>and at least casual passers-by see both sides of any issue.
I can't think of anything more truly naive than to imagine that any issue has only two sides. Humans, especially politicians, like to think and act as if they did - but the real world never works that way. This makes the whole "both sides" tactic a wonderful form of mass-manipulation.
By ignoring all shades of gray you can take somebody from a reasonable position and rapidly get them to agree to a highly unreasonable proposition by painting it as being on the same side of the line - but the real world doesn't have lines. It has a huge gray area that slowly shades from "where you were comfortable with" through "less and less okay" to "not okay at all".
You start out believing people should be allowed to write and read any newspaper they like, and end up supporting the right to put the recipe for nerf gas on a billboard. You start out believing a government should be beholden to it's people, and those people empowered to replace that government - and end up supporting the idea that a convicted fellon should be able to buy assault rifles with armor piercing bullets and finger-print resistant grips.
In reality - none of us are truly on the extremes - but we end up voting for them because we've been convinced that there is a black/white line and if we don't support one extreme we support the other. Generally though - if we truly probe our thoughts we discover that we are never really in support of the extremes. Even Timothy McVeigh thought that the right to bear arms shouldn't include nuclear weapons. Yep - a man who killed people and planted a bomb because he believed so strongly that people should be allowed to have ANY weapons, could see a kind of weapon he thought ought to be restricted.
You can really draw the same principle through almost every debate in politics today. Instead of "two sides" - look at it as two extremes with a huge gray area in the middle, and then say that each specific example in that gray area should be studied on merit and those that aren't two extreme on either side should probably be okay.
Thanks for the support- the version you give and the one I used are not all the incompatible though - Marx didn't write in English and I think both translations are equally accurate though.
Out of context quotes of what Marx actually wrote doesn't change the core of his philosophy into something it is not.
Later socialists expanded on the welfare state ideals but the reality is that capitalist countries are now, and always have been, bigger welfare states than any communist nation. It's easy to see why - without an all-powerful state employer FORCING everybody to work, you have unemployment (many capitalist economists actually believe that high unemployment is a GOOD thing for the economy as it drives down labor prices allowing businesses to flourish) - and when you have unemployment - you need wellfare. Communist countries had little to no unemployment at all - since the state put EVERYBODY to work. It wasn't pretty - but clearly the idea that the welfare state is communist is just plain wrong.
Communism doesn't even REQUIRE a state, let alone a welfare state. The fact that state socialism is what countries like the USSR claimed to implement doesn't change anything. Most socialist philosophers will say the USSR was never a communist country - it was state capitalism, it just replaced many corrupt employers who steal labour (by paying less than it's worth) with ONE who could steal more.
Proudhon's libertarian socialism was ALSO communist but at the same time it was anarchist and devoid of any state at all - in fact, outside the USA nearly every branch of libertarianism and anarchism is also socialist.
Socialism is an economic philosophy NOT a political one, the all-powerful state concept was merely one way to deal with the practical difficulties of socialism - but it's not PART of socialism anymore than the wellfare state. Frankly it was probably the worst approach that could have been taken.
Libertarian Socialists for example generally support a free market where businesses can operate and compete - but they oppose managerial ownership of businesses, demanding that all businesses be worker-owned. Anarcho-socialism said the same - but rejected the idea that these businesses should then try to maximise profit and compete - this largely led to it's failure in spain. Most libertarian socialists believe worker owned businesses should have no wages at all, they should be managed by consent, attempt to maximise profit and then share that profit among the people whose labor brought it about.
Such mutualist businesses (also known as cooperations) are not unknown even now - the biggest manufacturer of fabrics in the USA is run like that. We just believe we'd have a better world in all aspects if ALL businesses were run like that.
No need for an all-powerful state, no need for state involvement in business at all - it's as libertarian as Rand Paul, but it's also socialist in all the best ways without most of the problems that caused state socialism to fail so spectacularly.
This is the kind of philosophy you get from Joseph Proudhon, or a comtemporary would be Noam Chomsky. It's pure socialism - and the accusation in the GP's post doesn't enter into it anywhere.
Now you may dissagree with socialism if you want, but at least be informed, basing your rejection on a false strawman is ignorant and makes you look stupid - worse it leaves you incapable of making rational and intelligent decisions.
>So you approve of an unfair society where people are given things that they did not earn by having it forcefully taken from someone who did earn it? Call me crazy, but doesn't the dictionary define that sort of behavior as "theft"?
>Also, I find it horribly ironic that you talk about the evil "greedy" people, yet you fail to see the greed in thinking you should get something that you didn't earn.
Which bit of communism declares that anybody should get something they didn't earn ? Capitalism is full of that. Sorry - but those people who make fortunes playing stock markets didn't earn their money, in fact, they are a nett loss to the productive capacity of the economy.
Communism had some real flaws but this is not one of them. Nothing in communism is "give for free" - it's a structural equality. When it says "from each according to his means" it does say EACH. Everybody gains but everybody ALSO contributes.
True there are massive practical difficulties in sorting this out (biggest one - the greedy people who try to give less than their share or take more than they should - usually the people in charge), but communism is built on a system of shared production - nobody just "gets according to their need", they must also GIVE according to their means. You can raise many points against communism but "take from earners and give to non-earners" is a model that isn't even CONSIDERED in it. True that IS the model by which some wellfare systems work, but those are justified on other grounds (if you help those who REALLY suffer out, then they can become productive again) - this also doesn't always (perhaps even often) work well -but crucially it's by NO means part of communist philosphy. It is a system with strong socialist connotations (well it's done more in more socialist leaning countries) but it isn't actually part of socialism. The only thing REMOTELY like what you suggest is things like social security in the USA - and even THEN only for the very first generation who ever got it. Social security is not an investment you make in your old age. It's paying a debt. You achieved part of what you achieved because when you were a child who could not earn, you got given what you need to live by the previous generation, now that you are earning and they no longer can, social security is you paying them BACK for what they did for you, as your children are one day meant to do for you.
Despite popular perception - I have yet to see any socialist or communist philosophy where ANYTHING is given without being earned, these philosophies can at best be accused of expanding which activities should be considered worthy of reward.
Even hardcore capitalists with actual knowledge of what they talk about know this. The first proposal for social security was made by Adam Smith. True it didn't become a law in practical effect until Rooseveldt but the suggestion goes back to Smith himself.
Hopefully you read this whole post and is now a little less ignorant. Some of us think that a system where the hardest and most productive workers are the lowest paid members of society while those who contribute the least earn the most (all those middle men and excess lawyers in America's litigation-mad society) is real theft.
>I don't think so. You have zero air property rights. Your property rights exist only at ground level and perhaps below ground level, depending on your deed. The only people I can think of who actually have "air rights" are industry, the EPA, and the FAA.
Yes, I know I don't have them legally, but that's because we don't live in a libertarian world. The original capitalist libertarian philosophy was written when air rights were irrelevent, we didn't have powered flight - we didn't have fossil fuel (or even know about pollution) - so they didn't consider it. I have NO doubt that all those philosphers who wrote it would, if they wrote them today - have considered at least a certain amount of air rights. Even then - you are ignoring a right I most certainly DO have right now - the right to decide what goes into my body. If you inject me with a poison, you are guilty of murder. If you pump the room I'm in full of arsenic gas you are guilty of murder. Why should carbon dioxide be treated any differently ? Just because it kills more slowly ? Well that is purely a matter of dosage, up the dosage (not very much even) and it's just as fast a killer as arsenic or any other toxin. People regularly use exhaust fumes to commit suicide. Many people have died by accident from faulty exhausts that leaked into cars. This is not a harmless gas. True nature puts a lot of it in the air and our bodies are quite capable of handing that amount, but we put in a great deal more. Enough to reach lethal dosage in a car-sized space within a period of about 20 minutes. The reality is, that air rights or not, I have body rights- you're not just pumping it into my yard, you're pumping it into my LUNGS !
See my post above, your post is so full of factual errors it's frightening. Not least- the majority of wind turbines are NOT produced in China, they are produced by a Chinese company - with a factory in the USA.
>If "it takes more energy to produce and ship wind turbines than they will produce in the first 10 years", why would anyone install them? That claim is obvious tripe, because generation rates are dependent on where they're installed and if it was that incredibly inefficient you wouldn't find any company willing to use wind turbines to generate electricity.
Even more ironic - the majority of wind turbine production for use in the USA at this time is not done in China, the number one supplier is a Chinese company but their factory is in Nevada ! (Wow, must have been opposites day or something...) Actually the company stated that the shipping costs from China are higher than the wage savings they'd have had if they operated there - they almost exactly even out, the tax breaks Obama gave green energy companies meant they made MORE money by building a factory in the USA than they could in China - which of course removes all those shipping energy issues as well. Oh - and it gave jobs to 7000 Americans - wow... a US policy that got a foreign company to GIVE you jobs as opposed to exporting your jobs to a foreign country... that's a first !
>You mean, as it takes more energy to produce and ship wind turbines than they will produce the first 10 years. So it's more like "clean energy causes 10 times more harm than fossil fuels, but mostly in China".
Did I say wind-turbines in particular ? I am in favor of clean energy - I agree that currently the practical problems with wind energy is a major issue with it, personally, I prefer nuclear.
>Ending all wars ? Yeah right. Are you really moronic enough to think the middle east will stop fighting without oil ?
I never said ALL wars, I said it would end the OIL wars. I was specific, and the oil wars are not between middle eastern countries. I meant we will no longer see Western governments (one in particular) wanting to invade those countries for oil. That doesn't mean they will never be invaded for anything else. I never said we'd see world peace if we got rid of oil dependence, I just said we won't see oil wars anymore. Nobody fights a war for a resource unless that resource has value.
>I'd hate to see us stop trusting legitimate environmental science to the point we end up dumping toxic substances into our air and water again
Mmmm.... dumping toxic substances in the air... you mean toxic substances like carbon-dioxide and carbon-monoxide ?
Even if climate change was completely unwarranted as a threat, fossil-fuel energy causes massive, verifiable harm right now and is probably the largest single public health-risk today. Clean energy means significant reductions in cases of asthma, some variants of TB and dozens of other respiratory illnesses. It also means that the world can end it's state of being economic hostages to a bunch of really evil dictators out in the middle-east. It means the end of the oil wars.
Frankly I don't care if climate change is real or not- clean energy has so many advantages that it is frankly stupid not to pursue. I even think it's a libertarian concern. Everytime the toxic gas from your car blows over my fence - you're violating my basic property rights and intruding on my liberty to have clean air in my home, and causing me physical harm. The only thing that makes this almost acceptable is that we almost universally all contribute to doing it to each other but the only rational answer for a libertarian is to demand that government do it's only legitimate task and protect my rights - by doing everything in their power to end this situation in the shortest possible amount of time.
Okay - answer this. Why is the entropy law of thermodynamics the ONLY physical law ever written that is not time-reversible ? Answer - because it's a coarse-grained law, and the details that get lost in coarse-graining is what we'd need to time-reverse it.
Using an oversimplified analogy - it's very easy to scramble an egg, but unscrambling it is so incredibly difficult as to be only barely possible in theory. But it is possible. Entropy says it shouldn't be possible even in theory - because entropy coarse-grains the results. The thermodynamic model is an incredibly useful scientific model - even if it's first and third laws are really just restatements of Newtonian laws, but it does have it's limits. All scientific theories do - they all coarse-grain. What science DOES is to take a universe too complex to understand and explain it in simplified models that we CAN understand - and that is very useful and increases our understanding. Over time those models can get more complex, building on each other and themselves, and approach the reality but it could never get there (if it did, why have a model at all ?). One of the most basic rules of the philosophy of science is to remember that you're working with simplified models. Nearly always, it doesn't matter - but sometimes, sooner or later, you encounter areas where the coarse-graining of a scientific model is leaving out details that change the results. The simple truth is the universe is not trending towards an entropic state, you just have to look at it to see that is has - over time - become decidely MORE clumpy not LESS clumpy. To say "well entropy says the trend must eventually reverse" is too stare into the coarse-graining when reality most decidedly disagrees.
Recognizing that science is based on simplified models that do not correspond exactly to reality doesn't weaken science, it makes it stronger by letting it get the most out of those models and then changing to a different model when needed.
Here's another little brain-teaser for you. Thermodynamics predict that superconductors should be possible at very close to absolute zero. But we've built them at much higher temperatures, so high that liquid nitrogen cooling can keep them going - with them we've built electromagnets so powerful they keep the fastest train in the world running in mid-air from point to point.
We did that twenty years ago. But how are they possible ? What lets them work at such a high temperature ? Answer - we have no idea. They are working in practice but they are theoretically impossible. The adjustment to the theories to account for this observation is one of the greatest unanswered questions in modern physics. There are good scientists working on the problem and some theories are showing promise for explanations but none of them have any real evidence to support them yet. All of them require changing some fundamental aspects of the laws of thermodynamics - we don't yet know what we'll be changing but it's simply a fact that we WILL be seeing a change in at least one of the laws of thermodynamics in order to explain how something that they currently declare impossible is working so reliably we can engineer trains with it. Somewhere in the coarse-graining something is getting lost that's huge. If the fact that the universe is NOT following an entropic trend was not a big enough hint, then high-termperature superconductors are, something has to give here.
It's going to be very interesting to see what that something is.
Not quite but very close. Socialist Libertarian is very similar to anarcho-socialism, but not quite identical. For example most SL philosophers believe not in the destruction business or profit as a concept but in restructuring all businesses into worker-owned cooperations without managerial hierarchy. Instead of wages - every worker would earn a percentage of the companies nett income - that percentage is determined by his contribution to that income. So you still reward hard-work and learning, but you don't have a "boss" in charge - the company is run by concensus vote. The biggest manufacturer of fabrics in the USA is run that way right now.
Most SL's also don't favor a system without any authority but believes in massive decentralization and authority by the people themselves in the form of community based direct-democracy.
So very similar to socialist-anarchism, but not identical.
Only in America. Libertarianism was an invention of socialists (as an alternative to state-socialism) and in most of the world outside the USA the word libertarian is automatically associated with non-state-based socialism as well. To put it differently - in Europe "libertarian socialist" would be a tautology. Libertarian Capitalism was a much more recent philosophical movement and is almost entirely limited to the United States. Even there Libertarian Socialism still thrives (though it needs to be spelled out), for example one of the most prominent Libertarian Socialists of our time is an American you may have heard of. Fellow by the name of Noam Chomsky ?
>Dawkins says one thing. You say it's obviously wrong. Dawkins is qualified to speak on the topic of biology; he's earned that right through lifelong study. He can be as wrong as any other man, but it would take an equally qualified biologist to identify Dawkins' error. What, exactly, are your qualifications?
I'm sorry but even though I am a rationalist I must dispute you here. That entire paragraph is a call to authority - which is a fallacy. Dawkins's being a respected authority on biology does NOT EVER make what he says about it more trustworthy than a criticism by a layman. Not only would claiming so be a fallacy it is also repugnant to the scientific method (one of the specific reasons FOR the scientific method is a defense against authority). Dawkins' has authority because his science is sound - NOT the other way around. When a layman argues against him - that argument should be measured on scientific virtue - NOT on the "rankholding" of the speaker, because that is entirely irrelevant. Many scientific breakthroughs have been, and continue to be, made by laymen - and every young scientist would give his right arm to prove the great authority in his field wrong about something. That's what science IS - and it's exactly WHY we can put such trust in it. The correct answer to the GP would be "Dawkins follows the scientific method in his writings and thus far has done so impeccably, you say he is 'obviously wrong' - without giving any science at all to back up your assertion. Unless you can answer his science with BETTER science that's just meaningless drivel".
>Also, the fact that a particular combination of genes is highly improbable doesn't imply that it could not evolve,
By that logic, well the odds of a bunch of atoms being arranged into a DNA molecule with the GP's particular combination of genes are billions to one. I must therefore conclude that it is impossible for the GP to exist.
You'd think geeks would understand basic physics better than this. It was okay when Asimov got thermodynamics just plain wrong - because it was 60 years ago and everybody had it wrong. Even Roger Penrose still had it wrong in the 70's but the whole "universe increases in entropy so why are there constellations and life" paradox doesn't exist.
Real scientists figured that out a long, long time ago. The longer version is: thermodynamics is a model of the behavior of gasses in a closed system which makes a lot of assumptions (for starters: it treats all gas molecules as solid, perfect spheres that bounce off once another with no loss of velocity - e.g. energy transfer without friction). These assumptions are okay to make in thermodynamics because the energy "lost" to friction doesn't get "lost" from the system - it becomes heat energy and it all averages out. But they do mean something. Thermodynamics tells you if you dump a bunch of gas in a tank it will end up evenly spread rather than clumped in the corner (that is the ENTIRETY of the entropy law - and information entropy has NOTHING to do with it and the "relationship" is not even conjecture - it's BAD science fiction - for starters it goes in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION and the symbols in the equations have different meanings [c is a distance in geometry and a velocity in physics for example]). That is the purpose of thermodynamics, it's a model of physics that explains the behavior of gasses (and with minor adaptation liquids and solids) from a certain point of view, but it's a model of reality that ignores a bunch of inconvenient things because within the scale of the model those things have no measureable impact. Scientists call it "coarse-graining" - the details we don't see in thermodynamics because they are too small do matter on the scale of a star system. The most important detail that thermodynamics completely ignores is the force of gravity. There is no thermodynamic law that considers the impact of gravity. In a tank containing only one gass - it actually means that on average the gas will be slightly more concentrated on the bottom of the tank than the top - not enough to matter, so the model does it's job - but thats because individual gas molecules have very little mass, on astronomic scales the whole tank has almost no mass. But star systems and planets have huge amounts of mass - and suddenly a force which on the nuclear level is incredibly weak (a small speaker magnet has more than enough force to lift a nail against the gravity of the entire planet) starts to matter: a lot. Gravity on the universal force acts to collect things together, and the more they collect, the more gravity they have - it is a trend in the opposite direction of entropy. On small scales (what thermodynamics is for) entropy wins. On the scale of galaxies, entropy is (much) weaker than gravity and the entropic "heat death of the universe" is unscientific hogwash.
In the real universe the battle between entropy and gravity is pretty close. That's why we don't have a "smoothly spread" universe now. If gravity was too strong - we'd have the opposite: the entire universe collapsed into a single black-hole. The ultimate singularity.
In the end, one or the other may yet win out - but the odds of a black-hole ending is at least as good as a for an entropic heat death and either way for either to actually win when the difference is so small - would take a lot longer than the lifetime of the universe so far still - meaning we got at least a few hundred billion years left.
>Actually it's the other way around - Oracle tried to play the copyright card, but that didn't seem to work so well, so they're focusing on patents now.
You're right but I was referring to the discussion google has admitted to having had with SUN prior to the buyout by oracle. Oracle has shown no proof that this discussion was about patent licenses rather than a simple copyright license (which is what google claims) - even then the copyright license was purely considered as a means for a partnership in development - it was never suggested by google (or proven by Oracle) that they thought it was required for clean-room work on their own which is what they did in the end.
Yep, that's just about exactly what they did. They aren't the first either. Kaffeine and GCJ and many others have done the same - but oracle only sued Google.
You're ignoring some crucial points: 1) That google chose a clean-room over SUN tech after the dealmaking failed. That is a perfectly valid defense for a copyright claim - and nothing in the evidence so far suggests that anything other than a copyright claim was ever discussed. Patent claims wouldn't be addressed by a clean-room implementation but so far there is no evidence whatsoever of willfull patent infringement. 2) The factor of willful and selective enforcement: several other organisations have built java compatible VM's and compilers (Kaffeine and gcj for example) - and never has sun or oracle sued them -despite stating their aim at java-compatibility. 3) That java itself was GPL'd prior to the oracle acquisition and teh terms of that license provides blanket patent coverage over java itself, it's only the java test-suite (used for measuring compatibility) which is licensed differently (thus remaining patentable) and this is why code such as Apache Foundation's Harmony are safe - they don't do those tests. Oracle has yet to show any proof that google ever used the test-suite. 4) Public statements by SUN employees that the java patents in question are frivolous (made stronger by the fact that they are the very employees who applied for them) and were only filed to get sun defensive patent protection, and that they even competed to see who could get the stupidest, silliest patent granted.
This case is still very much up in the air in terms of real guilt. Whether you agree with software patents or not - the simple reality is that Oracle has a lot of unanswered questions here and it's by no means clear-cut whether google did in fact infringe any patents at all - let alone what the true damage assesment should be if they did.
I find one thing from this far more disturbing: google claims that real damages should be based on android value only, and since android is zero-cost that damages must be zero-cost as well. The judge declared that zero-cost is not applicable as their other income (ad-revenue) must be considered as tied in with this. This is very concerning because it would make the likely liability of open-source projects that are sued by patent trolls far higher, if the revenue from the supposedly infringing product is to be expanded to include revenue from any other software, service or product which in some way gets bundled or shared on that product then many open-source companies face a far higher risk in patents than they previously did.
Imagine if a company sued wordpress for patent infringement and then claimed that every ad shown on their commercial wordpress.com free blog hosting site is revenue that should count toward the calculation of patent damages ?
Back in 1992 (the same year that Snowcrash came out) I read a non-fiction book called "Being a driver on the information superhighway" - a sort of a businessman's guide to communications technology. It had chapters on answering machines, faxes and dial-in BBS systems for example.
The final chapter dealt with the internet - and stated that "the current hype around the internet will be shortlived and is best-ignored. The internet is based on antiquated 40-year old technology, has nobody to drive it forward and simply cannot provide a sustained information platform". This was the common belief among the majority of analysts and indeed technologists in the early 90's - even Microsoft famously blundered by shipping windows 3.1 without support for TCP/IP - they didn't support internet natively on Windows until Windows95.
That there were by the early '90s plenty of predictions of an information superhighway - the one thing nobody foresaw was one that didn't have a central authority to build, steer and maintain it. That truly democratic version did however fit into the Stephenson post-nation-state u/dystopia - and that prediction was the one above all that he got right - and which Neuromancer did not (Neuromancer made no predictions whatsoever about who/what would be BEHIND cyberspace). Stephenson did - and he got it right, the one thing nobody else saw coming except the few diligently working technologists who were bringing it about.
For that he deserves credit, the fact that it's a great book (I re-read it a few months ago) is a bonus.
As for the comparison between google and his central highway, the internet existed before google - and will persist after google, though I can see some similarity it's really on a different level altogether. Not least of which - it doesn't take an hour's "drive" to get to a website on the other side of the globe, it just takes a click. What the internet's transport mechanism actually ended up being modeled after was space-sifi's wormholes, we even named it after that- hypertext is directly derived from hyperspace.
As a regular flyer I can attest to this. I came up with about 5 different ways to get anything I want on an airplane one afternoon while sitting bored in an airport pub waiting for my flight to board.
Here's just a simple example. On international flights, you get to go shopping in the no-tax zone. The security is before you enter the zone. There is absolutely nothing that checks the safety of anything you bought while there (and by definition whatever you buy is now hand-luggage). Most of those zones include shopping for all sorts of things - not least I've never seen one without a pharmacy (meaning you can buy quite a lot of chemicals there ) and liquor stores (so much for no glassware on a plane when I can carry all the whiskey bottles I want, as every barfighter knows a pretty dangerous weaon - and filled with a flammable contents).
See, unlike you, I'm not subject to US jurisdiction and the TSA can suck me if they think I'll be afraid to point out how useless they are. If I wanted to get weapons on a plane nothing they are doing would stop me in the slightest. This is just one example - buy the weapons at the airport on the other side of the security gate. So you need to be a bit inventive (I've yet to see a gunstore in a no-tax zone) but it hardly takes McGuyver genius to turn a whiskey bottle into a weapon or make a smoke-bomb out of pharmacy-grade over-the-counter saltpeter.
Actually these predictions were standard fare in nearly all the cyberpunk novels of the 1980's (granted that was much closer to the realization than the 1960s but still well before). Neil Stephenson explored something that was remarkably like the internet in his brilliant Snowcrash and there was a network even MORE like what the internet ultimately became in Diamond Age. Neuromancer's prediction was similar to that in Snowcrash. While the VR based internet never happened, the underlying technologies as in Snowcrash were very close to the reality - barring a few small gaps (the real internet has no central highway by which we reach various sites and the entire method of transport is transparent to the user as opposed to the manual [simulated by vehicles] approach that Stephenson predicted). But these are relatively small nits to pick at. The core idea of a global communications network where anybody could speak to everybody was there. The last part of this century saw something else change however as content managers and automated blogging platforms and the like broke one of predictions Stephenson had made (and which was true in the 90s) where tech-skill directly equated to the success of your site and it's likely popularity. The better you could code, the more attractive your site would be -the more readers you'd get, much as the best coded buildings in Stephenson's cyberspace had the most visitors. Nowadays - coding skill of the speaker is no longer relevant to their likelihood of being listened too thanks to the proliferation of technologies that removed that need and in fact we're seeing an ever increasing move away from having your own website towards trying to be particularly visible on somebody else's site (social networks).
I guess the sad thing is that his "technological priesthood" was a rather shortlived age.
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>and at least casual passers-by see both sides of any issue.
I can't think of anything more truly naive than to imagine that any issue has only two sides. Humans, especially politicians, like to think and act as if they did - but the real world never works that way. This makes the whole "both sides" tactic a wonderful form of mass-manipulation.
By ignoring all shades of gray you can take somebody from a reasonable position and rapidly get them to agree to a highly unreasonable proposition by painting it as being on the same side of the line - but the real world doesn't have lines. It has a huge gray area that slowly shades from "where you were comfortable with" through "less and less okay" to "not okay at all".
You start out believing people should be allowed to write and read any newspaper they like, and end up supporting the right to put the recipe for nerf gas on a billboard. You start out believing a government should be beholden to it's people, and those people empowered to replace that government - and end up supporting the idea that a convicted fellon should be able to buy assault rifles with armor piercing bullets and finger-print resistant grips.
In reality - none of us are truly on the extremes - but we end up voting for them because we've been convinced that there is a black/white line and if we don't support one extreme we support the other.
Generally though - if we truly probe our thoughts we discover that we are never really in support of the extremes. Even Timothy McVeigh thought that the right to bear arms shouldn't include nuclear weapons. Yep - a man who killed people and planted a bomb because he believed so strongly that people should be allowed to have ANY weapons, could see a kind of weapon he thought ought to be restricted.
You can really draw the same principle through almost every debate in politics today. Instead of "two sides" - look at it as two extremes with a huge gray area in the middle, and then say that each specific example in that gray area should be studied on merit and those that aren't two extreme on either side should probably be okay.
Thanks for the support- the version you give and the one I used are not all the incompatible though - Marx didn't write in English and I think both translations are equally accurate though.
Ignorance.
Out of context quotes of what Marx actually wrote doesn't change the core of his philosophy into something it is not.
Later socialists expanded on the welfare state ideals but the reality is that capitalist countries are now, and always have been, bigger welfare states than any communist nation. It's easy to see why - without an all-powerful state employer FORCING everybody to work, you have unemployment (many capitalist economists actually believe that high unemployment is a GOOD thing for the economy as it drives down labor prices allowing businesses to flourish) - and when you have unemployment - you need wellfare. Communist countries had little to no unemployment at all - since the state put EVERYBODY to work.
It wasn't pretty - but clearly the idea that the welfare state is communist is just plain wrong.
Communism doesn't even REQUIRE a state, let alone a welfare state. The fact that state socialism is what countries like the USSR claimed to implement doesn't change anything. Most socialist philosophers will say the USSR was never a communist country - it was state capitalism, it just replaced many corrupt employers who steal labour (by paying less than it's worth) with ONE who could steal more.
Proudhon's libertarian socialism was ALSO communist but at the same time it was anarchist and devoid of any state at all - in fact, outside the USA nearly every branch of libertarianism and anarchism is also socialist.
Socialism is an economic philosophy NOT a political one, the all-powerful state concept was merely one way to deal with the practical difficulties of socialism - but it's not PART of socialism anymore than the wellfare state. Frankly it was probably the worst approach that could have been taken.
Libertarian Socialists for example generally support a free market where businesses can operate and compete - but they oppose managerial ownership of businesses, demanding that all businesses be worker-owned.
Anarcho-socialism said the same - but rejected the idea that these businesses should then try to maximise profit and compete - this largely led to it's failure in spain.
Most libertarian socialists believe worker owned businesses should have no wages at all, they should be managed by consent, attempt to maximise profit and then share that profit among the people whose labor brought it about.
Such mutualist businesses (also known as cooperations) are not unknown even now - the biggest manufacturer of fabrics in the USA is run like that. We just believe we'd have a better world in all aspects if ALL businesses were run like that.
No need for an all-powerful state, no need for state involvement in business at all - it's as libertarian as Rand Paul, but it's also socialist in all the best ways without most of the problems that caused state socialism to fail so spectacularly.
This is the kind of philosophy you get from Joseph Proudhon, or a comtemporary would be Noam Chomsky. It's pure socialism - and the accusation in the GP's post doesn't enter into it anywhere.
Now you may dissagree with socialism if you want, but at least be informed, basing your rejection on a false strawman is ignorant and makes you look stupid - worse it leaves you incapable of making rational and intelligent decisions.
>So you approve of an unfair society where people are given things that they did not earn by having it forcefully taken from someone who did earn it? Call me crazy, but doesn't the dictionary define that sort of behavior as "theft"?
>Also, I find it horribly ironic that you talk about the evil "greedy" people, yet you fail to see the greed in thinking you should get something that you didn't earn.
Which bit of communism declares that anybody should get something they didn't earn ? Capitalism is full of that. Sorry - but those people who make fortunes playing stock markets didn't earn their money, in fact, they are a nett loss to the productive capacity of the economy.
Communism had some real flaws but this is not one of them. Nothing in communism is "give for free" - it's a structural equality. When it says "from each according to his means" it does say EACH. Everybody gains but everybody ALSO contributes.
True there are massive practical difficulties in sorting this out (biggest one - the greedy people who try to give less than their share or take more than they should - usually the people in charge), but communism is built on a system of shared production - nobody just "gets according to their need", they must also GIVE according to their means.
You can raise many points against communism but "take from earners and give to non-earners" is a model that isn't even CONSIDERED in it.
True that IS the model by which some wellfare systems work, but those are justified on other grounds (if you help those who REALLY suffer out, then they can become productive again) - this also doesn't always (perhaps even often) work well -but crucially it's by NO means part of communist philosphy. It is a system with strong socialist connotations (well it's done more in more socialist leaning countries) but it isn't actually part of socialism.
The only thing REMOTELY like what you suggest is things like social security in the USA - and even THEN only for the very first generation who ever got it. Social security is not an investment you make in your old age. It's paying a debt. You achieved part of what you achieved because when you were a child who could not earn, you got given what you need to live by the previous generation, now that you are earning and they no longer can, social security is you paying them BACK for what they did for you, as your children are one day meant to do for you.
Despite popular perception - I have yet to see any socialist or communist philosophy where ANYTHING is given without being earned, these philosophies can at best be accused of expanding which activities should be considered worthy of reward.
Even hardcore capitalists with actual knowledge of what they talk about know this. The first proposal for social security was made by Adam Smith. True it didn't become a law in practical effect until Rooseveldt but the suggestion goes back to Smith himself.
Hopefully you read this whole post and is now a little less ignorant. Some of us think that a system where the hardest and most productive workers are the lowest paid members of society while those who contribute the least earn the most (all those middle men and excess lawyers in America's litigation-mad society) is real theft.
>I don't think so. You have zero air property rights. Your property rights exist only at ground level and perhaps below ground level, depending on your deed. The only people I can think of who actually have "air rights" are industry, the EPA, and the FAA.
Yes, I know I don't have them legally, but that's because we don't live in a libertarian world. The original capitalist libertarian philosophy was written when air rights were irrelevent, we didn't have powered flight - we didn't have fossil fuel (or even know about pollution) - so they didn't consider it.
I have NO doubt that all those philosphers who wrote it would, if they wrote them today - have considered at least a certain amount of air rights.
Even then - you are ignoring a right I most certainly DO have right now - the right to decide what goes into my body. If you inject me with a poison, you are guilty of murder. If you pump the room I'm in full of arsenic gas you are guilty of murder. Why should carbon dioxide be treated any differently ? Just because it kills more slowly ? Well that is purely a matter of dosage, up the dosage (not very much even) and it's just as fast a killer as arsenic or any other toxin. People regularly use exhaust fumes to commit suicide. Many people have died by accident from faulty exhausts that leaked into cars.
This is not a harmless gas. True nature puts a lot of it in the air and our bodies are quite capable of handing that amount, but we put in a great deal more. Enough to reach lethal dosage in a car-sized space within a period of about 20 minutes.
The reality is, that air rights or not, I have body rights- you're not just pumping it into my yard, you're pumping it into my LUNGS !
See my post above, your post is so full of factual errors it's frightening. Not least- the majority of wind turbines are NOT produced in China, they are produced by a Chinese company - with a factory in the USA.
>If "it takes more energy to produce and ship wind turbines than they will produce in the first 10 years", why would anyone install them? That claim is obvious tripe, because generation rates are dependent on where they're installed and if it was that incredibly inefficient you wouldn't find any company willing to use wind turbines to generate electricity.
Even more ironic - the majority of wind turbine production for use in the USA at this time is not done in China, the number one supplier is a Chinese company but their factory is in Nevada ! (Wow, must have been opposites day or something...)
Actually the company stated that the shipping costs from China are higher than the wage savings they'd have had if they operated there - they almost exactly even out, the tax breaks Obama gave green energy companies meant they made MORE money by building a factory in the USA than they could in China - which of course removes all those shipping energy issues as well.
Oh - and it gave jobs to 7000 Americans - wow... a US policy that got a foreign company to GIVE you jobs as opposed to exporting your jobs to a foreign country... that's a first !
>You mean, as it takes more energy to produce and ship wind turbines than they will produce the first 10 years. So it's more like "clean energy causes 10 times more harm than fossil fuels, but mostly in China".
Did I say wind-turbines in particular ? I am in favor of clean energy - I agree that currently the practical problems with wind energy is a major issue with it, personally, I prefer nuclear.
>Ending all wars ? Yeah right. Are you really moronic enough to think the middle east will stop fighting without oil ?
I never said ALL wars, I said it would end the OIL wars. I was specific, and the oil wars are not between middle eastern countries. I meant we will no longer see Western governments (one in particular) wanting to invade those countries for oil. That doesn't mean they will never be invaded for anything else.
I never said we'd see world peace if we got rid of oil dependence, I just said we won't see oil wars anymore. Nobody fights a war for a resource unless that resource has value.
>I'd hate to see us stop trusting legitimate environmental science to the point we end up dumping toxic substances into our air and water again
Mmmm.... dumping toxic substances in the air ... you mean toxic substances like carbon-dioxide and carbon-monoxide ?
Even if climate change was completely unwarranted as a threat, fossil-fuel energy causes massive, verifiable harm right now and is probably the largest single public health-risk today. Clean energy means significant reductions in cases of asthma, some variants of TB and dozens of other respiratory illnesses.
It also means that the world can end it's state of being economic hostages to a bunch of really evil dictators out in the middle-east. It means the end of the oil wars.
Frankly I don't care if climate change is real or not- clean energy has so many advantages that it is frankly stupid not to pursue. I even think it's a libertarian concern. Everytime the toxic gas from your car blows over my fence - you're violating my basic property rights and intruding on my liberty to have clean air in my home, and causing me physical harm.
The only thing that makes this almost acceptable is that we almost universally all contribute to doing it to each other but the only rational answer for a libertarian is to demand that government do it's only legitimate task and protect my rights - by doing everything in their power to end this situation in the shortest possible amount of time.
Okay - answer this.
Why is the entropy law of thermodynamics the ONLY physical law ever written that is not time-reversible ?
Answer - because it's a coarse-grained law, and the details that get lost in coarse-graining is what we'd need to time-reverse it.
Using an oversimplified analogy - it's very easy to scramble an egg, but unscrambling it is so incredibly difficult as to be only barely possible in theory. But it is possible. Entropy says it shouldn't be possible even in theory - because entropy coarse-grains the results.
The thermodynamic model is an incredibly useful scientific model - even if it's first and third laws are really just restatements of Newtonian laws, but it does have it's limits.
All scientific theories do - they all coarse-grain. What science DOES is to take a universe too complex to understand and explain it in simplified models that we CAN understand - and that is very useful and increases our understanding. Over time those models can get more complex, building on each other and themselves, and approach the reality but it could never get there (if it did, why have a model at all ?).
One of the most basic rules of the philosophy of science is to remember that you're working with simplified models. Nearly always, it doesn't matter - but sometimes, sooner or later, you encounter areas where the coarse-graining of a scientific model is leaving out details that change the results.
The simple truth is the universe is not trending towards an entropic state, you just have to look at it to see that is has - over time - become decidely MORE clumpy not LESS clumpy. To say "well entropy says the trend must eventually reverse" is too stare into the coarse-graining when reality most decidedly disagrees.
Recognizing that science is based on simplified models that do not correspond exactly to reality doesn't weaken science, it makes it stronger by letting it get the most out of those models and then changing to a different model when needed.
Here's another little brain-teaser for you. Thermodynamics predict that superconductors should be possible at very close to absolute zero. But we've built them at much higher temperatures, so high that liquid nitrogen cooling can keep them going - with them we've built electromagnets so powerful they keep the fastest train in the world running in mid-air from point to point.
We did that twenty years ago. But how are they possible ? What lets them work at such a high temperature ? Answer - we have no idea. They are working in practice but they are theoretically impossible. The adjustment to the theories to account for this observation is one of the greatest unanswered questions in modern physics. There are good scientists working on the problem and some theories are showing promise for explanations but none of them have any real evidence to support them yet.
All of them require changing some fundamental aspects of the laws of thermodynamics - we don't yet know what we'll be changing but it's simply a fact that we WILL be seeing a change in at least one of the laws of thermodynamics in order to explain how something that they currently declare impossible is working so reliably we can engineer trains with it. Somewhere in the coarse-graining something is getting lost that's huge. If the fact that the universe is NOT following an entropic trend was not a big enough hint, then high-termperature superconductors are, something has to give here.
It's going to be very interesting to see what that something is.
Sorry, I meant Jack Cohen, I always get their names mixed up.
Strange - Jack Kirby seems to agree with me, he's written three research papers and two books on the topic.
Not quite but very close. Socialist Libertarian is very similar to anarcho-socialism, but not quite identical. For example most SL philosophers believe not in the destruction business or profit as a concept but in restructuring all businesses into worker-owned cooperations without managerial hierarchy.
Instead of wages - every worker would earn a percentage of the companies nett income - that percentage is determined by his contribution to that income. So you still reward hard-work and learning, but you don't have a "boss" in charge - the company is run by concensus vote.
The biggest manufacturer of fabrics in the USA is run that way right now.
Most SL's also don't favor a system without any authority but believes in massive decentralization and authority by the people themselves in the form of community based direct-democracy.
So very similar to socialist-anarchism, but not identical.
Only in America. Libertarianism was an invention of socialists (as an alternative to state-socialism) and in most of the world outside the USA the word libertarian is automatically associated with non-state-based socialism as well.
To put it differently - in Europe "libertarian socialist" would be a tautology. Libertarian Capitalism was a much more recent philosophical movement and is almost entirely limited to the United States.
Even there Libertarian Socialism still thrives (though it needs to be spelled out), for example one of the most prominent Libertarian Socialists of our time is an American you may have heard of. Fellow by the name of Noam Chomsky ?
>Umm, you think a sampling of beauty pageant contestants is an informative sampling of US public opinion? They aren't exactly average Americans.
No, they aren't, but just because they bucked the trend on obesity doesn't imply that their other opinions will be different :P
http://silentcoder.co.za/2010/11/how-intelligent-is-the-designer/
Nuff said.
>Dawkins says one thing. You say it's obviously wrong. Dawkins is qualified to speak on the topic of biology; he's earned that right through lifelong study. He can be as wrong as any other man, but it would take an equally qualified biologist to identify Dawkins' error. What, exactly, are your qualifications?
I'm sorry but even though I am a rationalist I must dispute you here. That entire paragraph is a call to authority - which is a fallacy. Dawkins's being a respected authority on biology does NOT EVER make what he says about it more trustworthy than a criticism by a layman. Not only would claiming so be a fallacy it is also repugnant to the scientific method (one of the specific reasons FOR the scientific method is a defense against authority).
Dawkins' has authority because his science is sound - NOT the other way around. When a layman argues against him - that argument should be measured on scientific virtue - NOT on the "rankholding" of the speaker, because that is entirely irrelevant. Many scientific breakthroughs have been, and continue to be, made by laymen - and every young scientist would give his right arm to prove the great authority in his field wrong about something.
That's what science IS - and it's exactly WHY we can put such trust in it. The correct answer to the GP would be "Dawkins follows the scientific method in his writings and thus far has done so impeccably, you say he is 'obviously wrong' - without giving any science at all to back up your assertion. Unless you can answer his science with BETTER science that's just meaningless drivel".
>Also, the fact that a particular combination of genes is highly improbable doesn't imply that it could not evolve,
By that logic, well the odds of a bunch of atoms being arranged into a DNA molecule with the GP's particular combination of genes are billions to one. I must therefore conclude that it is impossible for the GP to exist.
You'd think geeks would understand basic physics better than this. It was okay when Asimov got thermodynamics just plain wrong - because it was 60 years ago and everybody had it wrong. Even Roger Penrose still had it wrong in the 70's but the whole "universe increases in entropy so why are there constellations and life" paradox doesn't exist.
Real scientists figured that out a long, long time ago. The longer version is: thermodynamics is a model of the behavior of gasses in a closed system which makes a lot of assumptions (for starters: it treats all gas molecules as solid, perfect spheres that bounce off once another with no loss of velocity - e.g. energy transfer without friction). These assumptions are okay to make in thermodynamics because the energy "lost" to friction doesn't get "lost" from the system - it becomes heat energy and it all averages out. But they do mean something. Thermodynamics tells you if you dump a bunch of gas in a tank it will end up evenly spread rather than clumped in the corner (that is the ENTIRETY of the entropy law - and information entropy has NOTHING to do with it and the "relationship" is not even conjecture - it's BAD science fiction - for starters it goes in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION and the symbols in the equations have different meanings [c is a distance in geometry and a velocity in physics for example]). That is the purpose of thermodynamics, it's a model of physics that explains the behavior of gasses (and with minor adaptation liquids and solids) from a certain point of view, but it's a model of reality that ignores a bunch of inconvenient things because within the scale of the model those things have no measureable impact. Scientists call it "coarse-graining" - the details we don't see in thermodynamics because they are too small do matter on the scale of a star system.
The most important detail that thermodynamics completely ignores is the force of gravity. There is no thermodynamic law that considers the impact of gravity. In a tank containing only one gass - it actually means that on average the gas will be slightly more concentrated on the bottom of the tank than the top - not enough to matter, so the model does it's job - but thats because individual gas molecules have very little mass, on astronomic scales the whole tank has almost no mass.
But star systems and planets have huge amounts of mass - and suddenly a force which on the nuclear level is incredibly weak (a small speaker magnet has more than enough force to lift a nail against the gravity of the entire planet) starts to matter: a lot.
Gravity on the universal force acts to collect things together, and the more they collect, the more gravity they have - it is a trend in the opposite direction of entropy.
On small scales (what thermodynamics is for) entropy wins. On the scale of galaxies, entropy is (much) weaker than gravity and the entropic "heat death of the universe" is unscientific hogwash.
In the real universe the battle between entropy and gravity is pretty close. That's why we don't have a "smoothly spread" universe now. If gravity was too strong - we'd have the opposite: the entire universe collapsed into a single black-hole. The ultimate singularity.
In the end, one or the other may yet win out - but the odds of a black-hole ending is at least as good as a for an entropic heat death and either way for either to actually win when the difference is so small - would take a lot longer than the lifetime of the universe so far still - meaning we got at least a few hundred billion years left.
>Actually it's the other way around - Oracle tried to play the copyright card, but that didn't seem to work so well, so they're focusing on patents now.
You're right but I was referring to the discussion google has admitted to having had with SUN prior to the buyout by oracle. Oracle has shown no proof that this discussion was about patent licenses rather than a simple copyright license (which is what google claims) - even then the copyright license was purely considered as a means for a partnership in development - it was never suggested by google (or proven by Oracle) that they thought it was required for clean-room work on their own which is what they did in the end.
Yep, that's just about exactly what they did. They aren't the first either. Kaffeine and GCJ and many others have done the same - but oracle only sued Google.
You're ignoring some crucial points:
1) That google chose a clean-room over SUN tech after the dealmaking failed. That is a perfectly valid defense for a copyright claim - and nothing in the evidence so far suggests that anything other than a copyright claim was ever discussed. Patent claims wouldn't be addressed by a clean-room implementation but so far there is no evidence whatsoever of willfull patent infringement.
2) The factor of willful and selective enforcement: several other organisations have built java compatible VM's and compilers (Kaffeine and gcj for example) - and never has sun or oracle sued them -despite stating their aim at java-compatibility.
3) That java itself was GPL'd prior to the oracle acquisition and teh terms of that license provides blanket patent coverage over java itself, it's only the java test-suite (used for measuring compatibility) which is licensed differently (thus remaining patentable) and this is why code such as Apache Foundation's Harmony are safe - they don't do those tests. Oracle has yet to show any proof that google ever used the test-suite.
4) Public statements by SUN employees that the java patents in question are frivolous (made stronger by the fact that they are the very employees who applied for them) and were only filed to get sun defensive patent protection, and that they even competed to see who could get the stupidest, silliest patent granted.
This case is still very much up in the air in terms of real guilt. Whether you agree with software patents or not - the simple reality is that Oracle has a lot of unanswered questions here and it's by no means clear-cut whether google did in fact infringe any patents at all - let alone what the true damage assesment should be if they did.
I find one thing from this far more disturbing: google claims that real damages should be based on android value only, and since android is zero-cost that damages must be zero-cost as well.
The judge declared that zero-cost is not applicable as their other income (ad-revenue) must be considered as tied in with this. This is very concerning because it would make the likely liability of open-source projects that are sued by patent trolls far higher, if the revenue from the supposedly infringing product is to be expanded to include revenue from any other software, service or product which in some way gets bundled or shared on that product then many open-source companies face a far higher risk in patents than they previously did.
Imagine if a company sued wordpress for patent infringement and then claimed that every ad shown on their commercial wordpress.com free blog hosting site is revenue that should count toward the calculation of patent damages ?
Back in 1992 (the same year that Snowcrash came out) I read a non-fiction book called "Being a driver on the information superhighway" - a sort of a businessman's guide to communications technology.
It had chapters on answering machines, faxes and dial-in BBS systems for example.
The final chapter dealt with the internet - and stated that "the current hype around the internet will be shortlived and is best-ignored. The internet is based on antiquated 40-year old technology, has nobody to drive it forward and simply cannot provide a sustained information platform".
This was the common belief among the majority of analysts and indeed technologists in the early 90's - even Microsoft famously blundered by shipping windows 3.1 without support for TCP/IP - they didn't support internet natively on Windows until Windows95.
That there were by the early '90s plenty of predictions of an information superhighway - the one thing nobody foresaw was one that didn't have a central authority to build, steer and maintain it.
That truly democratic version did however fit into the Stephenson post-nation-state u/dystopia - and that prediction was the one above all that he got right - and which Neuromancer did not (Neuromancer made no predictions whatsoever about who/what would be BEHIND cyberspace).
Stephenson did - and he got it right, the one thing nobody else saw coming except the few diligently working technologists who were bringing it about.
For that he deserves credit, the fact that it's a great book (I re-read it a few months ago) is a bonus.
As for the comparison between google and his central highway, the internet existed before google - and will persist after google, though I can see some similarity it's really on a different level altogether.
Not least of which - it doesn't take an hour's "drive" to get to a website on the other side of the globe, it just takes a click. What the internet's transport mechanism actually ended up being modeled after was space-sifi's wormholes, we even named it after that- hypertext is directly derived from hyperspace.
As a regular flyer I can attest to this. I came up with about 5 different ways to get anything I want on an airplane one afternoon while sitting bored in an airport pub waiting for my flight to board.
Here's just a simple example. On international flights, you get to go shopping in the no-tax zone. The security is before you enter the zone. There is absolutely nothing that checks the safety of anything you bought while there (and by definition whatever you buy is now hand-luggage).
Most of those zones include shopping for all sorts of things - not least I've never seen one without a pharmacy (meaning you can buy quite a lot of chemicals there ) and liquor stores (so much for no glassware on a plane when I can carry all the whiskey bottles I want, as every barfighter knows a pretty dangerous weaon - and filled with a flammable contents).
See, unlike you, I'm not subject to US jurisdiction and the TSA can suck me if they think I'll be afraid to point out how useless they are. If I wanted to get weapons on a plane nothing they are doing would stop me in the slightest. This is just one example - buy the weapons at the airport on the other side of the security gate.
So you need to be a bit inventive (I've yet to see a gunstore in a no-tax zone) but it hardly takes McGuyver genius to turn a whiskey bottle into a weapon or make a smoke-bomb out of pharmacy-grade over-the-counter saltpeter.
Actually these predictions were standard fare in nearly all the cyberpunk novels of the 1980's (granted that was much closer to the realization than the 1960s but still well before). Neil Stephenson explored something that was remarkably like the internet in his brilliant Snowcrash and there was a network even MORE like what the internet ultimately became in Diamond Age.
Neuromancer's prediction was similar to that in Snowcrash. While the VR based internet never happened, the underlying technologies as in Snowcrash were very close to the reality - barring a few small gaps (the real internet has no central highway by which we reach various sites and the entire method of transport is transparent to the user as opposed to the manual [simulated by vehicles] approach that Stephenson predicted).
But these are relatively small nits to pick at. The core idea of a global communications network where anybody could speak to everybody was there. The last part of this century saw something else change however as content managers and automated blogging platforms and the like broke one of predictions Stephenson had made (and which was true in the 90s) where tech-skill directly equated to the success of your site and it's likely popularity. The better you could code, the more attractive your site would be -the more readers you'd get, much as the best coded buildings in Stephenson's cyberspace had the most visitors.
Nowadays - coding skill of the speaker is no longer relevant to their likelihood of being listened too thanks to the proliferation of technologies that removed that need and in fact we're seeing an ever increasing move away from having your own website towards trying to be particularly visible on somebody else's site (social networks).
I guess the sad thing is that his "technological priesthood" was a rather shortlived age.