I once had to implement Bresenham's line drawing algorithm for a graphics course. There are already thousands of implementations of that algorithm out there, but by writing my own, I proved the following:
1) That I understood the algorithm very well.
2) That I could write code well enough to embody a relatively complicated idea in software.
You need to have those sorts of assignments in your course of study. Maybe fewer, but certainly at some point in your academic career you personally need to show that you can implement a specific algorithm.
That's only a problem if "identifying apparently similar code" is the end of the cheater-catching process, not the beginning. If it is, then the instructor is dropping the ball.
There are ways to distinguish between groups two and three. The most straightforward is to simply ask, "Is this your own work?" Many cheaters will admit that it's not. If they insist that it is, you can ask for witnesses or source control logs, ask them to explain how the program works and what variables i, j, and k are doing. If the results don't satisfy you one way or the other, you can ask them to modify or reimplement some part of the code in a controlled environment.
I don't think that these plagiarism checkers have caught up a large number of students who actually did their own work. Were that happening, I think a few such people would have written "it happened to me" stories in these very comments.
You're right about the education process being shockingly inefficient in lots of areas. I'm looking forward to the day when computerized, adaptive instruction can quickly gauge your current understanding of a subject and present precisely the material that will allow you to advance your understanding.
Speaking as a liberal, I think that teachers (and institutions, in fact) would have a much easier time failing students if they knew that doing so didn't amount to a death sentence for the student's hopes for a decent, middle-class-or-better life. Much easier to give them a barely-passing grade and hope it serves as a warning to them that they need to buckle down next time.
Middle schools pass the buck to colleges, colleges pass the buck to the job market, until the job market finally passes the buck to the manufacturers and distributors of government cheese.
You can't even say that the strategy is wrong. Many people who floated through high school go on to do impressive things in college. Many people who do mediocre work in college go on to have excellent careers. Like you said, most of what you learn there doesn't add much value to your abilities as a participant in the economy. The only thing that suffers is the ability to distinguish productive from unproductive hires based on academic record, and that wasn't all that discerning to begin with.
We need some sort of verifiable, competence-based reputation system to replace (or at least supplement) the degree system. Something fine-grained enough to say, "he can do algebra and a bit of trig, but only has a rough understanding of calculus. She is fluent in oral but not written Spanish. He knows how to write control structures for eight programming languages, yet somehow recursion still eludes him."
Technically, it's not a memory leak until the application no longer knows that it's holding on to the memory. So long as it's still holding the pointer that points to the memory, it's just bloat.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. You may need to elaborate. Sorry about that.
You're implying that we cannot discern a person's motives for assigning their vote to a certain individual, group, or referendum. That is often true. But if the assignment is a blind one (I'm sure that it's at least as cryptographically feasible as anonymous cybercash), we can almost entirely rule out "because someone is paying me to." Without the ability to verify how the vote was cast, there is little incentive to be a vote purchaser.
Now, a wrinkle comes in here because people upstream need to know how the people downstream used their votes. There would have to be rules governing vote aggregators, and they would most likely become stricter as the number of votes you wield rises.
It is often possible to distinguish between a vote assigned for cash-or-other-prizes and a vote assigned on the basis of conscience. Simply put, in order for you as a vote buyer to successfully buy a vote, you need to communicate the following to a fellow citizen:
1) What the person should do with their vote.
2) What the person shall receive in return (and how).
Now, under my brutal regime, either making or accepting such an offer would be illegal. Making such an offer to a significant fraction of a 300M population directly without attracting notice would be basically impossible in this day and age.
So you'd have to go after the aggregators. But you've got difficulties at all scales. The small-scale aggregators would be difficult to reach and coordinate, for the same reasons that make it difficult to bribe individual voters. The large-scale ones will hopefully care greatly about their reputations, because any whiff of scandal is going to cost them dearly.*
I don't think my system directly addresses the use of "soft influence," where those with political influence can be treated to campaign contributions, fact-finding trips, introductions to other movers and shakers, contacts with people who can hold out lucrative private industry jobs, etc. But neither does the current system.
Out of curiosity, would you consider the status quo "heavily gamed?" I certainly would.
Your argument that my system might only be able to pass popular things has merit. Most people will be assigning their vote to someone they expect to wield it more effectively than they themselves would, which I think puts my system above direct democracy. Even so, we might be able to avoid pulling a California just by instituting a draconian version of pay-go rules. Now, they haven't worked out perfectly in the past, partly because the rules get thrown out when inconvenient. But there is also economic value to deficit spending in some situations.**
My solution would be to have the government run a surplus during good economic times, but I don't know if that would get votes under my own system.
In closing, we currently have a system where billions of corporate dollars are sent to Washington in the hopes of influencing about 650 people who decide legislation. These 650 people make easy targets for corruption, because they have a set amount of influence for a set period of time, and can be expected to maintain that influence as long as they can get a periodic 50% + 1 of their constituents to affirm that influence. Under my system, the number of targets would be greatly expanded, the number of people whose will would be thwarted because they happen to be among the 50% - 1 drops to zero***, gerrymandering becomes irrelevant, and the potential bribers have no guarantee that anyone they try to bribe will maintain their influence into the weekend.
* Under the current system, it's easy enough to manage most scandals: just hope that something distracts the outraged between now and re-election.
** Ever taken out a mortgage? Point made.
*** Right now, I don't have a single person in Washington who I feel authentically represents my will. Obama, sadly, is the closest, and I didn't even vote for him.
>>>> Oh and using 30 mm canon against unarmed civilians - that's REAL heroism.
>> You'd prefer them to land the chopper and do a bayonet charge?
I don't think that's the point.
The guys pulling up in a van to evacuate the wounded showed courage. Had they been actual insurgent-islamofascists-who-hate-our-freedoms-and-our-burger-joints, they would still be acting heroically, because they were helping others at significant risk to their own lives.
The people in the gunship may have acted understandably, may have acted legally, may even have acted appropriately. But there was relatively little risk to their lives. My understanding is that they weren't even within RPG range. In short, they did not act heroically.
When we ascribe heroism to people -- or worse, to one side in a conflict -- rather than to individual actions by individual actors, the violence against the English language is the least of our worries. The real devastation comes from our curtailed ability to see the big picture. Atrocities by "our side" are warped into "heroism", while no understanding is shown towards those who genuinely believe that they are protecting their homeland from an unjust occupation.
Given all the grief us liberals are getting for claiming to know the contents of these soldiers' minds, I think you would do well to show the same reserve that's being asked of their critics.
Also, knowing now that the wounded person was actually an American reporter, not an Iraqi insurgent, does that change the calculation of how justified your supposed "mercy killing" was?
The dude was crawling away, which runs counter to your theory that withholding fire would merely prolong the inevitable.
In Basic Training (Army), when my drill sergeant was explaining the use of a 50-cal in combat, he said that under the Geneva Convention, we could only use it against "equipment", not personnel. Then he added something to the effect of, "But the rucksack the guy's carrying? The helmet he's wearing? That's equipment."
Back then, I was young and dumb enough to enjoy the sentiment.
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
Please corroborate your assertion that NDE experiences occur after the cessation of electrical activity. I'm guessing that they happen *near* death, and not *after* death.
Communism and Fascism are both forms of statism. That doesn't make the terms interchangeable, any more than "human" and "velociraptor" are interchangeable because both are bipeds.
Hint: Communism is when the corporations are beholden to the government. One of the defining features of Fascism is that the government is beholden to the corporations or other private business interests.
Environmentalism is very clearly *not* statism, and the fastest way to make yourself sound like a the-only-good-government-is-a-dead-government douchebag is to say that it is. Many have argued that free markets, private property, and a robust system of class action lawsuits are adequate to serve the goals of the environmental movement. I would argue against the proposition, but the point stands.
If China paid the money needed to effectively police their environment, if they paid the extra cost of using green energy, if they did any of that, their manufacturing costs would go through the roof, and we would start buying our cheap crap from some other country that more effectively despoiled its environment on our behalf.
We reap the benefits of China's poor environmental standards, poor workplace safety, low wages, and awful working conditions. We are able to keep our rivers clean in part because we move our pollution overseas.
As to the USSR, yes, they did some terrible things to their environment. But when they moved from the "communist" column to the "capitalist" column in the 1990s, it wasn't accompanied by a green renaissance. If anything, things have gotten worse, both for the environment and for the lives of the average Russian. A lot of the blame for that falls on us, for encouraging the wholesale looting... I mean, privatization... of state industries.
We already have laws against buying votes, and given the low, low prices at which you can buy a Congressperson these days, I'm not sure the economic incentives are as extreme as you suggest.
The whole thing would have to be web-mediated anyhow, so it should be possible to set up the system so that a person can know how many votes they control, without having any idea where those votes come from. It would be similar to suggestions that are already floating around that would require all campaign contributions to go through a "blind trust", making it impossible for a candidate to know who his donors are.
Sure, I could claim that I'm giving my vote to a certain person. But without corroboration, how much would Exxon pay for my "cross my heart and hope to die?"
You could argue that the lobbying/bribing money would at least be spent more equally, but I consider that a very weak argument.
It's a weak argument when it comes to fairness and egalitarianism. But it's a very, very strong argument when it comes to logistics.
What I mean is, it is much, much easier to bribe one congressman than to bribe a half a million citizens. Plus, there is no effective way to make sure a million people stay bought. You can't make them sign a contract, because selling your vote is illegal.
By the Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity/Fox News definition, perhaps. But to them, the words 'communist', 'socialist', 'fascist', 'liberal', 'progressive', 'satanic', 'social justice', 'community organizer', 'environmentalist', 'atheist', 'academic', and 'intellectual' are all the same word, which is to be applied to things that right-thinking, God-fearing Americans should hate.
I have a question. Given that most of China's pollution happens in the interest of building cheap plastic crap for Americans, does that pollution count against communism or capitalism?
In fact, given that democracies around the world benefit from the extraction of wealth from countries with all manner of illegitimate forms of government, and given our history of ousting any foreign leader who challenges our right to extract their country's wealth at bargain prices, I'm hard pressed to understand how you've made any meaningful claim at all.
We've been having this discussion for thousands of years. It's interesting that, in times of fear and crisis, societies tend to fall back on the totalitarian instincts that generally lead to worse outcomes. It must have something to do with our monkey brains.
Too many people, when they feel that society is headed toward a cliff, hope for some agreeably-minded dictator, or some great catastrophe that will get people lined back up on their side, or some other event that destroys the legitimacy of the status quo. Environmentalists* might hope to use Katrina as a wakeup call for global warming. Tea partiers long for proof of Obama's Kenyan origins, or for health care reform to be so disastrous as to force repeal. In some ways, they're all variations on a theme.
I think part of the problem is, the idea of a single wise man is easy to grasp, but the idea of a fractious, democratic, wisdom-of-crowds approach leading to better decisions is a difficult one to wrap that monkey brain around. It doesn't have the visceral appeal of "follow the alpha male."
I believe in democracy, but I agree with Lovelock that climate change is a strong challenge to democracy's ability to choose wise courses of action. Its complexity makes it hard to grasp and easy to discredit. It affects a broad swath of our economy, which means that there are untold sums of money involved in the decision. Worst, it's a global problem, where those who suffer the ills are not those who reap the rewards, and it's easy for jingoistic arguments to derail progress. You can get pretty far in denialist circles just by shouting "China! China! China!"
My hope is that a series of technological breakthroughs will cut through this gordian knot and render the whole debate moot. But even if that happens, the question should linger: how do we strengthen democracy, and make it less prone to the sort of weaknesses that this debate is revealing?
* I am an environmentalist. But Katrina is an oft-misused example.
I'm disinclined to agree here. Literacy tests for political participation have a very nasty history. Even if they could be administered fairly, they still disenfranchise people who need representation within the system.
Here's how I'd do it. Scrap the current system and replace it with an acyclical directed graph for each individual decision to come before the government.
Now, if I like, I can decide for myself whether my vote will be in the "yay" or "nay" column. Or, I can point my vote toward some other person or organization. If a million people want the ACLU to represent them in all their votes, they would effectively be a voting block unto themselves. If your neighbor decides to give you her vote because she doesn't care about politics, but thinks you can be trusted to represent her convictions, then she can.
You could elaborate the system by allowing multiple pointers based on the type of issue. I might assign my votes on copyright law to Cory Doctorow, who might assign his votes to the EFF. The trick would be categorizing things in a concrete way, since many bills might touch on multiple subjects.
The system is much more flexible and responsive than the current American system, where all our votes are assigned to whoever won our congressional district, for a set period of 2 years. Under my system, if your representative isn't going to vote your way, you can immediately nerf them.
I haven't really thought about how legislation actually gets created, or how the decision is made to bring a particular bill to a vote at a particular time. But I'm imagining that bills could be created by anyone; you could put your vote(s) on the pile at any time, and a formal vote might be triggered whenever the yea votes reached some threshold (say, 40M votes).
You could argue that this will give too much power to those who are too lazy to get involved and study the issues. Perhaps. But I think that knowing that you can put your decisions into effect immediately would make it more rewarding to be involved in the political process.
You could also argue that Glenn Beck would be swinging a million votes around. I have no answer to this argument, as it is absolutely devastating. Seriously, though, it's possible that some dangerous forms of populism would emerge. But I'm intrigued by the idea of letting coalitions emerge and dissipate.
Hmm... I haven't really given much thought to ballot secrecy either. That could really put a spanner in things.
No, seriously. When was the last time you heard of a totalitarian government cancel plans because it lost a popular referendum?
That's exactly what happened when Chavez asked to have term limits removed a few years back. You can argue that it's a very poor democracy, on a number of fronts, but when it comes to the single, defining feature of a democracy -- representing the will of the people (rather than wealthy business interests) -- Venezuela is none too shabby.
The trouble with your complacence is, we're most likely overextended already. There is little evidence that we can provide nine or ten billion people with the sort of comfortable life that counteracts population growth on this planet's resource base.
What we're going to end up with is one hellacious engineering problem after another until some form of equilibrium is reached. Extinction or societal collapse is one option, as is a great big beautiful tomorrow. But any population curbs that are compatible with a free and just society would help improve the odds of the latter.
Another extinction event, the Permian - Triassic (P-Tr), some 251 MYA, is informally known as 'the Great Dying.' Up to 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial species were erased as global ecosystems crumbled. Life itself nearly died - and Peter Ward makes a compelling case in "Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future" that global warming was the primary culprit.
Even ignoring global warming, most of the proposed solutions are still good policy. Energy efficiency, resource efficiency, distributed alternative energy sources, a high tech energy grid... none of these have to avert global warming to be a good idea.
Sure, relational databases can handle lots of very high performance tasks. I don't think that's up for dispute.
I'm skeptical of your premise, that the only problem NoSQL is trying to solve is, "what do I do if my site becomes the next Twitter?" If that were true, it wouldn't be getting the attention that it is right now.
Many of the NoSQL databases have scalability "built in" in a way that relational DBs don't, but the bigger problem that I think NoSQL is trying to solve is, "What if my data doesn't fit easily into a relational schema?"
There are times when you'd like to enrich some bit of your data, adding a new attribute or two, but your current database schema doesn't support the new form of data, and you have to decide how to extend your DB to allow for it.
In my current project, my database includes lots of columns that just hold type data, to say things like "what sort of object does the foreign key refer to," and a couple of columns that hold marshalled hash objects. During a prior project, I suggested implementing what was essentially a key/value pair table inside the project database.
With NoSQL databases, those sorts of contortions aren't necessary.
Other contortions might be, depending on which database you're using. You might end up using a relational database for, say, financial information that requires all the overhead of ACID, transactions, prepared statements, etc., and a NoSQL database for parts of a user forum, and maybe even an ORM to stitch the two together.
One suggestion: if you find yourself storing elaborate XML, YAML, or other formatted data in your DB, and especially if you're trying to use the data in a meaningful way (rather than just spitting out the raw data in response to someone's query), then NoSQL might have something to offer.
I've done little with NoSQL myself, but the point is that they're both "just tools." Neither is going to be objectively better in all situations, both are going to be put through ill-fated attempts do do things that they were never intended to do, neither needs to die in a fire, and there is nothing particularly magic or exotic about NoSQL.
For all but the wealthiest 10% of Venezuela's population, yes, they are much better off now than they were under previous regimes. The lower classes are getting health services, education, and -- horrifying to elitist right wingers like yourself -- political power. Something like 20% of the population was brought up above the poverty line just in the years between 2002 and 2006.
Globovision is basically FOX News in Spanish and on steroids. During the attempted coup against Chavez in 2002, they openly advocated for the coup, deliberately injected false information onto the airwaves (saying that troops were firing on protesters). When the counterprotest began, and the people in the slums came out in massive support of Chavez, they refused to report on it. When they could no longer find anything to spin into a "we are winning" message, they stopped reporting altogether, and ran cartoons instead.
So I don't see much in the way of journalistic ideals coming from them. They are the voice of privilege and corporate power in Venezuela. I would love to see truly independent media in Venezuela, but right now it seems that every outlet is either pro-Chavez propaganda or reactionary propaganda by the economic elites. Neither is particularly healthy for the country.
I'm at a loss to understand why you think the property rights of multinationals, which were often created at gunpoint, or by a handful of corrupt leaders, should be respected. Unless you believe that the resources of a country legitimately belong to a handful of despots with the military muscle to back up their theft.
I know it's tangential, but you write: "Don't build nuclear power plants at all? People die from lack of energy."
Arguably, nuclear is one of the more expensive options available. Also, if you like Alex Jones, then you might consider the high level of centralization, government involvement, and billions of dollars in financial capital needed to make a nuclear power plant viable. You simply can't have your own personal home power generation with nuclear power, the way you can with solar panels, wind, or geothermal.
I do think that if our current coal infrastructure was magically replaced by nuclear power plants, we'd be better off. I think if the third world magically got nuclear power plants and a reliable grid, they'd be better off. But the cost of new nuclear is -- if not entirely prohibitive -- too expensive to justify equating a moratorium on nuclear power to a death sentence.
The cost of solar power has been cut in half every six years since the 1970s, wind energy is nearly as cheap as coal already, and at the moment adding "effective capacity" to the grid by investing in energy efficiency is akin to putting new generation on the grid for 1 to 3 cents per kwh.
I know it's even more off topic, but re: your sig:
1) Google is a corporation, not a branch of government. Since when have libertarians been in favor of using the government to force companies to carry products they don't approve of?
2) Alex Jones calls Google "the biggest corporation in the world, the most wealthy corporation in the world." They're not even in the top 188.
3) Alex Jones has made a career of conspiracy-mongering. No surprise that every little obstacle that arises as he tries to promote his film somehow fits into the grand conspiracy.
P2P websites? Not a terrible idea, but it runs into a few problems.
It's relatively easy to P2P a single, consistent chunk of content. Anything you can get a consistent MD5 hash out of is fine. Websites today aren't like that at all. Most any page you go to today will be dynamically generated, linked to a DB backend, etc. You're going to have to find a way to keep the various P2P sources in sync, at a minimum.
The other problem is that it doesn't solve the big problem: for most sites that are facing these issues, the money spent for bandwidth and hosting is probably small compared to the cost of content generation (read: paying the writers and artists).
Still, for the situation of a small group of volunteers, who are willing to create for free but don't want to be hammered by hosting fees, there might be something to a P2P or website republication system.
Slashdot Mirror
I once had to implement Bresenham's line drawing algorithm for a graphics course. There are already thousands of implementations of that algorithm out there, but by writing my own, I proved the following:
1) That I understood the algorithm very well.
2) That I could write code well enough to embody a relatively complicated idea in software.
You need to have those sorts of assignments in your course of study. Maybe fewer, but certainly at some point in your academic career you personally need to show that you can implement a specific algorithm.
That's only a problem if "identifying apparently similar code" is the end of the cheater-catching process, not the beginning. If it is, then the instructor is dropping the ball.
There are ways to distinguish between groups two and three. The most straightforward is to simply ask, "Is this your own work?" Many cheaters will admit that it's not. If they insist that it is, you can ask for witnesses or source control logs, ask them to explain how the program works and what variables i, j, and k are doing. If the results don't satisfy you one way or the other, you can ask them to modify or reimplement some part of the code in a controlled environment.
I don't think that these plagiarism checkers have caught up a large number of students who actually did their own work. Were that happening, I think a few such people would have written "it happened to me" stories in these very comments.
You're right about the education process being shockingly inefficient in lots of areas. I'm looking forward to the day when computerized, adaptive instruction can quickly gauge your current understanding of a subject and present precisely the material that will allow you to advance your understanding.
Speaking as a liberal, I think that teachers (and institutions, in fact) would have a much easier time failing students if they knew that doing so didn't amount to a death sentence for the student's hopes for a decent, middle-class-or-better life. Much easier to give them a barely-passing grade and hope it serves as a warning to them that they need to buckle down next time.
Middle schools pass the buck to colleges, colleges pass the buck to the job market, until the job market finally passes the buck to the manufacturers and distributors of government cheese.
You can't even say that the strategy is wrong. Many people who floated through high school go on to do impressive things in college. Many people who do mediocre work in college go on to have excellent careers. Like you said, most of what you learn there doesn't add much value to your abilities as a participant in the economy. The only thing that suffers is the ability to distinguish productive from unproductive hires based on academic record, and that wasn't all that discerning to begin with.
We need some sort of verifiable, competence-based reputation system to replace (or at least supplement) the degree system. Something fine-grained enough to say, "he can do algebra and a bit of trig, but only has a rough understanding of calculus. She is fluent in oral but not written Spanish. He knows how to write control structures for eight programming languages, yet somehow recursion still eludes him."
Technically, it's not a memory leak until the application no longer knows that it's holding on to the memory. So long as it's still holding the pointer that points to the memory, it's just bloat.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. You may need to elaborate. Sorry about that.
You're implying that we cannot discern a person's motives for assigning their vote to a certain individual, group, or referendum. That is often true. But if the assignment is a blind one (I'm sure that it's at least as cryptographically feasible as anonymous cybercash), we can almost entirely rule out "because someone is paying me to." Without the ability to verify how the vote was cast, there is little incentive to be a vote purchaser.
Now, a wrinkle comes in here because people upstream need to know how the people downstream used their votes. There would have to be rules governing vote aggregators, and they would most likely become stricter as the number of votes you wield rises.
It is often possible to distinguish between a vote assigned for cash-or-other-prizes and a vote assigned on the basis of conscience. Simply put, in order for you as a vote buyer to successfully buy a vote, you need to communicate the following to a fellow citizen:
1) What the person should do with their vote.
2) What the person shall receive in return (and how).
Now, under my brutal regime, either making or accepting such an offer would be illegal. Making such an offer to a significant fraction of a 300M population directly without attracting notice would be basically impossible in this day and age.
So you'd have to go after the aggregators. But you've got difficulties at all scales. The small-scale aggregators would be difficult to reach and coordinate, for the same reasons that make it difficult to bribe individual voters. The large-scale ones will hopefully care greatly about their reputations, because any whiff of scandal is going to cost them dearly.*
I don't think my system directly addresses the use of "soft influence," where those with political influence can be treated to campaign contributions, fact-finding trips, introductions to other movers and shakers, contacts with people who can hold out lucrative private industry jobs, etc. But neither does the current system.
Out of curiosity, would you consider the status quo "heavily gamed?" I certainly would.
Your argument that my system might only be able to pass popular things has merit. Most people will be assigning their vote to someone they expect to wield it more effectively than they themselves would, which I think puts my system above direct democracy. Even so, we might be able to avoid pulling a California just by instituting a draconian version of pay-go rules. Now, they haven't worked out perfectly in the past, partly because the rules get thrown out when inconvenient. But there is also economic value to deficit spending in some situations.**
My solution would be to have the government run a surplus during good economic times, but I don't know if that would get votes under my own system.
In closing, we currently have a system where billions of corporate dollars are sent to Washington in the hopes of influencing about 650 people who decide legislation. These 650 people make easy targets for corruption, because they have a set amount of influence for a set period of time, and can be expected to maintain that influence as long as they can get a periodic 50% + 1 of their constituents to affirm that influence. Under my system, the number of targets would be greatly expanded, the number of people whose will would be thwarted because they happen to be among the 50% - 1 drops to zero***, gerrymandering becomes irrelevant, and the potential bribers have no guarantee that anyone they try to bribe will maintain their influence into the weekend.
* Under the current system, it's easy enough to manage most scandals: just hope that something distracts the outraged between now and re-election.
** Ever taken out a mortgage? Point made.
*** Right now, I don't have a single person in Washington who I feel authentically represents my will. Obama, sadly, is the closest, and I didn't even vote for him.
>>>> Oh and using 30 mm canon against unarmed civilians - that's REAL heroism.
>> You'd prefer them to land the chopper and do a bayonet charge?
I don't think that's the point.
The guys pulling up in a van to evacuate the wounded showed courage. Had they been actual insurgent-islamofascists-who-hate-our-freedoms-and-our-burger-joints, they would still be acting heroically, because they were helping others at significant risk to their own lives.
The people in the gunship may have acted understandably, may have acted legally, may even have acted appropriately. But there was relatively little risk to their lives. My understanding is that they weren't even within RPG range. In short, they did not act heroically.
When we ascribe heroism to people -- or worse, to one side in a conflict -- rather than to individual actions by individual actors, the violence against the English language is the least of our worries. The real devastation comes from our curtailed ability to see the big picture. Atrocities by "our side" are warped into "heroism", while no understanding is shown towards those who genuinely believe that they are protecting their homeland from an unjust occupation.
Given all the grief us liberals are getting for claiming to know the contents of these soldiers' minds, I think you would do well to show the same reserve that's being asked of their critics.
Also, knowing now that the wounded person was actually an American reporter, not an Iraqi insurgent, does that change the calculation of how justified your supposed "mercy killing" was?
The dude was crawling away, which runs counter to your theory that withholding fire would merely prolong the inevitable.
In Basic Training (Army), when my drill sergeant was explaining the use of a 50-cal in combat, he said that under the Geneva Convention, we could only use it against "equipment", not personnel. Then he added something to the effect of, "But the rucksack the guy's carrying? The helmet he's wearing? That's equipment."
Back then, I was young and dumb enough to enjoy the sentiment.
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
Please corroborate your assertion that NDE experiences occur after the cessation of electrical activity. I'm guessing that they happen *near* death, and not *after* death.
Why yes, I do want to be specific about it.
Communism and Fascism are both forms of statism. That doesn't make the terms interchangeable, any more than "human" and "velociraptor" are interchangeable because both are bipeds.
Hint: Communism is when the corporations are beholden to the government. One of the defining features of Fascism is that the government is beholden to the corporations or other private business interests.
Environmentalism is very clearly *not* statism, and the fastest way to make yourself sound like a the-only-good-government-is-a-dead-government douchebag is to say that it is. Many have argued that free markets, private property, and a robust system of class action lawsuits are adequate to serve the goals of the environmental movement. I would argue against the proposition, but the point stands.
If China paid the money needed to effectively police their environment, if they paid the extra cost of using green energy, if they did any of that, their manufacturing costs would go through the roof, and we would start buying our cheap crap from some other country that more effectively despoiled its environment on our behalf.
We reap the benefits of China's poor environmental standards, poor workplace safety, low wages, and awful working conditions. We are able to keep our rivers clean in part because we move our pollution overseas.
As to the USSR, yes, they did some terrible things to their environment. But when they moved from the "communist" column to the "capitalist" column in the 1990s, it wasn't accompanied by a green renaissance. If anything, things have gotten worse, both for the environment and for the lives of the average Russian. A lot of the blame for that falls on us, for encouraging the wholesale looting... I mean, privatization... of state industries.
We already have laws against buying votes, and given the low, low prices at which you can buy a Congressperson these days, I'm not sure the economic incentives are as extreme as you suggest.
The whole thing would have to be web-mediated anyhow, so it should be possible to set up the system so that a person can know how many votes they control, without having any idea where those votes come from. It would be similar to suggestions that are already floating around that would require all campaign contributions to go through a "blind trust", making it impossible for a candidate to know who his donors are.
Sure, I could claim that I'm giving my vote to a certain person. But without corroboration, how much would Exxon pay for my "cross my heart and hope to die?"
It's a weak argument when it comes to fairness and egalitarianism. But it's a very, very strong argument when it comes to logistics.
What I mean is, it is much, much easier to bribe one congressman than to bribe a half a million citizens. Plus, there is no effective way to make sure a million people stay bought. You can't make them sign a contract, because selling your vote is illegal.
Concern troll much?
Not by any meaningful definition of 'fascism.'
By the Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity/Fox News definition, perhaps. But to them, the words 'communist', 'socialist', 'fascist', 'liberal', 'progressive', 'satanic', 'social justice', 'community organizer', 'environmentalist', 'atheist', 'academic', and 'intellectual' are all the same word, which is to be applied to things that right-thinking, God-fearing Americans should hate.
I have a question. Given that most of China's pollution happens in the interest of building cheap plastic crap for Americans, does that pollution count against communism or capitalism?
In fact, given that democracies around the world benefit from the extraction of wealth from countries with all manner of illegitimate forms of government, and given our history of ousting any foreign leader who challenges our right to extract their country's wealth at bargain prices, I'm hard pressed to understand how you've made any meaningful claim at all.
We've been having this discussion for thousands of years. It's interesting that, in times of fear and crisis, societies tend to fall back on the totalitarian instincts that generally lead to worse outcomes. It must have something to do with our monkey brains.
Too many people, when they feel that society is headed toward a cliff, hope for some agreeably-minded dictator, or some great catastrophe that will get people lined back up on their side, or some other event that destroys the legitimacy of the status quo. Environmentalists* might hope to use Katrina as a wakeup call for global warming. Tea partiers long for proof of Obama's Kenyan origins, or for health care reform to be so disastrous as to force repeal. In some ways, they're all variations on a theme.
I think part of the problem is, the idea of a single wise man is easy to grasp, but the idea of a fractious, democratic, wisdom-of-crowds approach leading to better decisions is a difficult one to wrap that monkey brain around. It doesn't have the visceral appeal of "follow the alpha male."
I believe in democracy, but I agree with Lovelock that climate change is a strong challenge to democracy's ability to choose wise courses of action. Its complexity makes it hard to grasp and easy to discredit. It affects a broad swath of our economy, which means that there are untold sums of money involved in the decision. Worst, it's a global problem, where those who suffer the ills are not those who reap the rewards, and it's easy for jingoistic arguments to derail progress. You can get pretty far in denialist circles just by shouting "China! China! China!"
My hope is that a series of technological breakthroughs will cut through this gordian knot and render the whole debate moot. But even if that happens, the question should linger: how do we strengthen democracy, and make it less prone to the sort of weaknesses that this debate is revealing?
* I am an environmentalist. But Katrina is an oft-misused example.
I'm disinclined to agree here. Literacy tests for political participation have a very nasty history. Even if they could be administered fairly, they still disenfranchise people who need representation within the system.
Here's how I'd do it. Scrap the current system and replace it with an acyclical directed graph for each individual decision to come before the government.
Now, if I like, I can decide for myself whether my vote will be in the "yay" or "nay" column. Or, I can point my vote toward some other person or organization. If a million people want the ACLU to represent them in all their votes, they would effectively be a voting block unto themselves. If your neighbor decides to give you her vote because she doesn't care about politics, but thinks you can be trusted to represent her convictions, then she can.
You could elaborate the system by allowing multiple pointers based on the type of issue. I might assign my votes on copyright law to Cory Doctorow, who might assign his votes to the EFF. The trick would be categorizing things in a concrete way, since many bills might touch on multiple subjects.
The system is much more flexible and responsive than the current American system, where all our votes are assigned to whoever won our congressional district, for a set period of 2 years. Under my system, if your representative isn't going to vote your way, you can immediately nerf them.
I haven't really thought about how legislation actually gets created, or how the decision is made to bring a particular bill to a vote at a particular time. But I'm imagining that bills could be created by anyone; you could put your vote(s) on the pile at any time, and a formal vote might be triggered whenever the yea votes reached some threshold (say, 40M votes).
You could argue that this will give too much power to those who are too lazy to get involved and study the issues. Perhaps. But I think that knowing that you can put your decisions into effect immediately would make it more rewarding to be involved in the political process.
You could also argue that Glenn Beck would be swinging a million votes around. I have no answer to this argument, as it is absolutely devastating. Seriously, though, it's possible that some dangerous forms of populism would emerge. But I'm intrigued by the idea of letting coalitions emerge and dissipate.
Hmm... I haven't really given much thought to ballot secrecy either. That could really put a spanner in things.
Explain to me how Venezuela is not a democracy?
No, seriously. When was the last time you heard of a totalitarian government cancel plans because it lost a popular referendum?
That's exactly what happened when Chavez asked to have term limits removed a few years back. You can argue that it's a very poor democracy, on a number of fronts, but when it comes to the single, defining feature of a democracy -- representing the will of the people (rather than wealthy business interests) -- Venezuela is none too shabby.
The trouble with your complacence is, we're most likely overextended already. There is little evidence that we can provide nine or ten billion people with the sort of comfortable life that counteracts population growth on this planet's resource base.
What we're going to end up with is one hellacious engineering problem after another until some form of equilibrium is reached. Extinction or societal collapse is one option, as is a great big beautiful tomorrow. But any population curbs that are compatible with a free and just society would help improve the odds of the latter.
"According to the geologic record, global warming is almost universally beneficial to life."
Even ignoring global warming, most of the proposed solutions are still good policy. Energy efficiency, resource efficiency, distributed alternative energy sources, a high tech energy grid... none of these have to avert global warming to be a good idea.
Someone who agrees.
Sure, relational databases can handle lots of very high performance tasks. I don't think that's up for dispute.
I'm skeptical of your premise, that the only problem NoSQL is trying to solve is, "what do I do if my site becomes the next Twitter?" If that were true, it wouldn't be getting the attention that it is right now.
Many of the NoSQL databases have scalability "built in" in a way that relational DBs don't, but the bigger problem that I think NoSQL is trying to solve is, "What if my data doesn't fit easily into a relational schema?"
There are times when you'd like to enrich some bit of your data, adding a new attribute or two, but your current database schema doesn't support the new form of data, and you have to decide how to extend your DB to allow for it.
In my current project, my database includes lots of columns that just hold type data, to say things like "what sort of object does the foreign key refer to," and a couple of columns that hold marshalled hash objects. During a prior project, I suggested implementing what was essentially a key/value pair table inside the project database.
With NoSQL databases, those sorts of contortions aren't necessary.
Other contortions might be, depending on which database you're using. You might end up using a relational database for, say, financial information that requires all the overhead of ACID, transactions, prepared statements, etc., and a NoSQL database for parts of a user forum, and maybe even an ORM to stitch the two together.
One suggestion: if you find yourself storing elaborate XML, YAML, or other formatted data in your DB, and especially if you're trying to use the data in a meaningful way (rather than just spitting out the raw data in response to someone's query), then NoSQL might have something to offer.
I've done little with NoSQL myself, but the point is that they're both "just tools." Neither is going to be objectively better in all situations, both are going to be put through ill-fated attempts do do things that they were never intended to do, neither needs to die in a fire, and there is nothing particularly magic or exotic about NoSQL.
For all but the wealthiest 10% of Venezuela's population, yes, they are much better off now than they were under previous regimes. The lower classes are getting health services, education, and -- horrifying to elitist right wingers like yourself -- political power. Something like 20% of the population was brought up above the poverty line just in the years between 2002 and 2006.
Globovision is basically FOX News in Spanish and on steroids. During the attempted coup against Chavez in 2002, they openly advocated for the coup, deliberately injected false information onto the airwaves (saying that troops were firing on protesters). When the counterprotest began, and the people in the slums came out in massive support of Chavez, they refused to report on it. When they could no longer find anything to spin into a "we are winning" message, they stopped reporting altogether, and ran cartoons instead.
So I don't see much in the way of journalistic ideals coming from them. They are the voice of privilege and corporate power in Venezuela. I would love to see truly independent media in Venezuela, but right now it seems that every outlet is either pro-Chavez propaganda or reactionary propaganda by the economic elites. Neither is particularly healthy for the country.
I'm at a loss to understand why you think the property rights of multinationals, which were often created at gunpoint, or by a handful of corrupt leaders, should be respected. Unless you believe that the resources of a country legitimately belong to a handful of despots with the military muscle to back up their theft.
I know it's tangential, but you write: "Don't build nuclear power plants at all? People die from lack of energy."
Arguably, nuclear is one of the more expensive options available. Also, if you like Alex Jones, then you might consider the high level of centralization, government involvement, and billions of dollars in financial capital needed to make a nuclear power plant viable. You simply can't have your own personal home power generation with nuclear power, the way you can with solar panels, wind, or geothermal.
I do think that if our current coal infrastructure was magically replaced by nuclear power plants, we'd be better off. I think if the third world magically got nuclear power plants and a reliable grid, they'd be better off. But the cost of new nuclear is -- if not entirely prohibitive -- too expensive to justify equating a moratorium on nuclear power to a death sentence.
The cost of solar power has been cut in half every six years since the 1970s, wind energy is nearly as cheap as coal already, and at the moment adding "effective capacity" to the grid by investing in energy efficiency is akin to putting new generation on the grid for 1 to 3 cents per kwh.
I know it's even more off topic, but re: your sig:
1) Google is a corporation, not a branch of government. Since when have libertarians been in favor of using the government to force companies to carry products they don't approve of?
2) Alex Jones calls Google "the biggest corporation in the world, the most wealthy corporation in the world." They're not even in the top 188.
3) Alex Jones has made a career of conspiracy-mongering. No surprise that every little obstacle that arises as he tries to promote his film somehow fits into the grand conspiracy.
P2P websites? Not a terrible idea, but it runs into a few problems.
It's relatively easy to P2P a single, consistent chunk of content. Anything you can get a consistent MD5 hash out of is fine. Websites today aren't like that at all. Most any page you go to today will be dynamically generated, linked to a DB backend, etc. You're going to have to find a way to keep the various P2P sources in sync, at a minimum.
The other problem is that it doesn't solve the big problem: for most sites that are facing these issues, the money spent for bandwidth and hosting is probably small compared to the cost of content generation (read: paying the writers and artists).
Still, for the situation of a small group of volunteers, who are willing to create for free but don't want to be hammered by hosting fees, there might be something to a P2P or website republication system.