literature, history, languages, philosophy. Some put mathematics there, too.
People knowing history and language makes them better citizens. People knowing literature and philosophy makes them better humans (ok, that is debatable, but it can't hurt to have some knowledge of what other articulate people have written in the past). In general, these are the disciplines which should help people have a sense of perspective, and hopefully be less prone to believing bullshit.
And of course all those disciplines are unproductive so "the market" won't support them. But it's like art and music: these things make life worth living. And arguably, spending money on things that can make people happy is by no means the worse a government can do.
Oh, I agree. The problem is that what you describe is not waste, just (very) inefficient process. But to fix that, you need to start having benchmarks, and reviews (which also cause administrative costs).
Then you can say "this or that program does nothing good", or on the contrary, that it does. But that means that you accept that some technocrat/expert somewhere decides that this or that political choice was objectively good or bad.
Personally, I would love it if politicians got to decide on programmes and their stated objective, and some administration independently benchmarked them and had the power to axe them if it was found out that they did not go in the direction of their objective.
At least, it would force politicians to spell out their objectives. If you want to gut the middle class, go ahead, but you have to be frank about it.
I agree with you. But if you read the responses to my post, you can see that for many people, the idea that some idea might in fact be testable, and that we should just go for what works does not enter the question.
They believe that the very act of funding certain categories of services is a waste, independently of the outcome (you might want to rethink you position on liberal arts: they might be useless for 99% of their students, but by no means for society, and to be sure, the private sector won't fund them).
BTW, I am shocked that on slashdot, you find people who seriously think fundamental science should not be funded.
Yes, this is waste. But you miss the point: although this is waste, preventing it would likely cost much more.
The occasional excess should not be considered a valid reason to setup new, almost-pointless rules/administrations [1]. If you are trying to prevent a 3-sigma event with a low cost to society with a systemic protection, your are doing something wrong [2].
And if you then complain about government waste, this makes you a retard [3].
[1] case in point, the TSA. [2] that would be fighting the "welfare queens". So some individual benefit excessively (for quite moderate values of excess). And what? Unless you can _prove_ this makes the system insolvent or that at least preventing the excesses will neither downgrade the service for the rest of the beneficiaries nor cost more than the "waste" you pretend to waste, don't do it. Just don't. [3] the whole of the Tea Party who are not downright evil.
About not having a cell phone: clearly, you haven't tried. So you don't really have a choice.
And I won't debate the state of mobile telephony in Canada. If you think it is ok, and/or rightly priced, you clearly never looked beyond your borders.
Choice between a set of solutions, whether provided by the gov or by corps is not freedom. Freedom is about making up your own solutions, which very rarely happens.
Freedom is what the cell phone providers exerted. When you picked your plan/phone you were not free, just a consumer. And if you were in the US (or worse, Canada), _all_ your options were overpriced and crappy. Because the right of individual corporations trumped the collective good which would have required oversight and forced competition.
And yes, we all need the services within a narrow band of usage patterns.
Sure. But usually, the funds go to art colleges/foundations.
But frankly, are we better off when good art is decided upon by cultureless self-made-men? We all think art is great, and we all have a wholly different definition of what applies...
But that was my point, waste is in the eye of the beholder: tracking it is hard, and itself wasteful. Happiness is about accepting a measure of imperfection:)
Why? what is wrong with voting? we all use/need the collective services in the same way. We should vote for them/the guys responsible for their setup.
Unless you think that some of us are worth more than you, on the grounds that we are richer?
If it makes you happy, think of voting as a market operation. But remember: it is not freedom to individually decide on a globally suboptimal solution that we then all need to collectively live with. It is stupidity.
And BTW, yes, people can decide for you. They do, all the time: doctors decide what you have, engineers decide on your car's design, coders on how your programs are made, cell phones companies on their pricing schemes, the shop owner on the products that are on his shelves, the traffic authority the circulation plan of your neighbourhood, other countries the rules for access to their territories, the central banks decide on the value of your bank account, designers decide on the look of your garments.
Market freedom is an illusion. Markets are just a distribution mechanism, which works well in many cases, and terribly in others.
Surprisingly, not much lower. You hear a lot about waste/inefficiency, but although you can find any number of egregious examples of misapropriation, they amount to a small fraction of the total.
You could even argue that asking for low salaries for civil servants/contracting to the lowest bidder does a lot more to make the process inefficient than actual waste. For example, if working for the agencies controlling the markets paid much better than working in those markets, do you think we would have the problems we have now? Would it not be better to have the greedy bastards working for us rather than against us?
Also, what is "waste"? is funding fundamental science waste? is funding liberal arts waste? are the likes of the FDA waste? is paying for some dubious piece of art in your own town waste? is paying people to check for fraud waste, or is the fraud the largest cause of waste?
A transaction between myself and twitter is a contract. Amongst the things a contract cannot do is deprive me of my rights, even if I wanted it to. If twitter did not want the liability of having EU citizen clients, they should not have entered into the contract in the first place!
Again, this is completely different from someone using twitter in his country to do something illegal there (not twitter's problem). This is the case were twitter does something illegal in the EU _in the EU_ Because their client is a EU citizen located in the EU.
This is like you getting abducted by a Somali in the US to be brought back there, and the pirate telling the US to fuck off, because in Somalia, abduction is legal.
Look, you are sitting in your room, at your computer. The transaction occurs where you are. Were the servers are located is immaterial.
Were they are located make twitter the subject of this subpoena, true. But were the transaction occurred makes twitter subject to EU law on privacy.
The important point here is that twitter is potentially guilty of something, not the users. If twitter had been selling widgets legal in the US and illegal in the EU, then the buyers would be guilty (and maybe twitter would receive some court order to stop doing business in the EU). Here everything was legit, up to the point were twitter must now decide which law it'll break.
You cannot magically remove right from people just because they are dealing with foreign companies! Privacy is a right EU citizens have, and if a company accepts EU user data, they must abide by those laws. Otherwise, they shouldn't allow access to their service.
Because let's face it, twitter is all fine when it comes to receiving euros for advertising... in exchange from user data.
You misunderstand. Internet is not a magical no-law zone.
When twitter opens an account with a EU citizen, this transaction happened in the EU. They are bound, for this account, by EU law.
Your whole argument is that this is unworkable. In fact, it works very well: laws are mostly compatible, and citizens are mostly allowed to do as they please in the privacy of their own homes.
Once in a while, there is some incompatibility, and it needs to get resolved. But the greater point is that you, US citizen, do not lose rights because you use a Chinese website, nor does a EU citizen loses his when dealing with twitter.
This, in turns means that when twitter agreed to provide a service to a EU citizen, they also agreed to abide by EU privacy laws. In practice, this is incompatible with US law, because there, citizens have less rights. Again, in practice, this means that twitter ought to have a twitter EU subsidiary which does the data collection and management for EU citizens. And for technical reasons,I also expect them to do that anyway.
If you are a tiny company, this sucks, and you will have to decide which country enforces the stiffest penalty... But again, usually, this poses no problem. And if you cared about the privacy of you users, there would be no data to subpoena anyway.
No, your last line of defence against criminals is the police. If it is not, then your country is a failed state, and discussing laws a mere fantasy.
As a side note, your guns will in all likelihood never help you defend your family. They might, however, be instrumental in a tragic accident involving two members of your family. That you seem to be preparing yourself to kill another human, even in self defence, probably indicates that your family might need protection from you, rather than you protecting them.
Also, there is a large misunderstanding of what constitutes science. Ultimately, what matters is getting the theory right. That is:understanding the mechanisms and their mathematical expression.
Then, your results do not decline. Sadly, many publications lack proper analysis leading to the elucidation of a mechanism. Mostly because it is in fact much harder than doing lots of experiments and noticing an interesting trend. And bullshitting a pretext in stead of developing a proper framework/theory.
In fields where the mathematical foundations are shaky or nonexistent, the life sciences, medicine, social sciences, this is always going to be a prevalent problem. And that one finds that the results get tested again and again, and their significance put into question is, unlike what the article claims, perfect proof that the publication mechanisms, for all its flaws, basically works.
It should and could be better. But articles such as this one are infuriating: they attempt at misleading the public into general disbelief. And people start thinking that science is about doing lots of experiments and finding the trends, and get depressed because it doesn't scale/work. But this is not science. Science is about understanding. Science is about fitting measures in theories, and not fitting theories into measures.
Although I did not know the history of the terminal proposition (which, come to think of it, makes a lot of sense), terminal propositions still sound odd/have been considered wrong for nearly a couple centuries.
But then if there ever was a bastard child of Germanic and Latin languages, English is it:)
But I did. Meaning is not context-sensitive. Only interpretation is. Communication requires guessing what the other guy was trying to say. That doesn't mean you can't also tell him what he actually said.
Iterative processes can converge, you know. Otherwise, we would never learn to speak in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
But then, the alternative is Rogers or Bell, so...
literature, history, languages, philosophy. Some put mathematics there, too.
People knowing history and language makes them better citizens. People knowing literature and philosophy makes them better humans (ok, that is debatable, but it can't hurt to have some knowledge of what other articulate people have written in the past). In general, these are the disciplines which should help people have a sense of perspective, and hopefully be less prone to believing bullshit.
And of course all those disciplines are unproductive so "the market" won't support them. But it's like art and music: these things make life worth living. And arguably, spending money on things that can make people happy is by no means the worse a government can do.
Oh, I agree. The problem is that what you describe is not waste, just (very) inefficient process. But to fix that, you need to start having benchmarks, and reviews (which also cause administrative costs).
Then you can say "this or that program does nothing good", or on the contrary, that it does. But that means that you accept that some technocrat/expert somewhere decides that this or that political choice was objectively good or bad.
Personally, I would love it if politicians got to decide on programmes and their stated objective, and some administration independently benchmarked them and had the power to axe them if it was found out that they did not go in the direction of their objective.
At least, it would force politicians to spell out their objectives. If you want to gut the middle class, go ahead, but you have to be frank about it.
I agree with you. But if you read the responses to my post, you can see that for many people, the idea that some idea might in fact be testable, and that we should just go for what works does not enter the question.
They believe that the very act of funding certain categories of services is a waste, independently of the outcome (you might want to rethink you position on liberal arts: they might be useless for 99% of their students, but by no means for society, and to be sure, the private sector won't fund them).
BTW, I am shocked that on slashdot, you find people who seriously think fundamental science should not be funded.
woooosh.
Magnitudes? as in at least 2?
You would seriously pay another human being 1000$ a year? Even slave labour would cost more than that!
Yes, this is waste. But you miss the point: although this is waste, preventing it would likely cost much more.
The occasional excess should not be considered a valid reason to setup new, almost-pointless rules/administrations [1]. If you are trying to prevent a 3-sigma event with a low cost to society with a systemic protection, your are doing something wrong [2].
And if you then complain about government waste, this makes you a retard [3].
[1] case in point, the TSA.
[2] that would be fighting the "welfare queens". So some individual benefit excessively (for quite moderate values of excess). And what? Unless you can _prove_ this makes the system insolvent or that at least preventing the excesses will neither downgrade the service for the rest of the beneficiaries nor cost more than the "waste" you pretend to waste, don't do it. Just don't.
[3] the whole of the Tea Party who are not downright evil.
About not having a cell phone: clearly, you haven't tried. So you don't really have a choice.
And I won't debate the state of mobile telephony in Canada. If you think it is ok, and/or rightly priced, you clearly never looked beyond your borders.
Choice between a set of solutions, whether provided by the gov or by corps is not freedom. Freedom is about making up your own solutions, which very rarely happens.
Freedom is what the cell phone providers exerted. When you picked your plan/phone you were not free, just a consumer. And if you were in the US (or worse, Canada), _all_ your options were overpriced and crappy. Because the right of individual corporations trumped the collective good which would have required oversight and forced competition.
And yes, we all need the services within a narrow band of usage patterns.
Sure. But usually, the funds go to art colleges/foundations.
But frankly, are we better off when good art is decided upon by cultureless self-made-men? We all think art is great, and we all have a wholly different definition of what applies...
But that was my point, waste is in the eye of the beholder: tracking it is hard, and itself wasteful. Happiness is about accepting a measure of imperfection:)
Why? what is wrong with voting? we all use/need the collective services in the same way. We should vote for them/the guys responsible for their setup.
Unless you think that some of us are worth more than you, on the grounds that we are richer?
If it makes you happy, think of voting as a market operation. But remember: it is not freedom to individually decide on a globally suboptimal solution that we then all need to collectively live with. It is stupidity.
And BTW, yes, people can decide for you. They do, all the time: doctors decide what you have, engineers decide on your car's design, coders on how your programs are made, cell phones companies on their pricing schemes, the shop owner on the products that are on his shelves, the traffic authority the circulation plan of your neighbourhood, other countries the rules for access to their territories, the central banks decide on the value of your bank account, designers decide on the look of your garments.
Market freedom is an illusion. Markets are just a distribution mechanism, which works well in many cases, and terribly in others.
Yes. But that would not be considered humane -- would you eat the resulting crops?
Surprisingly, not much lower. You hear a lot about waste/inefficiency, but although you can find any number of egregious examples of misapropriation, they amount to a small fraction of the total.
You could even argue that asking for low salaries for civil servants/contracting to the lowest bidder does a lot more to make the process inefficient than actual waste. For example, if working for the agencies controlling the markets paid much better than working in those markets, do you think we would have the problems we have now? Would it not be better to have the greedy bastards working for us rather than against us?
Also, what is "waste"? is funding fundamental science waste? is funding liberal arts waste? are the likes of the FDA waste? is paying for some dubious piece of art in your own town waste? is paying people to check for fraud waste, or is the fraud the largest cause of waste?
This is exactly how the law works.
A transaction between myself and twitter is a contract. Amongst the things a contract cannot do is deprive me of my rights, even if I wanted it to. If twitter did not want the liability of having EU citizen clients, they should not have entered into the contract in the first place!
Again, this is completely different from someone using twitter in his country to do something illegal there (not twitter's problem). This is the case were twitter does something illegal in the EU _in the EU_ Because their client is a EU citizen located in the EU.
This is like you getting abducted by a Somali in the US to be brought back there, and the pirate telling the US to fuck off, because in Somalia, abduction is legal.
Look, you are sitting in your room, at your computer. The transaction occurs where you are. Were the servers are located is immaterial.
Were they are located make twitter the subject of this subpoena, true. But were the transaction occurred makes twitter subject to EU law on privacy.
The important point here is that twitter is potentially guilty of something, not the users. If twitter had been selling widgets legal in the US and illegal in the EU, then the buyers would be guilty (and maybe twitter would receive some court order to stop doing business in the EU). Here everything was legit, up to the point were twitter must now decide which law it'll break.
You cannot magically remove right from people just because they are dealing with foreign companies! Privacy is a right EU citizens have, and if a company accepts EU user data, they must abide by those laws. Otherwise, they shouldn't allow access to their service.
Because let's face it, twitter is all fine when it comes to receiving euros for advertising... in exchange from user data.
You misunderstand. Internet is not a magical no-law zone.
When twitter opens an account with a EU citizen, this transaction happened in the EU. They are bound, for this account, by EU law.
Your whole argument is that this is unworkable. In fact, it works very well: laws are mostly compatible, and citizens are mostly allowed to do as they please in the privacy of their own homes.
Once in a while, there is some incompatibility, and it needs to get resolved. But the greater point is that you, US citizen, do not lose rights because you use a Chinese website, nor does a EU citizen loses his when dealing with twitter.
This, in turns means that when twitter agreed to provide a service to a EU citizen, they also agreed to abide by EU privacy laws. In practice, this is incompatible with US law, because there, citizens have less rights. Again, in practice, this means that twitter ought to have a twitter EU subsidiary which does the data collection and management for EU citizens. And for technical reasons,I also expect them to do that anyway.
If you are a tiny company, this sucks, and you will have to decide which country enforces the stiffest penalty... But again, usually, this poses no problem. And if you cared about the privacy of you users, there would be no data to subpoena anyway.
lamba is not a keyword for two reasons:
a) it mostly evokes elvish pastry (properly spelt lembas)
b) lambda (/\), the Greek letter, is very common in scientific code, and making it a keyword would be painful.
“Ought”. “Aught” is a negation meaning “none, no one”, fallen into partial disuse.
Which makes your post more of a double entendre than you meant...
No, your last line of defence against criminals is the police. If it is not, then your country is a failed state, and discussing laws a mere fantasy.
As a side note, your guns will in all likelihood never help you defend your family. They might, however, be instrumental in a tragic accident involving two members of your family. That you seem to be preparing yourself to kill another human, even in self defence, probably indicates that your family might need protection from you, rather than you protecting them.
Also, there is a large misunderstanding of what constitutes science. Ultimately, what matters is getting the theory right. That is:understanding the mechanisms and their mathematical expression.
Then, your results do not decline. Sadly, many publications lack proper analysis leading to the elucidation of a mechanism. Mostly because it is in fact much harder than doing lots of experiments and noticing an interesting trend. And bullshitting a pretext in stead of developing a proper framework/theory.
In fields where the mathematical foundations are shaky or nonexistent, the life sciences, medicine, social sciences, this is always going to be a prevalent problem. And that one finds that the results get tested again and again, and their significance put into question is, unlike what the article claims, perfect proof that the publication mechanisms, for all its flaws, basically works.
It should and could be better. But articles such as this one are infuriating: they attempt at misleading the public into general disbelief. And people start thinking that science is about doing lots of experiments and finding the trends, and get depressed because it doesn't scale/work. But this is not science. Science is about understanding. Science is about fitting measures in theories, and not fitting theories into measures.
woooosh.
Although I did not know the history of the terminal proposition (which, come to think of it, makes a lot of sense), terminal propositions still sound odd/have been considered wrong for nearly a couple centuries.
But then if there ever was a bastard child of Germanic and Latin languages, English is it :)
So much for people saying the US constitution should never be changed/updated/revised, he?
No, sorry, the texts mean exactly what they mean, and if you cannot understand them, study more.
But I did. Meaning is not context-sensitive. Only interpretation is. Communication requires guessing what the other guy was trying to say. That doesn't mean you can't also tell him what he actually said.
Iterative processes can converge, you know. Otherwise, we would never learn to speak in the first place.