current status of previously copyrighted works. This is an Aikido approach -- rather than oppose the strong force, redirect it for your benefit. With looming defecits, this gives the US government a new revenue stream."
I think Lessig is trying to do a good job, but in my opinion, he proposes half measures which receive only lukewarm support (and strong opposition).
I also have a long essay on what the US could do to reform itself financially, including a copyright tax: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingASt arTrekSociety.html
This anime grapples somewhat with the issue of the tension between the elderly needing complete care and automation being cheaper but impersonal. It made me think about the moral and social dimensions of the issue -- especially as, after all, even an elderly feeble senile person augmented by being hooked up to an internet connected AI nursebot is part of Vinge's singularity and could perhaps outthink and outcompete a normal unaugmented person. See: Roujin Z From that page: Roujin Z Plot Synopsis: "In the very near future in Japan, the number of elderly people is steadily rising, and it is becoming more and more difficult to care for them. This is of concern to the student nurse Haruko. You see, there is a government experiment with the goal of completely automated care of the elderly going on, and it just so happens that the test subject for the project is going to be Haruko's patient. The project, a bed that can do anything from bathe a patient to have a conversation with him, is a miracle of modern automation. Things get a little weird when the old man starts calling for help--using the bed's built in Internet connection. Well, Haruko and friends have no choice but to help the old man escape, but they're having a number of problems with that process. After a couple of failed attempts, the bed (yes, the bed) decides to take matters into it's own hands. You see, the bed starts thinking that it's the old man's dead wife, and doesnt like the way he's being treated. Yes, you read that right. To make matters worse, the bed was also a secret military experiment, and has capabilities to match. So we've got an automated elder care bed that thinks it's an old man's wife running away from the Ministry of Health and the military and wreaking havoc in the process, all the while carrying around an out of it old guy and being chased by some overzealous nursing students who are in turn being monitored by a crew of elderly hackers. Then things start getting really weird..."
Good point, and I had indeed skipped over his first paranthetical comment in my eagerness to say something pithy (sorry), though it's not clear from the poster that for the one (of two) points he tried to change that the change got lost, or that it got undone. Clearly the second point is one he had not tried to change. Looking at the Wikipedia article and other comments, it does seem like his points are somewhat controversial issues, from Wikipedia Controversial_issue "The primary characteristic of a controversial issue is that the article is constantly being edited in a circular manner, or even worse provoking edit wars. This page is conceived as a location for articles that regularly become biased and need to be fixed, or articles that were once the subject of an NPOV dispute and are likely to suffer future disputes", so perhaps his one change was undone? Still, there is a facility in the Wikipedia (discussions) to approach these problems if he has faith in the process.
Essentially, whatever your supposed need to have the "product" of an "expert reviewed" free encyclopaedia, you are essentially proposing what can be thought of as immoral slacking in your reply to my reply -- by proposing the primacy of your desire to be a "user" with rights to free stuff and not the need to also be a "citizen" with obligations to help with quality and quantity of free stuff. So, you appear to claim rights without responsibilities. That is just not a defensible moral position (obviously it might be defensible, say, militarily for a time, if you can use the threat of force to get people to work for you for free as slaves). The net needs more "citizens" (or netizens) and less "users", IMHO. Look at, say, James P. Hogan's sci-fi novel _Voyage From Yesteryear_ to see the difference in attitude and what it means for humanity. Or, look at the culture of some of the Native People of the Americas who believed in universal abundance and a gift economy (before Western militarism and bioterorrism and corporatism took its toll).
To soften this criticism, I'll say I am guilty of it too sometimes -- I haven't added anything to Wikipedia though I use it sometimes (although I have occasionally been thinking about how to make it peer to peer). You or the original poster may well make wonderful contributions to other projects like FreeBSD and have a fair argument to expect high quality in others free work in exchange for yours.
Another deeper point is that the notion of an "encyclopedia" is to an extent a farce anyway -- it is just a sampling of all human knowledge and experience based on what the editors given their own biases could pay for and fit into a few dozen printed volumes. Wikipedia is one example of something so much greater. Beyond some basics, and even there sometimes, "accurate information" is a very subjective and problematical concept, at the very least because all information is subject to interpretation and context and selection (e.g. will an article on "red shift" discuss Halton Arp?), whereas collaboration is almost universally a good thing. A lot of experts have econmic reasons to give out poor answers and not challenge the academic status-quo and related dogmas. See for example Kicking the Sacred Cow: Questioning the Unquestionable and Thinking the Impermissible. He makes the point that engineering (like a bridge) ultimately works to fill a need or doesn't -- but science itself (or expert opinion) can end up becoming self-perpetuating dogma.
We may just have to agree to disagree here. Also, a better overall net system (or Google) woudl make it easy to find the original poster's criticism of the Puerto Rico article, making this argument moot as the new information might in the future be integrated by the original act of posting the ciriticism on a web site like Slashdot.
That was quite likely his point, but your reply misses mine. My point is that putting out useful information on the web is now a collaborative process made possible by technologies like Wikis. All you are suggesting is that the public may take on the role of free rider (and somehow wants to do that); I'm suggesting it is becoming the netizens civic reponsbility to give back -- and in this case, correct information they think it factually in error. Just like a free country doesn't stay that way unless everyone use their freedom to preserve it, so too we won't have free information sources if everyone takes the attitude of let someone else fix it. The original poster obviously cares enough about Puerto Rico's history to complain here -- it wouldn't take that much more effort to just fix the problem as they see it. Frankly, drawing upon typical conventionally produced texbook-style information sources (see _Lies My Teacher Told Me_), "Emily's fifth grade report on Puerto Rico" is probably already a bunch of malarky (ignoring for example aspects of imperialism and probably a puff piece, say, on how great it is the US government supposedly looks out for the best interests of people in the Carribean and has their best interests at heart). What is possible now through the internet provides a chance to make this better. And in any case, isn't it more important Emily learn about Wikis and the importance of multiple perspectives and collaboration than being taught to just simply sit down, shut up, do what she is told, and regurgitate the party line?
You see your duty, wiki web citizen, now do it!
(vaguely paraphrased from "Polity and Custom of the Camiroi", by RA Lafferty, where any citizen noticing a substandard work of art or landscaping or so on was obligated by custom to fix or improve it by their own effort).
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ [Windows only still, sorry, but source on the web site under GPL.]
The Garden with Insight garden simulator is an educational simulation that uses weather, soil, and plant growth models to simulate a simple garden in an open-ended microworld setting. You can plant vegetables and grow them to learn more about plants, the soil, the weather, gardening, and science.
Then, read James Lowen's _Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Texbook Got Wrong_ to see how your mind has unknowingly been filled with nationalist and consumer crap (despite your technical proclivities). Also check out Howard Zinn. Learn to live simply and frugally so you have more options:
If you have started doing all that, by now you are primed to begin to question what education really means.
And further, to even question why people need to work and what it should mean to do useful things.
You'll have time to read great minds like Bertrand Russel and Freeman Dyson.
Then you can accept you are still stuck in a stupid system.
But you'll be positioned to make the best of it and yet still see how the world can be a made better place to for the bulk of humanity and other creatures.
Always remember in your darker hours to at least ask yourself the question, "Can life be made worth living?" And in your brighter hours, remember to ask yourself if you are playing a finite (to win) game or an infinite (to play) game?
And, finally, for continual inspiration, read _Voyage From Yesteryear_ by James P. Hogan.
Now go out and take some educated risks to try to make life worth living -- despite your future happiness possibilities already almost being ruined by being convinced you that you are "bright" just because you know some technical things (same thing almost happened to me).
David Goodstein, Vice Provost of CalTech on the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme which drives science education in the USA and started to fail in the 1970s and, in his words: http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm [house.gov] " In the course of a career, a professor in a research university turns out, on the average, about 15 Ph.D.'s. Many of these would like, themselves, to become in turn professors in research universities and turn out 15 more Ph.D.'s. After all, these were the gems that were selected at each stage of the mining and sorting operation. Becoming a professor seems to many of them the natural culmination of their successful educations. That is obviously one of the principal engines of the exponential growth that lasted for a hundred years in America. Those students are bitterly disappointed when they find out the jobs they want aren't there, and their disappointment seeps down through the ranks, turning younger students away from science. ... The problem, to reiterate, is that science education in America is designed to select a small group of elite scientists. An unintended but inevitable side effect is that everyone else is left out. As a consequence of that, 20,000 American high schools lack a single qualified physics teacher, half the math classes in American schools are taught by people who lack the qualifications to teach them, and companies will increasingly find themselves without the technical competence they need at all levels from the shop floor to the executive suite."
One of the things I got from Infinite in All Directions - it was a delight to me, and I've been quoting it ever since - is that you honor inventors as much as scientists.
It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.
Is it the scientists who are putting them down?
Yes. There is this snobbism among scientists, especially the academic types.
Are there other kinds?
There are scientists in industry who are a bit more broad minded. The academics look down on them, too.
Is that a weird British hangover?
It's even worse in Germany. Intellectual snobbery is a worldwide disease. It certainly was very bad in China and probably held back development there by 2,000 years.
How would you stop this intellectual snobbery?
I would abolish the PhD system. The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.
Are those getting PhDs rewarded in any other way than as an honor?
It's much more than an honor. It's a ticket to a job.
So is anybody buying this? Are PhDs being abolished or disregarded?
No. The stranglehold has gotten even tighter over the years. It's become essentially like the MD - with much less justification. It's simply a barrier you have to climb over before you can make a career, and it's being imposed on more and more jobs. At even the smallest liberal arts college, nowadays, they say with pride, All of our faculty have PhDs. Many of the best teachers are thrown out because they don't have a PhD. It's a paper qualification that poisons the whole field.
What you're saying reminds me of a situation a couple of years ago when my colleague at GBN, Peter Schwartz, and I tried to do a book called Biofutures. When we started to research the future of biotechnology, we found an interesting contrast with the computer world. You can't get computer people to shut up about the future. They go on and on about it. In biotech we couldn't find anybody who would talk about the future.
There are a couple of interesting components to this. First is the government regulation you speak of, which has good reason for being in place because of the life-critical issues, deep cultural issues, and so on. The result is, of course, that when any of the researchers start talking out of school, saying, Well, maybe we'll cure death, that's it - they don't get the money, because they're obviously irresponsible.
The second component of this idea brings me on to your point about PhDs. Because of the whole realm of government permissions and grants surrounding biotech, it's attracting more PhD types and fewer amateur types, whereas computer technology tremendously enables amateurs.
What also strikes me is that the culture we see here [at the PC Forum, the annual computer conference run by Dyson's daughter Esther] is far friendlier to women than the academic world I come from; it's largely because you don't have to have a PhD. You don't even have to have an MBA to run a company. Many of these women,
> Voice recognition keeps being touted as the holy grail and end of all these problems but where is it? I remember VR demos from the 486 days, you can't tell me a 200-400mhz PDA can't manage that much horsepower.
Having worked on such systems, a few reasons (not to say it isn't coming someday...):
1. Audio systems on most PCs, especially portables, have historically been of poor quality so accuracy suffers.
2. You have to wear a properly configured and positioned microfphone, or accuracy again suffers.
3. Accuracy of 99% (unrealistic) still means correcting one word in 100 -- and corrections may take a lot of time and interrupt a flow of thought. And, since corrections are usually real words and not typos, they may be hard to spot.
4. Algorithm work on the PC moved towards floating point; many portable processors lack floating point.
5. Speech is very useful in interactive conversation between two people -- transcribing dictation when you don't know the problem domain and can't ask questions is a hard problem even for human transcriptionists.
6. Speech gives up some privacy (although cell phones do too).
7. The killer in portability -- SR takes a lot of CPU, which translates into a lot of battery power, which means short lived handhelds.
Personally, I would like to see the older discrete (pause between words) stuff used because it can be quite good when trained -- but the market seems to want continuous. Also, people are trying things like using wireless phones to offload speech processing to network servers (but wireless uses battery power too!)
Also, having said all that, I think conversational interfaces will be more and more important as time goes on in a variety of situations (although they will work alongside other modalities).
Thanks for the link from the 1998 paper (which suggests energy payback time in a four to eight years when including batteries for then (1998) current hardware, and perhaps 1.2 to 2.4 years for future systems).
Still, while six year old papers can help prove faster payback, citing them can't really prove slower payback in an exponentially increasing field like PV production and research (like a glance at the SolarBuzz site whould show). That would be like saying today's new CAD or game software should expect to be running on Pentium 100MHz with 640 X 480 X 256 colors with 32MB main memory and that you can't expect anything higher end to ever be available.
Currently, solar companies are moving to producing their own silicon because of the exponential growth in the solar market. Additionally, newer approaches, such as making PV cells out of plastic, may reduce energy costs very much.
> There really is no such thing as a free lunch.
Just look outside your window. Trees are solar collectors that are self replicating, produce their own power, and use solar panels so cheap they may throw them away annually and make new ones each spring. They may even produce fruit free for the lunch-time picking! So there is plenty of proof of concept here for cheap solar collectors.
While it is true current production techniques for meat or power may be wasteful for various reaons, remember the Native Peoples living with Buffalo on the Great Plains didn't require oil to make meat. It all depends on how you make things and what resources you use for that. The statistics you site are probably for feedlot grain fed beef. Grass fed beef on appropriate range land may require much less resources. So too, newer solar panels may require much less energy to produce then older designs.
One flaw in your argument is you ignore the exteranl costs of fossil fuels and nukes (pollution, militarism, monopolies, usa on hook for liability, etc.) which the tax code might seek to redress. So, one can manipulate the tax code to balance people being forced to live with acid rain or large defense layouts for the middle east so someone else can get power. So perhaps the deeper moral flaw lies in an economic system that ignores external costs?
From the second PDF: "Energy payback estimates for rooftop PV systems are 4, 3, 2, and 1 years: 4 years for systems using current multicrystalline-silicon PV modules, 3 years for current thin-film modules, 2 years for anticipated multicrystalline modules, and 1 year for anticipated thin-film modules (see Figure 1).With energy paybacks of 1 to 4 years and assumed life expectancies of 30 years, 87% to 97% of the energy that PV systems generate won't be plagued by pollution, greenhouse gases, and depletion of resources. ... Based on models and real data, the idea that PV cannot pay back its energy investment is simply a myth. Indeed, researchers Dones and Frischknecht found that PV-systems fabrication and fossil-fuel energy production have similar energy payback periods (including costs for mining, transportation, refining, and construction)."
Future versions of PV may of course payback their embodied energy in even shorter times.
And nothing meant personally by this, but perhaps you might ask why you have been misinformed on such a crucial issue? Perhaps somebody stands to make money by keeping you in the dark?
PV panels will win in the end (barring another breakthrough like cold fusion). Standard arguments against PV and rebuttals:
Doesn't making solar panels pollute? Not so true now, and if we don't solve the pollution problem for all manufacturing, nuclear power, solar space satellites, or any other energy source will still bury us in waste from consumer goods produced using that energy. So zero emissions manufacturing and recycling needs to be solved in any case.
Isn't PV is expensive? It is cost competitive in many situations right now, and it would be just about everywhere right now if the end user had to pay the true cost of fossil fuels (pollution, militarism, centralization, etc. which would mean the true cost of oil is now over $200 per barrel) And the costs continue to drop -- with no theoretical reason PV panels should ultimately cost much more than glass, shingles, or sheet plastic.
What about producing and storing power in nothern climates? No one says people have to be a purists at the start. Liquid fuels like ethanol or gaseous fuels like hydrogen can be produced in a variety of ways from PV in some centralized facilities and transported by truck or pipelines to be used for about 10% of a northern home's total energy use (mainly winter use) for northern climates which don't get much sun in the winter (as an alternative to solar arrays that are ten times larger to supply all power needs in the least sun winter months). These systems can also be used to cogenerate heat and power. Eventually energy storage techniques will continue to improve (better batteries, better hydrogen storage, PV systems that produce ethanol or other liquid fuels directly) and then even this minimal centralized assistance can be reduced.
Overall, decentralized power will be the future, just like we now have decentralized computing and decentralized printing. There may still be some use for centralized big power plants, despite various social costs of centralization (such as for making aluminum from ore), just the equivalent of the mainframe of today is still useful for big data crunching tasks. Still, as nanotech proliferates (leading up to the StarTrek replicator), decentralized power from PV will be able to handle more and more material production needs (including enabling people to make their own PV solar panels at home as they need them -- and probably enabling them to recycle PV systems locally as well).
So, no need for nukes! Don't underestimate what thirty or so years of continued innovation on PV and materials science and nanotech will produce.
Excerpt from the first: So anyway, what do people think? Would such a license management approach with tools, protocols, and standards (ensuring every work received or sent comes with a legally binding machine-readable license and related audit trails for derived works) promote more clearly titled (in a legal sense) free software or would it be the slippery slope to the "right-to-read" future? Without explicit licensing handling, are we just setting the free software or open content communities up for legal challenges down the road as people just try to do their best without such tools? Is trying to automate license handling really that much different (in a bad way) from the current situation of often distributing zip files including both content and license?
Excerpt from the second: This need for a license is especially true for making derived works you plan to redistribute, because here your liability seems highest. If we are to have a lot of free software and free content, based on fine grain collaboration made possible by the internet allowing us to rapidly modify each others works, that is a lot of licenses citing a lot of authors. If these licenses get lost (as in the midi file download example I cited), the content can no longer be considered free. Handling lots of papers is what computers are good at. The less time people need to spend thinking about, negotiating, and managing paperwork and extra files related to free licenses, the more time they can spend making free software and free content.
that should read -- ten to twenty million north american natives
Ray Bradbury is a great writer. But, like many sci-fi writers, he misses two things. One is the fact that self-replicating space habitats using sunlight and asteroidal ore could create thousands of times the surface area of the Earth and Mars in total across trillions of O'Neill, Bernal, and Savage style habitats (forming a sort of loose Dyson shell around the sun).
The other is a basic rah-rah view of US history. Consider his statement in the light of books like _A People's History of the United States_ or _Lies My Teacher Told Me_: So on the way to India, all three of them bumped into a huge obstruction. An obstruction that was empty, that was uncivilized, that was cold, and rejected them. ... Four hundred years before Kitty Hawk, an Italian lands on an empty shore, and four hundred years later the Wright Brothers take off into the air above the Earth.
Uncivilized? Then why was the Iroquis Confederacy an inspiration for the US constitution? Many aspects of several native cultures surpasses what the US has now. (Not all, but many).
Empty? Tell that to the ten to twenty north american natives who were mostly wiped out by disease brought by such visitors.
Unfriendly? Who kept up forest trails, made the praries, offered food, guides, and other assistance? Again, the natives.
Cold? The continent has a wonderful climate in many parts.
400 years? Just think what such wise people as many of the American Native Peoples (such as documented in the book _The Walking People_) could have accomplished without terrorist occupiers using biological warfare and other brutal military methods against them. Perhaps they would have reached Mars and even the stars a century ago.
David Goodstein, Vice Provost of CalTech on the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme which drives science education in the USA and started to fail in the 1970s and, in his words: http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm " In the course of a career, a professor in a research university turns out, on the average, about 15 Ph.D.'s. Many of these would like, themselves, to become in turn professors in research universities and turn out 15 more Ph.D.'s. After all, these were the gems that were selected at each stage of the mining and sorting operation. Becoming a professor seems to many of them the natural culmination of their successful educations. That is obviously one of the principal engines of the exponential growth that lasted for a hundred years in America. Those students are bitterly disappointed when they find out the jobs they want aren't there, and their disappointment seeps down through the ranks, turning younger students away from science. ... The problem, to reiterate, is that science education in America is designed to select a small group of elite scientists. An unintended but inevitable side effect is that everyone else is left out. As a consequence of that, 20,000 American high schools lack a single qualified physics teacher, half the math classes in American schools are taught by people who lack the qualifications to teach them, and companies will increasingly find themselves without the technical competence they need at all levels from the shop floor to the executive suite."
Lisp and Smalltalk possibly in the 70s & certainly in the 80s (when I used ZetaLisp on a Symbolics and Smalltalk on various hardware -- Mac, TI, etc.).
How much has been forgotten. Time and time again I hear people claiming Java invented something when it was just the place they first saw it compared to programming in C or TurboPascal or whatever. Java does have some ideas it popularized -- but they are things like interfaces. Much of its class design like for Swing was taken from ParcPlace Smatallk's VisualWorks. Hotspot profiling came from Smalltalk. MVC came from Smalltalk. etc. etc. Between Forth, Smalltalk, and Lisp (and a few other languages and libraries) most of the innovations people see now were invented a long time ago. VMs came from Smalltalk and IBM mainframes (first) and Pascal and Forth. Another example -- XML is a stupid version of Lisp s-expressions. And so it goes...