Deprived of the hagiographics surrounding the first American rulers, the early American state was indeed basically an oligarchy. What's more, it has largely stayed one ever since. You could argue that the President combines the role of a Consul and the Public Tribune, while the business of government as a whole is conducted by influential oligarchs whose rule is carried out by a compliant Civil Service. Pretty much like "Republican" Roman Government, in fact.The Constitution is interpreted to suit the rich, and until the 1850s in much of the USA was considered compatible with slavery. From then on it was merely interpreted as compatible with denial of civil rights in part of the USA. My nephew's public school in Virginia wasn't desegregated till, almost unbelievably for a European, 1974.
Was the early USA an improvement on the UK? On the whole I'd say yes. But it is worth remembering that people like Paul Revere were, by the standards of the time, rich and important men.
Indeed, as soon as it is shown that the wedge shape is functional (provides a small tilt for the keyboard, makes it easier to carry) that part of a design patent is invalidated. The reason so many details are needed in the application, I suspect, is to prevent a Chinese company from producing an exact knockoff by acquiring the dies and CAD files as soon as this version ceases manufacturing. Nothing to see here etc.
The father of the Experimental Method wasn't around when the Catholic Church turned his writings into dogma, but anybody who cares to read the Schoolmen (it is a hard read) knows that Aristotle was no Aristotelian.
The argument from superior intelligence doesn't hold water either. Newton was one of the most intelligent men who ever lived but he had some strange ideas, arising from the application of a very high IQ to false premises. As per his own quote, we are standing on the shoulders of giants, and so despite our inferiority, we can see further than they can.
Incidentally, as a good laugh, Wikipedia references Prime Mover as primum movens. The author of the article doesn't seemingly know that Aristotle wrote Greek, not Latin.
I'm posting to undo accidental moderation on a different post. Your arithmetic is wrong by a factor of 15. 100W by 15 rooms is 1.5kW, which would result in an annual cost of $2500 or thereabouts.
You don't understand this electricity grid thing, do you? It isn't "dumped on the grid". It gets used. While it supplies power to the grid, either other generation has a slightly smaller load or there is a minute voltage rise (which causes things like ovens to warm up a tiny bit faster so they reach desired temperature a little quicker.) This is the whole concept of the grid - lots of generation that comes on at different times and is carefully managed to meet the load requirements. Has it occurred to you, for instance, that when a conventional generator is down for maintenance it takes power from the grid to supply lighting, heating and equipment? We don't say it is useless because it has to be shut down periodically.
In effect, isn't there a risk that following your idea will simply mean that you will vote according to who buys the most online votes, whether by advertising or direct corruption? In this country (the UK) there is a long history of people voting for extreme parties or positions in elections that do not seem to matter. We believe that our representatives have not only the right, but the duty, to identify what is best for their constituents rather than simply to follow whoever shouts loudest.
In case you didn't know, and the dragging of your knuckles must make it hard to use Google, we're Indo-Europeans. That's right: we share our ancestry with the current inhabitants of India. And if you speak English, you will know that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic all derive from Indo-European roots, so you share a linguistic and cultural heritage with Indians. As a typical Brit - i.e. my extended family has roots in "Celtic" ancestry as well as Saxon, Norman, Indian, Iranian, Jewish, Russian and French - and that's just the ones I know about - I'm very happy about that.
Then there is the recently discovered fact that we "white" people are about 6% Neanderthal while black Africans are not. So are those Indians.
And don't get too involved in the history of the West of England, South Africa or the United States. There was an awful lot more interbreeding than you bigots like to imagine. The average white inhabitant of the English town of Bristol inherits about 8% of Afro-Caribbean genes. The average white South African? The average redneck? I'm guessing the same. The South African white supremacists had ways of dealing with the embarrassing off-white babies so many of them had when the right recessive genes lined up on the chromosomes.
So, basically, go back to wearing funny hoods and burning crosses, ae1294. That old DNA sure is no friend to the John Birch Society.
Some of this is due to fashion and some of it to what has looked at times like a concerted negative PR attack from the competition. The Playbook on which I'm writing this is a convenient and useful tablet. RIM is now like Apple was at OS 9.2, except BB 7.1 isn't as bad as 9.2 was. Perhaps they will emulate Apple. Perhaps they will sink without trace.
Still, old people like me who like real keyboards may hope to pick up a 9900 or a 9790 for silly money later this year. The 9790 is a small, convenient, well built and specified phone which would have been eye-opening - in 2010.
Psychology at least is science. People do proper experiments with controls and properly defined methodologies, they analyse the results statistically, other people reproduce them, modify them, confirm or deny the results. That is science.
My one time supervisor in psychology, Max Hammerton, once demonstrated to the British Association that "hard science" often is not, with his graph showing how the estimated size of Pluto had decreased with time. The reason is that when it was discovered (a) there was a desire to use it to account for discrepancies in the orbit of Neptune and (b) it was the only planet discovered by an American. So the estimate taken for the published size was at the very top of the estimated range. Subsequent measurements were more accurate and tended to the real value, but because of the pressure of history (and from American astronomers) were also at the top of the estimated range.
It was a neat demonstration (and the subsequent row over the downgrading of Pluto to a dwarf planet still arouses the ire of some astronomers - things have not improved).
Basically this was an early demonstration of the correctness of the article referenced in the story, and of the fact that even "hard" sciences have a lot of fluff in them
It would be more correct to say that the editing occurred then. The original stories are very much older, and much of the material is a re-telling of the stories of very ancient cultures. I wouldn't be surprised if parts of Bereshit/Genesis date back to the time of the drying out of the Middle East, ca. 5000 years ago.
Incidentally the Wikipedia article amused me. While superficially even handed it contains this line:
The problem lies in finding a way to unite the patriarchal theme of divine promise to the primeval history
The problem, of course, only exists in the minds of people who want it to be God-inspired. To anybody else there is no problem: there isn't one.
Pedantry note. Hebrew days were indeed from sunset to sunset, divided into the evening (darkness) and morning (light). In England, a "Morning coat" was so called because it was daytime formal dress until evening, when evening dress was worn. In a pre-clock society it is far more useful than using a.m. and p.m., which are of little use if you don't have a way of determining the moment of maximum solar altitude.
It's actually pretty inconvenient for observant Jews living in Northern Europe or Canada because the sun sets so early in winter.
Your straw man argument is just that. It isn't just the Earth, it is the entire observable universe that would have had to pop into existence 6000 years ago. And all the photons (and other radiation) on their way to us would have had to be aligned in precise courses, even the ones coming from stars that no longer existed. Imagine that: faked radiation arriving as if from stars that were around 13 billion years ago. Faked cosmic microwave background.
I think we can safely say that a probability so low that it's below one divided by the sum over the quantum descriptions of all the particles in the Universe is indistinguishable from zero. And that anybody who predicated their beliefs and behaviour on the idea that that probability should be taken into account in determining anything useful - is indeed a crackpot.
Any theologian can counter this one. Any God who deliberately designed the human race to be subject to temptation and then punished them for giving in to it is an inadequate God. Evangelical Christians do "blah blah God's purpose is unknowable blah". William Blake put his finger on it:
Surely, O Satan, thou art but a dunce
And cannot tell the garment from the man.
Every harlot was a virgin once
Nor canst thou ever turn Kate into Nan.
Though thou art worshipped by the names divine
of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary night's decline,
The lost traveller's dream under the hill.
The Bible (the Hebrew version) basically says that the Tree was the Tree of Knowledge: all knowledge other than basic gardening was a falling away from perfection. It's part of a quite general myth that everything was better in the past when things were simpler. But if the people who pursue knowledge are damned, God has a very funny way of showing it. To the pursuers of knowledge (S)he gives long life, worldly goods, a pleasant environment and an interesting existence. To the ones who claim to be obedient to her purpose she gives funny robes and membership in the Hassidic Jewish movement, the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Taliban. The day to day evidence is that Blake was right, and the God they claim to be obeying is actually Satan.
Though the drug dealers and pirates are doing quite nicely with their own efforts, thank you. Cheap submarines are potentially as big a threat to world peace as nuclear weapons.
It is the Civil Service. It has been commented, both by a retiring senior civil servant and an experienced Minister, that the Civil Service is full of people with dumb-as-a-very-dumb-thing ideas. The usual objection is that the proponents assume that everybody is exactly like them, and so once a law is passed people will just automatically obey it, and once an agency is set up it will instantly work perfectly.
Normally these people are kept in warm environments with soft lighting so they can't hurt themselves and cannot be released into the environment because of the damage they would do. But when times are difficult Ministers are looking for good ideas and they get presented with the loony schemes. Inexperienced Ministers - and the current lot are almost all very inexperienced indeed - may get taken in, and so these schemes see the daylight.
Mrs. Thatcher, long may she rot, at least realised that the privatisation of streets and the railways were loony ideas too far. The next Government was inexperienced enough to fall for rail privatisation (unfortunately writing about at least one of the proponents of this here could result in a libel suit).
I do sometimes wonder if, in fact, a number of our Eastern European immigrants are former Stasi members under fake passports who are running the Home Office. But that might be unfair to the Stasi.
Blanket, absolutist statements with absolutely no evidential backup? I could simply write the exact negative of your post and it would have exactly as much value (i.e. nil).
"When quota system is enforced, competition stops". Really? So when the University of Cambridge starts demanding of colleges that they admit a majority of students from the public sector rather than private education, everybody stops competing for places and entrants are simply admitted on a first come first served basis?
As for "robustness and stability of IT products" - my own anecdotal experience over many years is that woman in IT care more about this than men. It's men who care more about dick-swinging hairy-bottomed posturing over performance and using the latest technology before the bugs are ironed out.
So, let's have some examples, Taco Cowboy - unstable products produced by companies with a large number of women versus stable and robust ones produced by all-male companies? Did Microsoft put all the women on Windows ME? Is Facebook's security department an all women shop? I think we should be told.
Your comment would make sense if you were simply looking for coders. But if you are looking at programmers - people who turn top level concepts into software - the C++ guy will know all the things that go wrong, all the "this works" higher level schemas that 5 years of Scala alone won't have taught anybody. Twenty years ago the business problems were basically the same. The fact that Microsoft could screw up a leap year 29th February in 2012 shows exactly why there is no substitute for wide experience.
I'll add a point, perhaps a little inflammatory. Your grammar and syntax are not very good. That suggests you don't routinely communicate at senior management level, where that kind of thing gets noticed. Perhaps your comment reflects an inability to see the bigger picture, and your under-valuation of experience is linked to that.
Of course, those were the days when anybody with a functioning brain could just put down the opcodes on the fly. With the PDP-8 you almost knew which gates each opcode bit was controlling. And the RCA 1802! Quicker to type in hex than fire up the assembler.
Now remind me how to adjust the ignition timing on a modern ECU. Hint: there isn't a little screw on the distributor any more.
Quite a lot of the inhabitants of the Caribbean were very friendly towards Columbus and his successors, and you know how that turned out. Anybody capable of building an interstellar space ship is likely to regard you as farm animal, not equal. Unlike dogs, we are not particularly cute.
Small businesses are often quite good at making really bad decisions quickly, and taking forever over important things. Just like big businesses.
I once worked in a small business that was the exception. Every issue that came up was quickly dealt with with a director level meeting. We took decisions and followed them through. Unfortunately we grew so fast I ended up with a bad case of burnout, but having downsized to a lower intensity career I've often seen the effects of decision incapability in suppliers, vendors and in house.
I just advised someone today about resolving an issue I first encountered on a multiprocessor setup with a 1MHz clock and a "local network" based on two FIFO rings going in opposite directions. Computer science is computer science, even if it is done with punch cards. No: thinking about Feynman's work at Los Alamos, especially if it is done with punched cards. (partial subroutines for error correction on IBM machines using coloured card decks, anybody?)
What do you know about Teach First? It's a scheme, very successful in the US and the UK, to persuade high achieving graduates to at least spend a couple of years in teaching. Some of them stay; my daughter and her fiance are department heads at an early age. If they don't stay, at least when they get into business they are more likely to have an insight into the backgrounds and capabilities of a lot of the people who will work for them.
Eric Schmidt has done exactly the right thing. It's a pity that it takes someone like him to have a much better idea of how to spend money (and fix CS teaching in achools) than our politicians.
I know I shouldn't reply to myself. But my sig actually exemplifies my comment. Written by Tennyson in 1844, before The Origin of Species, it reflects his sudden realisation of the implications of fossils of species that no longer exist - that "Nature" (as it was called at the time) has no interest at all in the survival of any particular species. His "no not one" is his further realisation that this includes us.
It's a bad state of affairs when a significant number of people in developed English speaking countries have a worse understanding of biology than a poet writing before Darwin published.
Our success is due to the exploitation of resources. If those resources fail, game up. The human race very nearly went extinct in the Mesolithic. Don't think it could not happen again.
No other species could even evolve at this point
Except that it wouldn't be at this point, and it doesn't have to be a single species. Evolution presumes the passage of time. Already bacteria are evolving that are resistant to all our known antibiotics. And as Jay Gould observed, from the point of view of life on Earth as a whole, the dominant life form on Earth is still the bacteria.
Slashdot Mirror
Was the early USA an improvement on the UK? On the whole I'd say yes. But it is worth remembering that people like Paul Revere were, by the standards of the time, rich and important men.
Indeed, as soon as it is shown that the wedge shape is functional (provides a small tilt for the keyboard, makes it easier to carry) that part of a design patent is invalidated. The reason so many details are needed in the application, I suspect, is to prevent a Chinese company from producing an exact knockoff by acquiring the dies and CAD files as soon as this version ceases manufacturing. Nothing to see here etc.
The argument from superior intelligence doesn't hold water either. Newton was one of the most intelligent men who ever lived but he had some strange ideas, arising from the application of a very high IQ to false premises. As per his own quote, we are standing on the shoulders of giants, and so despite our inferiority, we can see further than they can.
Incidentally, as a good laugh, Wikipedia references Prime Mover as primum movens. The author of the article doesn't seemingly know that Aristotle wrote Greek, not Latin.
I'm posting to undo accidental moderation on a different post. Your arithmetic is wrong by a factor of 15. 100W by 15 rooms is 1.5kW, which would result in an annual cost of $2500 or thereabouts.
You don't understand this electricity grid thing, do you? It isn't "dumped on the grid". It gets used. While it supplies power to the grid, either other generation has a slightly smaller load or there is a minute voltage rise (which causes things like ovens to warm up a tiny bit faster so they reach desired temperature a little quicker.) This is the whole concept of the grid - lots of generation that comes on at different times and is carefully managed to meet the load requirements. Has it occurred to you, for instance, that when a conventional generator is down for maintenance it takes power from the grid to supply lighting, heating and equipment? We don't say it is useless because it has to be shut down periodically.
In effect, isn't there a risk that following your idea will simply mean that you will vote according to who buys the most online votes, whether by advertising or direct corruption? In this country (the UK) there is a long history of people voting for extreme parties or positions in elections that do not seem to matter. We believe that our representatives have not only the right, but the duty, to identify what is best for their constituents rather than simply to follow whoever shouts loudest.
Then there is the recently discovered fact that we "white" people are about 6% Neanderthal while black Africans are not. So are those Indians.
And don't get too involved in the history of the West of England, South Africa or the United States. There was an awful lot more interbreeding than you bigots like to imagine. The average white inhabitant of the English town of Bristol inherits about 8% of Afro-Caribbean genes. The average white South African? The average redneck? I'm guessing the same. The South African white supremacists had ways of dealing with the embarrassing off-white babies so many of them had when the right recessive genes lined up on the chromosomes.
So, basically, go back to wearing funny hoods and burning crosses, ae1294. That old DNA sure is no friend to the John Birch Society.
The one that dropped $7 billion on trades recently? Oh dear.
Still, old people like me who like real keyboards may hope to pick up a 9900 or a 9790 for silly money later this year. The 9790 is a small, convenient, well built and specified phone which would have been eye-opening - in 2010.
My one time supervisor in psychology, Max Hammerton, once demonstrated to the British Association that "hard science" often is not, with his graph showing how the estimated size of Pluto had decreased with time. The reason is that when it was discovered (a) there was a desire to use it to account for discrepancies in the orbit of Neptune and (b) it was the only planet discovered by an American. So the estimate taken for the published size was at the very top of the estimated range. Subsequent measurements were more accurate and tended to the real value, but because of the pressure of history (and from American astronomers) were also at the top of the estimated range.
It was a neat demonstration (and the subsequent row over the downgrading of Pluto to a dwarf planet still arouses the ire of some astronomers - things have not improved).
Basically this was an early demonstration of the correctness of the article referenced in the story, and of the fact that even "hard" sciences have a lot of fluff in them
Incidentally the Wikipedia article amused me. While superficially even handed it contains this line:
The problem, of course, only exists in the minds of people who want it to be God-inspired. To anybody else there is no problem: there isn't one.
It's actually pretty inconvenient for observant Jews living in Northern Europe or Canada because the sun sets so early in winter.
I think we can safely say that a probability so low that it's below one divided by the sum over the quantum descriptions of all the particles in the Universe is indistinguishable from zero. And that anybody who predicated their beliefs and behaviour on the idea that that probability should be taken into account in determining anything useful - is indeed a crackpot.
The Bible (the Hebrew version) basically says that the Tree was the Tree of Knowledge: all knowledge other than basic gardening was a falling away from perfection. It's part of a quite general myth that everything was better in the past when things were simpler. But if the people who pursue knowledge are damned, God has a very funny way of showing it. To the pursuers of knowledge (S)he gives long life, worldly goods, a pleasant environment and an interesting existence. To the ones who claim to be obedient to her purpose she gives funny robes and membership in the Hassidic Jewish movement, the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Taliban. The day to day evidence is that Blake was right, and the God they claim to be obeying is actually Satan.
Though the drug dealers and pirates are doing quite nicely with their own efforts, thank you. Cheap submarines are potentially as big a threat to world peace as nuclear weapons.
Normally these people are kept in warm environments with soft lighting so they can't hurt themselves and cannot be released into the environment because of the damage they would do. But when times are difficult Ministers are looking for good ideas and they get presented with the loony schemes. Inexperienced Ministers - and the current lot are almost all very inexperienced indeed - may get taken in, and so these schemes see the daylight.
Mrs. Thatcher, long may she rot, at least realised that the privatisation of streets and the railways were loony ideas too far. The next Government was inexperienced enough to fall for rail privatisation (unfortunately writing about at least one of the proponents of this here could result in a libel suit).
I do sometimes wonder if, in fact, a number of our Eastern European immigrants are former Stasi members under fake passports who are running the Home Office. But that might be unfair to the Stasi.
"When quota system is enforced, competition stops". Really? So when the University of Cambridge starts demanding of colleges that they admit a majority of students from the public sector rather than private education, everybody stops competing for places and entrants are simply admitted on a first come first served basis?
As for "robustness and stability of IT products" - my own anecdotal experience over many years is that woman in IT care more about this than men. It's men who care more about dick-swinging hairy-bottomed posturing over performance and using the latest technology before the bugs are ironed out.
So, let's have some examples, Taco Cowboy - unstable products produced by companies with a large number of women versus stable and robust ones produced by all-male companies? Did Microsoft put all the women on Windows ME? Is Facebook's security department an all women shop? I think we should be told.
I'll add a point, perhaps a little inflammatory. Your grammar and syntax are not very good. That suggests you don't routinely communicate at senior management level, where that kind of thing gets noticed. Perhaps your comment reflects an inability to see the bigger picture, and your under-valuation of experience is linked to that.
Now remind me how to adjust the ignition timing on a modern ECU. Hint: there isn't a little screw on the distributor any more.
Quite a lot of the inhabitants of the Caribbean were very friendly towards Columbus and his successors, and you know how that turned out. Anybody capable of building an interstellar space ship is likely to regard you as farm animal, not equal. Unlike dogs, we are not particularly cute.
I once worked in a small business that was the exception. Every issue that came up was quickly dealt with with a director level meeting. We took decisions and followed them through. Unfortunately we grew so fast I ended up with a bad case of burnout, but having downsized to a lower intensity career I've often seen the effects of decision incapability in suppliers, vendors and in house.
I just advised someone today about resolving an issue I first encountered on a multiprocessor setup with a 1MHz clock and a "local network" based on two FIFO rings going in opposite directions. Computer science is computer science, even if it is done with punch cards. No: thinking about Feynman's work at Los Alamos, especially if it is done with punched cards. (partial subroutines for error correction on IBM machines using coloured card decks, anybody?)
Eric Schmidt has done exactly the right thing. It's a pity that it takes someone like him to have a much better idea of how to spend money (and fix CS teaching in achools) than our politicians.
It's a bad state of affairs when a significant number of people in developed English speaking countries have a worse understanding of biology than a poet writing before Darwin published.
Except that it wouldn't be at this point, and it doesn't have to be a single species. Evolution presumes the passage of time. Already bacteria are evolving that are resistant to all our known antibiotics. And as Jay Gould observed, from the point of view of life on Earth as a whole, the dominant life form on Earth is still the bacteria.