The author is not talking about verbosity in bytes. He's talking about verbosity in code points. Talked about in this way, a thirty character variable name is no more verbose than a single character variable name.
That's incorrect. He is talking about verbosity in bytes. Take a look at his source code and the data file he used, which are linked to from TFA.
The justice or injustice of your comment depends strongly on what metric they're using for size, and
a lot of the replies to your comment have been speculating about what the metric really is. Okay, if you start with the game's FAQ, it looks like there are three different metric they actually computed:
size of the source code, in bytes
"gzip bytes," which they define as follows: "We started with the source-code markup you can see, removed comments, removed duplicate whitespace characters, and then applied minimum GZip compression."
amount of memory used when running
Obviously these are going to give completely different results. Java will come out looking awful by measure #3, for instance. The difference between #1 and #2 has more to do with the distinction between terseness and expressiveness. You wrote "Do you make all of your variables and class/function/methods a single character for the sake of verbosity? I hope not." If someone did that, it would have a huge effect on #1, but little or no effect on #2. Actually #2 seems to me like a very reasonable measure of expressiveness.
So now the question is which one the author of the article actually used for his plots. He doesn't say explicitly which one he used. However, he has links to the source code he used to generate the plots, and to the data file he used as input. The data file only has metrics #1 and #3, so it looks like he didn't actually use metric #2, which IMO is the only one that measures expressiveness in the way he obviously intended. If you look through his lisp code, it looks to me like he actually used #1. (See the line that reads "(normalize-accross (normalize-accross data 'cpu) 'size))". My lisp is pretty weak, but I believe he's extracting the columns whose names begin with the strings "cpu" and "size.")
So it looks to me like he picked the wrong metric, which makes your criticism valid, but that just means he should have picked the right metric.
Even the right metric, #2, still wouldn't be a perfect proxy for expressiveness, of course. For instance, a language with static typing and no type inference will require the programmer to expend a lot of characters on declarations. However, that's a matter of taste; some people feel safer with static typing.
First off, he presents the big chart twice. The second version is meant to compare functional languages with imperative languages, but it's also small enough to fit on my screen, so if you're browsing the article, you might want to look at that one first.
His "obsolete" sector is really more like a special-purpose sector. For instance, Erlang shows up in the obsolete sector, but that's because Erlang wasn't designed to be especially terse or fast. Erlang was designed to be fault-tolerant and automatically parallelizable. Io also ends up looking lousy, but Io also wast designed to be terse and fast; it was designed to be small and simple.
The biggest surprise for me was the high performance of some of the implementations of functional programming languages, even in cases where the particular languages aren't generally known for being implementable in a very efficient way. Two of the best-performing languages are stalin (an implementation of scheme/lisp) and mlton (an implementation of ml). However, as the author notes, it's common to find that if you aren't sufficiently wizardly with fp techniques, you may write fp code that performs much, much worse than the optimal; that was my own experience with ocaml, for instance.
The choice of a linear scale for performance can be a little misleading. For instance, csharp comes out looking like it's not such a great performer, and yet its performance is never worse than the best-performing language by more than a factor of 2 on any task. Typically, if two languages differ by only a factor of 2 in speed, then speed isn't an important factor for choosing between them. The real thing to look out for is that some of the languages seem to have performance that's a gazillion times worse than normal on certain specific tasks.
Many of the languages are hard to find, because they're listed by the names of their implementations. In particular, g95 is an implementation of fortran.
There's a big gray area. For instance, the Millikan oil drop experiment, which established quantization of charge, was arguably fraudulent. Millikan threw out all the data he didn't like, and then stated in his paper that he had never thrown out any data. His result was correct, but the way he went about proving it was ethically suspect.
The slashdot summary seems to me to have a heavy dose of sensationalism.
Oracle's implementation of java is GPL'd. What more do we want from them?
I doubt that there's been any recent research that's uncovered some fantastic new mechanism for garbage collection that was never known before. Garbage collection used to suck, and that was one of the problems, historically, with LISP. Over the decades, garbage collection has gradually gotten better. All the improvements in garbage collection are in the public domain. Gc is not generally a performance bottleneck for modern garbage-collected languages.
It would be slightly more worrisome if this new gc algorithm was patented -- but I haven't seen any evidence that it is. If it's not, then nothing is preventing anyone from making a fully GPL'd version of java with the new algorithm. If it was patented, then this would be a problem for all garbage-collected languages with open-source implemtations, not just java.
Does java's performance really depend much on the efficiency of its gc? My main complaint about java's performance is that the VM and libraries take too long to load.
It reminds me of all those B movies just after WW2 "Achtung! Show me your papers". How could y'all have just let this happen ?
We let it happen because we didn't believe in our own values. A band of terrorists attacked us, and we reacted by panicking and throwing the rule of law out the window.
If a significant portion of the group's resources are directed towards the wealth and well-being of its founders, as opposed to an external problem or cause, then you an unhealthy expression of religion, and quite possibly a cult.
Hmm...well, L. Ron Hubbard is dead, so I don't think your definition can be applied here unless you change the word "founders." If you change "founders" to "leaders," then your definition makes the Catholic Church a cult throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The Church was the single richest institution in Europe, both in land and in chattels.
Some types of anarchism may reject private property, but the only defining characteristic of anarchism in general is opposition to the existence of the state (i.e. no government). See, for example, free-market anarchism.
I know there are people who talk about free-market anarchism or anarchist capitalism. Most anarchists don't consider these to be types of anarchism, and they're really outside the mainstream of anarchist thought. That's not to make any value judgments about them; I just don't think they fall within the meaning of the term "anarchism," as commonly understood. Since you provided a WP link, I think it's worth noting that, IIRC, there was an extremely protracted edit war over whether to include things like anarchist capitalism in the various templates and categories relating to anarchism.
Socialism is state control. What we have on the web is anarchy. Fun, friendly anarchy.
Capitalism, socialism, and anarchism are ways of structuring an entire society. The web isn't a society, it's a tool. This is the same fallacy as talking about "netizens." You can't be a citizen of the net. That would be like being a citizen of your screwdriver.
The main thing that makes anarchism different from, say, libertarianism, is that anarchists are against private property. The typical anarchist analysis is that the accumulation of private property leads to social inequality, the runaway concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people, and war. The Microsoft monopoly, for example, is something that's definitely completely antithetical to anarchist ideals of how society should work. Given that microsoft.com is part of the web, and that they'll take your money in return for their software, I don't really think the web qualifies as an institution that would be typical of an anarchist society.
Since copyrights, trademarks, and patents are generally thought of as a kind of property, I really doubt that an anarchist society would have them. And yet I guarantee you that the computer I'm using, the computer you're using, and the computer that runs slashdot.org are all full of copyrighted software. For instance, my computer is running Linux, x.org, and Firefox right now. All that software is copyrighted, and the only reason it was legal for me to copy them off of the internet was that I was offered an opportunity to do so under licenses like the GPL. Doesn't sound very anarchistic to me.
The kind of Buddhism imported to the West - secularized, made "not a religion," turned into a kind of set of technologies for personal development, stripped of any perspectives that generally clash with regular humanism - is very much unlike the Buddhisms of Asia, which are very much religions, which have real religious exclusivity, which have outright superstitions, rituals, etc.
I'm sure you're right, but why does that matter? Conversely, if someone in Thailand wanted to take up Christianity, and asked me, as someone who'd grown up in Western culture, for insight, what would I say? I certainly wouldn't say just to pick some random flavor of organized Christianity and follow it. I guess I would probably say that it never hurt anyone to read the Gospels and think hard about them as a record of what one slightly crazy human being taught his students 2000 years ago.
I submit that believing some creator of the universe manifested its power in the form of a sacrificial holy man long ago is far less wacky then believing an intergalactic overlord imprisoned in a volcano who attached alien ghosts to primitive humans, causing all their problems.
They both seem equally wacky to me. If you grew up in Western society, you were immersed from birth in a culture that historically had Christianity as one of its foundations. That's likely to make its wacky myths seem more plausible to you.
In spite of all the shit they get, the Christians I've met in life have generally been very friendly and nice to me. Just good folks who believe what they believe. You have your bad apples, but that's true for every group in the world. Scientologists, on the other hand, will ask you if you rape babies and are trained to believe that anyone critical of the religion is a criminal who is hiding dark secrets.
I don't think it's valid to judge the validity of a belief system by whether its believers seem nice to you. For example, in 1209 an army of crusaders led by the Cistercian abbot Arnaud invaded the French city of Béziers, where some of the population were heretical Cathars. When the abbot was asked how to tell the orthodox Christians from the heretics, he said, "Kill them all, the Lord will recognise His own." They killed all 20,000 inhabitants: men, women, children, and babies. If I were judging by Abbot Arnaud, I'd judge Christianity to be a pretty scary religion.
The answer to any question like this completely depends on the kind of Buddhism. Some types of Buddhism are big on the golden statues, impressive displays of candles, etc. Others (like some types of Zen) have none of that. If you're the type of Buddhists who's into the golden statues, I don't see any fundamental reason why you couldn't be into this gadget. Buddhism in general is extremely diverse. You can have Buddhists who are atheists, and other Buddhists who consider the Buddha to be very much like a Jesus-type personal savior. You can have Buddhists (e.g., some Tibetan Buddhists) who believe in astrology and elaborate cosmologies, and others who don't believe in any of that. Historically, Buddhism does not have the kind of history of strong central control that Christianity did. Christianity had the Catholic church ("Catholic" means "universal"), which, e.g., massacred sects like the Cathars ("Kill them all, the Lord will recognize His own").
Haven't people realized by now that the fact that some people are misdiagnosed with ADHD doesn't mean that the condition isn't real? I don't blame people for being skeptical, but that doesn't mean there aren't real kids (or adults) with a real disorder.
One problem is that the symptoms listed in the link you provided form a continuum. Suppose you take a thousand kids and sort them out in a line according to how well they match these criteria, with kid #1 matching the best and kid #1000 giving the worst match. So #1 definitely has ADHD, and kid #1000 definitely doesn't. Now where do you draw the line? At kid #10? At kid #100? Parents have a strong incentive to get their kids classified as having the disability. If they get the kid classified as disabled, then the kid will get pills, which the parents hope will make the kid easier to deal with. If the kid is classified as disabled, the kid will get extra time on tests.
The cool thing about the possible new method described in TFA is that the determination of ADHD might become more of an objective matter, rather than a matter of whether affluent, pushy parents can bargain for what they want.
I teach at a community college, and the number of students who are diagnosed with learning disabilities is extremely high. I'm not even allowed to ask what their disability is; all I know is that they get special test-taking accomodations. The fact that so many of them have the diagnosis makes me suspect that the condition must be vastly overdiagnosed. If it weren't so overdiagnosed, then society might be able to focus better on helping the students who really do have a hardwired problem that makes their brain work in a qualitatively different way.
Akido37 wrote:
Anecdotally, a community college professor in my area (who holds a PhD) was fired because his classes were "too interactive", and he allowed students to "ask too many questions". To me, it sounds like he was doing his job: Helping the students learn.
In his case, the college wanted professors to stick to the lesson plan that had been handed down from the administration.
Red Flayer wrote:
That's a transfer credit acceptance issue.
If that professor deviates too much from the established curriculum, then it is possible that four-year colleges will not accept that course for credit at their institution.
I'm a community college physics teacher in California, and I think both of you may have a somewhat inaccurate understanding of how this works.
First off, the administration doesn't write lesson plans. That's the teacher's job. (A "lesson plan" means lecture notes, plans of demonstrations or videos to use, etc.) There is generally a course outline which is on file as part of the curriculum paperwork for a particular course, sort of like an expanded version of the course description listed in the college catalog. The course outline is not a lesson plan, and it generally says very little about teaching methods. It says things like, e.g., that Newton's laws of motion are one of the topics to be covered in Physics 205. The outline is also not written by the administration, it's written by the faculty (who have the knowledge of the subject area). It's true that the course outline needs to cover the right topics, or else four-year schools won't accept the course as being equivalent to one of theirs. This is called articulation. However, typically nobody looks over your shoulder to see whether you actually cover every topic that's listed. For example, Physics 205 is a real course at my school, and the course outline says that it's supposed to cover fluids. Some teachers at my school do cover fluids, but when I teach the course, I don't, and nobody cares.
In any case, none of this has anything to do imposing particular teaching methods, like chalk-and-talk rather than the kind of dialog that Akido37 liked. Generally the way that works is that when the teacher is first hired, he is on track for tenure, but he has to get regularly evaluated to see if he gets tenure. It is generally not difficult at all to get tenure at a community college. The jobs are difficult to get (often you're competing against a hundred applicants to get an interview), but in the natural science division of the school where I've taught for 13 years, we've probably made 20 tenure-track hires since I've been there, and IIRC there was only one who didn't get tenure. The evaluations are mostly made by your peers, not by an administrator.
Okay, it's true that traditional chalk-and-talk lecturing is the safest choice. As a teacher, you know that your students and peers are familiar with it. If you do it proficiently, your students and peers will give you good evaluations. Interactive teaching methods are harder to do well, although in my field (physics) there's quite a bit of research to show that, when done well, they give better results than chalk and talk (as measured on standardized tests). My experience is that students generally do not like interactive teaching methods. For one thing, it requires that they read the book and make an effort to get as much of the material as possible on their own, rather than just coming to class and having all the material spoon-fed to them. I still use interactive methods, because research shows that they're better, and I get good results with them. However, there is a lot more room to stumble when you're just starting out with interactive methods. For instance, when I was first starting out, I tended to expect my students to be able to do more difficult stuff than they could really do.
You make a good point about how future technological developments may kill the market for books and movies. However, I would argue (and did argue, in the GP post) that essentially nothing bad has happened to the market for music. If nothing bad has happened to music, which is already technologically easy to copy and share, then I don't see any reason to extrapolate that anything bad will happen to books and movies.
I can certainly imagine for the sake of argument that within 30 years, illegal copying will reduce the legal market for books, music, and movies to, say, 10% of its current size. I'm not at all convince it will happen, but even if it did, the question then is whether that' would be a bad thing. I'm not sure it is. Bach and Aristophanes never benefited from copyright. Hitchcock worked with budgets that were microscopic by today's standards. My daughter listens to the Jonas Brothers and Taylor Swift, mainly because Radio Disney pushes them. Would it really be the end of the world if she had to listen instead to hobbyist garage bands that put out their music on the internet for free? Writing novels is already something that is essentially a hobby for most authors, not a big source of income, and it's been that way for a long time. In fact, technology may improve the situation with novels. Currently, changes in distribution channels and marketing have made it very difficult for novelists to keep their work in print for very long. Digital distribution (a la Kindle) and print on demand may actually fix that problem. I write short science fiction stories, and although I'm beginning to sell quite a bit of my work, the income is negligible, and that's actually the way it's been for short fiction for decades now. Since long before the internet existed, SF magazines have had declining readerships. It really hasn't been possible to make a living writing short fiction since the golden age of the pulp magazines in the 1930's. And yet short fiction still keeps getting written, by people who pay the mortgage by working as accountants or college professors or whatever.
people should be shedding the ideas that functional languages are slow, and unusable, and trying them out in industry
There are some practical things that may make it difficult for that to happen.
I learned some Haskell recently, and the impression I got was that it was a lot like TeX, in the sense that there's a core language that's really a beautiful work of art, but slathered on top of that you get layer after layer of add-on software that is a mixed bag in terms of quality. I found a lot of issues with poor support for regexes and unicode strings, for example. The fact that Haskell has two different implementations of strings does sort of seem to me like an admission that if you do strings in the most elegant possible fp way (as lists of characters, manipulated using pattern matching), it may indeed be "slow and unusable."
With LISP, lack of standardization is an issue.
As you've noted, automagical support for parallelization is a huge factor in favor of fp now that hardware is moving toward SMP. But, e.g., ocaml's implementation of gc prevents it from doing parallelization as well as erlang.
As with any language that has a small population of users, fp languages often have issues with poor documentation, or lack of native libraries, or of conveniently packaged bindings to non-native libraries.
The thing is, there are a lot of nice multi-paradigm languages to choose from that are very well implemented, have excellent libraries, excellent documentation -- and that also allow you to use fp techniques for tasks that naturally lend themselves to fp. You can do fp in ruby or perl, for example.
And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.
This is an example of the shortage of careful analysis in his editorial. He lumps together four things: music, newspapers, movies and books. Okay, let's take these one at a time:
Music. Here is where he has the strongest case. It's undeniably true that a large number of people illegally download a lot of music. However, there's no real evidence that this hurts legal sales of music. Sales of recorded music have shown a general upward trend over time, and they also fluctuate a lot from year to year, e.g., 1982 was a good year, driven mainly by Michael Jackson's record "Thriller." The CD format started to grow in the 1980's, and may now be starting to die, but that's sort of a normal way for a particular data format to behave. A lot of people, including me, are just finding it more convenient to buy music in digital form rather than buying it on CD.
Newspapers. This one is totally different. The newspapers started experimenting long ago with primitive digital methods of distribution, and as the internet matured and its use became more widespread, the experiments became more and more serious and widely used. The newspapers put their own content online, and now they're finding that they don't have a viable business model anymore. This has nothing to do with illegal copying.
Movies. He talks about South Korea as an example. But I just don't see illegal copying of movies being a widespread phenomenon in the U.S. He says an illegal copy of the new X-Men film was downloaded four million times. That isolated example is a drop in the bucket compared to the whole U.S. movie market. I know tons of people who illegally download music, but I don't know anybody who's ever illegally downloaded a movie.
Books. Totally bogus example. There's a lot of speculation that illegal copying of books will start to have a big impact on the publishing industry, but so far it hasn't. Basically it's a lot of work to scan a book and put it online, and the resulting product (a giant PDF with scanned bitmapped pages) is not very convenient.
But, without standards of commerce and more action against piracy, the intellectual property of humankind will be subject to infinite exploitation on the Internet.
This is the closest he comes to laying out what he wants to happen, and it isn't very specific at all. What does he mean by "standards of commerce?" I have no idea. Is this his code word for pervasive DRM and trusted computing? What kind of "action against piracy" does he want? He's already got the DMCA. Does he want a new and improved DMCA II or something? If so, let's hear what he wants to go into that bill, so we can debate it.
What they're doing seems praiseworthy and idealistic, but really, their prices aren't that different from what I've found at Good Will, garage sales, swap meets, and on eBay. For instance, I've found that I can generally get keyboards for a buck at garage sales. Low-capacity IDE drives go for $10 (including shipping) on eBay. Memory in sizes of 512 Mb and less is too cheap to worry about; the main hassle is just figuring out compatibility.
It's not a sustainable business model because MS is bribing people.
That's possible. I don't know. It's also possible that it's not a sustainable business model because too many people return the computers. Returns are very expensive to process, and the profit margin on a $200 desktop machine is razor-thin.
Aha, after posting the above, I found out that Zareason sells the Everex gPC3. I wonder why the heck Everex's web page doesn't link to Zareason, and links instead to two nonfunctional retail channels??
I bought one of the first $200 Everex gPC boxes (reviewed here), and although their linux distro was awful at that time (it was a prerelease version), the hardware has worked fine. I put ubuntu on it, and it's a great machine.
However, they seem to have recurring problems with production and/or distribution channels. They were originally selling them through Walmart; you'd order it via Walmart's web site, and it would be shipped to your local store for you to pick up. Now Walmart no longer has them. If you go to everex.com, they proudly tell you that their latest version, the gPC3, is available for $199. But of the two links they offer for buying it, neither actually works. One is to newegg, which lists it as a "Deactivated Item." The other is a link to a nonexistent page on everexstore.com.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the recurring pattern. Fry's sold the $180-250 Great Quality machines, then stopped. Sears had the Mirus with Freespire (ugh) for $200, but now they only sell it with Windows. Now the gPC seems to be headed down the same road. It seems like lots of people get this great idea of selling a linux box for $200, but nobody seems to be able to sustain it as a business model. It probably doesn't help that they all put the world's lousiest linux distros on their machines, instead of just going with Ubuntu, which would be the sane, obvious choice these days.
Slashdot Mirror
That's incorrect. He is talking about verbosity in bytes. Take a look at his source code and the data file he used, which are linked to from TFA.
That's a myth.
The justice or injustice of your comment depends strongly on what metric they're using for size, and a lot of the replies to your comment have been speculating about what the metric really is. Okay, if you start with the game's FAQ, it looks like there are three different metric they actually computed:
Obviously these are going to give completely different results. Java will come out looking awful by measure #3, for instance. The difference between #1 and #2 has more to do with the distinction between terseness and expressiveness. You wrote "Do you make all of your variables and class/function/methods a single character for the sake of verbosity? I hope not." If someone did that, it would have a huge effect on #1, but little or no effect on #2. Actually #2 seems to me like a very reasonable measure of expressiveness.
So now the question is which one the author of the article actually used for his plots. He doesn't say explicitly which one he used. However, he has links to the source code he used to generate the plots, and to the data file he used as input. The data file only has metrics #1 and #3, so it looks like he didn't actually use metric #2, which IMO is the only one that measures expressiveness in the way he obviously intended. If you look through his lisp code, it looks to me like he actually used #1. (See the line that reads "(normalize-accross (normalize-accross data 'cpu) 'size))". My lisp is pretty weak, but I believe he's extracting the columns whose names begin with the strings "cpu" and "size.")
So it looks to me like he picked the wrong metric, which makes your criticism valid, but that just means he should have picked the right metric.
Even the right metric, #2, still wouldn't be a perfect proxy for expressiveness, of course. For instance, a language with static typing and no type inference will require the programmer to expend a lot of characters on declarations. However, that's a matter of taste; some people feel safer with static typing.
First off, he presents the big chart twice. The second version is meant to compare functional languages with imperative languages, but it's also small enough to fit on my screen, so if you're browsing the article, you might want to look at that one first.
His "obsolete" sector is really more like a special-purpose sector. For instance, Erlang shows up in the obsolete sector, but that's because Erlang wasn't designed to be especially terse or fast. Erlang was designed to be fault-tolerant and automatically parallelizable. Io also ends up looking lousy, but Io also wast designed to be terse and fast; it was designed to be small and simple.
The biggest surprise for me was the high performance of some of the implementations of functional programming languages, even in cases where the particular languages aren't generally known for being implementable in a very efficient way. Two of the best-performing languages are stalin (an implementation of scheme/lisp) and mlton (an implementation of ml). However, as the author notes, it's common to find that if you aren't sufficiently wizardly with fp techniques, you may write fp code that performs much, much worse than the optimal; that was my own experience with ocaml, for instance.
The choice of a linear scale for performance can be a little misleading. For instance, csharp comes out looking like it's not such a great performer, and yet its performance is never worse than the best-performing language by more than a factor of 2 on any task. Typically, if two languages differ by only a factor of 2 in speed, then speed isn't an important factor for choosing between them. The real thing to look out for is that some of the languages seem to have performance that's a gazillion times worse than normal on certain specific tasks.
Many of the languages are hard to find, because they're listed by the names of their implementations. In particular, g95 is an implementation of fortran.
There's a big gray area. For instance, the Millikan oil drop experiment, which established quantization of charge, was arguably fraudulent. Millikan threw out all the data he didn't like, and then stated in his paper that he had never thrown out any data. His result was correct, but the way he went about proving it was ethically suspect.
The slashdot summary seems to me to have a heavy dose of sensationalism.
Oracle's implementation of java is GPL'd. What more do we want from them?
I doubt that there's been any recent research that's uncovered some fantastic new mechanism for garbage collection that was never known before. Garbage collection used to suck, and that was one of the problems, historically, with LISP. Over the decades, garbage collection has gradually gotten better. All the improvements in garbage collection are in the public domain. Gc is not generally a performance bottleneck for modern garbage-collected languages.
It would be slightly more worrisome if this new gc algorithm was patented -- but I haven't seen any evidence that it is. If it's not, then nothing is preventing anyone from making a fully GPL'd version of java with the new algorithm. If it was patented, then this would be a problem for all garbage-collected languages with open-source implemtations, not just java.
Does java's performance really depend much on the efficiency of its gc? My main complaint about java's performance is that the VM and libraries take too long to load.
We let it happen because we didn't believe in our own values. A band of terrorists attacked us, and we reacted by panicking and throwing the rule of law out the window.
Hmm...well, L. Ron Hubbard is dead, so I don't think your definition can be applied here unless you change the word "founders." If you change "founders" to "leaders," then your definition makes the Catholic Church a cult throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The Church was the single richest institution in Europe, both in land and in chattels.
This may have to do with the fact that Fermilab could find the Higgs particle very soon, and then the LHC would have been scooped on its single most important reason for existing.
I know there are people who talk about free-market anarchism or anarchist capitalism. Most anarchists don't consider these to be types of anarchism, and they're really outside the mainstream of anarchist thought. That's not to make any value judgments about them; I just don't think they fall within the meaning of the term "anarchism," as commonly understood. Since you provided a WP link, I think it's worth noting that, IIRC, there was an extremely protracted edit war over whether to include things like anarchist capitalism in the various templates and categories relating to anarchism.
Capitalism, socialism, and anarchism are ways of structuring an entire society. The web isn't a society, it's a tool. This is the same fallacy as talking about "netizens." You can't be a citizen of the net. That would be like being a citizen of your screwdriver.
The main thing that makes anarchism different from, say, libertarianism, is that anarchists are against private property. The typical anarchist analysis is that the accumulation of private property leads to social inequality, the runaway concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people, and war. The Microsoft monopoly, for example, is something that's definitely completely antithetical to anarchist ideals of how society should work. Given that microsoft.com is part of the web, and that they'll take your money in return for their software, I don't really think the web qualifies as an institution that would be typical of an anarchist society.
Since copyrights, trademarks, and patents are generally thought of as a kind of property, I really doubt that an anarchist society would have them. And yet I guarantee you that the computer I'm using, the computer you're using, and the computer that runs slashdot.org are all full of copyrighted software. For instance, my computer is running Linux, x.org, and Firefox right now. All that software is copyrighted, and the only reason it was legal for me to copy them off of the internet was that I was offered an opportunity to do so under licenses like the GPL. Doesn't sound very anarchistic to me.
I'm sure you're right, but why does that matter? Conversely, if someone in Thailand wanted to take up Christianity, and asked me, as someone who'd grown up in Western culture, for insight, what would I say? I certainly wouldn't say just to pick some random flavor of organized Christianity and follow it. I guess I would probably say that it never hurt anyone to read the Gospels and think hard about them as a record of what one slightly crazy human being taught his students 2000 years ago.
They both seem equally wacky to me. If you grew up in Western society, you were immersed from birth in a culture that historically had Christianity as one of its foundations. That's likely to make its wacky myths seem more plausible to you.
I don't think it's valid to judge the validity of a belief system by whether its believers seem nice to you. For example, in 1209 an army of crusaders led by the Cistercian abbot Arnaud invaded the French city of Béziers, where some of the population were heretical Cathars. When the abbot was asked how to tell the orthodox Christians from the heretics, he said, "Kill them all, the Lord will recognise His own." They killed all 20,000 inhabitants: men, women, children, and babies. If I were judging by Abbot Arnaud, I'd judge Christianity to be a pretty scary religion.
The answer to any question like this completely depends on the kind of Buddhism. Some types of Buddhism are big on the golden statues, impressive displays of candles, etc. Others (like some types of Zen) have none of that. If you're the type of Buddhists who's into the golden statues, I don't see any fundamental reason why you couldn't be into this gadget. Buddhism in general is extremely diverse. You can have Buddhists who are atheists, and other Buddhists who consider the Buddha to be very much like a Jesus-type personal savior. You can have Buddhists (e.g., some Tibetan Buddhists) who believe in astrology and elaborate cosmologies, and others who don't believe in any of that. Historically, Buddhism does not have the kind of history of strong central control that Christianity did. Christianity had the Catholic church ("Catholic" means "universal"), which, e.g., massacred sects like the Cathars ("Kill them all, the Lord will recognize His own").
One problem is that the symptoms listed in the link you provided form a continuum. Suppose you take a thousand kids and sort them out in a line according to how well they match these criteria, with kid #1 matching the best and kid #1000 giving the worst match. So #1 definitely has ADHD, and kid #1000 definitely doesn't. Now where do you draw the line? At kid #10? At kid #100? Parents have a strong incentive to get their kids classified as having the disability. If they get the kid classified as disabled, then the kid will get pills, which the parents hope will make the kid easier to deal with. If the kid is classified as disabled, the kid will get extra time on tests.
The cool thing about the possible new method described in TFA is that the determination of ADHD might become more of an objective matter, rather than a matter of whether affluent, pushy parents can bargain for what they want.
I teach at a community college, and the number of students who are diagnosed with learning disabilities is extremely high. I'm not even allowed to ask what their disability is; all I know is that they get special test-taking accomodations. The fact that so many of them have the diagnosis makes me suspect that the condition must be vastly overdiagnosed. If it weren't so overdiagnosed, then society might be able to focus better on helping the students who really do have a hardwired problem that makes their brain work in a qualitatively different way.
I'm a community college physics teacher in California, and I think both of you may have a somewhat inaccurate understanding of how this works.
First off, the administration doesn't write lesson plans. That's the teacher's job. (A "lesson plan" means lecture notes, plans of demonstrations or videos to use, etc.) There is generally a course outline which is on file as part of the curriculum paperwork for a particular course, sort of like an expanded version of the course description listed in the college catalog. The course outline is not a lesson plan, and it generally says very little about teaching methods. It says things like, e.g., that Newton's laws of motion are one of the topics to be covered in Physics 205. The outline is also not written by the administration, it's written by the faculty (who have the knowledge of the subject area). It's true that the course outline needs to cover the right topics, or else four-year schools won't accept the course as being equivalent to one of theirs. This is called articulation. However, typically nobody looks over your shoulder to see whether you actually cover every topic that's listed. For example, Physics 205 is a real course at my school, and the course outline says that it's supposed to cover fluids. Some teachers at my school do cover fluids, but when I teach the course, I don't, and nobody cares.
In any case, none of this has anything to do imposing particular teaching methods, like chalk-and-talk rather than the kind of dialog that Akido37 liked. Generally the way that works is that when the teacher is first hired, he is on track for tenure, but he has to get regularly evaluated to see if he gets tenure. It is generally not difficult at all to get tenure at a community college. The jobs are difficult to get (often you're competing against a hundred applicants to get an interview), but in the natural science division of the school where I've taught for 13 years, we've probably made 20 tenure-track hires since I've been there, and IIRC there was only one who didn't get tenure. The evaluations are mostly made by your peers, not by an administrator.
Okay, it's true that traditional chalk-and-talk lecturing is the safest choice. As a teacher, you know that your students and peers are familiar with it. If you do it proficiently, your students and peers will give you good evaluations. Interactive teaching methods are harder to do well, although in my field (physics) there's quite a bit of research to show that, when done well, they give better results than chalk and talk (as measured on standardized tests). My experience is that students generally do not like interactive teaching methods. For one thing, it requires that they read the book and make an effort to get as much of the material as possible on their own, rather than just coming to class and having all the material spoon-fed to them. I still use interactive methods, because research shows that they're better, and I get good results with them. However, there is a lot more room to stumble when you're just starting out with interactive methods. For instance, when I was first starting out, I tended to expect my students to be able to do more difficult stuff than they could really do.
You make a good point about how future technological developments may kill the market for books and movies. However, I would argue (and did argue, in the GP post) that essentially nothing bad has happened to the market for music. If nothing bad has happened to music, which is already technologically easy to copy and share, then I don't see any reason to extrapolate that anything bad will happen to books and movies.
I can certainly imagine for the sake of argument that within 30 years, illegal copying will reduce the legal market for books, music, and movies to, say, 10% of its current size. I'm not at all convince it will happen, but even if it did, the question then is whether that' would be a bad thing. I'm not sure it is. Bach and Aristophanes never benefited from copyright. Hitchcock worked with budgets that were microscopic by today's standards. My daughter listens to the Jonas Brothers and Taylor Swift, mainly because Radio Disney pushes them. Would it really be the end of the world if she had to listen instead to hobbyist garage bands that put out their music on the internet for free? Writing novels is already something that is essentially a hobby for most authors, not a big source of income, and it's been that way for a long time. In fact, technology may improve the situation with novels. Currently, changes in distribution channels and marketing have made it very difficult for novelists to keep their work in print for very long. Digital distribution (a la Kindle) and print on demand may actually fix that problem. I write short science fiction stories, and although I'm beginning to sell quite a bit of my work, the income is negligible, and that's actually the way it's been for short fiction for decades now. Since long before the internet existed, SF magazines have had declining readerships. It really hasn't been possible to make a living writing short fiction since the golden age of the pulp magazines in the 1930's. And yet short fiction still keeps getting written, by people who pay the mortgage by working as accountants or college professors or whatever.
There are some practical things that may make it difficult for that to happen.
I learned some Haskell recently, and the impression I got was that it was a lot like TeX, in the sense that there's a core language that's really a beautiful work of art, but slathered on top of that you get layer after layer of add-on software that is a mixed bag in terms of quality. I found a lot of issues with poor support for regexes and unicode strings, for example. The fact that Haskell has two different implementations of strings does sort of seem to me like an admission that if you do strings in the most elegant possible fp way (as lists of characters, manipulated using pattern matching), it may indeed be "slow and unusable."
With LISP, lack of standardization is an issue.
As you've noted, automagical support for parallelization is a huge factor in favor of fp now that hardware is moving toward SMP. But, e.g., ocaml's implementation of gc prevents it from doing parallelization as well as erlang.
As with any language that has a small population of users, fp languages often have issues with poor documentation, or lack of native libraries, or of conveniently packaged bindings to non-native libraries.
The thing is, there are a lot of nice multi-paradigm languages to choose from that are very well implemented, have excellent libraries, excellent documentation -- and that also allow you to use fp techniques for tasks that naturally lend themselves to fp. You can do fp in ruby or perl, for example.
Lynton said:
This is an example of the shortage of careful analysis in his editorial. He lumps together four things: music, newspapers, movies and books. Okay, let's take these one at a time:
This is the closest he comes to laying out what he wants to happen, and it isn't very specific at all. What does he mean by "standards of commerce?" I have no idea. Is this his code word for pervasive DRM and trusted computing? What kind of "action against piracy" does he want? He's already got the DMCA. Does he want a new and improved DMCA II or something? If so, let's hear what he wants to go into that bill, so we can debate it.
What they're doing seems praiseworthy and idealistic, but really, their prices aren't that different from what I've found at Good Will, garage sales, swap meets, and on eBay. For instance, I've found that I can generally get keyboards for a buck at garage sales. Low-capacity IDE drives go for $10 (including shipping) on eBay. Memory in sizes of 512 Mb and less is too cheap to worry about; the main hassle is just figuring out compatibility.
That's possible. I don't know. It's also possible that it's not a sustainable business model because too many people return the computers. Returns are very expensive to process, and the profit margin on a $200 desktop machine is razor-thin.
D'oh, now I feel like a complete idiot, with two replies-to-self. Zareason doesn't actually have them in stock.
Aha, after posting the above, I found out that Zareason sells the Everex gPC3. I wonder why the heck Everex's web page doesn't link to Zareason, and links instead to two nonfunctional retail channels??
I bought one of the first $200 Everex gPC boxes (reviewed here), and although their linux distro was awful at that time (it was a prerelease version), the hardware has worked fine. I put ubuntu on it, and it's a great machine.
However, they seem to have recurring problems with production and/or distribution channels. They were originally selling them through Walmart; you'd order it via Walmart's web site, and it would be shipped to your local store for you to pick up. Now Walmart no longer has them. If you go to everex.com, they proudly tell you that their latest version, the gPC3, is available for $199. But of the two links they offer for buying it, neither actually works. One is to newegg, which lists it as a "Deactivated Item." The other is a link to a nonexistent page on everexstore.com.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the recurring pattern. Fry's sold the $180-250 Great Quality machines, then stopped. Sears had the Mirus with Freespire (ugh) for $200, but now they only sell it with Windows. Now the gPC seems to be headed down the same road. It seems like lots of people get this great idea of selling a linux box for $200, but nobody seems to be able to sustain it as a business model. It probably doesn't help that they all put the world's lousiest linux distros on their machines, instead of just going with Ubuntu, which would be the sane, obvious choice these days.
Thanks, that's helpful!