This idea is far from original. Just look at the 1970s-era A Fortran Coloring Book or the modern A Manga Guide to Calculus for two of many similar titles.
That follows only if you think that the logicist system for the foundation of mathematics proposed in the Principia is something "similar" to Fortran and the calculus.
Corporations do not care one whit for the shareholders. This is a gross misconception I see repeated here often. "Corporations", this is: the Board of Directors, only cares about increasing the wealth of the Board of Directors. Most shareholders have little or no say in what the corporation does, thanks to the invention of non-voting stock.
The board of directors, of course, are shareholders, and normally some of the very biggest ones. It's not rare for the board to collectively hold a controlling share of a corporation, even without recourse to tricks like share classes with limited voting rights. So saying that corporations don't care about shareholders isn't the most insightful way of putting it; it's more like majority shareholders have interests that are different from minority shareholders.
One example: if you're a majority shareholder, you almost automatically welcome the company's an acquisition of another business (as long as it's at the right price), because it diversifies the income streams to your corporation and thus reduces the risk of the stock that makes up the vast majority of your wealth. A minority shareholder, on the other hand, can simply buy another stock to add to his portfolio, so an acquisition only makes sense if the combined business is more efficient than the pieces held separately.
So now users can call tech support with their mouse plugged into their monitor and say that their "computer doesn't work".
Actually, let's just pause right there. If the monitor has the correct type of outlet for the mouse's plug, why shouldn't the user be able to plug the mouse into the monitor, and have it work fine? It just means that the monitor has to serve as a peripheral hub for the computer.
I don't understand the fixation on making a completely universal plug. It seems good in theory, but what does it actually get us beyond some cable interchanging possibilities and expensive upgrades?
The ability to plug in pretty much any device into your computer without needing to have a special adapter card for it. Do you really want to go back to the bad old days where adding an external peripheral to your computer meant adding a custom adapter card just for that one peripheral?
Here's the devices that I have that plug through USB. Can you imagine what nightmare this would be without an universal plug?
Mouse
DAC with headphone amplifier
iPod
Digital camera
GPS receiver
External HD
Why aren't we working on better wireless communication so that we don't need wires at all? I can't get my wireless mouse 2 feet away from the receiver, and I sure as hell don't want another cable cluttering things up.
I can't speak for everybody, but I tend to do this by asking questions like the following:
What depends on this piece of code?
How likely are we to go back and change this function in the future?
If it's a function that either a lot of stuff depends on (or not a lot, but really important stuff), and we are likely to go back and change it in the future, then yeah, both of those are cases for writing unit tests for it. But if it's not a relatively "core" piece of code (that other things depend on), or if I can't imagine that it's going to get modified in the future, then no unit test. (If the "no revisions" assumption is proven wrong later, then yeah, you can write unit tests then.)
The top targets for unit tests in my book tend to be highly reusable, complex pieces of code that simplify a non-trivial problem that gets encountered in many forms, and where it is likely that you will either (a) get some functional detail wrong that is only discovered in the future, (b) discover a faster way of doing the same thing. For example, code that generically implements a search algorithm deserves to be unit-tested extensively.
It's pretty clear you don't understand what duck typing is. Go look it up and get back to us.
I know what duck typing is. I once drank the Ruby koolaid.
Basically, the situation where you can duck type and still get a correctly typed program is when all the objects that may be arguments share a specific type: the type of objects that can respond to the message that occurs in that point of the code. The typical statically typed languages that people use don't have a type system rich enough to express that kind of type, because they don't have a concept like "the anonymous type that is inhabited by values that respond to the 'close' message with no arguments."
To put it in somewhat more concrete terms: every instance of duck typing can be replicated in a language like Java by using a one-method interface. The problem isn't that Java has static types; the problem is that Java makes it too costly in terms of programmer effort to create and implement interfaces; and to make it worse, which interfaces are implemented by a class is determined at compilation time, so that if you have to use somebody else's code, you're stuck with whatever interfaces their code was compiled to use. If the language had anonymous interfaces which were type-checked by the VM at class-loading time, then you could have both your duck-typing and most of your static type checking (at the expense that some problems would be caught by the class loader, but that's better than having them only be triggered when the actual code runs).
To be fair, you must concede that while the static languages catch some errors at compile time which might not be caught until runtime (or ideally, QA) with a dynamic/duck language, the static languages also "catch" a great deal of non-errors which the programmer is forced to deal with even though they never would have caused problems at run-time, while having the side-effect of reducing code re-use.
No, this is simply not like this. If a static type system compiler fails to compile the file because of a type error, then there is truly a type error in the program. The idea that some such programs would not have caused problems at runtime is dubious, because what programs can actually run cannot be divorced from which programs compile.
The arguments in "favor" of dynamic typing are simply misaimed. More and better static analysis of code before allowing it to execute is a virtue; the lack of static analysis and rejection of code is not an argument for dynamic type systems, it's an argument against it.
The sort of argument that can be made fairly against static type systems is the following:
Static type systems that are too simple tend to prevent code reuse, while those that allow it better tend to be a lot more complicated (Haskell, anybody?)
Even when a simple type system shouldn't have gotten in the way, programmers will tend to make very bad use of it. My paradigm example is that typical Java programmers tend to put way too many methods in their interfaces (when they use interfaces at all!). The more methods you put in an interface, the less likely somebody else is going to implement that interface, especially if they just need 1/4 of the methods in it.
Languages with powerful static type systems tend to also be languages with strong "closed world" assumptions, where the compiler assumes that all code and all types that will be used at runtime are known at compilation time. This tends to make it hard to develop software that does things like load plugins, or at the very least, makes it so that such programs must forfeit a good chunk of the correctness guarantees that the type system is supposed to provide.
So basically, static type analysis is (a) desirable, (b) hard to get right, (c) easy to misuse.
You can get a "Philly Cheesesteak" just about anywhere in the US, but that's irrelevant to somebody who judges by quality. Imagine how absurd it would be to shut down the thousands of fake phillies all over the country just to benefit some rat who's got the law on his side.
Indeed, that is the reason why the Malaysia claim is not like Protected Designations of Origin. It is worth mentioning, though, that Europe, the stronghold of PDO laws, works the same way as the USA in this regard. An analogue to a Philly Cheesesteak in Europe would be something like Paella Valenciana--a dish whose name incorporates the name of a place (Valencia). That doesn't get legal protection in the EU--a restaurant outside Valencia can call its own dish a "Paella Valenciana" if it wishes.
I find it interesting that Malaysia would be claiming there should be copyright protection for foods, when there isn't any kind of copyright protection for anything else in that country/region -- not in any real sense.
Malaysia isn't actually claiming copyright on food. The use of the term "copyright" here is nothing more than typical Slashdot journalistic standards. What actually has happened is that some minister of something in Malaysia claimed... something over some specific dishes or recipes. What the hell that claim is, what acts are supposed to constitute violations of it, and what exactly the guy thinks should happen to people who violate it, well, that's something that's far from clear.
So please, before you 'grrrr' at me, check your facts.
The "grrrr" wasn't directed at you. It was a parenthetical gripe at the slashdot editors, who, in my opinion, shouldn't have linked some random blog entry about a news story, and should have linking the actual news story instead.
In fact, I think we only have minor disagreements. You compare the Malaysian claim with AOCs; I think that comparison is bad because (a) AOCs are supposed to cover agricultural products, (b) AOCs are supposed to protect export markets for products that are tied to one specific locale. You answer that 'Feta' is an AOC based on a non-geographical name. I have to answer that that's a reasonable criticism of the 'Feta' AOC, but that at least that AOC does have the virtue of covering an actual export market for an agricultural product, something that I can't see the Malaysian recipes claim doing.
As a Serbian I can assure you there are lots of Feta products that are really declared as Feta.
Serbia is not part of the EU. So yeah, you can sell Serbian-made cheese in Serbia and call it "feta," but any cheese you export to the EU may not be labeled so. And if you joined the EU, unless you got a special concession about this, those cheeses you mention would have to change their labeling.
You're not generally allowed to mislabel your products in the USA to make consumers believe that they come from some region that they do not, especially if you do so to mislead consumers into paying a higher price. There exist specific exceptions in regional wine names that are recognized as semi-generics with special rules, and some regional product names that are seen as generics ("parmesan"). You can take your Wisconsin cheese and label it "Parmesan," and nobody will go after you in the United States; but if you label your $5/lb Wisconsin cheese as "Parmigiano Reggiano," that's not cool.
"Appellation d'origine contrôlée" has existed for centuries, and there are plenty of sensible arguments for and against it. I would not mind seeing where Slashdot stands on that issue, but presenting what Malaysia is doing as a brand new concept is ridiculous.
The problem here is that what Malaysia is doing, as described by the article linked from the article linked from the posting (grrrr), isn't in fact a form of AOC. AOC has never been applied to recipes; it has only been applied to ingredients and processed agricultural products.
In the case of an AOC, the intent is clear: if the region of Sancerre makes a remarkable wine and people seek it out as being special, it would be good to prevent winemakers not from Sancerre from labeling ultra-cheap wines as "Sancerre" and selling it for inflated prices. In the case of Malaysian recipes, on the other hand, it's not at all clear what the intent is, since it just cannot be analogous. Recipes are things that people prepare when they want to eat them, not a finished foodstuff that they buy. The closest I can stretch this analogy would be some sort of ban on preventing non-Malaysian companies from labeling frozen or instant packaged meals with the names of the Malaysian dishes, but even that just degenerates into absurdity when you try to apply it to restaurants who cook their own nasi lemak on a per-order basis.
The problem with Parmesan and Champagne is there's not a good generic term for foodstuffs of that type not from that origin, whereas if you could get decent maple syrup outside of Vermont you could call it "maple syrup" and people would actually understand what it is.
There's a perfectly decent generic term for sparkling wine. Talking about grana cheese generically is considerably more difficult, though, at least if you want people to understand you.
Not that we in the US honor Europe's protected designations of origins anyway.
Actually, the USA partially does so; the EU's gripe is that the USA doesn't honor them enough. But basically, in the USA:
You can't generally label a wine, cheese or other such product with a geographic designation that it's not entitled to. You can't take Sonoma Sauvignon Blanc and label it Sancerre. (Or for that matter, you can't take Central Valley Chardonnay and call it Napa Valley.)
However, there are certain names that the USA considers semi-generic, and that are qualified exceptions to the general rule. You can take Sonoma sparkling wine and label it "Californian champagne" for sale in the USA, or fortify some Central Valley red wine and call it Californian port wine. You have to have the geographic descriptor along with the semi-generic name; you can't label your American sparkling wine simply as "Champagne," and you sure as hell can't call your cheap fortified swill an Oporto.
When I was a teen, I always consciously kept track where the North was. Every time I made a turn, I would adjust my imaginary compass - yeah I was some kind of freak. I would also make note of the orientation of some landmarks in every city. After a while, it became an automatism, now (over 20 yrs later) I often amaze people by pointing where the North is with very good accuracy without using a compass. It always works, but if I have been a passenger in a car (or other transport) it takes about half an hour after arriving before I know where the North is. Extra bonus: if the sun is visible, I can read the time of day from its position. I guess everybody can train it with a little bit of effort.
There are several cultures, most famously Australian Aborigines, where you can't even speak the language correctly if you don't have this skill. A quick example is from this article by Lera Borodistky:
Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms -- north, south, east, and west -- to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."
Asking to buy health insurance when you're sick is like asking to buy car insurance after you've already wrecked your car. If you want to have coverage, you must begin paying for it before you need it. By the way, I'm certain that there are abuses that go on in the insurance industry, but if you want health insurance, the general idea is that you sign up for it before you need it.
This is indeed the argument for health insurance mandates (which I support as long as there's a public option health insurance plan), but it fails to address one of the bigger, more pervasive problems with the American private health insurance industry: they're perfectly happy to take your money for years on end, and then when you actually need coverage, to dig out your insurance application and rescind your coverage over any little excuse they can find.
Basically, in actual practice, that argument is defeated by the abuse that the insurers make of it. The best you can do to strengthen it is to forbid insurers from rescinding policy coverage after a certain period of time, say, one year.
The Galileo affair is certainly a textbook case for separation of church and state. It's hard to conclude much more beyond that--and do we really need to? Again, there's a point that Feyerabend makes that is crucial here: the Copernican system only overcame the Ptolemaic one after being developed for at least 200 years, over which there were all kinds of serious objections that needed to be overcome.
Ugh, I didn't make myself clear at all here. Let me try again: one of Feyerabend's central arguments is that many of our dominant scientific theories, like heliocentrism and geodynamicism, only succeeded because people like Galileo pursued them despite overwhelming evidence against them by contemporary standards. The way he puts it is, very roughly, that a bunch of individually refuted theories can lend mutual support to each other and eventually, taken together, cohere and form a new paradigm that topples the old order.
This is why the separation of church and state should be doubly important for Feyerabend, despite his quote about the Church's treatment of Galileo. The Church should not have had the power to stop Galileo from teaching his theory, no matter what the contemporary scientific judgement of his colleagues was. So by my interpretation of Feyerabend's argument about the pursuit of "refuted" theories, it's simply irrelevant whether Galileo turned out to be right in the end.
The GP makes it sound like a disbelief in Science is a new thing, but that's not right. As you say: disbelief in correct, but inconvenient, things is as old as humanity. For proof, look at the trial of Galileo for his support of Copernican Astronomy. Still, nearly 400 years after the event, the Pope is still quoting people who said:
The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune.
Ah, that's a Feyerabend quote--and probably the worst of his otherwise excellent Against Method. Feyerabend is very worth reading, but let it be said that he is somewhat of a troll.
Sure, Galileo, Hansen and Gore can be criticized and torn apart for their flaws and missteps, but in the end, the only thing that matters is if they were right or not.
Science-infatuated people today have a very unfortunate tendency to overstate Galileo's scientific case, and understate the objections of his contemporary astronomer colleagues--which were very good objections, when judged by contemporary standards. The aforementioned book by Feyerabend goes at length about this; Galileo needed to overturn Aristotelian mechanics to really win the scientific contest, and he didn't manage to overturn it.
The Church's treatment of Galileo, also, was more politically and personally motivated than scientifically so: the church authorities initially protected him from his conservative opponents within it, and then he went and wrote a book making fun of the pope. The Galileo affair is certainly a textbook case for separation of church and state. It's hard to conclude much more beyond that--and do we really need to? Again, there's a point that Feyerabend makes that is crucial here: the Copernican system only overcame the Ptolemaic one after being developed for at least 200 years, over which there were all kinds of serious objections that needed to be overcome.
Not that I want to make the parallel case about human-induced climate change, though.
Well then, presumably someone should be able to design an IQ test on which blacks and hispanics consistently outscore whites, asians and jews. Shouldn't they?
No, it doesn't follow. The first question is whether the test format is capable of truly measuring the abilities of the person it's administered to. The point is that in many cases the answer will be "no," because the person is culturally conditioned in a way that they won't sit down and take the test very seriously.
Not to add to what is sure to be an offtopic flamewar, but IQ tests are certainly not culturally biased. Unless, of course, you think logic, math, and spatial recognition are culturally biased.
Spatial cognition has been shown to be culturally variable; check out the work of Stephen Levinson on language and spatial cognition. It is possible to design spatial reasoning tests that are culturally biased in that regard; e.g., the Queensland Test was designed to raise the score of Australian Aborigines relative to Australian Whites.
In fact, there's just nothing culturally neutral about getting somebody to sit down to answer an intelligence test. Read the New Yorker's article on the controversy about the Pirahã and ask yourself, in the end: how would you administer an IQ test to this tribe, and would the results be more indicative of their "intelligence" or of their cultural differences to us?
To paraphrase William Labov: if you want to figure out how intelligent somebody is, you have to enter the appropriate social relationship with that person. IQ tests simply fail this; they presuppose that everybody is a well-mannered urban European middle-class authority-fearing white-coat-deferring sit-downer, who is just delighted to sit down and perform decontextualized, pointless intellectual exercise on command.
However, I feel that it is important to point out that it is not just science that is being neglected by the community; politics, philosophy, social conscience and other highly important fields have also been totally lost to the common mind.
This is an old theme of American history, called anti-intellectualism. The American public isn't so much "anti-science" as anti-intellectual.
I think that GP has a point about the proper relationship between science and policy; all too often people use the authority of science to sneak in policy and value judgements as science (for example, intelligence testing). We need to be critical of the people who insist that science should set policy, as GP recommends.
However, to do so successfully we can't be anti-intellectual, and that's where I part with GP. The Republicans are the party that panders to anti-intellectualism; their war on science was real. G.W. Bush is an anti-intellectual poster boy, too.
This may all sound very high-horsey, however, I challenge anyone to go to a party, bring up a discussion about the question of whether mathematics is invented or discovered, and see how long you can keep it up.
Google has made absolutely ZERO attempt to ascertain the identity or whereabouts of the rightsholders of these "orphan" works. I'm one of them. I have been notified by Google about each of my in-print books (five in all), but NONE of my parents' books, even though they were published by HarperCollins, who used to send me royalty checks for those books and would no doubt be happy to tell Google how to reach me.
So that puts you squarely into category three, "copyright trolls looking to pounce on innocent infringers".
Do you expect anyone in this community to have pity for you? You are denying humanity the benefits of your parents' (out-of-print!) intellectual legacy; then you whine about Google who make it available for humanity, just because you want to wring even more money out of your parents?
I think the GP is wrong, but I still do think there's something very fishy about what Google's getting away with. It's a really bad solution to a a real problem, here. I'd support if if Congress made some sort of compulsory licensing for orphaned books, or made it easier for such books to fall into the public domain, but when it's Google and the Authors' Guild doing backhanded deals between themselves, it is just Evil(TM).
Slashdot Mirror
That follows only if you think that the logicist system for the foundation of mathematics proposed in the Principia is something "similar" to Fortran and the calculus.
The board of directors, of course, are shareholders, and normally some of the very biggest ones. It's not rare for the board to collectively hold a controlling share of a corporation, even without recourse to tricks like share classes with limited voting rights. So saying that corporations don't care about shareholders isn't the most insightful way of putting it; it's more like majority shareholders have interests that are different from minority shareholders.
One example: if you're a majority shareholder, you almost automatically welcome the company's an acquisition of another business (as long as it's at the right price), because it diversifies the income streams to your corporation and thus reduces the risk of the stock that makes up the vast majority of your wealth. A minority shareholder, on the other hand, can simply buy another stock to add to his portfolio, so an acquisition only makes sense if the combined business is more efficient than the pieces held separately.
Actually, let's just pause right there. If the monitor has the correct type of outlet for the mouse's plug, why shouldn't the user be able to plug the mouse into the monitor, and have it work fine? It just means that the monitor has to serve as a peripheral hub for the computer.
The ability to plug in pretty much any device into your computer without needing to have a special adapter card for it. Do you really want to go back to the bad old days where adding an external peripheral to your computer meant adding a custom adapter card just for that one peripheral?
Here's the devices that I have that plug through USB. Can you imagine what nightmare this would be without an universal plug?
Because we don't all really need wireless stuff.
I can't speak for everybody, but I tend to do this by asking questions like the following:
If it's a function that either a lot of stuff depends on (or not a lot, but really important stuff), and we are likely to go back and change it in the future, then yeah, both of those are cases for writing unit tests for it. But if it's not a relatively "core" piece of code (that other things depend on), or if I can't imagine that it's going to get modified in the future, then no unit test. (If the "no revisions" assumption is proven wrong later, then yeah, you can write unit tests then.)
The top targets for unit tests in my book tend to be highly reusable, complex pieces of code that simplify a non-trivial problem that gets encountered in many forms, and where it is likely that you will either (a) get some functional detail wrong that is only discovered in the future, (b) discover a faster way of doing the same thing. For example, code that generically implements a search algorithm deserves to be unit-tested extensively.
I know what duck typing is. I once drank the Ruby koolaid.
Basically, the situation where you can duck type and still get a correctly typed program is when all the objects that may be arguments share a specific type: the type of objects that can respond to the message that occurs in that point of the code. The typical statically typed languages that people use don't have a type system rich enough to express that kind of type, because they don't have a concept like "the anonymous type that is inhabited by values that respond to the 'close' message with no arguments."
To put it in somewhat more concrete terms: every instance of duck typing can be replicated in a language like Java by using a one-method interface. The problem isn't that Java has static types; the problem is that Java makes it too costly in terms of programmer effort to create and implement interfaces; and to make it worse, which interfaces are implemented by a class is determined at compilation time, so that if you have to use somebody else's code, you're stuck with whatever interfaces their code was compiled to use. If the language had anonymous interfaces which were type-checked by the VM at class-loading time, then you could have both your duck-typing and most of your static type checking (at the expense that some problems would be caught by the class loader, but that's better than having them only be triggered when the actual code runs).
No, this is simply not like this. If a static type system compiler fails to compile the file because of a type error, then there is truly a type error in the program. The idea that some such programs would not have caused problems at runtime is dubious, because what programs can actually run cannot be divorced from which programs compile.
The arguments in "favor" of dynamic typing are simply misaimed. More and better static analysis of code before allowing it to execute is a virtue; the lack of static analysis and rejection of code is not an argument for dynamic type systems, it's an argument against it.
The sort of argument that can be made fairly against static type systems is the following:
So basically, static type analysis is (a) desirable, (b) hard to get right, (c) easy to misuse.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Something like a Grammar strict police...
Indeed, that is the reason why the Malaysia claim is not like Protected Designations of Origin. It is worth mentioning, though, that Europe, the stronghold of PDO laws, works the same way as the USA in this regard. An analogue to a Philly Cheesesteak in Europe would be something like Paella Valenciana--a dish whose name incorporates the name of a place (Valencia). That doesn't get legal protection in the EU--a restaurant outside Valencia can call its own dish a "Paella Valenciana" if it wishes.
Malaysia isn't actually claiming copyright on food. The use of the term "copyright" here is nothing more than typical Slashdot journalistic standards. What actually has happened is that some minister of something in Malaysia claimed... something over some specific dishes or recipes. What the hell that claim is, what acts are supposed to constitute violations of it, and what exactly the guy thinks should happen to people who violate it, well, that's something that's far from clear.
The "grrrr" wasn't directed at you. It was a parenthetical gripe at the slashdot editors, who, in my opinion, shouldn't have linked some random blog entry about a news story, and should have linking the actual news story instead.
In fact, I think we only have minor disagreements. You compare the Malaysian claim with AOCs; I think that comparison is bad because (a) AOCs are supposed to cover agricultural products, (b) AOCs are supposed to protect export markets for products that are tied to one specific locale. You answer that 'Feta' is an AOC based on a non-geographical name. I have to answer that that's a reasonable criticism of the 'Feta' AOC, but that at least that AOC does have the virtue of covering an actual export market for an agricultural product, something that I can't see the Malaysian recipes claim doing.
Serbia is not part of the EU. So yeah, you can sell Serbian-made cheese in Serbia and call it "feta," but any cheese you export to the EU may not be labeled so. And if you joined the EU, unless you got a special concession about this, those cheeses you mention would have to change their labeling.
You're not generally allowed to mislabel your products in the USA to make consumers believe that they come from some region that they do not, especially if you do so to mislead consumers into paying a higher price. There exist specific exceptions in regional wine names that are recognized as semi-generics with special rules, and some regional product names that are seen as generics ("parmesan"). You can take your Wisconsin cheese and label it "Parmesan," and nobody will go after you in the United States; but if you label your $5/lb Wisconsin cheese as "Parmigiano Reggiano," that's not cool.
The problem here is that what Malaysia is doing, as described by the article linked from the article linked from the posting (grrrr), isn't in fact a form of AOC. AOC has never been applied to recipes; it has only been applied to ingredients and processed agricultural products.
In the case of an AOC, the intent is clear: if the region of Sancerre makes a remarkable wine and people seek it out as being special, it would be good to prevent winemakers not from Sancerre from labeling ultra-cheap wines as "Sancerre" and selling it for inflated prices. In the case of Malaysian recipes, on the other hand, it's not at all clear what the intent is, since it just cannot be analogous. Recipes are things that people prepare when they want to eat them, not a finished foodstuff that they buy. The closest I can stretch this analogy would be some sort of ban on preventing non-Malaysian companies from labeling frozen or instant packaged meals with the names of the Malaysian dishes, but even that just degenerates into absurdity when you try to apply it to restaurants who cook their own nasi lemak on a per-order basis.
Your own link contradicts you. Champagne has never been a trademark; it's a protected designation of origin.
It turns out now there's a Grana Padano protected designation, so you can't call that kind of cheese grana anymore.
There's a perfectly decent generic term for sparkling wine. Talking about grana cheese generically is considerably more difficult, though, at least if you want people to understand you.
Actually, the USA partially does so; the EU's gripe is that the USA doesn't honor them enough. But basically, in the USA:
There are several cultures, most famously Australian Aborigines, where you can't even speak the language correctly if you don't have this skill. A quick example is from this article by Lera Borodistky:
This is indeed the argument for health insurance mandates (which I support as long as there's a public option health insurance plan), but it fails to address one of the bigger, more pervasive problems with the American private health insurance industry: they're perfectly happy to take your money for years on end, and then when you actually need coverage, to dig out your insurance application and rescind your coverage over any little excuse they can find.
Basically, in actual practice, that argument is defeated by the abuse that the insurers make of it. The best you can do to strengthen it is to forbid insurers from rescinding policy coverage after a certain period of time, say, one year.
Ugh, I didn't make myself clear at all here. Let me try again: one of Feyerabend's central arguments is that many of our dominant scientific theories, like heliocentrism and geodynamicism, only succeeded because people like Galileo pursued them despite overwhelming evidence against them by contemporary standards. The way he puts it is, very roughly, that a bunch of individually refuted theories can lend mutual support to each other and eventually, taken together, cohere and form a new paradigm that topples the old order.
This is why the separation of church and state should be doubly important for Feyerabend, despite his quote about the Church's treatment of Galileo. The Church should not have had the power to stop Galileo from teaching his theory, no matter what the contemporary scientific judgement of his colleagues was. So by my interpretation of Feyerabend's argument about the pursuit of "refuted" theories, it's simply irrelevant whether Galileo turned out to be right in the end.
Ah, that's a Feyerabend quote--and probably the worst of his otherwise excellent Against Method. Feyerabend is very worth reading, but let it be said that he is somewhat of a troll.
Um, do you seriously think that Galileo's contemporaries ought to have judged his theory on the basis of evidence that wouldn't be discovered until at least one hundred years later (like stellar aberration or observation of stellar parallax), not to mention a theory of mechanics that hadn't yet been invented?
Science-infatuated people today have a very unfortunate tendency to overstate Galileo's scientific case, and understate the objections of his contemporary astronomer colleagues--which were very good objections, when judged by contemporary standards. The aforementioned book by Feyerabend goes at length about this; Galileo needed to overturn Aristotelian mechanics to really win the scientific contest, and he didn't manage to overturn it.
The Church's treatment of Galileo, also, was more politically and personally motivated than scientifically so: the church authorities initially protected him from his conservative opponents within it, and then he went and wrote a book making fun of the pope. The Galileo affair is certainly a textbook case for separation of church and state. It's hard to conclude much more beyond that--and do we really need to? Again, there's a point that Feyerabend makes that is crucial here: the Copernican system only overcame the Ptolemaic one after being developed for at least 200 years, over which there were all kinds of serious objections that needed to be overcome.
Not that I want to make the parallel case about human-induced climate change, though.
No, it doesn't follow. The first question is whether the test format is capable of truly measuring the abilities of the person it's administered to. The point is that in many cases the answer will be "no," because the person is culturally conditioned in a way that they won't sit down and take the test very seriously.
Spatial cognition has been shown to be culturally variable; check out the work of Stephen Levinson on language and spatial cognition. It is possible to design spatial reasoning tests that are culturally biased in that regard; e.g., the Queensland Test was designed to raise the score of Australian Aborigines relative to Australian Whites.
In fact, there's just nothing culturally neutral about getting somebody to sit down to answer an intelligence test. Read the New Yorker's article on the controversy about the Pirahã and ask yourself, in the end: how would you administer an IQ test to this tribe, and would the results be more indicative of their "intelligence" or of their cultural differences to us?
To paraphrase William Labov: if you want to figure out how intelligent somebody is, you have to enter the appropriate social relationship with that person. IQ tests simply fail this; they presuppose that everybody is a well-mannered urban European middle-class authority-fearing white-coat-deferring sit-downer, who is just delighted to sit down and perform decontextualized, pointless intellectual exercise on command.
This is an old theme of American history, called anti-intellectualism. The American public isn't so much "anti-science" as anti-intellectual.
I think that GP has a point about the proper relationship between science and policy; all too often people use the authority of science to sneak in policy and value judgements as science (for example, intelligence testing). We need to be critical of the people who insist that science should set policy, as GP recommends.
However, to do so successfully we can't be anti-intellectual, and that's where I part with GP. The Republicans are the party that panders to anti-intellectualism; their war on science was real. G.W. Bush is an anti-intellectual poster boy, too.
Invented, just like chess.