I doubt it'll go that far. No doubt there'll be a few MPs on the list. What there will be is a lot of domestic arguments between men and their wives who want to know why the block has been removed. Or men who no longer secretly access porn because they don't want that conversation. And it'll be the casual/occasional viewers most affected, not the real porn addicts. Personally, I see it as more of a sop to a general anti-porn attitude resulting in more conservative elements wanting to nudge/push people away from porn rather than some secret conspiracy for widespread oppression.
Consider, too, the political context. We have a liberal/conservative coalition which has been doing poorly and in which the conservatives are by far the largest part by seats. Many conservatives feel that the liberal part has been too powerful and want to see the conservative part being more assertive. And many conservatives also feel they're not doing enough to appeal to ordinary conservative voters (rather than, say, just the rich ones). It's a gimmick for core-voter and party support, a gimmick that the liberal coalition partner can't easily oppose.
That's because that's what it actually does mean, and unambiguously so. Presumably the author either doesn't know how to use the subjunctive mood or didn't read his own article properly. (To the grammar-challenged and non-native: take the 's' off 'manages').
Suppose you see someone in your community arrested in this way. It goes to court. There are accusations of entrapment, and of the police putting the plot together and leading these people on. Suppose you see the prosecution and the media reporting put forward their arguments in ways that make everything look as bad as possible and the individuals look as weird as possible - ways which are selective and distorting without actually lying. And suppose you see a jury of 12 people not like you, 12 bored and stupid people who you can easily imagine have bought in to the 'muslim stuff = one step short of violence' thing in the media. And you see those people be convicted and imprisoned for a fantasy plot.
Then you come across genuine extremism - maybe you don't know for sure there's violence, but you do see hatred of government or of other religious groups. Or maybe you just see something suspicious. Or maybe it's simply a much lesser and ordinary crime.
Do you report it? Do you risk setting up a load of otherwise innocent people to be entrapped, just because they hate a government which is targetting your community? Do you trust them to sort fact from fiction and only prosecute if there's a genuine prior intention to commit a crime? Or do you play it safe and stay quiet?
I think it may be partly about how potential employers think about and express the sort of 'level' they want their new employees to be. Want someone fairly cheap to do gruntwork but without constant assistance/direction? Look for someone with 2-4 years experience. Want someone who can work fairly independently and make design and basic business decisions about your product? Maybe 5-10 years. People in the industry put people in 'slots' defined by years of experience. Partly I wonder if this is a lack of vocabulary....there's no other way to easily say 'someone who is a fairly competent programmer who can be trusted to make some lower level decisions about how this software will work but who isn't a software architect or manager'.
Just look through some job ads. You'll constantly see years of experience used as a criterion like that, and they'll mostly be less than ten years. I'm not so sure that employers are consciously deciding en masse that older programmers are no good. Rather I think they express the profile of the sort of person they want in terms of years of experience and so, without thinking about it, exclude those who have lots of experience but no desire (or maybe ability) to be more senior.
Secondly, those involved in businesses may have an incentive to act this way, but it's not what an economy is about, or for, and businesses are just a legal/organizational tool to economic ends. An economy's correct purpose is to make economic decisions - what/how much to produce, how to produce it, who gets to consume it - so as to maximize its citizens welfare. (Simple to say, of course....limited rationality, the enormous potential for conflict between individuals and between equity and efficiency and the mixing in of politics makes it incredibly hard).
An economy can fail by producing too little or too much or dividing the work badly (and so the leisure/consumption balance is wrong). It can fail by degrading the environment its citizens experience without adequate associated benefits to them (eg, allowing poor quality building, or the destruction of parks). It can fail by producing something stupid, such as air passenger scans that cause harm and bring no benefits. It can fail by incurring costs such as the training of new staff in exchange for a smaller benefit to an individual in a powerful position, and with the result that poor economic decisions continue to be made because his mismanagement goes unchallenged.
So.....how do you think this particular government decision is doing when it comes to having a well functioning economy?
Taxes paid by a customer should be at the rate where the customer is. Taxes paid by a business should be paid at the rate where the business is. That's the only way to create a fair, level playing field for both.
And where is the business, and how much in each place? That's essentially the problem here. There's a UK business arguable undercharging a Luxembourg business ultimately owned by the same (presumably US) owner. ie, they're possibly putting the UK profit inside a Luxembourg business even when most of the work is done in the UK. And so the tax authorities somehow have to work out how much the UK business 'ought' to be charging the Luxembourg business.
It's a good example of how taxes distort behaviour. Amazon has restructured itself and put certain work in certain places done in certain ways not because it helps to deliver books better but because of tax rules. The equity vs debt decision is also one affected by the same tax rules and with negative effects.
Personally, I'm all in favour of abolishing both corporation taxes and national insurance (payroll taxes) and rolling both in to plain income tax. By reducing the differences between taxation of different kinds of income it reducing the number of games people can play (and the amount of resources wasted). All taxes ultimately fall on people....the only real reason for having corporation tax at all is that electorates somehow feel it's paid by someone else (which is, of course, utterly untrue). In any case, I don't see any good reason from an equity point of view why income from employment should be so heavily taxed compared to other kinds of income, with income from ownership of shares coming second and debt/royalties/rent/others being lightly taxed.
Why would he know not to use it in a school building? The word 'fuck' is a perfectly normal part of informal communication, especially between peers in a harsh, unforgiving, competitive, conformist and low-level-violent social environment like a school. Not using it in a conversation with a teacher? Yes, of course he should know that, he should know it's not something you use in a formal context or with people to whom you're expected to show deference. As for expulsion....that's utterly ludicrous. Would he really have been expected to connect the act with the consequences? And what sort of problem is this supposed to solve anyway? I presume the state, even in the US, is still required to provide a free education if he wants it and I can't see a school for 'special' children being where they'd send him, so the effect is to move him from one school to another. I really hope there's an appeals mechanism.
One can be successful without a knowledge of many things. However, your opportunities for success (including more middle of the road success, not just top-of-your-profession success) may be narrower. A lawyer with a better understanding of computers than his peers may have more success when it comes to litigating some cases, for example. Or maybe he has an understanding of chemistry, or medicine, or engineering, or anything else that might mean he can read and digest related documents faster, follow arguments better, sift the important from the irrelevant and think of things others might not.
This is not just about being able to 'do the computer stuff', it's also about people who may have commission software, make purchasing, investment or budgeting decisions, understand organizations which produce or heavily use software, write regulations, laws or standards, or do many other things in other specialisms that have some sort of connection with computers.
Learning a few basic coding skills may only be a small part of what may be useful...but a better conceptual understanding and a better understanding of the nature of working with IT/software might not just help them make better decisions, but help them interact in a better and less frustrating way with the IT specialists they employ/work for/work with.
'X is important' is not the same as 'everything else is less important than X'. Even in the US freedom of speech is not absolute. The US is quite extreme in some respects, but it still has libel laws, and copyright laws, and restrictions on TV and cinema (sex, violence, etc), and laws against inciting violence and suchlike. In the EU a private life is also a right. It isn't an absolute right, but the balance compared to freedom of speech is not the same in the US.
A lot of commenters from the US seem to assume that any sort of censorship not permitted in the US is automatically political repression. It really isn't. Some is, of course, but some is a reflection of the culture in those other places and may have wide support. Rules against naming rape victims, for example, or the re-publication of sexual material taken without the participants consent are not political censorship or repression. They do not prevent full participation by anyone in any political debate.
US cultural views on speech, and many other things, are being imposed on others. Some of the things this might permit will be thought of as disgusting in places, and the inaction of US law unacceptable. Think of the self-righteous indignation some Americans on here have whenever a US corporation might have non-US laws imposed on it when operating in other countries. Now imagine that same indignation pointing back at the US because the US is itself imposing its own culture and law on others because its own laws are so influential on the Internet, or is doing things such as prejudicing court cases by publishing information before the conclusion of a trial.
The US fights to impose its rules on others, from free speech and US interpretation of copyright law to lack of freedom to gamble. It's no surprise that other countries will sometimes use what power they have, too.
Dispelling ignorance is costly. You're expecting consumers to investigate (or even just read) the privacy policies and practices of the operator of every website they use, to monitor them for changes, to monitor for compliance, to complain and switch suppliers when necessary.....just to enforce some basic standards of decent behaviour? Including consumers who may happen to be 10 years old? And this is assuming that there is sufficient diversity in the marketplace to make it possible to begin with.
Students are typically also paying rent to their University, which is acting as a landlord. Restricting the private use of a service provided as part of a private residence because that use isn't part of some other service you're also providing is not an acceptable practice. Though, of course, limiting it in the library, lecture halls, etc., may be a different matter.
And how would you do it w/o one thread or process per client? Multiplexing?
One thread (and maybe one process per CPU) and non-blocking IO (with kqueue,/dev/poll or similar) is the way to go if you want very high performance, especially if you might have large numbers of idle or slow connections (as with keep-alive). The level of resource use is vastly, vastly lower and there's never any synchronization or scheduling overhead. I've written high-performance servers using this model and it works very well.
FRAND is reasonable. This is because private concerns exist. Without FRAND, we end up with lame standards that tiptoe around patents (like all Theora, and now WebM vs H.264). We also wouldn't have a worldwide GSM standard. Even with local variations, the standard is pretty reliable and useful. If each cell phone manufacturer and network only used standards which were not patent encumbered, we'd have a much less robust wireless market.
Or, alternatively, they could licence the patents to the whole world for free for the purpose of implementing the standards.
Patents are a mechanism for granting temporary monopolies that limit the use of some device/process to those authorized. Companies use them to obtain monopoly profits when they think they'll gain from that. Standards bodies are a mechanism for widening the use of some device/process to all those in an industry. Companies use them when they think they'll gain from interoperability.
They should pick one, not both.
In any case, a company with patents covering a standard can administer the standard themselves - licencing it only to compliant implementations. They don't need standards bodies, and shouldn't have official backing or power for their standards.
The are LOTS of flaws in your agument. Prehaps the easiest to explain is what happens if the is a revolution in your country and previous 'free-expression' suddenly lands you in jail?
Let's imagine I have a home printer that prints these microdots. I use it for printing birthday cards, kids' homework, letters to my bank, and other miscellany. If there's a revolution and any of these things become illegal, I've got bigger problems than being tracked by my printer.
As a further note, right now there's no way to trace that serial number to me.
Apart from all the birthday cards, letters to your bank and so on with your name on it, you mean? And this doesn't just extend to governments oppressing citizenry en masse. A whistleblower in the public or private sector could get caught out by this - print your document, send it to the press (or boss or regulator or potentially corrupt police or whatever), have it seized or otherwise examined by someone you've criticized and lose your job. Anyone could correlate the dots on your secret documents to those on your non-secret ones.
That's not the problem. If they were censoring based on usage, or even arbitrarily, there wouldn't be an issue.
Yes, there would, albeit a different issue, at least when it comes to access in people's rooms. Whether legal or not, landlords should not be filtering their tenants Internet access like that, and it doesn't matter if the landlord is a private landlord, a government entity, a University or a charity. It's not an acceptable commercial practice. And it's most especially unacceptable if the landlord ensures they are a monopoly supplier of fixed-line access to that person (no idea if they are, but I can imagine the reaction had I asked my college for a phone line and ADSL/cable).
We have to wait and see what they actually do with this.
Here might be some examples of non-evil uses, or at least uses which are in the same class as blocking the word 'democracy' or 'tibet' in China:
- Removing material which breaches only US copyright laws in only the US.
- Removing private information subject to a UK injunction only from the UK site.
- Blocking holocaust denying material from the German site only.
- Blocking material which can't be distributed in a particular country due to an ongoing court case.
- Blocking material containing the names of rape victims or children involved in court cases in countries which ban publishing them.
No company can be totally free in which governments or jurisdictions it chooses to alienate. Maybe you can accept copyright infringement in Russia and be Russia-based, or you can accept criticism of Vladimir Putin and be US-based, but you can't do both. And similar countries often cooperate (or are exposed to coercion, such as US export of its copyright laws).
If we're talking about programming as a school (ie, pre-University) subject then it surely wouldn't extend to actually being able to develop useful software. No-one is ever going to be able to get a job as a software developer based on having studied it at high-school.
There are some ways in which it might be useful, though.
Not all programming is writing giant software systems, and knowing some basics could be very useful for people who might one day have a reason to write a macro in a piece of software, write an SQL query or do something simple with HTML or JavaScript. This also extends to being a starting point for those who specialize in other areas (sciences, say) but one day have to write simple limited-use software to help them with their job.
Being good at writing simple software is a good signal (and perhaps good training) for careful and rigorous logical thought, just as studying philosophy might. In the UK it's been promoted as a 'new latin', presumably for similar reasons.
Software and computers are very important features of modern human society. Having a better understanding of what they are and aren't, can and can't do, and just how difficult and complex software is may help people interact with software and software developers.
Getting some exposure to it will means children who might otherwise never have considered it for future study will have a better idea of whether or not they should.
I also disagree that it'll become quickly outdated. Variables, comparisons, loops, functions, arguments and so on are not going to go out of date anytime soon - certainly not in the way that the current nonsense 'how to use Word' lessons will.
The biggest threat, I think, is that they'd be watered down to pathetic uselessness that provides no insight at all. I suspect some children would be sufficiently useless at the necessary thorough logical thought (possibly the same ones I remember who couldn't cope with basic maths) that any attempt to design a course that didn't leave them far behind would make the whole thing worthless. So there needs to be some way to deal with them, like putting them in another stream, which IIRC isn't normally done for non-core subjects. Come to think of it, maths lessons were slow enough for anyone with any aptitude for it that it could make sense to speed them up for those who are good at them and use some of the extra time for software.
It's not a good concept at all. It's not just about being 'fair' to a loosely defined collection of many people named 'the recording industry', the incentives placed on people is also important. Copyright is about creating incentives to product copyright material which will be benificial to society as a whole. That means rewarding people who play a part in producing things that are widely valued, whether as creators, financers who take on risk, or whatever, and not rewarding those who do not. Distributed blank media tax revenues via some sort of formula may not do a good job of correlating payments with the value of the work people are doing. It's a bung to dominant encumbants and no incentive to new entrants, for example.
Again, a common misconception of morons. Crawling painfully slow? Now, that just makes you look ignorant. SWT is actually quite good.
I've seen slow SWT apps too, but then the problem isn't really the GUI but rather the habit of the Java runtime to use lots of memory. Any machine is slow when forced to page (and when using Java on something with plenty of RAM, it flies).
A lot of C or C++ applications also use a lot of memory (maybe less, I'm not sure, but still a lot) - but there's a better chance that a lot of it can be paged out and left there because they don't have a garbage collector regularly scanning it.
All taxes modify behaviour, intended or not. At the moment most taxes are raised in ways which result in modifications to behaviour which are bad. For example, taxes on labour, and taxes that cause corporations to prefer debt financing over equity financing when there's no underlying business reason to do so. You have to pay your taxes somehow.....much better to have them levied on things where there's an obvious economic advantage (like fuel and anything else with negative externalities) than where the opposite is true. There's a limited supply of those things, but what supply there is isn't being fully used.
My argument that the creation of models of the world on the basis of evidence and testing is a process not compatible with 'believe this because an authority says so', but that humans frequently use one of the two at a time depending on which seems most appropriate to them? I don't see how the models not being perfect models causes problems for this argument.
The problem is that you accept one known-to-be-wrong argument (e.g. ZF, but likewise things like relativity and quantum theory, and loads of inconsistent theories further on) on external authority, and claims of it's utility, yet refuse to do the same for a might-be-wrong model, where you admit equal utility exists... For science "utility" is reason enough, yet it isn't enough for religion. Those models of science are like stating "the sky was painted blue 500 years ago", it provides an accurate description, useful prediction, and is known to be wrong. Yet you would never accept that theory : it is not merely "imperfect" in that it has a few holes. It is wrong, in the sense that it contradicts itself. Just because you are not currently properly equipped to detect the holes in, say, even in classical mechanics does not mean they don't exist.
Which makes the "they're correct" argument bullshit for your belief in science. So what remains ? Utility.
I haven't made a 'they're correct' argument for science. Scientific theories are developed using a particular process, a process which is a credible way of creating and assessing the models it produces, one which can make known the difference between real behaviour and the model and one which can plausibly bring those models closer and closer to 'correctness'. Tests of the most important and basic parts have been carried out by a diverse set of individuals who are credibly able to do so as far as a human can, and the results disseminated through diverse channels via direct and carefully recorded contact with those who have produced, refined and tested those theories. The theories and tests are well described and specific, and are to a very substantial degree consistent with each other (with inconsistencies at the edges of our knowledge). Outside the basic parts there may not be replication and there may be greater scope for manipulation or mistakes. But the process still provides a good reason to take the results as likely to be an improvement of our collective modelling of the world. Finally, individuals sometimes make knowlingly or wrecklesses false claims (eg, false data), but the process means that it's unlikely that a huge body of false knowledge will be established through deception because each piece of later modelling is separately performed and tested.
Religious models of the world - it's creation, it's functioning and so on - are based on divine revelation of one kind or another. The proposed mechanism is that god causes an individual human to make the claims that he requires, and that god's claims are both accurate and made usefully accurately by his proxies. This process is not credible, and is vulnerable to becoming circular ('what I say is the word of god, you know it's the word of god because I say so, and you know I'm not lying or deceived because everything I say is the word of god'). The claims are not very specific and not always very well specified. They're often not testable or tested at all, never mind credibly or with a credible mechanism for the outcomes to be accurately disseminated. They're not disseminated from the original claimant to us now in a way likely to have good accuracy and there's no means for modern humans to verify them. Finally, humans are known to sometimes spontaneously produce new clearly false religious beliefs and for others to follow them. eg, cargo cults or Jonestown. The claimed process of divine revelation and human dissemination has no defence against this.
I also make a distinction between scientific models and statements about the world and statements about ot
I like your attitude, really, but... your ideas about science are very strange indeed...
Science - the development of theories based on testing, evidence and logic - is not compatible with arguments such as 'believe this book because authoritative people claim that it has an authoritative author'.
This doesn't apply to mathematics at all.
No. Maths is not science, it's extended logic alone.
We believe in the axioms because... well they're useful (an argument that can be made equally well, maybe even better, about the bible).
We treat axioms as true because it's useful to do so, yes. Often they're useful because they help us to produce surprisingly accurate models of the world that produce useful predictions. Often there are attempts to undermine them or find out what happens when some of them don't hold, just in case that produces something useful, or just out of curiosity.
It isn't actually possible to -correctly- define natural numbers using the Peano axioms... so it's not just that we believe in things for good reasons, we believe in all sorts of things *known to be wrong* because we don't know a more useful solution (Actually there is a simple known way to fix natural numbers, you basically pick some n, arbitrary large but finite and work in Zn. Know anyone who actually uses that over N ?). Godel proved that it is not possible to provide a finite extension to the peano axioms that is internally consistent and solves the problem. Whoops.
So we know we have run down a dead end... yet nobody's seriously considering anything else. Why do we believe it anyway ? We've done it for 2000 years... and it isn't all that "in your face".
I haven't read too much so far about mathematical philosophy, but Bertrand Russell at least appears to propose alternatives to Peano's axioms. Maths does produce results useful to achieving goals and which have a very high degree of consistency both internally and with what we observe. It's also quite possible that the ability to do the basics of maths - counting, adding, etc. - on which we've based all of the serious stuff are capabilities which humans have evolved to have as a survival advantage.....and so it'd be no surprise that it's almost universally believed among non-philosophers.
This is where your argument runs stuck. And in case you find this way to theoretical, rest assured that there are plenty of known holes in just about any theory. Physics was last thought to be correct until 1850 or so. Then they discovered quantum theory, which created dozens of new problems, most of which are unsolved (e.g. the famous gravity conundrum : it is actually impossible for quantum theory to exist in relativistic space... whoops. But that's not the only problem by far).
My argument that the creation of models of the world on the basis of evidence and testing is a process not compatible with 'believe this because an authority says so', but that humans frequently use one of the two at a time depending on which seems most appropriate to them? I don't see how the models not being perfect models causes problems for this argument. I don't claim perfect models, merely that science is the only reasonable method for advancing and assessing humanity's collective stock of them. And these models DO produce highly consistent, repeatable and accurate predictions under a very wide set of circumstances and DO perform a very great deal better than the pure logic that preceded it, and better yet than the intuitive guesses, dogma and superstitions which preceded that.
I agree that a claim of divine intervention can always be used to counter an argument that a claimed historical or current factual account is physically implausible. I d
As any politician will tell you, the goal in a debate is not to convince the person with whom you're debating. It's to convince the audience. It's not worth even hoping that your online debating partner is ever going to agree with you, and certainly not that he'll say so, but that doesn't mean you're not achieving your goal.
I'm curious... since it has been proven a few decades ago that the human mind is in fact incapable of rational thinking.
I'm sceptical. And I'm sceptical it's easy to define 'rational', too. Humans clearly are capable of recognizing rational arguments to some degree (with, of course, some possibly high level of mistakes), mathematical proofs being an example. Maybe you mean to say that humans have limited rationality of some sort.
In fact computers aren't either, since rational reasoning can only take place with full information, which simply isn't available.
That's not obviously true. Surely 'rationality' might mean 'coming to optimal conclusions/actions toward your goal within the constraints of information and information processing to which you are subject'. (I'm presuming there's no such thing as a 'rational goal', but you'll need to ask a philosopher about that). You conclusions may be uncertain, but not necessarily irrational. In any case, I don't doubt that humans have very limited rationality, but I would certainly not expect to do better by throwing away our limited attempts to use it.
But even rational reasoning "in tanks" (massively simplified simulated worlds) is horrendously difficult and not at all optimal (especially if thinking is not -entirely- free and determining a rational course of action is often an NP-hard problem. E.g. the minimax algorithm in the case of a non-universal heuristic). But it gets worse. In a system that has the property of chaos (like the real world) it is utterly impossible to find the rational course of action, even with infinite time, infinite processing capacity and full information (none of which are available).
The rational course of action may simply be to pick one at random out of a set of alternatives between which a preference can't be established. It isn't rational, for example, to starve to death in between two restaurants because determining which is best is impossible or requires a few centuries of computation.
So here's a thought :
the only way atheists get convinced of atheism is exactly the same way people get convinced of religions. It is a numbers game.
As I understand it, the means, biological/psychological/neurological mechanism and biological purpose or survival advantage (if any) of the transmission of religion are widely debated and not well settled. There are theories involving hyper-active agent detection, in-group cohesion mechanisms that don't compromise the capacity for out-group hatred, shamanic healing, perhaps political manipulation of existing traits, and no doubt many more. The 'it is a numbers game' theory is one of which I wasn't previously aware.
I know that atheists pride themselves on their supposed superiority because of compatibility with science.
Science - the development of theories based on testing, evidence and logic - is not compatible with arguments such as 'believe this book because authoritative people claim that it has an authoritative author'. This does not, of course, automatically mean that it is irrational to use one process in some instances and the other in others. Also, atheists have existed longer than science and I wouldn't wish to claim that 'atheists' as a group have any particular pride or motivation for it. I'd also say it's not implausible that the first humans didn't have religion, as we would think of it, but they certainly wouldn't have had science.
But while this is a good argument against quite a few religions, it doesn't actually apply to them all, as any good philosophy class should point out (google "philosophy miracles" and read up a bit on it). Science is perfectly compatible with religions that do not assume constant divine intervention and postulate a rule-based universe with local divine intervention, like Judaism, Buddhism or Christianity, and only contradic
I think, in part, some of the intolerance towards challenges to faith (and especially towards atheists) comes from how effective social pressure is at passing religious ideas in to new hosts. Treating those who reject your faith as, for example, failing in their social obligations and being a disappointing embarrassment within the community is part of that social pressure. And if it's effective at getting a religion passed on then religious beliefs that do it will outcompete those that don't, at least as far as that particular community's bonds go. Maybe not everyone cares so much about pushing their religion on to others, but some do. Challenging the most evangelicals' ability to exert that pressure, either directly or by creating an environment in which it's easier to resist without feeling cast out, is a direct challenge to their ability to do something they regard as their moral and social duty.
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I doubt it'll go that far. No doubt there'll be a few MPs on the list. What there will be is a lot of domestic arguments between men and their wives who want to know why the block has been removed. Or men who no longer secretly access porn because they don't want that conversation. And it'll be the casual/occasional viewers most affected, not the real porn addicts. Personally, I see it as more of a sop to a general anti-porn attitude resulting in more conservative elements wanting to nudge/push people away from porn rather than some secret conspiracy for widespread oppression.
Consider, too, the political context. We have a liberal/conservative coalition which has been doing poorly and in which the conservatives are by far the largest part by seats. Many conservatives feel that the liberal part has been too powerful and want to see the conservative part being more assertive. And many conservatives also feel they're not doing enough to appeal to ordinary conservative voters (rather than, say, just the rich ones). It's a gimmick for core-voter and party support, a gimmick that the liberal coalition partner can't easily oppose.
That's because that's what it actually does mean, and unambiguously so. Presumably the author either doesn't know how to use the subjunctive mood or didn't read his own article properly. (To the grammar-challenged and non-native: take the 's' off 'manages').
I don't think learning by example is the problem.
Suppose you see someone in your community arrested in this way. It goes to court. There are accusations of entrapment, and of the police putting the plot together and leading these people on. Suppose you see the prosecution and the media reporting put forward their arguments in ways that make everything look as bad as possible and the individuals look as weird as possible - ways which are selective and distorting without actually lying. And suppose you see a jury of 12 people not like you, 12 bored and stupid people who you can easily imagine have bought in to the 'muslim stuff = one step short of violence' thing in the media. And you see those people be convicted and imprisoned for a fantasy plot.
Then you come across genuine extremism - maybe you don't know for sure there's violence, but you do see hatred of government or of other religious groups. Or maybe you just see something suspicious. Or maybe it's simply a much lesser and ordinary crime.
Do you report it? Do you risk setting up a load of otherwise innocent people to be entrapped, just because they hate a government which is targetting your community? Do you trust them to sort fact from fiction and only prosecute if there's a genuine prior intention to commit a crime? Or do you play it safe and stay quiet?
I think it may be partly about how potential employers think about and express the sort of 'level' they want their new employees to be. Want someone fairly cheap to do gruntwork but without constant assistance/direction? Look for someone with 2-4 years experience. Want someone who can work fairly independently and make design and basic business decisions about your product? Maybe 5-10 years. People in the industry put people in 'slots' defined by years of experience. Partly I wonder if this is a lack of vocabulary....there's no other way to easily say 'someone who is a fairly competent programmer who can be trusted to make some lower level decisions about how this software will work but who isn't a software architect or manager'.
Just look through some job ads. You'll constantly see years of experience used as a criterion like that, and they'll mostly be less than ten years. I'm not so sure that employers are consciously deciding en masse that older programmers are no good. Rather I think they express the profile of the sort of person they want in terms of years of experience and so, without thinking about it, exclude those who have lots of experience but no desire (or maybe ability) to be more senior.
Firstly, the TSA is not a business.
Secondly, those involved in businesses may have an incentive to act this way, but it's not what an economy is about, or for, and businesses are just a legal/organizational tool to economic ends. An economy's correct purpose is to make economic decisions - what/how much to produce, how to produce it, who gets to consume it - so as to maximize its citizens welfare. (Simple to say, of course....limited rationality, the enormous potential for conflict between individuals and between equity and efficiency and the mixing in of politics makes it incredibly hard).
An economy can fail by producing too little or too much or dividing the work badly (and so the leisure/consumption balance is wrong). It can fail by degrading the environment its citizens experience without adequate associated benefits to them (eg, allowing poor quality building, or the destruction of parks). It can fail by producing something stupid, such as air passenger scans that cause harm and bring no benefits. It can fail by incurring costs such as the training of new staff in exchange for a smaller benefit to an individual in a powerful position, and with the result that poor economic decisions continue to be made because his mismanagement goes unchallenged.
So.....how do you think this particular government decision is doing when it comes to having a well functioning economy?
Taxes paid by a customer should be at the rate where the customer is. Taxes paid by a business should be paid at the rate where the business is. That's the only way to create a fair, level playing field for both.
And where is the business, and how much in each place? That's essentially the problem here. There's a UK business arguable undercharging a Luxembourg business ultimately owned by the same (presumably US) owner. ie, they're possibly putting the UK profit inside a Luxembourg business even when most of the work is done in the UK. And so the tax authorities somehow have to work out how much the UK business 'ought' to be charging the Luxembourg business.
It's a good example of how taxes distort behaviour. Amazon has restructured itself and put certain work in certain places done in certain ways not because it helps to deliver books better but because of tax rules. The equity vs debt decision is also one affected by the same tax rules and with negative effects.
Personally, I'm all in favour of abolishing both corporation taxes and national insurance (payroll taxes) and rolling both in to plain income tax. By reducing the differences between taxation of different kinds of income it reducing the number of games people can play (and the amount of resources wasted). All taxes ultimately fall on people....the only real reason for having corporation tax at all is that electorates somehow feel it's paid by someone else (which is, of course, utterly untrue). In any case, I don't see any good reason from an equity point of view why income from employment should be so heavily taxed compared to other kinds of income, with income from ownership of shares coming second and debt/royalties/rent/others being lightly taxed.
Why would he know not to use it in a school building? The word 'fuck' is a perfectly normal part of informal communication, especially between peers in a harsh, unforgiving, competitive, conformist and low-level-violent social environment like a school. Not using it in a conversation with a teacher? Yes, of course he should know that, he should know it's not something you use in a formal context or with people to whom you're expected to show deference. As for expulsion....that's utterly ludicrous. Would he really have been expected to connect the act with the consequences? And what sort of problem is this supposed to solve anyway? I presume the state, even in the US, is still required to provide a free education if he wants it and I can't see a school for 'special' children being where they'd send him, so the effect is to move him from one school to another. I really hope there's an appeals mechanism.
One can be successful without a knowledge of many things. However, your opportunities for success (including more middle of the road success, not just top-of-your-profession success) may be narrower. A lawyer with a better understanding of computers than his peers may have more success when it comes to litigating some cases, for example. Or maybe he has an understanding of chemistry, or medicine, or engineering, or anything else that might mean he can read and digest related documents faster, follow arguments better, sift the important from the irrelevant and think of things others might not.
This is not just about being able to 'do the computer stuff', it's also about people who may have commission software, make purchasing, investment or budgeting decisions, understand organizations which produce or heavily use software, write regulations, laws or standards, or do many other things in other specialisms that have some sort of connection with computers.
Learning a few basic coding skills may only be a small part of what may be useful...but a better conceptual understanding and a better understanding of the nature of working with IT/software might not just help them make better decisions, but help them interact in a better and less frustrating way with the IT specialists they employ/work for/work with.
'X is important' is not the same as 'everything else is less important than X'. Even in the US freedom of speech is not absolute. The US is quite extreme in some respects, but it still has libel laws, and copyright laws, and restrictions on TV and cinema (sex, violence, etc), and laws against inciting violence and suchlike. In the EU a private life is also a right. It isn't an absolute right, but the balance compared to freedom of speech is not the same in the US.
A lot of commenters from the US seem to assume that any sort of censorship not permitted in the US is automatically political repression. It really isn't. Some is, of course, but some is a reflection of the culture in those other places and may have wide support. Rules against naming rape victims, for example, or the re-publication of sexual material taken without the participants consent are not political censorship or repression. They do not prevent full participation by anyone in any political debate.
US cultural views on speech, and many other things, are being imposed on others. Some of the things this might permit will be thought of as disgusting in places, and the inaction of US law unacceptable. Think of the self-righteous indignation some Americans on here have whenever a US corporation might have non-US laws imposed on it when operating in other countries. Now imagine that same indignation pointing back at the US because the US is itself imposing its own culture and law on others because its own laws are so influential on the Internet, or is doing things such as prejudicing court cases by publishing information before the conclusion of a trial.
The US fights to impose its rules on others, from free speech and US interpretation of copyright law to lack of freedom to gamble. It's no surprise that other countries will sometimes use what power they have, too.
Dispelling ignorance is costly. You're expecting consumers to investigate (or even just read) the privacy policies and practices of the operator of every website they use, to monitor them for changes, to monitor for compliance, to complain and switch suppliers when necessary.....just to enforce some basic standards of decent behaviour? Including consumers who may happen to be 10 years old? And this is assuming that there is sufficient diversity in the marketplace to make it possible to begin with.
Students are typically also paying rent to their University, which is acting as a landlord. Restricting the private use of a service provided as part of a private residence because that use isn't part of some other service you're also providing is not an acceptable practice. Though, of course, limiting it in the library, lecture halls, etc., may be a different matter.
And how would you do it w/o one thread or process per client? Multiplexing?
One thread (and maybe one process per CPU) and non-blocking IO (with kqueue, /dev/poll or similar) is the way to go if you want very high performance, especially if you might have large numbers of idle or slow connections (as with keep-alive). The level of resource use is vastly, vastly lower and there's never any synchronization or scheduling overhead. I've written high-performance servers using this model and it works very well.
FRAND is reasonable. This is because private concerns exist. Without FRAND, we end up with lame standards that tiptoe around patents (like all Theora, and now WebM vs H.264). We also wouldn't have a worldwide GSM standard. Even with local variations, the standard is pretty reliable and useful. If each cell phone manufacturer and network only used standards which were not patent encumbered, we'd have a much less robust wireless market.
Or, alternatively, they could licence the patents to the whole world for free for the purpose of implementing the standards.
Patents are a mechanism for granting temporary monopolies that limit the use of some device/process to those authorized. Companies use them to obtain monopoly profits when they think they'll gain from that. Standards bodies are a mechanism for widening the use of some device/process to all those in an industry. Companies use them when they think they'll gain from interoperability.
They should pick one, not both.
In any case, a company with patents covering a standard can administer the standard themselves - licencing it only to compliant implementations. They don't need standards bodies, and shouldn't have official backing or power for their standards.
The are LOTS of flaws in your agument. Prehaps the easiest to explain is what happens if the is a revolution in your country and previous 'free-expression' suddenly lands you in jail?
Let's imagine I have a home printer that prints these microdots. I use it for printing birthday cards, kids' homework, letters to my bank, and other miscellany. If there's a revolution and any of these things become illegal, I've got bigger problems than being tracked by my printer.
As a further note, right now there's no way to trace that serial number to me.
Apart from all the birthday cards, letters to your bank and so on with your name on it, you mean? And this doesn't just extend to governments oppressing citizenry en masse. A whistleblower in the public or private sector could get caught out by this - print your document, send it to the press (or boss or regulator or potentially corrupt police or whatever), have it seized or otherwise examined by someone you've criticized and lose your job. Anyone could correlate the dots on your secret documents to those on your non-secret ones.
That's not the problem. If they were censoring based on usage, or even arbitrarily, there wouldn't be an issue.
Yes, there would, albeit a different issue, at least when it comes to access in people's rooms. Whether legal or not, landlords should not be filtering their tenants Internet access like that, and it doesn't matter if the landlord is a private landlord, a government entity, a University or a charity. It's not an acceptable commercial practice. And it's most especially unacceptable if the landlord ensures they are a monopoly supplier of fixed-line access to that person (no idea if they are, but I can imagine the reaction had I asked my college for a phone line and ADSL/cable).
We have to wait and see what they actually do with this.
Here might be some examples of non-evil uses, or at least uses which are in the same class as blocking the word 'democracy' or 'tibet' in China:
No company can be totally free in which governments or jurisdictions it chooses to alienate. Maybe you can accept copyright infringement in Russia and be Russia-based, or you can accept criticism of Vladimir Putin and be US-based, but you can't do both. And similar countries often cooperate (or are exposed to coercion, such as US export of its copyright laws).
If we're talking about programming as a school (ie, pre-University) subject then it surely wouldn't extend to actually being able to develop useful software. No-one is ever going to be able to get a job as a software developer based on having studied it at high-school.
There are some ways in which it might be useful, though.
I also disagree that it'll become quickly outdated. Variables, comparisons, loops, functions, arguments and so on are not going to go out of date anytime soon - certainly not in the way that the current nonsense 'how to use Word' lessons will.
The biggest threat, I think, is that they'd be watered down to pathetic uselessness that provides no insight at all. I suspect some children would be sufficiently useless at the necessary thorough logical thought (possibly the same ones I remember who couldn't cope with basic maths) that any attempt to design a course that didn't leave them far behind would make the whole thing worthless. So there needs to be some way to deal with them, like putting them in another stream, which IIRC isn't normally done for non-core subjects. Come to think of it, maths lessons were slow enough for anyone with any aptitude for it that it could make sense to speed them up for those who are good at them and use some of the extra time for software.
It's not a good concept at all. It's not just about being 'fair' to a loosely defined collection of many people named 'the recording industry', the incentives placed on people is also important. Copyright is about creating incentives to product copyright material which will be benificial to society as a whole. That means rewarding people who play a part in producing things that are widely valued, whether as creators, financers who take on risk, or whatever, and not rewarding those who do not. Distributed blank media tax revenues via some sort of formula may not do a good job of correlating payments with the value of the work people are doing. It's a bung to dominant encumbants and no incentive to new entrants, for example.
Again, a common misconception of morons. Crawling painfully slow? Now, that just makes you look ignorant. SWT is actually quite good.
I've seen slow SWT apps too, but then the problem isn't really the GUI but rather the habit of the Java runtime to use lots of memory. Any machine is slow when forced to page (and when using Java on something with plenty of RAM, it flies).
A lot of C or C++ applications also use a lot of memory (maybe less, I'm not sure, but still a lot) - but there's a better chance that a lot of it can be paged out and left there because they don't have a garbage collector regularly scanning it.
All taxes modify behaviour, intended or not. At the moment most taxes are raised in ways which result in modifications to behaviour which are bad. For example, taxes on labour, and taxes that cause corporations to prefer debt financing over equity financing when there's no underlying business reason to do so. You have to pay your taxes somehow.....much better to have them levied on things where there's an obvious economic advantage (like fuel and anything else with negative externalities) than where the opposite is true. There's a limited supply of those things, but what supply there is isn't being fully used.
My argument that the creation of models of the world on the basis of evidence and testing is a process not compatible with 'believe this because an authority says so', but that humans frequently use one of the two at a time depending on which seems most appropriate to them? I don't see how the models not being perfect models causes problems for this argument.
The problem is that you accept one known-to-be-wrong argument (e.g. ZF, but likewise things like relativity and quantum theory, and loads of inconsistent theories further on) on external authority, and claims of it's utility, yet refuse to do the same for a might-be-wrong model, where you admit equal utility exists ... For science "utility" is reason enough, yet it isn't enough for religion. Those models of science are like stating "the sky was painted blue 500 years ago", it provides an accurate description, useful prediction, and is known to be wrong. Yet you would never accept that theory : it is not merely "imperfect" in that it has a few holes. It is wrong, in the sense that it contradicts itself. Just because you are not currently properly equipped to detect the holes in, say, even in classical mechanics does not mean they don't exist.
Which makes the "they're correct" argument bullshit for your belief in science. So what remains ? Utility.
I haven't made a 'they're correct' argument for science. Scientific theories are developed using a particular process, a process which is a credible way of creating and assessing the models it produces, one which can make known the difference between real behaviour and the model and one which can plausibly bring those models closer and closer to 'correctness'. Tests of the most important and basic parts have been carried out by a diverse set of individuals who are credibly able to do so as far as a human can, and the results disseminated through diverse channels via direct and carefully recorded contact with those who have produced, refined and tested those theories. The theories and tests are well described and specific, and are to a very substantial degree consistent with each other (with inconsistencies at the edges of our knowledge). Outside the basic parts there may not be replication and there may be greater scope for manipulation or mistakes. But the process still provides a good reason to take the results as likely to be an improvement of our collective modelling of the world. Finally, individuals sometimes make knowlingly or wrecklesses false claims (eg, false data), but the process means that it's unlikely that a huge body of false knowledge will be established through deception because each piece of later modelling is separately performed and tested.
Religious models of the world - it's creation, it's functioning and so on - are based on divine revelation of one kind or another. The proposed mechanism is that god causes an individual human to make the claims that he requires, and that god's claims are both accurate and made usefully accurately by his proxies. This process is not credible, and is vulnerable to becoming circular ('what I say is the word of god, you know it's the word of god because I say so, and you know I'm not lying or deceived because everything I say is the word of god'). The claims are not very specific and not always very well specified. They're often not testable or tested at all, never mind credibly or with a credible mechanism for the outcomes to be accurately disseminated. They're not disseminated from the original claimant to us now in a way likely to have good accuracy and there's no means for modern humans to verify them. Finally, humans are known to sometimes spontaneously produce new clearly false religious beliefs and for others to follow them. eg, cargo cults or Jonestown. The claimed process of divine revelation and human dissemination has no defence against this.
I also make a distinction between scientific models and statements about the world and statements about ot
I like your attitude, really, but ... your ideas about science are very strange indeed ...
Science - the development of theories based on testing, evidence and logic - is not compatible with arguments such as 'believe this book because authoritative people claim that it has an authoritative author'.
This doesn't apply to mathematics at all.
No. Maths is not science, it's extended logic alone.
We believe in the axioms because ... well they're useful (an argument that can be made equally well, maybe even better, about the bible).
We treat axioms as true because it's useful to do so, yes. Often they're useful because they help us to produce surprisingly accurate models of the world that produce useful predictions. Often there are attempts to undermine them or find out what happens when some of them don't hold, just in case that produces something useful, or just out of curiosity.
It isn't actually possible to -correctly- define natural numbers using the Peano axioms ... so it's not just that we believe in things for good reasons, we believe in all sorts of things *known to be wrong* because we don't know a more useful solution (Actually there is a simple known way to fix natural numbers, you basically pick some n, arbitrary large but finite and work in Zn. Know anyone who actually uses that over N ?). Godel proved that it is not possible to provide a finite extension to the peano axioms that is internally consistent and solves the problem. Whoops.
So we know we have run down a dead end ... yet nobody's seriously considering anything else. Why do we believe it anyway ? We've done it for 2000 years ... and it isn't all that "in your face".
I haven't read too much so far about mathematical philosophy, but Bertrand Russell at least appears to propose alternatives to Peano's axioms. Maths does produce results useful to achieving goals and which have a very high degree of consistency both internally and with what we observe. It's also quite possible that the ability to do the basics of maths - counting, adding, etc. - on which we've based all of the serious stuff are capabilities which humans have evolved to have as a survival advantage.....and so it'd be no surprise that it's almost universally believed among non-philosophers.
This is where your argument runs stuck. And in case you find this way to theoretical, rest assured that there are plenty of known holes in just about any theory. Physics was last thought to be correct until 1850 or so. Then they discovered quantum theory, which created dozens of new problems, most of which are unsolved (e.g. the famous gravity conundrum : it is actually impossible for quantum theory to exist in relativistic space ... whoops. But that's not the only problem by far).
My argument that the creation of models of the world on the basis of evidence and testing is a process not compatible with 'believe this because an authority says so', but that humans frequently use one of the two at a time depending on which seems most appropriate to them? I don't see how the models not being perfect models causes problems for this argument. I don't claim perfect models, merely that science is the only reasonable method for advancing and assessing humanity's collective stock of them. And these models DO produce highly consistent, repeatable and accurate predictions under a very wide set of circumstances and DO perform a very great deal better than the pure logic that preceded it, and better yet than the intuitive guesses, dogma and superstitions which preceded that.
I agree that a claim of divine intervention can always be used to counter an argument that a claimed historical or current factual account is physically implausible. I d
As any politician will tell you, the goal in a debate is not to convince the person with whom you're debating. It's to convince the audience. It's not worth even hoping that your online debating partner is ever going to agree with you, and certainly not that he'll say so, but that doesn't mean you're not achieving your goal.
I'm curious ... since it has been proven a few decades ago that the human mind is in fact incapable of rational thinking.
I'm sceptical. And I'm sceptical it's easy to define 'rational', too. Humans clearly are capable of recognizing rational arguments to some degree (with, of course, some possibly high level of mistakes), mathematical proofs being an example. Maybe you mean to say that humans have limited rationality of some sort.
In fact computers aren't either, since rational reasoning can only take place with full information, which simply isn't available.
That's not obviously true. Surely 'rationality' might mean 'coming to optimal conclusions/actions toward your goal within the constraints of information and information processing to which you are subject'. (I'm presuming there's no such thing as a 'rational goal', but you'll need to ask a philosopher about that). You conclusions may be uncertain, but not necessarily irrational. In any case, I don't doubt that humans have very limited rationality, but I would certainly not expect to do better by throwing away our limited attempts to use it.
But even rational reasoning "in tanks" (massively simplified simulated worlds) is horrendously difficult and not at all optimal (especially if thinking is not -entirely- free and determining a rational course of action is often an NP-hard problem. E.g. the minimax algorithm in the case of a non-universal heuristic). But it gets worse. In a system that has the property of chaos (like the real world) it is utterly impossible to find the rational course of action, even with infinite time, infinite processing capacity and full information (none of which are available).
The rational course of action may simply be to pick one at random out of a set of alternatives between which a preference can't be established. It isn't rational, for example, to starve to death in between two restaurants because determining which is best is impossible or requires a few centuries of computation.
So here's a thought : the only way atheists get convinced of atheism is exactly the same way people get convinced of religions. It is a numbers game.
As I understand it, the means, biological/psychological/neurological mechanism and biological purpose or survival advantage (if any) of the transmission of religion are widely debated and not well settled. There are theories involving hyper-active agent detection, in-group cohesion mechanisms that don't compromise the capacity for out-group hatred, shamanic healing, perhaps political manipulation of existing traits, and no doubt many more. The 'it is a numbers game' theory is one of which I wasn't previously aware.
I know that atheists pride themselves on their supposed superiority because of compatibility with science.
Science - the development of theories based on testing, evidence and logic - is not compatible with arguments such as 'believe this book because authoritative people claim that it has an authoritative author'. This does not, of course, automatically mean that it is irrational to use one process in some instances and the other in others. Also, atheists have existed longer than science and I wouldn't wish to claim that 'atheists' as a group have any particular pride or motivation for it. I'd also say it's not implausible that the first humans didn't have religion, as we would think of it, but they certainly wouldn't have had science.
But while this is a good argument against quite a few religions, it doesn't actually apply to them all, as any good philosophy class should point out (google "philosophy miracles" and read up a bit on it). Science is perfectly compatible with religions that do not assume constant divine intervention and postulate a rule-based universe with local divine intervention, like Judaism, Buddhism or Christianity, and only contradic
I think, in part, some of the intolerance towards challenges to faith (and especially towards atheists) comes from how effective social pressure is at passing religious ideas in to new hosts. Treating those who reject your faith as, for example, failing in their social obligations and being a disappointing embarrassment within the community is part of that social pressure. And if it's effective at getting a religion passed on then religious beliefs that do it will outcompete those that don't, at least as far as that particular community's bonds go. Maybe not everyone cares so much about pushing their religion on to others, but some do. Challenging the most evangelicals' ability to exert that pressure, either directly or by creating an environment in which it's easier to resist without feeling cast out, is a direct challenge to their ability to do something they regard as their moral and social duty.