The demarcation is only for which statements are scientific and which are not. As I think you were trying to point out, falsifiable statements are scientific statements, so stating that the evidence cannot be questioned is removing the theory from criticism. Technically, this is a correct statement, but it is completely missing the point of the parent. Using demarcation against Gore like that, to try and trap him on a technical question to hide from the larger criticisms he argues is quite disingenuous and slanderous to Critical Rationalism for you to wield scientific demarcation like that while claiming to uphold Popper's assertions. Popper and his student Bartley didn't stop at demarcation.
What we are really discussing is a "should" statement. The question is "What should be done, if anything, about environmental changes?" There can be no rationally justified answer to this question, just as there can be no rationally justified answer to any "should" statement. There are no good reasons, rationally speaking, for taking any action for the simple fact that predicting the future is impossible. When it comes to "should" statements we must rely on the probabilities produced by models of the problem.
So, for climate change, there are a number of parameters that our model needs to understand in order to calculate the probable success of any proposal to not cause or even prevent harm to society. If the climate changes will cause harm, can we alter them? Is human action contributing to the harmful climate changes? What human actions will reduce harm the most?
What I believe the parent was communicating and the point Gore was trying to make, was that the scientific statements that have survived falsification thus far best fit the explanation that the earth is getting warmer due to increased carbon levels that are currently best explained by fossil fuel burning, that this is harmful and that we should do something about it. What Gore and a large part of the scientific community are trying to say, is that further attempts at falsification before action is taken is self-defeating at best and suicidal at worst. Will we ever know for sure? Nope. Can't be sure the sun is going to come up tomorrow until tomorrow either. I'm not real inclined to quit taking any action today that has to do with tomorrow because I can't be sure the sun is going to come up. Especially given the really huge probability that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. Just as the scientific facts which have survived falsification point to the sun coming up tomorrow, they point to human assisted global climate changes.
Either falsify the science that leads to these calculations of probabilities or start arguing for a course of action that deals with the changes. Anything else has no information content that is meaningful to the discussion. Oh, and go read David Miller's "Out of Error". It will bring you up to speed on what's happened with Popper's ideas since the 30's.
You are clearly confused. Gonzales wasn't with the Justice Department at that time - he was part of the White House general council. And the only reason Fitzgerald was appointed was because Chuck Schumer whined about it. This was 100% about politics, not justice.
Read the Constitution. It's Congress' job to make sure that the executive branch is following the law. Small 'j' justice is inherently political, especially wrt Congressional oversight of the Executive. We elect people through a political process to perform this function. If you can't account for the normal politicization and distill the objective information that remains, that's your problem, not a flaw with the system. Your assertion has no information content. The people directly responsible for Fitz's appointment to this case were Republican loyalist Bush appointees. That Gonzales wasn't head of DOJ at the time is irrelevant to your point that this was a miscarriage of justice. How does the fact that Mr. "tits are more important than terrorism" Ashcroft was in charge negate the falsification of your assertion that Fitz's appointment and subsequent prosecution somehow lacked integrity? You have yet to actually defend your statement. Unless the point of fact in error changes the meaning of the assertion, you're just dealing with distractions.
Riiiiight. And the FBI agent that interviewed Russert reported that Russert "could not completely rule out the possibility that he had such an exchange" with Libby and that "he speaks to many people on a daily basis and it is difficult to reconstruct some specific conversations, particularly one which occurred several months ago". Apparently Tim's memory of the conversation somehow improved in the couple of years it took for him to get on the stand and testify. Don't worry -- no reasonable doubt here.
Not enough for the jury. What's your point? Several witnesses "clarified their statements" between initial interviews and their testimony. Karl Rove appeared 5 times before the GJ. These people acted very carelessly with state secrets and the CIA was harmed. Fitz was charged with discovering what crimes were committed and to prosecute those responsible. A Grand Jury indicted Libby on 5 counts, a jury convicted him on 4. He was given the best counsel possible, you cannot specifically point to any reasonable excuse for his actions. If he was so forgetful and undisciplined, how did he manage to be the chief of staff for the VP? A VP, reputed to be the most powerful VP in history, has an idiot for his COS?
Riiight. Fitzgerald knew from the first day he started investigating who leaked the name, and he also knew that no law had been broken because he didn't charge the leaker. How was "justice" obstructed when the prosecutor knew there was no "justice" to obstruct from the first day of his investigation? Oh yeah, special prosecutors know that they can't run a 3 year investigation and not charge anybody. That would be such a waste!
Fitz knew Armitage had leaked it to Novak. He did not know who had told everyone else or when. Remember Miller went to jail over this for 90 days. Cooper folded quickly. The law specifically states that the person must know that the identity is covert. Armitage didn't know this and Armitage was forthcoming and cooperative with the investigation. Justice was obstructed because Rove and Libby were not forthcoming and did not reasonably cooperate without pressure from the state. Again, you seem to be ignoring the basic processes of our legal system. Your concept of justice has no place in a society that lives under the rule of law, you have no right to hide or otherwise mischaractorize information from a legal investigation, you may only plead the 5th. The waste was generated by the hostility of those being investigated. This sort of insubordination would be cause for termination at any company, why is Rove still working at the WH? You're claims that no crime could have been committed is false on it's face and willfully ignores the basic tenets of US l
This will be another installment of "Who the hell modded up this crap?" How am I supposed to not feed trolls if they are modded up so high? There are impressionable minds out there that could be permanently damaged by hearing enough people claim this subjective crap amounts to a decent argument. Won't some mods think of the children?
So where were we....
Your argument is specious and consists of meaningless statements that have no bearing on the issue. In other words, your claims lack integrity.
Lied about what? Libby was NOT the leaker, and Fitzgerald knew that when he interviewed him 3 different times. I'd challenge you to remember, under oath, the exact date and content of a handful of conversations you had several years ago. Apparently if you get some dates mixed up, it's only criminal if you are a Republican.
Oh stop the pity party. The CIA requested the DOJ investigate the possibility that classified info had been leaked and that this may have constituted a crime. Fitz was appointed by the Bush Justice Dept. under Abu Gonzales to head this investigation. Libby specifically lied to the Grand Jury about his conversations, Tim Russert busted him on the stand. There was an indictment from a Grand Jury and a conviction on 4 of 5 counts, including perjury. This isn't about forgetting some dates, this is about purposefully concealing information regarding a crime. Had Libby cooperated, he would not have been charged with anything, just like Karl Rove wasn't. They put poor black Democrats in ass raping prison all the time for covering up misdemeanors, excuse me if I'm not crying over some over-privileged asshole who was complicit in outing the head of the US spy network in a country we were, and still are, at war with. He got his fair trial, his choice of defense and will get his appeals, that's all us civilized folks are obliged to provide, morally or legally. You know we also get to scorn him after he gets pardoned too.
And remember, the Jury wasn't presented with all of the facts.
This is usually where you Bush supporting dead-enders get into trouble, I'm going to enjoy this.
They were not presented with the covert status of Ms. Plame.
This was dealt with during hearings, Judge Walton decided it wasn't pertinent to the case at hand and kept both sides from bringing this up. He didn't want Fitz to prejudice the jury against Libby and he knew there was no purpose for this information to the defense other than to create a greymail smokescreen, which Libby's lawyers have been known to use before (Iran-Contra anyone). Are you suggesting that Judge Walton just has it out for Republicans? Is he in it with Fritz? Is the entire Federal judiciary in it with the underlings of the Republican managed DOJ? Are they all out to "get" Bush? I'm sure Fox will have the entire story up tonight.
They were not presented the identity of who actually "leaked" her role at the CIA.
This assertion is false, it was in the freaking testimony. Dick Armitage took the stand and was deposed in the grand jury. Libby didn't know that Armitage was the one who told Novak. Rove told Cooper and cooperated, while Libby told Miller and lied. Rove, no charges, Libby charges. Is this starting to make any sense to you yet? Fitz, like a good prosecutor, didn't tell the suspects what he knew to gauge the verisimilitude of their statements. Rove was smart enough to cooperate, Libby thought he should cover his actions up.
They were not presented with the lies her husband told to the press, and they were not presented the motivations behind the actual leaker.
Again, how is this pertinent to Libby's actions that obstructed a DOJ investigation? Regardless of the verisimilitude of Joe Wilson's statements, another argument I'll kick your ass in at another time, Libby still doesn't get to obstruct investigations by the DOJ. Or do you agree with Nixon's statement to John Dean, "Remember, you're doing the right thing." Your assertions are completely out of t
The idea that one can invest in capital markets without interacting with companies whose policies one my disagree is laughable. As is the idea that the foundation must just accept the market as it is.
In the specific scenario mentioned in the LA Times article, the oil plant that causes respiratory illness where the foundation is trying to improve health, the foundation could use it's ownership in the corporation to compell the board to improve the quality of the refinery. This may reduce the foundation's return on investment from the stock, but it will increase the effectiveness of the foundation's efforts in that community. If, for economic reasons or otherwise, the foundation could not exert it's control through ownership, it could leverage it's investment and local relationships to come up with a solution, such as subsidizing pollution techology. Regardless of the specific solution needed, the foundation is not forced to choose between changing these conditions and assuring maximum return on investment. This idea is no different than partnering with some local charity for distribution of charity rather than investing in your own infrastructure to do so. Partnering with businesses might actually be easier in some cases since money usually buys cooperation in the business world and the foundation is hardly lacking in that area.
Wealth is power. For the foundation to give up that power is counter to it's goals. It must effectively use that power to further it's goals. The premise that blindly investing for growth reduces the rate of return on charitable works is valid. That the solution is all or nothing, depending whether the company is "good" or "evil" is invalid.
You can't point out Zimbabwe and condemn any attempt to provide a form of wealth distribution. To counter your point, in Poland the state easily controlled at least 70% of the wealth. The transition from concentration of wealth in the state to distributing it among the citizens was much smoother and Poland isn't experiencing the inflation that Zimbabwe does. The goals were the same, the solution was ultimately the same as well, division of concentrated wealth.
Did Zimbabwe royally screw up their attempt? Were they clumsy in their execution? Most definately, otherwise they would not have the problems they have today. Might I also point out that the current leadership of Zimbabwe was antagonistic, to put it nicely, towards the wealthy. A couple of rich whites got killed over this situation and fear of violence and political instability were a much larger causes of capital flight than simple wealth redistribution.
The lesson here is not to allow this situation to develop in the first place. If you do find your nation in such a situation the solution will need to be well engineered so as not to create more instability that it attempts to solve.
OK, there is the (pick a liberal) solution: take money through taxation and give it back to people as a government handout.
There's more than one way to skin a cat. Tax breaks on primary residence mortgages and subsidized loan systems have increased home ownership, one import factor in the distribution of wealth. The government regulates in a manner which encourages citizens to own their own home at the very least. This subsidy is offset by those who have more wealth. It is not a government handout.
There are a number of problems with that approach, probably the biggest one is that it fosters dependence on the government as the supplier of all that is good in life.
Only someone who has never knowingly had to depend on government subsidies would make that statement. It is absurd in this country. The "good things in life" can be achieved through far less effort in the private sector than depending on any public institution to provide it. There is nobody who is explicitly subsidized by the government that holds this view, and I challenge you to prove otherwise. Only if there is no opportunity available does this statement become true. Overly unequal distribution of wealth disproportionatley limits opportunity for those with the least wealth. We are talking about modifications to the distribution to provide the basic infrastructure to insure adequate opportunity for as many people as possible. Only in that environment exists can you truly blame someone for not achieving self reliance without also pointing out what society could have done better.
While some might argue that that is what government should be, it doesn't work very well. So while concentrating power in the hands of a few is bad, concentrating power in the hands of the government (or unelected bureaucracy) is provably worse.
No it's not. It's the same danger. Market fundamentalism doesn't work for the same reason's Communism doesn't, concentration of power.
Most of what we are seeing today is a direct outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution where the concept of one man working produced one man's work output was negated. One man with a machine suddenly became capable of producing much more than a different man with hand tools. And the machines cost money, lots of money. This leads directly to Marx, with the idea that the workers should own the maans of production rather than the factory owner that figured out how to get the money for the machines.
The Industrial Revolution simply modified the required infrastructure to provide the same goals as the Constitution intended. Some of this was rectified through legislation like the Small Business Administration and other low interest loan schemes. Others were put into place like the GI Bill, which gave the first people in many families the requisite knowledge to create wealth in the post-Industrial economy. The most efficient place to pay for the subsidies required for the infrastructure is through economic growth. That way, you know how much you can spend on infrastructure without over extending your economy. Unregulated swings in capital markets have had horrendous consequences in society, a la, The Great Depression. Instability is only good for markets if it does not exceed certain thresholds. Same thing with wealth inequality. Some wealth inequality is good, some speculation is good and some instability is good. If you have too much, you can easily wind up killing the proverbial goose of capital markets.
Today, many of us are "factory owners" - we own a computer that is a more powerful machine than anything dreamed of in 1850. This machine can produce wealth, but only with skills to operate it. The unskilled are in an extremely bad position because now we don't need hundreds of unskilled laborers in our "factory" to make money with our machines.
The issue is not with the income inequality of citizens in 1850 vs. modern citizens. It's a comparison amongst modern citizens alone. The point is how do you prevent the untenabl
Noah Webster, of Webster's Dictionary fame (the reason we don't spell color, colour), was the Federalist who gave the most detailed account of the nature of property and wealth to a free society. Essentially, he stated that the point of the Constitution was to break up power so that it would be too difficult to gain enough for one group of citizens to deny the rights of another group. The creation of 2nd class citizens (slaves were not citizens and indentured servants had rights) undermines the Constitution. The idea that Webster brought to the forefront was that wealth is power, therefore one the Constitution cannot survive an economic system that concentrates wealth and therefore power.
The second link was a paper written "at the request of the federalist leadership shortly after the ratification debate had begun" (Bailyn, Ideological Origins... p373). These ideas were in response to alleged errors made by Montesquieu first noted by the Willian Vans Murrary, an American law-student studying in London after the revolution.
Webster talks primarily of real property, ie land. In an agrarian economy real land is the primary infrastructure for the creation of wealth. Now that we have moved to a different economy, the fact that wealth equals power and the vulnerabilities of the Constitution have not changed, so we must adapt our regulations of the market in accordence. The historic record shows that the vast majority of the Founding generation would be shocked and deeply disturbed by the inequality of wealth in this country today and the trends regarding those statistics. They would see it as endangering the Constitution itself. I'm not for radical reorganization of wealth, I believe redistributing growth is much more efficient and fair than redistributing existing wealth. That's why income inequality is such an important factor and why it matters. It may not be the only problem and it may be a symptom of larger issues, but it's an effective measure given the current economic structure of the nation.
Re:"Disagreement on Terminology"
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Ajax Design Patterns
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· Score: 4, Interesting
AJAX is a tiny component of the overall distributed application. The distributed application is not written in AJAX. AJAX isn't even a language; JavaScript is. Maybe some people who write AJAX code actually wrote some RPC stuff too, but I'd wager they're just a 13-year-old web monkey. RPC is distributed computing. RMI, CORBA, even XML web services are distributed computing. JavaScript is just glue. Get over it.
In the day and age where I have clients who all now want web apps, but still want all the functionality of a desktop app, you better believe AJAX and this Web 2.0 crap is here to stay. AJAX is also going to stay because the tools are better. I've been avoiding Javascript for years, I can't stand figuring out all the browser quirks, I'd much rather write a Swing app. Google's Web Toolkit changed that. It's a seamless framework for cross-browser applications, I can use CSS to style my UI and Swing like components in a Java IDE to write the actual code. The lack of decent tools is why CORBA didn't take off. Hello World is no less complex in AJAX than CORBA or RMI, it all has to make it across a network and back. It's just that the tools are better, which was probably helped by the lack of complexity in the underlying protocol, but c'est la vie. The web browser is now a rich client. You may believe HTTP is a most horrid protocol for doing RPC or that Javascript is a most horrendous environment for writing anything other than hello world, and I would agree. Like I said, this is all simple CORBA again, but with a universal client app container (the javascript/dom/css capable xml browser) instead of a hand coded top-to-bottom desktop app.
Why wouldn't it make sense to do it this way? We've moved to application containers on the server end to instrument applications with basic infrastructure, why not do it on the desktop too? How is a data structure serialized via a Javascript call to an HTTP request that returns another data structure in an HTTP response any different from RMI, CORBA, MSRPC, XML-RPC or SOAP? Same basic process, so what if Javascript is just glue? By that premise, so is every other language that uses C libraries. Javascript is a scripting language that can be used to draw interactive UI's. The fact that Javascript is not really a great environment to write really interactive UI's doesn't change that. How is GMail any different from early desktop email clients? And I don't even have to actually touch the Javascript if I use existing GWT components, I can write the whole damn thing in Java.
I'd roll my own. If I really needed to write an application that constantly transferred huge amounts back to the client, it'd probably be a clue that a proper desktop client/server app would be a better architecture.
Personally, I'd recommend GWT for Java devs, but to each his own. My question is what if your client requires a web based app? Are you going to tell them you're only going to write that kind of app in a proper desktop environment? CORBA was a damn good architecture too, but how many CORBA apps to I get paid to write? And it's not like our company wouldn't win the work, we've got several people who've rolled their own CORBA orbs. AJAX is here to stay because it fulfills the requirements today. Half the crap on teh Intarweb today would be kicked off if my view of engineering aesthetics were adhered to.
I mean, most AJAX people don't even realize that the server-side input doesn't need to be written in XML. Guess what? if you're receiving so much data back from the server as to need to process huge XML documents, it's just a fast to do a post-back.
You are correct here. That's why I'd recommend a framework, better not to confuse them with your hand rolled hiding of all this. After all, you don't intend on maintaining this thing forever do you? It's also the reason I like CORBA over SOAP, that and SOAP is freaking reinventing every CORBA spec out there, It's not like the CORBA way is any more painful or that the tools couldn't be written just as easi
Re:"Disagreement on Terminology"
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Ajax Design Patterns
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sorry, AJAX just isn't that complicated, and trying to make it sound big and complicated is just more Web 2.0 hype.
AJAX is distributed computing. Distributed computing is hard. Ergo, AJAX is hard. If you're building a real application and not just adding flaming and spinning icons to a web page, you are doing nothing conceptually different than any other remote procedure call. The problem is, most people don't know how to write software in any language that handles that environment well. I know because I usually come in an clean up after them. I've had to do it in just about every language and with every rpc protocol. It's the same mistakes everytime. Your comment is like saying C++ isn't that complicated because it's Java without automated memory management. First of all, AJAX is a PITA to debug, you may have to step through code in a number or separate environments in order to debug a single round trip, like all rpc calls. GWT makes this easier, but that's done by having the programmer develop the client side code in the same environment as the server side code and coming with it's own special debugger. Avoiding more debugging and having to debug really hard to find problems is the point of understanding patterns. I'd much rather see the new AJAX dev on the team reading this book instead of AJAX in 24 hrs or something.
Besides, who needs a book to learn AJAX? Unless I missed something important, a few paragraphs and a couple code samples explain things just fine.
Ok smarty, which AJAX framework would you choose? GWT, J2Script? Would you handroll your own? What sort of data structures were you planning on using to get the data across the wire? Should your AJAX calls be fewer in number with larger payloads or would your application benefit from many calls with small payloads?
The AJAX environment may not cover the scope of the C++ one, but that doesn't mean that anyone is going to walk in and start using it properly. I doubt you can claim that you've never had to scrap an unworkable design. Due to AJAX's limited scope and nature, rpc calls from JavaScript, it is entirely appropriate to emphasize good distributed computing patterns. It's no different than a book on CORBA in C++ that discussed patterns. Web Services, both AJAX and SOAP, are CORBA and RPC all over again. That's why SOA is just Same Old Architecture. The patterns are mostly the same, it's just different capabilities and different transports.
Did they weigh 1/13th of the Earth plans weight?
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NASA Weighs Moon Plans
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I'm not just throwing around random insults. If you believe in unproven and especially disproved things, you are in fact an idiot. So by simple definition, MOST religious people (all billions of them) are in fact idiots.
Count yourself in that group. There is no certainty as you cannot know what it is that you do not know. That is the boundary of rationality, if you cannot test it, you cannot disprove it, therefore you cannot rationally consider the question. Having faith in the existence or non-existence of omniscient dieties falls outside the limits of criticism. Attempting to prove religious belief with certainty is as much a futile effort as trying to disprove them. As the parent pointed out, the only logically true statements are boring and do not tell you jack about what you should do.
I mean, if you truly believe that some guy died for your sins 2,000 years ago and that your belief in him somehow will be your salvation "in the next life", or in some made up location like "heaven" or "hell", which clearly we have absolutely no evidence for, then you ARE in very simple terms, a moron.
You have no evidence for getting up in the morning. There is no certainty, no rational reason to believe you will live to see another day, that the sun will rise or that this day even exists and this isn't just a dream. Just ask yourself this question, why do you get out of bed? You will not find a rational basis for the answer, no matter how many answers you try.
Lots of people believe the earth is flat. What do you call them?
This is testable, like the age of dinosaur bones, however these tests are a predicated on the irrational belief that there is some sort of natural order to the universe. Rationality has been our best tool for discerning this natural order, but to overlook the limits of criticism and thus the bounds of rationality leaves one with statements of faith disguised the illusion of reason. If all of our empirical tests are not invalid for some reason, the earth is not flat. However, I cannot know the answer to this question with certainty, just as those who declare it is flat cannot present their position with certainty. Now, it may be counter productive to most of the shared irrational goals of humans to disregard empirical evidence, but one can only claim superior adherence to the rationalist identity if one explicity states the irrational goals, such as the natural order of the universe, that the predictive content of your assertion is based.
Now, there is a possibility in some backwards cultures and societies that these believers are in fact ignorant and not morons, but with the advent of the internet, at least in most countries where you have access to so much knowledge for free (wikipedia, etc.), ignorance is no excuse, and in fact if you REMAIN ignorant, that is in itself a form of idiocy.
Again, you're simply assuming that everyone else shares your irrational goals for why they get out of bed in the morning.
Stop defending ignorant people who willfully refuse to accept the reality they live in. They are idiots, and they're hurting themselves, their families, the planet, and most of the good things that humanity and individuals IN humanity have achieved over the last few millennia. It's inexcusable. Stop defending them. They are idiots, by the very definition of the word.
Perhaps you should concentrate on your own illusions and errors. How is it that you can go about providing salvation for the rest of humanity when you have such a poor understanding of your own faith? I don't care what irrational goals other people have, nor what their faith dictates they believe. That is liberty of conscience, something I refuse to live without and would not deny to another. I only care if you violate my rights, which are the irrational goals of the political state I live in. The civil courts and law enforcement have a way of ensuring there are consequences to impedding those goals, just as reality has a messy habit of enforcing gr
Modern agricultural productivity is heavily dependent upon cheap energy. From the machines to the fertilizers and pesticides. The majority of advances in food production have come with the energy usage price tag. Although I figured the exaggeration of "all the oil" would be an obvious quip, the point still stands. If cheap energy is not available, food production will suffer.
It's an eventuality that we have to deal with, whether it's the late 2010's or 2050's, oil production will decline. Investing in the diversification of cheap energy sources cannot possibly work against us. Oh wait, scratch that, with the current leadership here in the US, we're likely to waste all the money through Congressional corruption. Switchgrass anyone?
Well, good old progress has allowed us to produce a lot more food than we could back in the 70s, when people were fond of predicting we'd all be dead of starvation by now, on account of there being too many of us to ever possibly feed.
As it turns out, the population has grown as predicted, but progress managed to keep up.
Incest/rape is a boogy man. While it probably happens to a very small extent in all societies, it is against the social norm of virtually all societies and cultures for the last 500 years.
Did you read the article? How another article verifying this story from ABC News? Have you researched this or are you just pulling this argument out of your ass to be a contrarian?
However, rape, incest, and sexual deviancy fears are very useful to disparage a religion, culture, or group. From the old Nazi propoganda posters of charactures of "hooked-nose" Jews stealing away virtuous German woman, to the stereotypes in deep south U.S. about black men without sexual control, or the alternate stereotype of the inbred redneck, to the Communist propoganda about "Homosexual Capitalism"... over an over again you see stereotypes or generalizations about sex being used to disparage or spread fear about a certain group.
Yer knee's jerkin pretty hard there. Any insinuation that the Amish might not be so pious by bringing up very real civil rights violations is trying to scapegoat? Uh, yeah prosecuting civil rights violations is just like what the Nazi's did to the Jews and the Klan did to blacks. Got any more amazing feats of equivocation in that bag o'tricks?
As for spreading fear, I'm sorry but it's a simple fact that people fear rape, just like they fear death. Not to distract you too much from your horseshit abstraction, but rape is a very real thing that people fear. WTF, are you on the PA tourist board or something?
There is absolutly no evidence that rape, molestation, or incest is any more common amoung Amish than any other group of people.
You really are talking out of your ass now. Where is the assertion that these incidents are more common? The assertion is that these civil rights violations are not stopped. Victims are not protected from their assailants within this community due to it's specific belief that all sins are equal. You really should get that knee checked out.
However, Amish are a religious minority, and they largely exist outside the realm of government control, corporate consumerist advertising, and modern day "political correctness".
Yeah cause keeping rapists away from their victims is something we just invented after we all got "politically correct". This idea that the Amish are somehow above criticism due to their lifestyle choice is beyond contempt. Polygamists who force 14 year old girls to marry senior citizens and kick teenage boys out on the street are a religious minority too, what's your fucking point? Are you actually insinuating that these gross violations of basic civil rights are to be overlooked because of some kook's religious beliefs? What if I suddenly decide the righteous hand of God is mine to smite sinners and go on a rampage? Any objections there? By your logic, am I not justified by my deep religious convictions and my determination to live "outside the mainstream"? I'm afraid you may be the one trying to inject some sort of "political correctness" here.
As one of the last groups to resist becoming assimilated into the rest of society and to come under control of the power elite, there is an agenda to disparage them, to undercut peoples respect for their lifestyle, and for building popular support for the final destruction and assimilation of the Amish people. The people with that agenda, both in the government and the media have been spreading FUD about the Amish being a bunch of perverts, based on a handful of isolated cases that were not really any different than what happens every day to non-Amish people.
Right, cause no one has anything better to do than worry about some farmers in the midwest who drive buggies and still churn butter by hand. Just out of curiosity, who are these people that are out to destroy the Amish, is it t
The commies didn't have secular groupthink. They had a religious groupthink based on atheism, there's a difference. Secularism holds that questions of faith are outside the realm of politics, that the state has no interest in holding one matter of conscience above another, that's why you have defined rights.
Secularism is the freedom to practice your religious views as you see fit as long as you do not violate the civil rights of others, it is not the absence of religion, anyone who claims that it is is either ignorant or lying.
What you're alluding to is technocracy, which is not secularism. I'm really not sure you've thought about what it is that you're asserting.
It's a mistake to believe Amish peity is somehow more civilized or superior to the court system. Amish forgiveness cuts both ways, they also forgive their teenage boys who rape and molest their daughters. In fact daughters going to the outside world for protection from predators in their own community has resulted in retaliation against the victims by the community.
Impressed by their piety, courts have permitted the Amish to live outside the law. But in some places, the group's ethic of forgive and forget has produced a plague of incest--and let many perpetrators go unpunished.
Amish forgiveness has just as much chance for arbitrary tyranny as any other system. Only a rational, secular legal system can successfully remove arbitrariness from the social order you live under.
I'm a Java developer, in the past 18 months I've worked on Postgres, MySQL, DB2, Oracle and MSSQL. All of my co-workers are in the same boat. Most of us have at least 10 years of experience working with various mature and popular (at the time) databases. This is the current list, or rather the survivors. The biggest pain about moving around to all these databases is how to x in y database. You try having to switch environments that many times and see if you remember the syntactic details of each dialect. It's not like ORM tools do the debugging and performance for you.
I'm seriously considering getting getting together a group order at the office. I'm sure somebody will kvetch over the lack of documentation for DBase4 or GemStone, but hey, it only claims to cover SQL.
will spammers get the death penalty? Think I just found the ultimate ethical delimma for the average slashdotter. Is it good if China executes a spammer, but does so in it's new fleet of mobile lethal injection vans and harvests the organs for sale? When cheering the execution of spammers, which at least half the readership here has been waiting for, can you be sure your celebration is for a real spammer or a political dissident?
Amen. We're doing CORBA all over again, just slower with crappier libraries and technologies. WSDL is IDL, your HTTP server/SOAP handler is your ORB. You have to use 2WSDL / WSDL2 just like IDL compilers. I can't wait for another 5 years of tech changes to webservices that will make it run, as you said, just like CORBA has for over a decade. I just want to know who looked at HTTP and said, "Yeah, this is better than IIOP!", cause I don't want them anywhere near my projects.
Webservices should be left to rot, the technology provides nothing that CORBA didn't do better.
Objectively Speaking, Mike McCurry is a whore
on
Net Neutrality or Not?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
And CNN is publishing industry press releases as news, but hey, what's new?
Notice no disclosure that he's completely freaking paid for by the telecom industry, who do you think Public Strategies' clients are? And "Hands off the Internet"? That's an astro-turf campaign, noticed the crappy wanna-be underground looking propaganda that's been popping up on blog-ads, that's them. More info at DailyKos.
Editor's note: Mike McCurry is a partner at Public Strategies Washington Inc. where he provides strategic communications counsel. He is a co-chairman of Hands off the Internet, a coalition of telecommunication-related businesses. McCurry served as press secretary to President Bill Clinton from 1995 until 1998.
This is just like the telcos claims over open access. Every regional telco has been granted monopoly status for years, we the users paid for that infrastructure, and we'll use the same model in the future if need be. These claims of eminent domain are horseshit distractions. They were when they strangled and drowned the CLECs and they are now as they try to do to the Internet what the cell companies have done to wireless. I don't use my phone other than to talk, data services currently lack value over the cell networks in the existing price structure. They want to impose the same pricing structure possibilities on their segments of the Internet. Just like access to the copper, they want you to pay for what you've already paid for. Mike McCurry is getting paid to help these people steal from you; for this payment, he's trying to convince you that being stolen from is in your best interest.
These assholes will kill the goose that laid the golden egg if allowed. Support Save the Internet, don't let them do it.
I'm a science student and those are all meaningful questions to me, and not ones that require the input of a philosopher. I've read Popper, and my major response was "Well, duh".
When you start asking these questions, you enter to domain of philosophy. I'm not sure why you would assume you'd need a professional philosopher to ponder these questions anymore than you would need a professional physicist to think about relativity. The "well, duh" reaction to Popper is a testament to his work's success. It took about 50 years before people moved from, "That can't be right" to "Well, duh". Popper put the nail in the coffin of logical positivism, his work into the limits of rationality and the theory of knowledge changed science forever. You may need to understand what a mess the question of demarcation was before Popper to appreciate his first breakthrough. There are also some aspects of rationality discovered by the Critical Rationalists, such as non-justificationalism, that are still very non-obvious. If you are concerned with understanding rationality, then I recommend continuing your research into Popper and his students.
Just to illustrate the point, Einstien told Popper in the very early 50's that belief in logical positivism had been one of his intellectual life's greatest mistakes. Believe me, what Popper proposed was far from "Well, duh".
Calm down, sparky.
Praise of Plato gets my blood going. The guy is looked at as some wise sage to whom we should turn about the mysteries of civilization and the nature of political order. The guy was going around trying to implement his own brand of tyranny. He was training young princes to become tyrants, 9 at last count. There is little left in Plato's body of work that can be considered meaningful. His ideas about Forms are predicated on the irrational belief in an unchanging world. Beyond making a record of Socrates work, I have little use for Plato. There are much more interesting ancient Greeks, Plato getting all the glory is just annoying.
What is objective knowledge for a given science? How do you demarcate what is a meaningful statement in computer science and what is meaningful in biology? How do you allow knowledge from one field to be objectively considered by another field with a different domain? These are meaningful questions in the domain of philosophy. All objective knowledge relies on logic, Gödel and Tarski showed us that while we can find truth in a domain, we can never be certain that the truth we have found will not be falsified later. There is no certainty to objective knowledge, no justification. At best, we can determine meaningfulness and test meaningful statements for falsity content. That was the innovation of Popper and the Critical Rationalists.
The goal of philosophy is methodological correctness, logic is at the heart of philosophy because that's how we describe method. Philosophy can only explore what the limits of lawfulness and order are. Without the ability to demarcate meaning, we cannot determine order. Why we seek lawfulness and order is a metaphysical question, it cannot be answered by philosophy, thus making philosophy incomplete and paying the price for objectivity.
Since computers are all systems of logic, we can use philosophy to determine what each system's limitations are and how differing systems can interact. Take the theoretical in computer science, how did we develop quantum computing? How will we integrate it into the rest of our systems? As we search for innovative ways to look for solutions to these questions, philosophy guides us, by maintaining methodological correctness, forcing us to maintain the integrity of the identity we have chosen.
Ethics is not philosophy. It is the application of objectivity to another set of goals, a different domain. If ethics is the domain of how to best get along with our neighbors and avoid creating unnecessary confrontation, then we can apply methodology to determine which statements are meaningful within this domain. For instance, Richard Stallman is a computer ethicist. His goal is to provide a particular ethical view of how we should integrate computer systems into our lives. Some statements are meaningful to these goals and others are not. Out of the meaningful statements, I can test which are most efficient at reaching specific goals, such as those of the FSF. I may not agree with those goals, I may oppose those goals, but since Stallman and the FSF have stated what their goals are, I can properly scope a domain. Once I understand the domain, I can test proposals and conjectures to determine which are most efficient towards reaching those goals. This is how objective knowledge grows, our motivation is always metaphysical. We cannot rationalize or justify inspiration. By understanding this, by enforcing methodological separation, we can concentrate on growing objective knowledge about our metaphysical goals. There is no natural imperative to understand the quantum structure of matter or to understand biological systems. We simply find these things useful, fulfilling.
If it is philosophy that you want to study, then study Critical Rationalism. The works of Popper, Bartley and Miller should keep you busy for a while and give you a thorough tour of just about everybody, as they've managed to falsify quite a few names in the summary. If it is ethics you are interested in, I can really only recommend who to avoid. Those who hide from criticism are unethical. Plato and Hegel are primarily useless. Both hid their ideas from criticism, attempting to fool the reader into prematurely aborting their attempt to rationalize their proposals. Plato taught 9 tyrants, Hegel was courtier to his own and the father of the Nazi lies. I would also avoid the spawn of these liars, Leo Strauss, Barth and Schaeffer. All of these have either embraced the Noble Lie or Nihilism. Either path is a cover from criticism; nihilism absurdly denies the capabilities of criticism, while the Noble Lie invokes paradox of the liar. One can never determine when a liar is inserting chaos into order to avoid criticism. Integrity is indispensable.
Generic statement, should have been more precise. Google Maps uses AJAX, same backend, different front-ends. All part of same plan non-evil world domination.
Slashdot Mirror
The demarcation is only for which statements are scientific and which are not. As I think you were trying to point out, falsifiable statements are scientific statements, so stating that the evidence cannot be questioned is removing the theory from criticism. Technically, this is a correct statement, but it is completely missing the point of the parent. Using demarcation against Gore like that, to try and trap him on a technical question to hide from the larger criticisms he argues is quite disingenuous and slanderous to Critical Rationalism for you to wield scientific demarcation like that while claiming to uphold Popper's assertions. Popper and his student Bartley didn't stop at demarcation.
What we are really discussing is a "should" statement. The question is "What should be done, if anything, about environmental changes?" There can be no rationally justified answer to this question, just as there can be no rationally justified answer to any "should" statement. There are no good reasons, rationally speaking, for taking any action for the simple fact that predicting the future is impossible. When it comes to "should" statements we must rely on the probabilities produced by models of the problem.
So, for climate change, there are a number of parameters that our model needs to understand in order to calculate the probable success of any proposal to not cause or even prevent harm to society. If the climate changes will cause harm, can we alter them? Is human action contributing to the harmful climate changes? What human actions will reduce harm the most?
What I believe the parent was communicating and the point Gore was trying to make, was that the scientific statements that have survived falsification thus far best fit the explanation that the earth is getting warmer due to increased carbon levels that are currently best explained by fossil fuel burning, that this is harmful and that we should do something about it. What Gore and a large part of the scientific community are trying to say, is that further attempts at falsification before action is taken is self-defeating at best and suicidal at worst. Will we ever know for sure? Nope. Can't be sure the sun is going to come up tomorrow until tomorrow either. I'm not real inclined to quit taking any action today that has to do with tomorrow because I can't be sure the sun is going to come up. Especially given the really huge probability that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. Just as the scientific facts which have survived falsification point to the sun coming up tomorrow, they point to human assisted global climate changes.
Either falsify the science that leads to these calculations of probabilities or start arguing for a course of action that deals with the changes. Anything else has no information content that is meaningful to the discussion. Oh, and go read David Miller's "Out of Error". It will bring you up to speed on what's happened with Popper's ideas since the 30's.
You are clearly confused. Gonzales wasn't with the Justice Department at that time - he was part of the White House general council. And the only reason Fitzgerald was appointed was because Chuck Schumer whined about it. This was 100% about politics, not justice.
Read the Constitution. It's Congress' job to make sure that the executive branch is following the law. Small 'j' justice is inherently political, especially wrt Congressional oversight of the Executive. We elect people through a political process to perform this function. If you can't account for the normal politicization and distill the objective information that remains, that's your problem, not a flaw with the system. Your assertion has no information content. The people directly responsible for Fitz's appointment to this case were Republican loyalist Bush appointees. That Gonzales wasn't head of DOJ at the time is irrelevant to your point that this was a miscarriage of justice. How does the fact that Mr. "tits are more important than terrorism" Ashcroft was in charge negate the falsification of your assertion that Fitz's appointment and subsequent prosecution somehow lacked integrity? You have yet to actually defend your statement. Unless the point of fact in error changes the meaning of the assertion, you're just dealing with distractions.
Riiiiight. And the FBI agent that interviewed Russert reported that Russert "could not completely rule out the possibility that he had such an exchange" with Libby and that "he speaks to many people on a daily basis and it is difficult to reconstruct some specific conversations, particularly one which occurred several months ago". Apparently Tim's memory of the conversation somehow improved in the couple of years it took for him to get on the stand and testify. Don't worry -- no reasonable doubt here.
Not enough for the jury. What's your point? Several witnesses "clarified their statements" between initial interviews and their testimony. Karl Rove appeared 5 times before the GJ. These people acted very carelessly with state secrets and the CIA was harmed. Fitz was charged with discovering what crimes were committed and to prosecute those responsible. A Grand Jury indicted Libby on 5 counts, a jury convicted him on 4. He was given the best counsel possible, you cannot specifically point to any reasonable excuse for his actions. If he was so forgetful and undisciplined, how did he manage to be the chief of staff for the VP? A VP, reputed to be the most powerful VP in history, has an idiot for his COS?
Riiight. Fitzgerald knew from the first day he started investigating who leaked the name, and he also knew that no law had been broken because he didn't charge the leaker. How was "justice" obstructed when the prosecutor knew there was no "justice" to obstruct from the first day of his investigation? Oh yeah, special prosecutors know that they can't run a 3 year investigation and not charge anybody. That would be such a waste!
Fitz knew Armitage had leaked it to Novak. He did not know who had told everyone else or when. Remember Miller went to jail over this for 90 days. Cooper folded quickly. The law specifically states that the person must know that the identity is covert. Armitage didn't know this and Armitage was forthcoming and cooperative with the investigation. Justice was obstructed because Rove and Libby were not forthcoming and did not reasonably cooperate without pressure from the state. Again, you seem to be ignoring the basic processes of our legal system. Your concept of justice has no place in a society that lives under the rule of law, you have no right to hide or otherwise mischaractorize information from a legal investigation, you may only plead the 5th. The waste was generated by the hostility of those being investigated. This sort of insubordination would be cause for termination at any company, why is Rove still working at the WH? You're claims that no crime could have been committed is false on it's face and willfully ignores the basic tenets of US l
This will be another installment of "Who the hell modded up this crap?" How am I supposed to not feed trolls if they are modded up so high? There are impressionable minds out there that could be permanently damaged by hearing enough people claim this subjective crap amounts to a decent argument. Won't some mods think of the children?
So where were we....
Your argument is specious and consists of meaningless statements that have no bearing on the issue. In other words, your claims lack integrity.
Lied about what? Libby was NOT the leaker, and Fitzgerald knew that when he interviewed him 3 different times. I'd challenge you to remember, under oath, the exact date and content of a handful of conversations you had several years ago. Apparently if you get some dates mixed up, it's only criminal if you are a Republican.
Oh stop the pity party. The CIA requested the DOJ investigate the possibility that classified info had been leaked and that this may have constituted a crime. Fitz was appointed by the Bush Justice Dept. under Abu Gonzales to head this investigation. Libby specifically lied to the Grand Jury about his conversations, Tim Russert busted him on the stand. There was an indictment from a Grand Jury and a conviction on 4 of 5 counts, including perjury. This isn't about forgetting some dates, this is about purposefully concealing information regarding a crime. Had Libby cooperated, he would not have been charged with anything, just like Karl Rove wasn't. They put poor black Democrats in ass raping prison all the time for covering up misdemeanors, excuse me if I'm not crying over some over-privileged asshole who was complicit in outing the head of the US spy network in a country we were, and still are, at war with. He got his fair trial, his choice of defense and will get his appeals, that's all us civilized folks are obliged to provide, morally or legally. You know we also get to scorn him after he gets pardoned too.
And remember, the Jury wasn't presented with all of the facts.
This is usually where you Bush supporting dead-enders get into trouble, I'm going to enjoy this.
They were not presented with the covert status of Ms. Plame.
This was dealt with during hearings, Judge Walton decided it wasn't pertinent to the case at hand and kept both sides from bringing this up. He didn't want Fitz to prejudice the jury against Libby and he knew there was no purpose for this information to the defense other than to create a greymail smokescreen, which Libby's lawyers have been known to use before (Iran-Contra anyone). Are you suggesting that Judge Walton just has it out for Republicans? Is he in it with Fritz? Is the entire Federal judiciary in it with the underlings of the Republican managed DOJ? Are they all out to "get" Bush? I'm sure Fox will have the entire story up tonight.
They were not presented the identity of who actually "leaked" her role at the CIA.
This assertion is false, it was in the freaking testimony. Dick Armitage took the stand and was deposed in the grand jury. Libby didn't know that Armitage was the one who told Novak. Rove told Cooper and cooperated, while Libby told Miller and lied. Rove, no charges, Libby charges. Is this starting to make any sense to you yet? Fitz, like a good prosecutor, didn't tell the suspects what he knew to gauge the verisimilitude of their statements. Rove was smart enough to cooperate, Libby thought he should cover his actions up.
They were not presented with the lies her husband told to the press, and they were not presented the motivations behind the actual leaker.
Again, how is this pertinent to Libby's actions that obstructed a DOJ investigation? Regardless of the verisimilitude of Joe Wilson's statements, another argument I'll kick your ass in at another time, Libby still doesn't get to obstruct investigations by the DOJ. Or do you agree with Nixon's statement to John Dean, "Remember, you're doing the right thing." Your assertions are completely out of t
The idea that one can invest in capital markets without interacting with companies whose policies one my disagree is laughable. As is the idea that the foundation must just accept the market as it is.
In the specific scenario mentioned in the LA Times article, the oil plant that causes respiratory illness where the foundation is trying to improve health, the foundation could use it's ownership in the corporation to compell the board to improve the quality of the refinery. This may reduce the foundation's return on investment from the stock, but it will increase the effectiveness of the foundation's efforts in that community. If, for economic reasons or otherwise, the foundation could not exert it's control through ownership, it could leverage it's investment and local relationships to come up with a solution, such as subsidizing pollution techology. Regardless of the specific solution needed, the foundation is not forced to choose between changing these conditions and assuring maximum return on investment. This idea is no different than partnering with some local charity for distribution of charity rather than investing in your own infrastructure to do so. Partnering with businesses might actually be easier in some cases since money usually buys cooperation in the business world and the foundation is hardly lacking in that area.
Wealth is power. For the foundation to give up that power is counter to it's goals. It must effectively use that power to further it's goals. The premise that blindly investing for growth reduces the rate of return on charitable works is valid. That the solution is all or nothing, depending whether the company is "good" or "evil" is invalid.
You can't point out Zimbabwe and condemn any attempt to provide a form of wealth distribution. To counter your point, in Poland the state easily controlled at least 70% of the wealth. The transition from concentration of wealth in the state to distributing it among the citizens was much smoother and Poland isn't experiencing the inflation that Zimbabwe does. The goals were the same, the solution was ultimately the same as well, division of concentrated wealth.
Did Zimbabwe royally screw up their attempt? Were they clumsy in their execution? Most definately, otherwise they would not have the problems they have today. Might I also point out that the current leadership of Zimbabwe was antagonistic, to put it nicely, towards the wealthy. A couple of rich whites got killed over this situation and fear of violence and political instability were a much larger causes of capital flight than simple wealth redistribution.
The lesson here is not to allow this situation to develop in the first place. If you do find your nation in such a situation the solution will need to be well engineered so as not to create more instability that it attempts to solve.
OK, there is the (pick a liberal) solution: take money through taxation and give it back to people as a government handout.
There's more than one way to skin a cat. Tax breaks on primary residence mortgages and subsidized loan systems have increased home ownership, one import factor in the distribution of wealth. The government regulates in a manner which encourages citizens to own their own home at the very least. This subsidy is offset by those who have more wealth. It is not a government handout.
There are a number of problems with that approach, probably the biggest one is that it fosters dependence on the government as the supplier of all that is good in life.
Only someone who has never knowingly had to depend on government subsidies would make that statement. It is absurd in this country. The "good things in life" can be achieved through far less effort in the private sector than depending on any public institution to provide it. There is nobody who is explicitly subsidized by the government that holds this view, and I challenge you to prove otherwise. Only if there is no opportunity available does this statement become true. Overly unequal distribution of wealth disproportionatley limits opportunity for those with the least wealth. We are talking about modifications to the distribution to provide the basic infrastructure to insure adequate opportunity for as many people as possible. Only in that environment exists can you truly blame someone for not achieving self reliance without also pointing out what society could have done better.
While some might argue that that is what government should be, it doesn't work very well. So while concentrating power in the hands of a few is bad, concentrating power in the hands of the government (or unelected bureaucracy) is provably worse.
No it's not. It's the same danger. Market fundamentalism doesn't work for the same reason's Communism doesn't, concentration of power.
Most of what we are seeing today is a direct outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution where the concept of one man working produced one man's work output was negated. One man with a machine suddenly became capable of producing much more than a different man with hand tools. And the machines cost money, lots of money. This leads directly to Marx, with the idea that the workers should own the maans of production rather than the factory owner that figured out how to get the money for the machines.
The Industrial Revolution simply modified the required infrastructure to provide the same goals as the Constitution intended. Some of this was rectified through legislation like the Small Business Administration and other low interest loan schemes. Others were put into place like the GI Bill, which gave the first people in many families the requisite knowledge to create wealth in the post-Industrial economy. The most efficient place to pay for the subsidies required for the infrastructure is through economic growth. That way, you know how much you can spend on infrastructure without over extending your economy. Unregulated swings in capital markets have had horrendous consequences in society, a la, The Great Depression. Instability is only good for markets if it does not exceed certain thresholds. Same thing with wealth inequality. Some wealth inequality is good, some speculation is good and some instability is good. If you have too much, you can easily wind up killing the proverbial goose of capital markets.
Today, many of us are "factory owners" - we own a computer that is a more powerful machine than anything dreamed of in 1850. This machine can produce wealth, but only with skills to operate it. The unskilled are in an extremely bad position because now we don't need hundreds of unskilled laborers in our "factory" to make money with our machines.
The issue is not with the income inequality of citizens in 1850 vs. modern citizens. It's a comparison amongst modern citizens alone. The point is how do you prevent the untenabl
Noah Webster, Miscellaneous Remarks on Divizions of Property . . . in the United States
Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution
Noah Webster, of Webster's Dictionary fame (the reason we don't spell color, colour), was the Federalist who gave the most detailed account of the nature of property and wealth to a free society. Essentially, he stated that the point of the Constitution was to break up power so that it would be too difficult to gain enough for one group of citizens to deny the rights of another group. The creation of 2nd class citizens (slaves were not citizens and indentured servants had rights) undermines the Constitution. The idea that Webster brought to the forefront was that wealth is power, therefore one the Constitution cannot survive an economic system that concentrates wealth and therefore power.
The second link was a paper written "at the request of the federalist leadership shortly after the ratification debate had begun" (Bailyn, Ideological Origins... p373). These ideas were in response to alleged errors made by Montesquieu first noted by the Willian Vans Murrary, an American law-student studying in London after the revolution.
Webster talks primarily of real property, ie land. In an agrarian economy real land is the primary infrastructure for the creation of wealth. Now that we have moved to a different economy, the fact that wealth equals power and the vulnerabilities of the Constitution have not changed, so we must adapt our regulations of the market in accordence. The historic record shows that the vast majority of the Founding generation would be shocked and deeply disturbed by the inequality of wealth in this country today and the trends regarding those statistics. They would see it as endangering the Constitution itself. I'm not for radical reorganization of wealth, I believe redistributing growth is much more efficient and fair than redistributing existing wealth. That's why income inequality is such an important factor and why it matters. It may not be the only problem and it may be a symptom of larger issues, but it's an effective measure given the current economic structure of the nation.
AJAX is a tiny component of the overall distributed application. The distributed application is not written in AJAX. AJAX isn't even a language; JavaScript is. Maybe some people who write AJAX code actually wrote some RPC stuff too, but I'd wager they're just a 13-year-old web monkey. RPC is distributed computing. RMI, CORBA, even XML web services are distributed computing. JavaScript is just glue. Get over it.
In the day and age where I have clients who all now want web apps, but still want all the functionality of a desktop app, you better believe AJAX and this Web 2.0 crap is here to stay. AJAX is also going to stay because the tools are better. I've been avoiding Javascript for years, I can't stand figuring out all the browser quirks, I'd much rather write a Swing app. Google's Web Toolkit changed that. It's a seamless framework for cross-browser applications, I can use CSS to style my UI and Swing like components in a Java IDE to write the actual code. The lack of decent tools is why CORBA didn't take off. Hello World is no less complex in AJAX than CORBA or RMI, it all has to make it across a network and back. It's just that the tools are better, which was probably helped by the lack of complexity in the underlying protocol, but c'est la vie. The web browser is now a rich client. You may believe HTTP is a most horrid protocol for doing RPC or that Javascript is a most horrendous environment for writing anything other than hello world, and I would agree. Like I said, this is all simple CORBA again, but with a universal client app container (the javascript/dom/css capable xml browser) instead of a hand coded top-to-bottom desktop app.
Why wouldn't it make sense to do it this way? We've moved to application containers on the server end to instrument applications with basic infrastructure, why not do it on the desktop too? How is a data structure serialized via a Javascript call to an HTTP request that returns another data structure in an HTTP response any different from RMI, CORBA, MSRPC, XML-RPC or SOAP? Same basic process, so what if Javascript is just glue? By that premise, so is every other language that uses C libraries. Javascript is a scripting language that can be used to draw interactive UI's. The fact that Javascript is not really a great environment to write really interactive UI's doesn't change that. How is GMail any different from early desktop email clients? And I don't even have to actually touch the Javascript if I use existing GWT components, I can write the whole damn thing in Java.
I'd roll my own. If I really needed to write an application that constantly transferred huge amounts back to the client, it'd probably be a clue that a proper desktop client/server app would be a better architecture.
Personally, I'd recommend GWT for Java devs, but to each his own. My question is what if your client requires a web based app? Are you going to tell them you're only going to write that kind of app in a proper desktop environment? CORBA was a damn good architecture too, but how many CORBA apps to I get paid to write? And it's not like our company wouldn't win the work, we've got several people who've rolled their own CORBA orbs. AJAX is here to stay because it fulfills the requirements today. Half the crap on teh Intarweb today would be kicked off if my view of engineering aesthetics were adhered to.
I mean, most AJAX people don't even realize that the server-side input doesn't need to be written in XML. Guess what? if you're receiving so much data back from the server as to need to process huge XML documents, it's just a fast to do a post-back.
You are correct here. That's why I'd recommend a framework, better not to confuse them with your hand rolled hiding of all this. After all, you don't intend on maintaining this thing forever do you? It's also the reason I like CORBA over SOAP, that and SOAP is freaking reinventing every CORBA spec out there, It's not like the CORBA way is any more painful or that the tools couldn't be written just as easi
Sorry, AJAX just isn't that complicated, and trying to make it sound big and complicated is just more Web 2.0 hype.
AJAX is distributed computing. Distributed computing is hard. Ergo, AJAX is hard. If you're building a real application and not just adding flaming and spinning icons to a web page, you are doing nothing conceptually different than any other remote procedure call. The problem is, most people don't know how to write software in any language that handles that environment well. I know because I usually come in an clean up after them. I've had to do it in just about every language and with every rpc protocol. It's the same mistakes everytime. Your comment is like saying C++ isn't that complicated because it's Java without automated memory management. First of all, AJAX is a PITA to debug, you may have to step through code in a number or separate environments in order to debug a single round trip, like all rpc calls. GWT makes this easier, but that's done by having the programmer develop the client side code in the same environment as the server side code and coming with it's own special debugger. Avoiding more debugging and having to debug really hard to find problems is the point of understanding patterns. I'd much rather see the new AJAX dev on the team reading this book instead of AJAX in 24 hrs or something.
Besides, who needs a book to learn AJAX? Unless I missed something important, a few paragraphs and a couple code samples explain things just fine.
Ok smarty, which AJAX framework would you choose? GWT, J2Script? Would you handroll your own? What sort of data structures were you planning on using to get the data across the wire? Should your AJAX calls be fewer in number with larger payloads or would your application benefit from many calls with small payloads?
The AJAX environment may not cover the scope of the C++ one, but that doesn't mean that anyone is going to walk in and start using it properly. I doubt you can claim that you've never had to scrap an unworkable design. Due to AJAX's limited scope and nature, rpc calls from JavaScript, it is entirely appropriate to emphasize good distributed computing patterns. It's no different than a book on CORBA in C++ that discussed patterns. Web Services, both AJAX and SOAP, are CORBA and RPC all over again. That's why SOA is just Same Old Architecture. The patterns are mostly the same, it's just different capabilities and different transports.
nt
I'm not just throwing around random insults. If you believe in unproven and especially disproved things, you are in fact an idiot. So by simple definition, MOST religious people (all billions of them) are in fact idiots.
Count yourself in that group. There is no certainty as you cannot know what it is that you do not know. That is the boundary of rationality, if you cannot test it, you cannot disprove it, therefore you cannot rationally consider the question. Having faith in the existence or non-existence of omniscient dieties falls outside the limits of criticism. Attempting to prove religious belief with certainty is as much a futile effort as trying to disprove them. As the parent pointed out, the only logically true statements are boring and do not tell you jack about what you should do.
I mean, if you truly believe that some guy died for your sins 2,000 years ago and that your belief in him somehow will be your salvation "in the next life", or in some made up location like "heaven" or "hell", which clearly we have absolutely no evidence for, then you ARE in very simple terms, a moron.
You have no evidence for getting up in the morning. There is no certainty, no rational reason to believe you will live to see another day, that the sun will rise or that this day even exists and this isn't just a dream. Just ask yourself this question, why do you get out of bed? You will not find a rational basis for the answer, no matter how many answers you try.
Lots of people believe the earth is flat. What do you call them?
This is testable, like the age of dinosaur bones, however these tests are a predicated on the irrational belief that there is some sort of natural order to the universe. Rationality has been our best tool for discerning this natural order, but to overlook the limits of criticism and thus the bounds of rationality leaves one with statements of faith disguised the illusion of reason. If all of our empirical tests are not invalid for some reason, the earth is not flat. However, I cannot know the answer to this question with certainty, just as those who declare it is flat cannot present their position with certainty. Now, it may be counter productive to most of the shared irrational goals of humans to disregard empirical evidence, but one can only claim superior adherence to the rationalist identity if one explicity states the irrational goals, such as the natural order of the universe, that the predictive content of your assertion is based.
Now, there is a possibility in some backwards cultures and societies that these believers are in fact ignorant and not morons, but with the advent of the internet, at least in most countries where you have access to so much knowledge for free (wikipedia, etc.), ignorance is no excuse, and in fact if you REMAIN ignorant, that is in itself a form of idiocy.
Again, you're simply assuming that everyone else shares your irrational goals for why they get out of bed in the morning.
Stop defending ignorant people who willfully refuse to accept the reality they live in. They are idiots, and they're hurting themselves, their families, the planet, and most of the good things that humanity and individuals IN humanity have achieved over the last few millennia. It's inexcusable. Stop defending them. They are idiots, by the very definition of the word.
Perhaps you should concentrate on your own illusions and errors. How is it that you can go about providing salvation for the rest of humanity when you have such a poor understanding of your own faith? I don't care what irrational goals other people have, nor what their faith dictates they believe. That is liberty of conscience, something I refuse to live without and would not deny to another. I only care if you violate my rights, which are the irrational goals of the political state I live in. The civil courts and law enforcement have a way of ensuring there are consequences to impedding those goals, just as reality has a messy habit of enforcing gr
Modern agricultural productivity is heavily dependent upon cheap energy. From the machines to the fertilizers and pesticides. The majority of advances in food production have come with the energy usage price tag. Although I figured the exaggeration of "all the oil" would be an obvious quip, the point still stands. If cheap energy is not available, food production will suffer.
It's an eventuality that we have to deal with, whether it's the late 2010's or 2050's, oil production will decline. Investing in the diversification of cheap energy sources cannot possibly work against us. Oh wait, scratch that, with the current leadership here in the US, we're likely to waste all the money through Congressional corruption. Switchgrass anyone?
Well, good old progress has allowed us to produce a lot more food than we could back in the 70s, when people were fond of predicting we'd all be dead of starvation by now, on account of there being too many of us to ever possibly feed.
As it turns out, the population has grown as predicted, but progress managed to keep up.
Too bad we've used up all the oil doing it.
Incest/rape is a boogy man. While it probably happens to a very small extent in all societies, it is against the social norm of virtually all societies and cultures for the last 500 years.
Did you read the article? How another article verifying this story from ABC News? Have you researched this or are you just pulling this argument out of your ass to be a contrarian?
However, rape, incest, and sexual deviancy fears are very useful to disparage a religion, culture, or group. From the old Nazi propoganda posters of charactures of "hooked-nose" Jews stealing away virtuous German woman, to the stereotypes in deep south U.S. about black men without sexual control, or the alternate stereotype of the inbred redneck, to the Communist propoganda about "Homosexual Capitalism"... over an over again you see stereotypes or generalizations about sex being used to disparage or spread fear about a certain group.
Yer knee's jerkin pretty hard there. Any insinuation that the Amish might not be so pious by bringing up very real civil rights violations is trying to scapegoat? Uh, yeah prosecuting civil rights violations is just like what the Nazi's did to the Jews and the Klan did to blacks. Got any more amazing feats of equivocation in that bag o'tricks?
As for spreading fear, I'm sorry but it's a simple fact that people fear rape, just like they fear death. Not to distract you too much from your horseshit abstraction, but rape is a very real thing that people fear. WTF, are you on the PA tourist board or something?
There is absolutly no evidence that rape, molestation, or incest is any more common amoung Amish than any other group of people.
You really are talking out of your ass now. Where is the assertion that these incidents are more common? The assertion is that these civil rights violations are not stopped. Victims are not protected from their assailants within this community due to it's specific belief that all sins are equal. You really should get that knee checked out.
However, Amish are a religious minority, and they largely exist outside the realm of government control, corporate consumerist advertising, and modern day "political correctness".
Yeah cause keeping rapists away from their victims is something we just invented after we all got "politically correct". This idea that the Amish are somehow above criticism due to their lifestyle choice is beyond contempt. Polygamists who force 14 year old girls to marry senior citizens and kick teenage boys out on the street are a religious minority too, what's your fucking point? Are you actually insinuating that these gross violations of basic civil rights are to be overlooked because of some kook's religious beliefs? What if I suddenly decide the righteous hand of God is mine to smite sinners and go on a rampage? Any objections there? By your logic, am I not justified by my deep religious convictions and my determination to live "outside the mainstream"? I'm afraid you may be the one trying to inject some sort of "political correctness" here.
As one of the last groups to resist becoming assimilated into the rest of society and to come under control of the power elite, there is an agenda to disparage them, to undercut peoples respect for their lifestyle, and for building popular support for the final destruction and assimilation of the Amish people. The people with that agenda, both in the government and the media have been spreading FUD about the Amish being a bunch of perverts, based on a handful of isolated cases that were not really any different than what happens every day to non-Amish people.
Right, cause no one has anything better to do than worry about some farmers in the midwest who drive buggies and still churn butter by hand. Just out of curiosity, who are these people that are out to destroy the Amish, is it t
The commies didn't have secular groupthink. They had a religious groupthink based on atheism, there's a difference. Secularism holds that questions of faith are outside the realm of politics, that the state has no interest in holding one matter of conscience above another, that's why you have defined rights.
Secularism is the freedom to practice your religious views as you see fit as long as you do not violate the civil rights of others, it is not the absence of religion, anyone who claims that it is is either ignorant or lying.
What you're alluding to is technocracy, which is not secularism. I'm really not sure you've thought about what it is that you're asserting.
It's a mistake to believe Amish peity is somehow more civilized or superior to the court system. Amish forgiveness cuts both ways, they also forgive their teenage boys who rape and molest their daughters. In fact daughters going to the outside world for protection from predators in their own community has resulted in retaliation against the victims by the community.
Impressed by their piety, courts have permitted the Amish to live outside the law. But in some places, the group's ethic of forgive and forget has produced a plague of incest--and let many perpetrators go unpunished.
Amish forgiveness has just as much chance for arbitrary tyranny as any other system. Only a rational, secular legal system can successfully remove arbitrariness from the social order you live under.
They will, but only because the published times keep changing to match the trains.
I'm a Java developer, in the past 18 months I've worked on Postgres, MySQL, DB2, Oracle and MSSQL.
All of my co-workers are in the same boat. Most of us have at least 10 years of experience working with various mature and popular (at the time) databases. This is the current list, or rather the survivors. The biggest pain about moving around to all these databases is how to x in y database. You try having to switch environments that many times and see if you remember the syntactic details of each dialect. It's not like ORM tools do the debugging and performance for you.
I'm seriously considering getting getting together a group order at the office. I'm sure somebody will kvetch over the lack of documentation for DBase4 or GemStone, but hey, it only claims to cover SQL.
will spammers get the death penalty? Think I just found the ultimate ethical delimma for the average slashdotter. Is it good if China executes a spammer, but does so in it's new fleet of mobile lethal injection vans and harvests the organs for sale? When cheering the execution of spammers, which at least half the readership here has been waiting for, can you be sure your celebration is for a real spammer or a political dissident?
Amen. We're doing CORBA all over again, just slower with crappier libraries and technologies. WSDL is IDL, your HTTP server/SOAP handler is your ORB. You have to use 2WSDL / WSDL2 just like IDL compilers. I can't wait for another 5 years of tech changes to webservices that will make it run, as you said, just like CORBA has for over a decade. I just want to know who looked at HTTP and said, "Yeah, this is better than IIOP!", cause I don't want them anywhere near my projects.
Webservices should be left to rot, the technology provides nothing that CORBA didn't do better.
And CNN is publishing industry press releases as news, but hey, what's new?
Notice no disclosure that he's completely freaking paid for by the telecom industry, who do you think Public Strategies' clients are? And "Hands off the Internet"? That's an astro-turf campaign, noticed the crappy wanna-be underground looking propaganda that's been popping up on blog-ads, that's them. More info at DailyKos.
Editor's note: Mike McCurry is a partner at Public Strategies Washington Inc. where he provides strategic communications counsel. He is a co-chairman of Hands off the Internet, a coalition of telecommunication-related businesses. McCurry served as press secretary to President Bill Clinton from 1995 until 1998.
More coverage by kos, john marshall, la times, matt stoller.
This is just like the telcos claims over open access. Every regional telco has been granted monopoly status for years, we the users paid for that infrastructure, and we'll use the same model in the future if need be. These claims of eminent domain are horseshit distractions. They were when they strangled and drowned the CLECs and they are now as they try to do to the Internet what the cell companies have done to wireless. I don't use my phone other than to talk, data services currently lack value over the cell networks in the existing price structure. They want to impose the same pricing structure possibilities on their segments of the Internet. Just like access to the copper, they want you to pay for what you've already paid for. Mike McCurry is getting paid to help these people steal from you; for this payment, he's trying to convince you that being stolen from is in your best interest.
These assholes will kill the goose that laid the golden egg if allowed. Support Save the Internet, don't let them do it.
Stop them cause Mike McCurry is a Jeff Gannon-wannabe manwhore.
The lights go out, the blinds close, the displays read, "feel the energy" as a voice repeats the same phrase over a deep bass beat."
Appearantly, these "freshmen" haven't been out of their dorm room since the early 90's
I'm a science student and those are all meaningful questions to me, and not ones that require the input of a philosopher. I've read Popper, and my major response was "Well, duh".
When you start asking these questions, you enter to domain of philosophy. I'm not sure why you would assume you'd need a professional philosopher to ponder these questions anymore than you would need a professional physicist to think about relativity. The "well, duh" reaction to Popper is a testament to his work's success. It took about 50 years before people moved from, "That can't be right" to "Well, duh". Popper put the nail in the coffin of logical positivism, his work into the limits of rationality and the theory of knowledge changed science forever. You may need to understand what a mess the question of demarcation was before Popper to appreciate his first breakthrough. There are also some aspects of rationality discovered by the Critical Rationalists, such as non-justificationalism, that are still very non-obvious. If you are concerned with understanding rationality, then I recommend continuing your research into Popper and his students.
Just to illustrate the point, Einstien told Popper in the very early 50's that belief in logical positivism had been one of his intellectual life's greatest mistakes. Believe me, what Popper proposed was far from "Well, duh".
Calm down, sparky.
Praise of Plato gets my blood going. The guy is looked at as some wise sage to whom we should turn about the mysteries of civilization and the nature of political order. The guy was going around trying to implement his own brand of tyranny. He was training young princes to become tyrants, 9 at last count. There is little left in Plato's body of work that can be considered meaningful. His ideas about Forms are predicated on the irrational belief in an unchanging world. Beyond making a record of Socrates work, I have little use for Plato. There are much more interesting ancient Greeks, Plato getting all the glory is just annoying.
What is objective knowledge for a given science? How do you demarcate what is a meaningful statement in computer science and what is meaningful in biology? How do you allow knowledge from one field to be objectively considered by another field with a different domain? These are meaningful questions in the domain of philosophy. All objective knowledge relies on logic, Gödel and Tarski showed us that while we can find truth in a domain, we can never be certain that the truth we have found will not be falsified later. There is no certainty to objective knowledge, no justification. At best, we can determine meaningfulness and test meaningful statements for falsity content. That was the innovation of Popper and the Critical Rationalists.
The goal of philosophy is methodological correctness, logic is at the heart of philosophy because that's how we describe method. Philosophy can only explore what the limits of lawfulness and order are. Without the ability to demarcate meaning, we cannot determine order. Why we seek lawfulness and order is a metaphysical question, it cannot be answered by philosophy, thus making philosophy incomplete and paying the price for objectivity.
Since computers are all systems of logic, we can use philosophy to determine what each system's limitations are and how differing systems can interact. Take the theoretical in computer science, how did we develop quantum computing? How will we integrate it into the rest of our systems? As we search for innovative ways to look for solutions to these questions, philosophy guides us, by maintaining methodological correctness, forcing us to maintain the integrity of the identity we have chosen.
Ethics is not philosophy. It is the application of objectivity to another set of goals, a different domain. If ethics is the domain of how to best get along with our neighbors and avoid creating unnecessary confrontation, then we can apply methodology to determine which statements are meaningful within this domain. For instance, Richard Stallman is a computer ethicist. His goal is to provide a particular ethical view of how we should integrate computer systems into our lives. Some statements are meaningful to these goals and others are not. Out of the meaningful statements, I can test which are most efficient at reaching specific goals, such as those of the FSF. I may not agree with those goals, I may oppose those goals, but since Stallman and the FSF have stated what their goals are, I can properly scope a domain. Once I understand the domain, I can test proposals and conjectures to determine which are most efficient towards reaching those goals. This is how objective knowledge grows, our motivation is always metaphysical. We cannot rationalize or justify inspiration. By understanding this, by enforcing methodological separation, we can concentrate on growing objective knowledge about our metaphysical goals. There is no natural imperative to understand the quantum structure of matter or to understand biological systems. We simply find these things useful, fulfilling.
If it is philosophy that you want to study, then study Critical Rationalism. The works of Popper, Bartley and Miller should keep you busy for a while and give you a thorough tour of just about everybody, as they've managed to falsify quite a few names in the summary. If it is ethics you are interested in, I can really only recommend who to avoid. Those who hide from criticism are unethical. Plato and Hegel are primarily useless. Both hid their ideas from criticism, attempting to fool the reader into prematurely aborting their attempt to rationalize their proposals. Plato taught 9 tyrants, Hegel was courtier to his own and the father of the Nazi lies. I would also avoid the spawn of these liars, Leo Strauss, Barth and Schaeffer. All of these have either embraced the Noble Lie or Nihilism. Either path is a cover from criticism; nihilism absurdly denies the capabilities of criticism, while the Noble Lie invokes paradox of the liar. One can never determine when a liar is inserting chaos into order to avoid criticism. Integrity is indispensable.
Generic statement, should have been more precise. Google Maps uses AJAX, same backend, different front-ends. All part of same plan non-evil world domination.