I understand that. Nevertheless, as you yourself admit, without the computer error the plane would not have crashed and the people would not have died.
If a traffic light gets jammed at green while the lights pointing the other way continue to cycle, I might drive through and cause a crash. The primary fault would be mine, as the light being at green does not absolve me from the responsibility of checking that it is safe to proceed. However, the traffic light failure would certainly contribute to the accident.
This news puts Trojans in a new light. Taking over PCs to run scams is one thing; causing the deaths of 154 people is entirely different. Every top law enforcement agency and intelligence organization should be working to track down all of those responsible - from the guys who wrote the Trojans to the managers who allowed them to contaminate their computers, and very possibly those who wrote the vulnerable software and those who sold it for such a safety-critical application.
I shall be interested to see whether this case gets the same level of attention from the CIA, etc., as the Lockerbie crash. The latter killed 270 people (including some on the ground), but that's just because there were more passengers on that particular flight. The essential crime - the destruction of an airliner and most, or all, on board - is the same. Are we about to see a "war on malware" from the White House and the Pentagon?
Then I told it to search all my emails for the string "gorilla". That saturated one of my eight cores (so about 10-12% CPU usage) for 1 minute and 20 seconds of CPU time. But what the hey - the other seven cores were still at my disposal.
Noticing from this thread that 3.1.2 was available, I applied it and restarted Thunderbird. Five minutes later, its accumulated CPU time since the restart is 00:00.03. That is 30 milliseconds. CPU usage, of course, is 00%. Peak working set a little over 113KB.
I've got three accounts in one profile, with all sent and received messages back to about 1997. Many, many thousands of them.
From what I hear, that might well be part of it. Although they have some very nasty beliefs and rules, the Taliban - as religious fundamentalists - are absolutely opposed to drugs. While they were ruling Afghanistan, they came quite close to stamping out opium production completely. Today, it is booming again - which is odd when the Coalition is seemingly so keen to prevent it. http://www.counterpunch.org/mercile06302010.html
Or did we send someone into the future to find out about the untapped mineral resources that were just discovered?
Just because you have a fine knowledge of history does not mean that you understand true intent.
Thanks for the compliment. But how does knowing less about history make one able to "understand true intent"? That sounds dangerously close to telepathy.
Our mission was to destroy Al Qaeda.
To destroy a shadowy organization, not certainly known to exist at all, with unknown membership, size, resources, whereabouts, and intentions. And the way to do this was to invade and subjugate a sovereign nation that had made no overt hostile act, kill or maim very large numbers of its citizens, overthrow its government, and set up a Quisling regime? http://www.counterpunch.org/rothenberg05262010.html
Unfortunately, the second mission was the neocon ideal of "nation building" that is doomed to failure.
It seems to me that was why it was chosen. A state of war gives the executive enormous power and impunity. But most wars are so short... As Orwell pointed out in 1984, the logical solution is a permanent state of war. How better to guarantee that than to invade a country that has never been permanently conquered, in pursuit of an organization not certainly known to exist, and attempt to change that nation into a standard-issue Western democracy?
"Of all enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germs of every other. War is the parent of armies: from these proceed debt and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare". - James Madison
Apologies, Scrameustache. My post being a long one, by the time I was ready to submit I got a timeout message instead. Something about the resource no longer being valid. So I copied my reply, cancelled it, started a new reply, and pasted it in. Fortunately I didn't lose my text, but I did carelessly reply to the wrong person. (I meant to reply to your reply's parent ckedge).
Add one to the long, long, long list of screwups caused by distributed computing (and human error).
I hesitate to intrude upon this good-natured colloquy, but I must point out that there were no "Frenchmen" (or French women) for about 1000 years after Caesar and his colleagues conquered Gaul. (The very name "France" derives from the Franks, a tribe of barbarians who invaded Gaul hundreds of years after Caesar). The main source for the Roman conquest of Gaul, of course, consists of Caesar's own books. Is it at all possible that he might have slanted them, perhaps touching up a few facts and figures, in order to impress the voters back in Rome? (Point 1: Caesar is one hell of a general, who conquers whole provinces in a matter of months and utterly destroys Rome's enemies; Point 2: You *really* do not want to anger him).
You are probably aware of the wide gap between pagan Roman (and Greek, and for that matter Gaulish) ethics and the Christian ethics with which everyone in the West is more or less permeated. Whereas Christ abjured us to love our enemies, turn the other cheek when struck, and to forgive our brother "unto seventy times seven" times, the ancients believed in returning whatever they received - with interest. A noble Roman, Greek, Gaul, or Goth would take pride in rewarding his friends and servants lavishly, heaping kindness upon his dependents, and showing the most merciless cruelty to his declared enemies. In some ways, the Nazi philosophy (if one can dignify it with that name) harked back to the days of the Romans in regarding forgiveness and mercy as signs of weakness, likely to be abused and exploited by enemies. So it's not surprising that the Romans took such a robust approach to conquering other nations and repressing rebellions. The very word "virtue" originates from the Latin "vir" (a man) and to the Romans meant the manly virtues of truth, courage, and strength. That's why it's foolish and inappropriate to compare the violence of 20th and 21st century wars with those of the pre-Christian period. One shouldn't forget, either, the appalling bloodiness of the high Christian period, from the Dark Ages through to the Enlightenment. No one who casts stones at Islam for its culture of violent intolerance should forget that Christianity, for most of its history, was very similar in that regard. It has just had an extra few hundred years to lose its sharp edges.
Nowadays, in the post-Christian epoch, everyone has been exposed to Christian ethics - even if many of us are avowed agnostics or atheists, the ethical rules that we consider self-evident and universal often derive from Christianity. So we pay abundant lip service to kindness, mercy, charity and forgiveness. Yet the people who reach the top layers of government and the armed forces cannot afford any such scruples: they have to behave very much like ancient Romans, while pretending to subscribe to Christian or humanist ethics. Hence the paradoxes expressed in the t-shirt slogan "Whom would Jesus bomb?" Clinton had it right: "It's the economy, stupid!" Every US president (and all their staff too) is fully aware that his overriding goal must be to make Americans prosperous and keep them that way. That is not done by exporting the huge amounts of wealth that would be necessary to turn a country like Afghanistan into a passable replica of Ohio (or even Egypt); instead, it is done by sucking wealth out of such countries for the enrichment of Americans. But overt looting of foreign nations is frowned upon, most of all by our own ethics. How to square the circle? (Hint: I do know that's impossible) The method adopted has been to pretend that the invasion is for the good of the invaded. The forces of Western civilisation are conquering Afghanistan - as they did Iraq - to bring freedom, security, and the American Way of Life to the benighted heathen (sorry, "impoverished tribesmen").
It won't work. And there is very good reason to believe that no one in the White House or the Pentagon ever believed it could. This is what Maximilien Robespierre, no pacifist himself, had to say on the subject in 1791:
"Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to". - Hannen Swaffer (journalist) 1928
That's still entirely true - perhaps even more so than it was in 1928. The golden rule obtains, as always: he who has the gold makes the rules, whether that means the proprietor, the advertisers, or the government. Mostly, I suppose, it is a variable mixture of all three.
Having understood these simple facts, we should have no difficulty in seeing why certain stories - and entire topics - are never discussed by our mainstream media. Or why informal online news and comment, such as that supplied by blogs and sites such as Slashdot, are so extravagantly criticized by mainstream editors and journalists.
I don't think people of our current society really understand how good we have it.
Damn straight. Nor do they understand how tiny a fraction of the human race, past and present, were responsible for all the practical improvements that have led to our current state of (fairly) contented security. It's getting on for 40 years since Heinlein wrote that "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects". How many of those things can YOU do? (I could change a diaper, balance very simple accounts, take orders with an ill grace, program a computer very crudely, and maybe a couple of other things. Possibly par for the course?)
How would we get on if we suddenly found ourselves naked and without possessions, alone or in a small group in the middle of nowhere? Even if we didn't freeze, roast, die of thirst, or get eaten within hours or days, what would be our chances of making it for even one year? Anyone fancy himself as Robinson Crusoe?
Reflect on those matters for a while, and then consider how unbelievably our Stone Age ancestors acquitted themselves. If you look down on them you merely demean yourself. They were very probably twice the men we are.
But for my money, Geoffrey Miller has it. Try reading his book "The Mating Mind". I just quickly scanned "Why We Haven't Met Many Aliens", and it looks like one of those astonishingly simple perceptions that is absolutely right and immensely important.
For the past 25 years, give or take, I have been studying the software industry and, to a lesser extent, IT in general and its effects on human society as a whole. Pretty much my number one conclusion has been that we have accomplished far less than we might have done, because of the overwhelming tendency to treat everything as entertainment. As Larry Ellison said a while back, software is one of the very few areas of technology that are more fashion-conscious than women's clothes. Why is that? An important sub-question, under that general heading, is how did Microsoft become the world's most influential IT company?
Miller has grasped a very important truth, and we need to take him seriously. (Of course, it might be more fun and more profitable - as well as amusingly self-referential - to make a computer game out of his scenario).
"Java has evolved from a groundbreaking, revolutionary language platform to something closer to a modern-day version of Cobol."
Since the great majority of actual working, robust, reliable, efficient applications that keep our civilisation running are written in COBOL, that is the greatest possible compliment to Java.
It would be a very good thing if we could learn to distinguish between the academic, the artistic, and the business/engineering aspects of software. I don't know about you, but I really don't want to fly across an ocean in airliner designed by this year's latest and greatest methods, using revolutionary new materials that show great promise in some ways. Give me 747 or at least a 777 - as long as it has been properly maintained.
Was Lovelock referring to the system of elective oligarchy that prevails in the "West", and which it is forcibly imposing on the rest of the world as fast as possible?
Democracy means rule by the people, or a system in which the people have power. In Britain and the USA today, however, the vast majority of people have no power at all. Once every 5 or 7 years (give or take) they get the opportunity to vote in an election, and thus to help choose which of the two dominant political parties will govern the nation for the next 5 or 7 years. But increasingly, they find that there is no practical difference between those parties. In Britain, the Labour party is no longer socialist in any meaningful way, while the Conservative party has given up all pretense of conserving anything (because that would be too unpopular). Even the third-placed Liberal party is strikingly illiberal in most of its attitudes and policies - and, of course, it enjoys the inestimable luxury of never having governed (in its present form) and being unlikely ever to be called on to do so. Much the same is true of the USA. What Gore Vidal wrote 35 years ago is even more accurate today:
"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties".
The reason we do not have democracy (and never had, apart from that brief flirtation in Athens which ended in utter ruin) is the plain and simple fact that human beings are not equal. Not at all, not in any way. Some of us* are incomparably cleverer, more decisive, more determined, more ruthless, more charismatic, or all of these combined. And they are the ones who get what they want, while everyone else is left wondering where it all went wrong.
*To save the smartarses among us a little time, let me say that I am most certainly NOT one of the elite. Quite the contrary, in fact, as demonstrated by the fact that I am here discussing this with others of the reality-based community (aka losers).
It gets worse... much worse. When I was working for a leading multinational computer vendor back in the 1980s, I distinctly recall beavering away at work while other team members chatted over coffee. I felt rather superior and smug, thinking "Well, even if they are letting the side down, I am making sure the work gets done".
You could have knocked me over with a feather when, at my next review, my supervisor criticized me sharply for my anti-social behaviour. He told me I should relax, chat more with the others, and generally be more human. The strong implication was that I had actually been undermining morale by failing to socialize and, perhaps, by making some of the others feel guilty.
As time went by, I found it tempting and easy to start slacking myself - especially if I was getting no credit, but actually harming my career prospects, by working flat out all shift (and sometimes several hours beyond).
All this nonsense about "links" has gone much too far. Haven't any of them read this or this or this?
Everyone is connected to everyone else by some kind of chain of events or relationships, and anyone with enough money, power, and malevolence can track down and highlight such "links". Giving to charities, for instance, is now a very hazardous activity unless you limit your giving to the best-known (and hence biggest and, sometimes, least efficient) organizations. All it takes is for (1) someone in authority to take a dislike to you for any reason, and (2) someone you have never heard of to have some (alleged) relationship to the charity of your choice, and - bang! There you are (or aren't, depending on the enthusiasm of the people sent to collect you).
What I would like to know is, when are the authorities going to take a practical interest in such "links" as those between:
1. The Bush family and the bin Laden family;
2. Many thousands of ordinary Americans (and some foreigners) and a shadowy but vast organization, said to be based in Washington DC, that is believed to be responsible for the violent deaths of millions of people and the ruination of several nations.
Between 1979 and 1985, I was directly involved in remotely diagnosing hardware and software faults on DEC's VAX computers. To start with, they were quite big machines - definitely server class in today's terms - the size of a row of refrigerators with the old hard drives the size of washing machines. And of course they cost a lot more than PCs. Nevertheless, their operating system, VMS (now OpenVMS) was specifically designed to be portable across a very wide range of computers, from PC equivalents to near-mainframes and clusters. By 1985 there were MicroVAXes slightly larger than modern PC system boxes, soon to be followed - with the addition of bitmapped graphics monitors - by VAXstations that were very similar to the kind of big desktop PCs many of us still use today.
So what's the point of this little excursion down memory lane? Well, right from its inception in the mid-1970s, VMS had built-in error checking and logging, which was soon exploited to provide very sophisticated and accurate diagnostic software. A competent sysadmin would check the summary error log from time to time, and zoom in on any developing patterns. The fully detailed level of the error log was mind-boggling, with complete dumps of all the registers and data for every single error - of which there might of course be thousands. The VMS engineers soon produced software to automate error log and crash dump analysis, so it was often fairly easy to see which hardware component was at fault. (One of the reasons we disliked Unix, which was becoming popular as a cheaper alternative to VMS, was its complete lack - at that time - of any comparable diagnosis features).
Thus, when I sat in front of my VAXstation 20 years ago, I could at any time call up the error log at any of a number of levels of detail, and analyze it or a crash dump file in order to see if any hardware units were generating errors that might be significant. There were also standalone and online diagnostic programs, although system engineers working to diagnose a flaky computer often preferred to load up the machine with a lot of specially designed "exerciser" programs that stressed the hardware, as they could then avail themselves of VMS' built-in error logging features.
Whenever one of my PCs acts up nowadays, I find myself missing VMS' many troubleshooting features. The Windows event viewer seems carefully designed to collect as much useless information as possible, without ever catching hardware errors and the like. How often has a PC crashed due to a hardware fault, rebooted, and then - when I examined the event log - shown nothing at all except the restart.
It seems strange that Microsoft missed the opportunity to copy this useful facility from VMS, when so much else was incorporated in Windows NT and its successors. One salient difference is that anyone writing a VMS device driver was encouraged to include errorr-logging, whereas the huge majority of Windows drivers seem to lack anything of the sort. The assumption seems to be that PCs work most of the time, and if they crash or work unreliably then the solution is to reboot - or, if the problem is persistent, buy a new PC.
I read a very apposite quotation about that just last night. Showing that some things never change, it is attributed to a journalist named Hannon Swaffer back in 1928.
"Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to".
'Senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired "sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable" atom bomb'.
Wow! Panic, everyone!!
Oh, wait. An American high school kid already did that - 32 years ago.
"It also runs about 75 per cent of the world's business applications"
Gee, I didn't know Windows Apps were coded in COBOL.
They can be, using the excellent Microfocus COBOL or many other implementations.
But actually, only a very few of the world's (important) business applications run on Windows. Seriously. Big heavy-duty transaction-processing apps run overwhelmingly on mainframes, because they just work.
"His life's work on developing high-yield, disease-resistant crops has been credited with having saved an estimated one billion people from famine..."...allowing them to give birth to, and raise to adulthood, an estimated 2-3 billion more people, who in turn...
In other news, the Prime Minister also apologised for the burning of Joan of Arc and Bishops Ridley and Latimer.
"Apologising" for things other people did is a great way to look good without any risk of admitting your own faults and mistakes. Indeed, it can be a subtle way of rebuking those people for their shortcomings, with the implication that you yourself are free from them.
By apologising for the witch-hunt Turing was subjected to, Brown manages to give the impression that he is unprejudiced, not a bigot, modern, and humble enough to admit past mistakes. To quote the brilliantly-worded title of Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson's book, "Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)". http://tinyurl.com/mlmjt6
Why do I have the feeling that plenty of people in Brown's 21st century Britain are being persecuted - right now - for beliefs and characteristics that our leaders find just as frightening and alien as earlier British politicians found Turing's homosexuality (and intelligence)?
"This leads to speculation that men use up so much of their brain function or 'cognitive resources' trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks. Psychologists at Radboud University in The Netherlands carried out the study after one of them was so struck on impressing an attractive woman he had never met before, that he could not remember his address when she asked him where he lived".
Thanks for that unsupported, dogmatic statement. Gee, now I know the truth!
"Just get on your bike or lift dumbells. Killing your body by removing a required nutrient isn't a diet, it's stupid. Probably as much as vegans".
AFAIK carbohydrates in any form are not required nutrients. At least, there are plenty of documented cases of people living long, happy, healthy, productive lives without ever tasting them. The Inuit, for instance, used to regard plants as unfit for human consumption, and would never touch them unless they were starving. OTOH there is evidence that excessive carbohydrates (or possibly the wrong kind) can gradually bring about insulin resistance, obesity, and eventually diabetes.
"Simple equation: energy in == energy consumed".
Yes, you're right: that IS a simple equation. And you sound like a simple person. Why on earth do you imagine that an immensely complex biological organism like a human being should function like a diesel engine? In fact, even a diesel engine doesn't work the way you suggest. Butter has energy, doesn't it? You would certainly rebuke a person who ate butter for too much "energy in". What happens if you put butter in your car's diesel tank - does it turn into "energy consumed"? No, it just clogs up the works and prevents any energy from being consumed.
Again, there is ample evidence to show that some people (as in many thousands) have consumed well under 2000 calories a month for decades, in the form of carbohydrates, while doing hard physical work - and wound up grossly obese. Just as others (usually much wealthier) have eaten far more than 2000 calories a day for years, while doing little or no physical work, and remained lean and fit.
Consider, if it's not too challenging, the possibility that human bodies treat different nutrients in different ways. Ask yourself why - if constant weight can be maintained only by making sure that "energy in equals energy out" - most human beings (and other animals) keep their weight within a pound or two for decades on end.
"If that is not the case, you're doing it wrong. You obviously have enough self-discipline to prevent yourself from eating things you decide, so why not have the self-discipline to do the same using a healthy diet and some exercise?"
Yes, that's right - join the bulk of the scientific, medical, and political establishments - and the big food manufacturers who fund them - and blame the victims. It might be possible to do as you suggest if they would tell us what constitutes a healthy diet. Most intelligent, open-minded people who have taken the trouble to inquire about the subject and researched it widely for years must be quite bewildered by now.
Slashdot Mirror
Let them use slide rules. Once they have graduated they can indulge in all the fancy electronic equipment they like.
The primary fault was pilot error.
I understand that. Nevertheless, as you yourself admit, without the computer error the plane would not have crashed and the people would not have died.
If a traffic light gets jammed at green while the lights pointing the other way continue to cycle, I might drive through and cause a crash. The primary fault would be mine, as the light being at green does not absolve me from the responsibility of checking that it is safe to proceed. However, the traffic light failure would certainly contribute to the accident.
This news puts Trojans in a new light. Taking over PCs to run scams is one thing; causing the deaths of 154 people is entirely different. Every top law enforcement agency and intelligence organization should be working to track down all of those responsible - from the guys who wrote the Trojans to the managers who allowed them to contaminate their computers, and very possibly those who wrote the vulnerable software and those who sold it for such a safety-critical application.
I shall be interested to see whether this case gets the same level of attention from the CIA, etc., as the Lockerbie crash. The latter killed 270 people (including some on the ground), but that's just because there were more passengers on that particular flight. The essential crime - the destruction of an airliner and most, or all, on board - is the same. Are we about to see a "war on malware" from the White House and the Pentagon?
Then I told it to search all my emails for the string "gorilla". That saturated one of my eight cores (so about 10-12% CPU usage) for 1 minute and 20 seconds of CPU time. But what the hey - the other seven cores were still at my disposal.
Noticing from this thread that 3.1.2 was available, I applied it and restarted Thunderbird. Five minutes later, its accumulated CPU time since the restart is 00:00.03. That is 30 milliseconds. CPU usage, of course, is 00%. Peak working set a little over 113KB.
I've got three accounts in one profile, with all sent and received messages back to about 1997. Many, many thousands of them.
So, we invaded Afghanistan for their opium?
From what I hear, that might well be part of it. Although they have some very nasty beliefs and rules, the Taliban - as religious fundamentalists - are absolutely opposed to drugs. While they were ruling Afghanistan, they came quite close to stamping out opium production completely. Today, it is booming again - which is odd when the Coalition is seemingly so keen to prevent it.
http://www.counterpunch.org/mercile06302010.html
Or did we send someone into the future to find out about the untapped mineral resources that were just discovered?
More like "into the past":
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/06/14/minerals_in_afghanistan_mais_oui
Just because you have a fine knowledge of history does not mean that you understand true intent.
Thanks for the compliment. But how does knowing less about history make one able to "understand true intent"? That sounds dangerously close to telepathy.
Our mission was to destroy Al Qaeda.
To destroy a shadowy organization, not certainly known to exist at all, with unknown membership, size, resources, whereabouts, and intentions. And the way to do this was to invade and subjugate a sovereign nation that had made no overt hostile act, kill or maim very large numbers of its citizens, overthrow its government, and set up a Quisling regime?
http://www.counterpunch.org/rothenberg05262010.html
Unfortunately, the second mission was the neocon ideal of "nation building" that is doomed to failure.
It seems to me that was why it was chosen. A state of war gives the executive enormous power and impunity. But most wars are so short... As Orwell pointed out in 1984, the logical solution is a permanent state of war. How better to guarantee that than to invade a country that has never been permanently conquered, in pursuit of an organization not certainly known to exist, and attempt to change that nation into a standard-issue Western democracy?
"Of all enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germs of every other. War is the parent of armies: from these proceed debt and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare".
- James Madison
Apologies, Scrameustache. My post being a long one, by the time I was ready to submit I got a timeout message instead. Something about the resource no longer being valid. So I copied my reply, cancelled it, started a new reply, and pasted it in. Fortunately I didn't lose my text, but I did carelessly reply to the wrong person. (I meant to reply to your reply's parent ckedge).
Add one to the long, long, long list of screwups caused by distributed computing (and human error).
I hesitate to intrude upon this good-natured colloquy, but I must point out that there were no "Frenchmen" (or French women) for about 1000 years after Caesar and his colleagues conquered Gaul. (The very name "France" derives from the Franks, a tribe of barbarians who invaded Gaul hundreds of years after Caesar). The main source for the Roman conquest of Gaul, of course, consists of Caesar's own books. Is it at all possible that he might have slanted them, perhaps touching up a few facts and figures, in order to impress the voters back in Rome? (Point 1: Caesar is one hell of a general, who conquers whole provinces in a matter of months and utterly destroys Rome's enemies; Point 2: You *really* do not want to anger him).
You are probably aware of the wide gap between pagan Roman (and Greek, and for that matter Gaulish) ethics and the Christian ethics with which everyone in the West is more or less permeated. Whereas Christ abjured us to love our enemies, turn the other cheek when struck, and to forgive our brother "unto seventy times seven" times, the ancients believed in returning whatever they received - with interest. A noble Roman, Greek, Gaul, or Goth would take pride in rewarding his friends and servants lavishly, heaping kindness upon his dependents, and showing the most merciless cruelty to his declared enemies. In some ways, the Nazi philosophy (if one can dignify it with that name) harked back to the days of the Romans in regarding forgiveness and mercy as signs of weakness, likely to be abused and exploited by enemies. So it's not surprising that the Romans took such a robust approach to conquering other nations and repressing rebellions. The very word "virtue" originates from the Latin "vir" (a man) and to the Romans meant the manly virtues of truth, courage, and strength. That's why it's foolish and inappropriate to compare the violence of 20th and 21st century wars with those of the pre-Christian period. One shouldn't forget, either, the appalling bloodiness of the high Christian period, from the Dark Ages through to the Enlightenment. No one who casts stones at Islam for its culture of violent intolerance should forget that Christianity, for most of its history, was very similar in that regard. It has just had an extra few hundred years to lose its sharp edges.
Nowadays, in the post-Christian epoch, everyone has been exposed to Christian ethics - even if many of us are avowed agnostics or atheists, the ethical rules that we consider self-evident and universal often derive from Christianity. So we pay abundant lip service to kindness, mercy, charity and forgiveness. Yet the people who reach the top layers of government and the armed forces cannot afford any such scruples: they have to behave very much like ancient Romans, while pretending to subscribe to Christian or humanist ethics. Hence the paradoxes expressed in the t-shirt slogan "Whom would Jesus bomb?" Clinton had it right: "It's the economy, stupid!" Every US president (and all their staff too) is fully aware that his overriding goal must be to make Americans prosperous and keep them that way. That is not done by exporting the huge amounts of wealth that would be necessary to turn a country like Afghanistan into a passable replica of Ohio (or even Egypt); instead, it is done by sucking wealth out of such countries for the enrichment of Americans. But overt looting of foreign nations is frowned upon, most of all by our own ethics. How to square the circle? (Hint: I do know that's impossible) The method adopted has been to pretend that the invasion is for the good of the invaded. The forces of Western civilisation are conquering Afghanistan - as they did Iraq - to bring freedom, security, and the American Way of Life to the benighted heathen (sorry, "impoverished tribesmen").
It won't work. And there is very good reason to believe that no one in the White House or the Pentagon ever believed it could. This is what Maximilien Robespierre, no pacifist himself, had to say on the subject in 1791:
"The most extravagant idea that c
"Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to".
- Hannen Swaffer (journalist) 1928
That's still entirely true - perhaps even more so than it was in 1928. The golden rule obtains, as always: he who has the gold makes the rules, whether that means the proprietor, the advertisers, or the government. Mostly, I suppose, it is a variable mixture of all three.
Having understood these simple facts, we should have no difficulty in seeing why certain stories - and entire topics - are never discussed by our mainstream media. Or why informal online news and comment, such as that supplied by blogs and sites such as Slashdot, are so extravagantly criticized by mainstream editors and journalists.
I don't think people of our current society really understand how good we have it.
Damn straight. Nor do they understand how tiny a fraction of the human race, past and present, were responsible for all the practical improvements that have led to our current state of (fairly) contented security. It's getting on for 40 years since Heinlein wrote that "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects". How many of those things can YOU do? (I could change a diaper, balance very simple accounts, take orders with an ill grace, program a computer very crudely, and maybe a couple of other things. Possibly par for the course?)
How would we get on if we suddenly found ourselves naked and without possessions, alone or in a small group in the middle of nowhere? Even if we didn't freeze, roast, die of thirst, or get eaten within hours or days, what would be our chances of making it for even one year? Anyone fancy himself as Robinson Crusoe?
Reflect on those matters for a while, and then consider how unbelievably our Stone Age ancestors acquitted themselves. If you look down on them you merely demean yourself. They were very probably twice the men we are.
But for my money, Geoffrey Miller has it. Try reading his book "The Mating Mind". I just quickly scanned "Why We Haven't Met Many Aliens", and it looks like one of those astonishingly simple perceptions that is absolutely right and immensely important.
For the past 25 years, give or take, I have been studying the software industry and, to a lesser extent, IT in general and its effects on human society as a whole. Pretty much my number one conclusion has been that we have accomplished far less than we might have done, because of the overwhelming tendency to treat everything as entertainment. As Larry Ellison said a while back, software is one of the very few areas of technology that are more fashion-conscious than women's clothes. Why is that? An important sub-question, under that general heading, is how did Microsoft become the world's most influential IT company?
Miller has grasped a very important truth, and we need to take him seriously. (Of course, it might be more fun and more profitable - as well as amusingly self-referential - to make a computer game out of his scenario).
"Java has evolved from a groundbreaking, revolutionary language platform to something closer to a modern-day version of Cobol."
Since the great majority of actual working, robust, reliable, efficient applications that keep our civilisation running are written in COBOL, that is the greatest possible compliment to Java.
It would be a very good thing if we could learn to distinguish between the academic, the artistic, and the business/engineering aspects of software. I don't know about you, but I really don't want to fly across an ocean in airliner designed by this year's latest and greatest methods, using revolutionary new materials that show great promise in some ways. Give me 747 or at least a 777 - as long as it has been properly maintained.
Was Lovelock referring to the system of elective oligarchy that prevails in the "West", and which it is forcibly imposing on the rest of the world as fast as possible?
Democracy means rule by the people, or a system in which the people have power. In Britain and the USA today, however, the vast majority of people have no power at all. Once every 5 or 7 years (give or take) they get the opportunity to vote in an election, and thus to help choose which of the two dominant political parties will govern the nation for the next 5 or 7 years. But increasingly, they find that there is no practical difference between those parties. In Britain, the Labour party is no longer socialist in any meaningful way, while the Conservative party has given up all pretense of conserving anything (because that would be too unpopular). Even the third-placed Liberal party is strikingly illiberal in most of its attitudes and policies - and, of course, it enjoys the inestimable luxury of never having governed (in its present form) and being unlikely ever to be called on to do so. Much the same is true of the USA. What Gore Vidal wrote 35 years ago is even more accurate today:
"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties".
The reason we do not have democracy (and never had, apart from that brief flirtation in Athens which ended in utter ruin) is the plain and simple fact that human beings are not equal. Not at all, not in any way. Some of us* are incomparably cleverer, more decisive, more determined, more ruthless, more charismatic, or all of these combined. And they are the ones who get what they want, while everyone else is left wondering where it all went wrong.
*To save the smartarses among us a little time, let me say that I am most certainly NOT one of the elite. Quite the contrary, in fact, as demonstrated by the fact that I am here discussing this with others of the reality-based community (aka losers).
It gets worse... much worse. When I was working for a leading multinational computer vendor back in the 1980s, I distinctly recall beavering away at work while other team members chatted over coffee. I felt rather superior and smug, thinking "Well, even if they are letting the side down, I am making sure the work gets done".
You could have knocked me over with a feather when, at my next review, my supervisor criticized me sharply for my anti-social behaviour. He told me I should relax, chat more with the others, and generally be more human. The strong implication was that I had actually been undermining morale by failing to socialize and, perhaps, by making some of the others feel guilty.
As time went by, I found it tempting and easy to start slacking myself - especially if I was getting no credit, but actually harming my career prospects, by working flat out all shift (and sometimes several hours beyond).
That's how Wally came to be the way he is today!
"Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)"
Wasn't it actually Hannibal Lecter who said that?
All this nonsense about "links" has gone much too far. Haven't any of them read this or this or this?
Everyone is connected to everyone else by some kind of chain of events or relationships, and anyone with enough money, power, and malevolence can track down and highlight such "links". Giving to charities, for instance, is now a very hazardous activity unless you limit your giving to the best-known (and hence biggest and, sometimes, least efficient) organizations. All it takes is for (1) someone in authority to take a dislike to you for any reason, and (2) someone you have never heard of to have some (alleged) relationship to the charity of your choice, and - bang! There you are (or aren't, depending on the enthusiasm of the people sent to collect you).
What I would like to know is, when are the authorities going to take a practical interest in such "links" as those between:
1. The Bush family and the bin Laden family;
2. Many thousands of ordinary Americans (and some foreigners) and a shadowy but vast organization, said to be based in Washington DC, that is believed to be responsible for the violent deaths of millions of people and the ruination of several nations.
Between 1979 and 1985, I was directly involved in remotely diagnosing hardware and software faults on DEC's VAX computers. To start with, they were quite big machines - definitely server class in today's terms - the size of a row of refrigerators with the old hard drives the size of washing machines. And of course they cost a lot more than PCs. Nevertheless, their operating system, VMS (now OpenVMS) was specifically designed to be portable across a very wide range of computers, from PC equivalents to near-mainframes and clusters. By 1985 there were MicroVAXes slightly larger than modern PC system boxes, soon to be followed - with the addition of bitmapped graphics monitors - by VAXstations that were very similar to the kind of big desktop PCs many of us still use today.
So what's the point of this little excursion down memory lane? Well, right from its inception in the mid-1970s, VMS had built-in error checking and logging, which was soon exploited to provide very sophisticated and accurate diagnostic software. A competent sysadmin would check the summary error log from time to time, and zoom in on any developing patterns. The fully detailed level of the error log was mind-boggling, with complete dumps of all the registers and data for every single error - of which there might of course be thousands. The VMS engineers soon produced software to automate error log and crash dump analysis, so it was often fairly easy to see which hardware component was at fault. (One of the reasons we disliked Unix, which was becoming popular as a cheaper alternative to VMS, was its complete lack - at that time - of any comparable diagnosis features).
Thus, when I sat in front of my VAXstation 20 years ago, I could at any time call up the error log at any of a number of levels of detail, and analyze it or a crash dump file in order to see if any hardware units were generating errors that might be significant. There were also standalone and online diagnostic programs, although system engineers working to diagnose a flaky computer often preferred to load up the machine with a lot of specially designed "exerciser" programs that stressed the hardware, as they could then avail themselves of VMS' built-in error logging features.
Whenever one of my PCs acts up nowadays, I find myself missing VMS' many troubleshooting features. The Windows event viewer seems carefully designed to collect as much useless information as possible, without ever catching hardware errors and the like. How often has a PC crashed due to a hardware fault, rebooted, and then - when I examined the event log - shown nothing at all except the restart.
It seems strange that Microsoft missed the opportunity to copy this useful facility from VMS, when so much else was incorporated in Windows NT and its successors. One salient difference is that anyone writing a VMS device driver was encouraged to include errorr-logging, whereas the huge majority of Windows drivers seem to lack anything of the sort. The assumption seems to be that PCs work most of the time, and if they crash or work unreliably then the solution is to reboot - or, if the problem is persistent, buy a new PC.
I read a very apposite quotation about that just last night. Showing that some things never change, it is attributed to a journalist named Hannon Swaffer back in 1928.
"Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to".
Source: "Newspeak in the 21st Century, David Edwards and David Cromwell"
http://www.amazon.com/NEWSPEAK-21st-Century-David-Edwards/dp/0745328938/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255263047&sr=1-1
'Senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired "sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable" atom bomb'.
Wow! Panic, everyone!!
Oh, wait. An American high school kid already did that - 32 years ago.
http://www.amazon.com/Mushroom-True-Story-Bomb-Kid/dp/0671827316/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254673660&sr=1-7
I bet no one at the Pentagon knew that...
"It also runs about 75 per cent of the world's business applications"
Gee, I didn't know Windows Apps were coded in COBOL.
They can be, using the excellent Microfocus COBOL or many other implementations.
But actually, only a very few of the world's (important) business applications run on Windows. Seriously. Big heavy-duty transaction-processing apps run overwhelmingly on mainframes, because they just work.
Now if that isn't a troll...
"His life's work on developing high-yield, disease-resistant crops has been credited with having saved an estimated one billion people from famine..." ...allowing them to give birth to, and raise to adulthood, an estimated 2-3 billion more people, who in turn...
In other news, the Prime Minister also apologised for the burning of Joan of Arc and Bishops Ridley and Latimer.
"Apologising" for things other people did is a great way to look good without any risk of admitting your own faults and mistakes. Indeed, it can be a subtle way of rebuking those people for their shortcomings, with the implication that you yourself are free from them.
By apologising for the witch-hunt Turing was subjected to, Brown manages to give the impression that he is unprejudiced, not a bigot, modern, and humble enough to admit past mistakes. To quote the brilliantly-worded title of Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson's book, "Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)". http://tinyurl.com/mlmjt6
Why do I have the feeling that plenty of people in Brown's 21st century Britain are being persecuted - right now - for beliefs and characteristics that our leaders find just as frightening and alien as earlier British politicians found Turing's homosexuality (and intelligence)?
"This leads to speculation that men use up so much of their brain function or 'cognitive resources' trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks. Psychologists at Radboud University in The Netherlands carried out the study after one of them was so struck on impressing an attractive woman he had never met before, that he could not remember his address when she asked him where he lived".
I bet that impressed her.
"Low or no-carb diets are bad".
Thanks for that unsupported, dogmatic statement. Gee, now I know the truth!
"Just get on your bike or lift dumbells. Killing your body by removing a required nutrient isn't a diet, it's stupid. Probably as much as vegans".
AFAIK carbohydrates in any form are not required nutrients. At least, there are plenty of documented cases of people living long, happy, healthy, productive lives without ever tasting them. The Inuit, for instance, used to regard plants as unfit for human consumption, and would never touch them unless they were starving. OTOH there is evidence that excessive carbohydrates (or possibly the wrong kind) can gradually bring about insulin resistance, obesity, and eventually diabetes.
"Simple equation: energy in == energy consumed".
Yes, you're right: that IS a simple equation. And you sound like a simple person. Why on earth do you imagine that an immensely complex biological organism like a human being should function like a diesel engine? In fact, even a diesel engine doesn't work the way you suggest. Butter has energy, doesn't it? You would certainly rebuke a person who ate butter for too much "energy in". What happens if you put butter in your car's diesel tank - does it turn into "energy consumed"? No, it just clogs up the works and prevents any energy from being consumed.
Again, there is ample evidence to show that some people (as in many thousands) have consumed well under 2000 calories a month for decades, in the form of carbohydrates, while doing hard physical work - and wound up grossly obese. Just as others (usually much wealthier) have eaten far more than 2000 calories a day for years, while doing little or no physical work, and remained lean and fit.
Consider, if it's not too challenging, the possibility that human bodies treat different nutrients in different ways. Ask yourself why - if constant weight can be maintained only by making sure that "energy in equals energy out" - most human beings (and other animals) keep their weight within a pound or two for decades on end.
"If that is not the case, you're doing it wrong. You obviously have enough self-discipline to prevent yourself from eating things you decide, so why not have the self-discipline to do the same using a healthy diet and some exercise?"
Yes, that's right - join the bulk of the scientific, medical, and political establishments - and the big food manufacturers who fund them - and blame the victims. It might be possible to do as you suggest if they would tell us what constitutes a healthy diet. Most intelligent, open-minded people who have taken the trouble to inquire about the subject and researched it widely for years must be quite bewildered by now.