There's a book well-known in the humanities, Visual Thinking by Rudolph Arnheim, arguing that thinking is essentially visual. But most of the people working in cognitive science don't believe this, but instead that thinking is essentially linguistic (even if it's in something different from our public languages, such as Jerry Fodor's Language of Thought - where the most he'll give to visualization is that it can be an "image over a description").
Or perhaps visual and linguistic intelligence both exist in their own right, but some cultures do better at one or the other? If so, we're still a culture built on "In the beginning was the Word." We think we're so visual because of movies and whatever, but compared to the visual immersion of a traditional tribal, forest culture in its heyday we're nowhere with vision. So what does it do if we get a bunch of executives "visualizing"? Does it really make them smarter than if they work out their decisions logically, in language, in the traditional way of our culture? Or is it just a new way of dressing up the yes-men?
Even to the extent that we can importantly visualize, what gives you the clearer, more vital vision, a well crafted book - just words - or a comic? Because, let's face it, what software provides is at best like a cheap comic. And if financial markets are the measure of how bright visualization tools make us... enough said.
I was just packing up to move my office, and looking at all the mostly-redundant Unix and Linux administration books, and realizing that although I have more than two dozen on different aspects, I open maybe one or two of them once or twice a year. Everything else it's just easier to pursue online. I'm a believer that the book format has real advantages, particularly when fresh to a subject area. When I take up some totally new technology again, I'll buy a half-dozen books on it again. Maybe. If the online resources aren't there yet.
As for what flavor of Linux to cover, I've run Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake and Debian in production environments... and any place I have the choice these days I prefer Gentoo. It's better laid out. It's more current. It better optimizes for the hardware. Or if I just want to give someone a slick workstation in a hurry, Knoppix (yeah, it's Debian-based, but it's way ahead of it too).
Some people disagree philosophically with Palladium's goals, not its technical merits.
How do you separate these two? Having a car you don't hold the key to, but instead have to call some central bureau on your cellphone to unlock wouldn't just be a philosophical problem, but a technical one. It would totally suck technically if your cellphone wouldn't work, for instance - and this vulnerability would be technically more likely than if you carried your own key - a higher rate of failure at car starting. Now philosophically, you may be against always reporting to a central bureau when you'd like to start your car; but technically the scheme still sucks. Same if it's a key to your computer.
Nanotechnology companies said that the havoc that asbestos claims have created in industry has made businesses extremely sensitive to the health impact of new materials. Halting development to perform health studies would simply send nanotechnology development offshore, they said.
What asbestos claims have done is make industry extremely sensitive to the health impacts on industry of not being protected from lawsuits. They can avoid these lawsuits two ways, (1) moving offshore, (2) legislative "relief." So, if you are in congress they will provide donations to you and perhaps jobs in your district if you enact (2). On the other hand, if we make import of this technology illegal, then moving offshore isn't so profitable. Certainly the EU will be quick to outlaw it; the US following that lead may be enough to stall it.
Sure, it may be able to do a few promising things. But our technology is so capable, and expandable in so many directions, why head off in the most dangerous ones first? Do we have to let the rich get richer at every opportunity, while continuing to degrade the environments most folks actually live in? You can be sure the rich will have ways to filter this stuff from their palaces and domes.
Democracy? Internet? These are not the traditional ways of the Iraqi people. Let's restore Baghdad to the grandeur it has as capital of the Arab Empire, and visit it as a theme park. Best of both worlds: they get their traditions restored, and we get another Disneyland.
But seriously, we won the war largely because of strategies enabled by our information systems. The advantage of good information systems also applies to economic opportunities, not just military. And to rebuild a simple oil economy is a recipe for disaster just as soon as oil runs short or new technologies greatly lessen the use of it.
Since all those poor, unfortunate people died in the twin towers, your government has been free to do *whatever* it pleases. *Very* convenient for them, all in all. Think of the profit. And all it cost is the lives of a few thousand innocents (so far).
What that attack (which I witnessed) showed vividly is that the oceans no longer keep America safe from attack by relatively small forces representing foreign religious, tribal or governmental agencies. We're in an age of truly terrifying weapons, which are no longer the monopoly of a few great powers holding each other in mutual restraint. We stopped the Soviets because they weren't fully insane (and because, apparently, Stalin's inner circle poisoned him just before he was able to launch a planned attack on the US's West Coast). But if an Islamic terrorist group sets off a nuke in a US city, or a truly massive chemical poisoning, and it is only loosely linked to any particular government or country, against whom can the US retaliate? What worked against the Soviets is no longer a workable option. The only workable option is to go directly after any small group or nation of questionable sanity which tries to acquire nukes or other massively deadly means. It's that or a sure chance of losing some major cities. Which of our cities do you propose we can do without?
Do you really think every madman has a right to bear nuclear arms? Do you think it gives him a more legitimate right if he's the murderous tyrant of a nation? If he's the murderous leader of a religious sect?
Nonetheless this is no reason to have our government spy against it's own people. The enemies are elsewhere. And if we can promote more real freedom in societies elsewhere, the enemies will eventually be fewer. Where there are dangerous tyrannies, we may need to use force. But we must remain clear on the coherent, consistent goal of expanding the sphere of freedom.
Well, let's see, we created the terrorists by insisting they have democracies, or by allowing them to continue to have dictatorships? Which should we be doing in Iraq? We created the terrorists by failing to engage with their governments, or by failing to disengage? Can you give a clear prescription for what our government could do that would not end up with it being blamed by people like you for "creating the terrorists"? During the cold war, in a world with many dictatorships, should we have forced them all into alliance with the Soviets by declaring ourselves enemies of each and every one of them? Or should we have respected that maybe some societies really don't want to be democracies, and been friendly to some dictatorships on this basis? Do you really have some simple formula for "sanity" here?
As for religious oppression, you've got to be kidding. We've allowed some very ugly variants of religion to persist. We haven't even stopped the Saudis from funding schools throughout the developing Muslim world that teach as a fundamental lesson that we are literally the henchmen of Satan. Perhaps you attended one of these schools?
NAT or VPN may fall within the meaning of laws against concealing the identity of origin of Net packets. Anonymous remailers, intended to fully obscure the origin of messages, most certainly would violate these laws. Yet there are times when a citizen wants to be able to give a tip to law enforcement without becoming personally involved. Let's say I have a well-founded suspicion that my neighbor robbed the bank in the next town. Let's further posit I don't want my neighbor to have any hint I've turned her in, and don't want to play any role in court proceedings (maybe she has a sister who'd come after my family; maybe I don't want the government to inquire as to how I know about the robbery). Won't laws which criminalize anonymous cooperation with law enforcement significantly hinder the well-being of society?
Programming is a lot closer to doing formal logic - such as many philosophers do - than mathematics - such as most fields of engineering apply to their tasks. So let's use the most accurate name (surely any good engineer or philosopher would want to use the most accurate name - we're not talking marketing or "communications" here). It's computer philosophy.
Sheesh, you'd think this would be obvious to/.ers!
There's an implicit belief behind most of the anti-American, anti-war comments here that only pure motives are good - that if you have more than one motivation for an action, and some of those motivations are of economic benefit to you, then the entire action is tainted.
But consider what's at play here: 9/11 demonstrated that American cities are vulnerable to catastrophic attack by terrorists. At that point it was prudent to ask what nations are in the position of being (1) run by sociopaths with a record of mass killings which (2) have or can afford to acquire catastrophic weapons and (3) are in ideological or religious proximity to those with demonstrated terrorist abilities. The whole claim of the Bush administration is that it is legitimate self-defense to remove such threats to our cities.
Saddam is a sociopath who has killed many hundreds of thousands. It is extremely unlikely this war will kill more Iraqis than Saddam's own forces would have killed this year anyway... and each year after that he had stayed in power. He has worked to acquire vicious weapons in the past, and has the wealth to buy nukes from elsewhere (impoverished North Korea, for example). If he were to plant a few of those nukes in US cities, then set off one as an example while, say, invading Saudi Arabia, would we be willing to sacrifice more cities to stop him? Or do you think he's too nice a guy to enter into such a scenario?
Given the overwhelming historical logic that requires that we act against him now - not in a couple of years after he's got things set up to his best advantage - is there something evil about our being concerned that in return for the vast cost of this action to us in lives and treasure that we receive some small economic opportunities afterwards? If the US finances a new phone system after the war, should we do it to French specs? This level of "purity" would be absurd, IMHO.
Remember when we used to have sigs that included keywords that were designed to attract the attention of spooks using Echelon to monitor e-mail traffic? Well, we can easily add recorded voice clips to the end of our VOIP calls to similar effect. Go to the library, check out a book of war poetry, and start recording those keyword-rich sound bites. Or select passages from Gravity's Rainbow.
Hmm, we could put this stuff on our answering machines too. As a way of supporting America's martial spirit, of course.
What I like about Epson inkjets is that for just a few dollars more than replacing the cartridges, I can replace the whole printer. Since their printers really do get better year-to-year, why not?
Now, I can't believe they're making money on me, since the printers sell for cost... but what they hey?
Note: They'll support Saddam Husein because they can do business with him. If they owe so much to Saddam, how much more do they owe to Bertelsman for handling crucial war-time propaganda? Ah, the Germans get their revenge on the Americans now, teach them a lesson about trying to remove a dictator, especially one who can be good for business. And isn't it so much better to not let the market decide which artists get supported, but instead to leave that to the government committee which will distribute the funds taken from the computer buyers? Yes, computers - so useful when IBM provided them to count the Jews. But now even the Turkish guest workers can afford them. Better to raise the price.
Since we're in different towns, and both signing up for this service, if I proxy it for you and you for me we've both got total coverage. I'm perfectly happy to connect to you for this through ipsec. They'll never know.
Isn't discussing books a violation?
on
An IMDb for Books
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Isn't discussing books online a violation of Amazon's recent patent. Granted, that only applies in contexts where the books are also offered for sale. But if you offer them for sale at anywhere other than Amazon, they can come after you, as long as that silly patent holds up. Meanwhile, I'd suggest that sites which do both discuss and link books consider bn.com - as complete a catalog as Amazon, no bad patents. Let's keep Bezos busy making more enemies.
"If on your campus you had an assault and battery or a murder, you'd go down to the district attorney's office and deal with it that way," said Rep. William Jenkins, R-Tenn.
Colleges will generally go as far as possible to avoid bringing in the police. Cynically, it's bad public relations to be connected with crime. It's only been in recent years that most campuses have been shamed into encouraging rapes to be reported. Rapes are the obvious case where we should want the police in. But what about gay sex in the states where that's still illegal? What about kids having a beer? Smoking a joint?
The law is traditionally less restrictive on the privileged - trusts them to have a native sense of good that may be more refined that that in the code books. Thus Geo. Bush Jr., faced with a law that said he had to serve in the military, got into the National Guard and got away with skipping duty - didn't even show up for that - for a year. Okay, so there are times where this exception is regrettable. But his grandfather stole the skull of an Indian child from a cemetary as a Skull & Bones prank. There are pretty serious laws about this, but they weren't applied - he was a privileged student.
Still, the law is a regrettable intrusion that should only be applied when human beings are not behaving themselves - when real harm is being done to someone other than themselves. Busting a student for drinking a beer or sharing a song does more harm than good to people. Beer and songs are both positive things, on the whole. And anyone who has behaved and studied well enough to get into college should be trusted to be not as in need of supervision by the law as someone who had neither the internal discipline nor intelligence to get there.
A society overly concerned with enforcing laws - especially laws which serve business but not human interests - is violating the fundamental right of humans to live a good life as they see fit. Policing, in itself, is not a virtue, and is a value only to dictators.
Another candidate explanation for the change in consciousness which is now generally agreed to have occured 50,000 years back is Turner & Fauconnier's The Way We Think. The key to their work is the discovery - coming from linguistics - that language depends on a capability to do a certain sort of "blending" or mapping of elements between different "mental spaces." In short, language falls out from an ability to do a certain sort of conceptual work. The ability to do that work is present to a degree in all mammals, but when a certain threshold of capability is crossed you get the sort of mental richness which can and will produce language.
The importance of Turner and Fauconnier's work is that they're coming out of linguistics and a deep understanding of the functions of such things as metaphors and counterfactuals and their essential involvement in letting language make sense.
Once such a threshold is crossed, you're going to see genetic selection for secondary characteristics which suddenly acquire greater pertinence to survival advantage. Trivially, if we can talk certain shapes of tongues will be favored, where before there may have been no selection pressure towards those best at forming the sounds of words. So on this sort of hypothesis - that a general sort of cognitive capability gradually increased until crossing a threshold at which a novel and significant sort of performance became enabled - there are also likely to be genetic shifts in the population following this favoring those genes which are most compatible with the new capability. This does not mean that these genetic shifts are themselves responsible for its appearance. It does not mean there is a "gene for language," even if you can demonstrate a correlation between the emergence of language and the favoring of a certain gene.
If, to again make a trivial example, on a planet far away a species developed the game of basketball. And if there were a vast intergalactic audience that quickly developed a love of basketball such that the players in this species developed a large survival advantage which extended for many generations, then you would subsequently see in their genetic record a flourishing of those genes which correspond with taller stature. That does not in any way prove or indicate that those are "basketball genes."
How the guy quoted in this article ever got a doctorate, let alone a post at Stanford, is baffling.
The expression "trail of tears" predated the Cherokee forced march. The idea that once a common expression is applied to something, that something henceforth acquires primary ownership of said expression is the same logic by which Microsoft owns "windows".
There are also "final solutions" both before and after the Holocaust that have nothing to do with it. Similarly "niggardly" has never had any meaning connected with skin color. If there were a Cherokee expression which applied solely to the "Trail of Tears" then indeed it would be insensitive to use it for anything else not equally tragic. But to ask users of standard English not run all phrases of standard English through some sort of sensitivity checker prior to use is just another way of enforcing the Christian notion of original sin on everybody. Surely at least some friends of the Cherokees have a few doubts left about the Christian worldview?
California is in the hole because they allowed themselves (with the insistance of the Bush government) to be ripped off for billions by the Texas energy firms. Trying to recover the losses to the mostly-criminal energy sector by going after the mostly-ethical tech sector is really, really wrong. California has to go after the thieves that done it to 'em, not round up the innocent and good-willed in order to make up for what they lost to the thieves.
This guy has legitmately been a martyred hero to freedom. In my book that should afford him a lot of goodwill in his business ventures. Plus, it's interesting to see where his later life is taking him. Like, we don't chat about how Linus is making out at Transmeta? And not even any martyrdom points for him. Jeeze.
The US air traffic control system is still many years behind on replacing all the computers from the early 60s. They kept coming up with prototype systems with magnitudes more processing power - and magnitudes more bugs. It looks like they're finally installing stuff that mostly works; but it's around 15 years behind schedule.
On a similar note, I know of a Fortune 500 corporation that was still running its accounting system on early-60s RCA mainframes in the mid 80s. It wasn't worth it to recreate the software - which worked fine - until financial execs who were starting to put PCs on their desks got too frustrated about not being able to access the data directly.
You can build an airframe requiring extraordinary processing power just to keep it stable in flight - our newest fighters are of the sort. But the shuttle's not. And maybe it shouldn't be - since if it was there'd be no possibility of a human pilot subbing for a down computer. In combat, if the computer's down, the craft's toast anyway.
In America the means of production are in private hands ( the very definition of capitalism) but own the government.
Adam Smith wrote: "the government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever." So even the guy who definitively linked prosperity with a free economic system - one where the politicians don't exert much control over the markets - could see that the reverse situation - where the markets own the political power - should be avoided at almost any cost.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a book well-known in the humanities, Visual Thinking by Rudolph Arnheim, arguing that thinking is essentially visual. But most of the people working in cognitive science don't believe this, but instead that thinking is essentially linguistic (even if it's in something different from our public languages, such as Jerry Fodor's Language of Thought - where the most he'll give to visualization is that it can be an "image over a description").
... enough said.
Or perhaps visual and linguistic intelligence both exist in their own right, but some cultures do better at one or the other? If so, we're still a culture built on "In the beginning was the Word." We think we're so visual because of movies and whatever, but compared to the visual immersion of a traditional tribal, forest culture in its heyday we're nowhere with vision. So what does it do if we get a bunch of executives "visualizing"? Does it really make them smarter than if they work out their decisions logically, in language, in the traditional way of our culture? Or is it just a new way of dressing up the yes-men?
Even to the extent that we can importantly visualize, what gives you the clearer, more vital vision, a well crafted book - just words - or a comic? Because, let's face it, what software provides is at best like a cheap comic. And if financial markets are the measure of how bright visualization tools make us
I was just packing up to move my office, and looking at all the mostly-redundant Unix and Linux administration books, and realizing that although I have more than two dozen on different aspects, I open maybe one or two of them once or twice a year. Everything else it's just easier to pursue online. I'm a believer that the book format has real advantages, particularly when fresh to a subject area. When I take up some totally new technology again, I'll buy a half-dozen books on it again. Maybe. If the online resources aren't there yet.
... and any place I have the choice these days I prefer Gentoo. It's better laid out. It's more current. It better optimizes for the hardware. Or if I just want to give someone a slick workstation in a hurry, Knoppix (yeah, it's Debian-based, but it's way ahead of it too).
As for what flavor of Linux to cover, I've run Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake and Debian in production environments
Some people disagree philosophically with Palladium's goals, not its technical merits.
How do you separate these two? Having a car you don't hold the key to, but instead have to call some central bureau on your cellphone to unlock wouldn't just be a philosophical problem, but a technical one. It would totally suck technically if your cellphone wouldn't work, for instance - and this vulnerability would be technically more likely than if you carried your own key - a higher rate of failure at car starting. Now philosophically, you may be against always reporting to a central bureau when you'd like to start your car; but technically the scheme still sucks. Same if it's a key to your computer.
Nanotechnology companies said that the havoc that asbestos claims have created in industry has made businesses extremely sensitive to the health impact of new materials. Halting development to perform health studies would simply send nanotechnology development offshore, they said.
What asbestos claims have done is make industry extremely sensitive to the health impacts on industry of not being protected from lawsuits. They can avoid these lawsuits two ways, (1) moving offshore, (2) legislative "relief." So, if you are in congress they will provide donations to you and perhaps jobs in your district if you enact (2). On the other hand, if we make import of this technology illegal, then moving offshore isn't so profitable. Certainly the EU will be quick to outlaw it; the US following that lead may be enough to stall it.
Sure, it may be able to do a few promising things. But our technology is so capable, and expandable in so many directions, why head off in the most dangerous ones first? Do we have to let the rich get richer at every opportunity, while continuing to degrade the environments most folks actually live in? You can be sure the rich will have ways to filter this stuff from their palaces and domes.
Democracy? Internet? These are not the traditional ways of the Iraqi people. Let's restore Baghdad to the grandeur it has as capital of the Arab Empire, and visit it as a theme park. Best of both worlds: they get their traditions restored, and we get another Disneyland.
But seriously, we won the war largely because of strategies enabled by our information systems. The advantage of good information systems also applies to economic opportunities, not just military. And to rebuild a simple oil economy is a recipe for disaster just as soon as oil runs short or new technologies greatly lessen the use of it.
or Chipheads?
or Electroneers?
or Weownyous?
Since all those poor, unfortunate people died in the twin towers, your government has been free to do *whatever* it pleases. *Very* convenient for them, all in all. Think of the profit. And all it cost is the lives of a few thousand innocents (so far).
What that attack (which I witnessed) showed vividly is that the oceans no longer keep America safe from attack by relatively small forces representing foreign religious, tribal or governmental agencies. We're in an age of truly terrifying weapons, which are no longer the monopoly of a few great powers holding each other in mutual restraint. We stopped the Soviets because they weren't fully insane (and because, apparently, Stalin's inner circle poisoned him just before he was able to launch a planned attack on the US's West Coast). But if an Islamic terrorist group sets off a nuke in a US city, or a truly massive chemical poisoning, and it is only loosely linked to any particular government or country, against whom can the US retaliate? What worked against the Soviets is no longer a workable option. The only workable option is to go directly after any small group or nation of questionable sanity which tries to acquire nukes or other massively deadly means. It's that or a sure chance of losing some major cities. Which of our cities do you propose we can do without?
Do you really think every madman has a right to bear nuclear arms? Do you think it gives him a more legitimate right if he's the murderous tyrant of a nation? If he's the murderous leader of a religious sect?
Nonetheless this is no reason to have our government spy against it's own people. The enemies are elsewhere. And if we can promote more real freedom in societies elsewhere, the enemies will eventually be fewer. Where there are dangerous tyrannies, we may need to use force. But we must remain clear on the coherent, consistent goal of expanding the sphere of freedom.
Well, let's see, we created the terrorists by insisting they have democracies, or by allowing them to continue to have dictatorships? Which should we be doing in Iraq? We created the terrorists by failing to engage with their governments, or by failing to disengage? Can you give a clear prescription for what our government could do that would not end up with it being blamed by people like you for "creating the terrorists"? During the cold war, in a world with many dictatorships, should we have forced them all into alliance with the Soviets by declaring ourselves enemies of each and every one of them? Or should we have respected that maybe some societies really don't want to be democracies, and been friendly to some dictatorships on this basis? Do you really have some simple formula for "sanity" here?
As for religious oppression, you've got to be kidding. We've allowed some very ugly variants of religion to persist. We haven't even stopped the Saudis from funding schools throughout the developing Muslim world that teach as a fundamental lesson that we are literally the henchmen of Satan. Perhaps you attended one of these schools?
NAT or VPN may fall within the meaning of laws against concealing the identity of origin of Net packets. Anonymous remailers, intended to fully obscure the origin of messages, most certainly would violate these laws. Yet there are times when a citizen wants to be able to give a tip to law enforcement without becoming personally involved. Let's say I have a well-founded suspicion that my neighbor robbed the bank in the next town. Let's further posit I don't want my neighbor to have any hint I've turned her in, and don't want to play any role in court proceedings (maybe she has a sister who'd come after my family; maybe I don't want the government to inquire as to how I know about the robbery). Won't laws which criminalize anonymous cooperation with law enforcement significantly hinder the well-being of society?
Programming is a lot closer to doing formal logic - such as many philosophers do - than mathematics - such as most fields of engineering apply to their tasks. So let's use the most accurate name (surely any good engineer or philosopher would want to use the most accurate name - we're not talking marketing or "communications" here). It's computer philosophy.
/.ers!
Sheesh, you'd think this would be obvious to
There's an implicit belief behind most of the anti-American, anti-war comments here that only pure motives are good - that if you have more than one motivation for an action, and some of those motivations are of economic benefit to you, then the entire action is tainted.
... and each year after that he had stayed in power. He has worked to acquire vicious weapons in the past, and has the wealth to buy nukes from elsewhere (impoverished North Korea, for example). If he were to plant a few of those nukes in US cities, then set off one as an example while, say, invading Saudi Arabia, would we be willing to sacrifice more cities to stop him? Or do you think he's too nice a guy to enter into such a scenario?
But consider what's at play here: 9/11 demonstrated that American cities are vulnerable to catastrophic attack by terrorists. At that point it was prudent to ask what nations are in the position of being (1) run by sociopaths with a record of mass killings which (2) have or can afford to acquire catastrophic weapons and (3) are in ideological or religious proximity to those with demonstrated terrorist abilities. The whole claim of the Bush administration is that it is legitimate self-defense to remove such threats to our cities.
Saddam is a sociopath who has killed many hundreds of thousands. It is extremely unlikely this war will kill more Iraqis than Saddam's own forces would have killed this year anyway
Given the overwhelming historical logic that requires that we act against him now - not in a couple of years after he's got things set up to his best advantage - is there something evil about our being concerned that in return for the vast cost of this action to us in lives and treasure that we receive some small economic opportunities afterwards? If the US finances a new phone system after the war, should we do it to French specs? This level of "purity" would be absurd, IMHO.
Remember when we used to have sigs that included keywords that were designed to attract the attention of spooks using Echelon to monitor e-mail traffic? Well, we can easily add recorded voice clips to the end of our VOIP calls to similar effect. Go to the library, check out a book of war poetry, and start recording those keyword-rich sound bites. Or select passages from Gravity's Rainbow.
Hmm, we could put this stuff on our answering machines too. As a way of supporting America's martial spirit, of course.
What I like about Epson inkjets is that for just a few dollars more than replacing the cartridges, I can replace the whole printer. Since their printers really do get better year-to-year, why not?
... but what they hey?
Now, I can't believe they're making money on me, since the printers sell for cost
"Best experienced with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5"
Note: They'll support Saddam Husein because they can do business with him. If they owe so much to Saddam, how much more do they owe to Bertelsman for handling crucial war-time propaganda? Ah, the Germans get their revenge on the Americans now, teach them a lesson about trying to remove a dictator, especially one who can be good for business. And isn't it so much better to not let the market decide which artists get supported, but instead to leave that to the government committee which will distribute the funds taken from the computer buyers? Yes, computers - so useful when IBM provided them to count the Jews. But now even the Turkish guest workers can afford them. Better to raise the price.
Since we're in different towns, and both signing up for this service, if I proxy it for you and you for me we've both got total coverage. I'm perfectly happy to connect to you for this through ipsec. They'll never know.
Isn't discussing books online a violation of Amazon's recent patent. Granted, that only applies in contexts where the books are also offered for sale. But if you offer them for sale at anywhere other than Amazon, they can come after you, as long as that silly patent holds up. Meanwhile, I'd suggest that sites which do both discuss and link books consider bn.com - as complete a catalog as Amazon, no bad patents. Let's keep Bezos busy making more enemies.
Colleges will generally go as far as possible to avoid bringing in the police. Cynically, it's bad public relations to be connected with crime. It's only been in recent years that most campuses have been shamed into encouraging rapes to be reported. Rapes are the obvious case where we should want the police in. But what about gay sex in the states where that's still illegal? What about kids having a beer? Smoking a joint?
The law is traditionally less restrictive on the privileged - trusts them to have a native sense of good that may be more refined that that in the code books. Thus Geo. Bush Jr., faced with a law that said he had to serve in the military, got into the National Guard and got away with skipping duty - didn't even show up for that - for a year. Okay, so there are times where this exception is regrettable. But his grandfather stole the skull of an Indian child from a cemetary as a Skull & Bones prank. There are pretty serious laws about this, but they weren't applied - he was a privileged student.
Still, the law is a regrettable intrusion that should only be applied when human beings are not behaving themselves - when real harm is being done to someone other than themselves. Busting a student for drinking a beer or sharing a song does more harm than good to people. Beer and songs are both positive things, on the whole. And anyone who has behaved and studied well enough to get into college should be trusted to be not as in need of supervision by the law as someone who had neither the internal discipline nor intelligence to get there.
A society overly concerned with enforcing laws - especially laws which serve business but not human interests - is violating the fundamental right of humans to live a good life as they see fit. Policing, in itself, is not a virtue, and is a value only to dictators.
Anyone setting up alternate root servers that will negate this and future Ashcroft thefts from the public commons?
Or would that be circumventing their technological lockout, and itself be in violation?
The importance of Turner and Fauconnier's work is that they're coming out of linguistics and a deep understanding of the functions of such things as metaphors and counterfactuals and their essential involvement in letting language make sense.
Once such a threshold is crossed, you're going to see genetic selection for secondary characteristics which suddenly acquire greater pertinence to survival advantage. Trivially, if we can talk certain shapes of tongues will be favored, where before there may have been no selection pressure towards those best at forming the sounds of words. So on this sort of hypothesis - that a general sort of cognitive capability gradually increased until crossing a threshold at which a novel and significant sort of performance became enabled - there are also likely to be genetic shifts in the population following this favoring those genes which are most compatible with the new capability. This does not mean that these genetic shifts are themselves responsible for its appearance. It does not mean there is a "gene for language," even if you can demonstrate a correlation between the emergence of language and the favoring of a certain gene.
If, to again make a trivial example, on a planet far away a species developed the game of basketball. And if there were a vast intergalactic audience that quickly developed a love of basketball such that the players in this species developed a large survival advantage which extended for many generations, then you would subsequently see in their genetic record a flourishing of those genes which correspond with taller stature. That does not in any way prove or indicate that those are "basketball genes."
How the guy quoted in this article ever got a doctorate, let alone a post at Stanford, is baffling.
The expression "trail of tears" predated the Cherokee forced march. The idea that once a common expression is applied to something, that something henceforth acquires primary ownership of said expression is the same logic by which Microsoft owns "windows".
There are also "final solutions" both before and after the Holocaust that have nothing to do with it. Similarly "niggardly" has never had any meaning connected with skin color. If there were a Cherokee expression which applied solely to the "Trail of Tears" then indeed it would be insensitive to use it for anything else not equally tragic. But to ask users of standard English not run all phrases of standard English through some sort of sensitivity checker prior to use is just another way of enforcing the Christian notion of original sin on everybody. Surely at least some friends of the Cherokees have a few doubts left about the Christian worldview?
California is in the hole because they allowed themselves (with the insistance of the Bush government) to be ripped off for billions by the Texas energy firms. Trying to recover the losses to the mostly-criminal energy sector by going after the mostly-ethical tech sector is really, really wrong. California has to go after the thieves that done it to 'em, not round up the innocent and good-willed in order to make up for what they lost to the thieves.
This guy has legitmately been a martyred hero to freedom. In my book that should afford him a lot of goodwill in his business ventures. Plus, it's interesting to see where his later life is taking him. Like, we don't chat about how Linus is making out at Transmeta? And not even any martyrdom points for him. Jeeze.
The US air traffic control system is still many years behind on replacing all the computers from the early 60s. They kept coming up with prototype systems with magnitudes more processing power - and magnitudes more bugs. It looks like they're finally installing stuff that mostly works; but it's around 15 years behind schedule.
On a similar note, I know of a Fortune 500 corporation that was still running its accounting system on early-60s RCA mainframes in the mid 80s. It wasn't worth it to recreate the software - which worked fine - until financial execs who were starting to put PCs on their desks got too frustrated about not being able to access the data directly.
You can build an airframe requiring extraordinary processing power just to keep it stable in flight - our newest fighters are of the sort. But the shuttle's not. And maybe it shouldn't be - since if it was there'd be no possibility of a human pilot subbing for a down computer. In combat, if the computer's down, the craft's toast anyway.
Adam Smith wrote: "the government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever." So even the guy who definitively linked prosperity with a free economic system - one where the politicians don't exert much control over the markets - could see that the reverse situation - where the markets own the political power - should be avoided at almost any cost.