I think the answer to your ending "why" is that statism ends up evoking the same form of behaviors as religions. Saying "we need more laws" is like a prayer or chant. The minds of most people simply don't seem to be able to operate in a conceptual framework of general principles. Which may also be why they are also unable to see absurd logical contradictions btw. the conflicting belief systems in their heads.
That's right, we need more laws! Will another 120000pages do, or isn't that enough? Is there any limit to how many laws we should have?
Did you know there's a law against trespassing? Why not simply define one's property to be some number of meters above, say 50, and be done with it? Then we don't need another law to be interpreted in ways never intended to bust people for all the wrong reasons. We can just use the existing laws.
Do you know what "generalization" means???
BTW, no one really can "look" into your windows, rather, you radiate light waves out of them. If you don't want people collecting those light waves, close your fucking curtains or blinds!
And do you really believe that laws to protect people from spying, by government, will be enforced? Who is going to enforce them, the government? See any problem with that?
At this point, we lack institutions to enforce law on the government. Many laws to protect citizens are written in such a way that there is no penalty for government entities breaking them anyway. And even when there are penalties, it's much more difficult to initiate an indictment vs. if you break a law. We need some radically different mechanism to handle this, such as having a citizen owned bank clear all the tax payments to.gov. Then have standing grand juries which can be petitioned by citizens to investigate alleged crimes by.gov agents. If a prosecutor then fails to prosecute an indictment brought by the grand jury, the jury can instruct the bank to pull the plug on funding that entire branch of.gov. Just shut the fucking thing down. Gone. Ie., there must be mechanisms for the citizenry to peacefully de-legitimize and dissolve the.gov at various levels for failure to abide by the law.
You may have been able to simply rename the encrypted file.pdf, and it would fly through the filter. Then instruct them to rename it on their end, if need be.
They should know not to have any sort of personally identifiable information of any employees other than themselves on a personally owned computer, or a work owned computer lacking an encrypted drive. That is a big no-no. Not nearly as big as having classified outside of where it belongs, but still a thing that if someone does it, they should be seriously demoted. Someone at the level of a director should not be fucking up like this.
No. There is no objective definition of the "spirit" of anything. Law must not be subjective, or else it is impossible for anyone to ever be sure that they are not breaking a law.
A law was passed making it is a crime to intercept someone's phone conversation by "wiretapping" (well understood to mean law enforcement authorities going to the phone company and plugging their recorder into your line) without a warrant. The "spirit" of this law was in fact to protect people's constitutional rights. That is often how laws are sold. The unintended consequences are rarely understood in advance.
But the authorities decided that the "spirit" of this law meant something entirely different--that if an ordinary person records a phone call without informing the caller, then they are guilty of wiretapping.
99% of people now accept this like some sort of religious dogma. But it is utterly insane. It's not a crime for me to remember what a caller said using my brain right? But the moment I add a recorder, I become a felon?
He said iridium, not indium! Geez, I hope you aren't a pharmacist!
Besides, indium as used in LEDs isn't fabricated into anything as metallic, elemental indium, but rather as part of compounds with other elements, aka, InGaN, InGaAs, etc.
There are laws against discrimination based on gender among other things, right, passed by these same idiots? Not that I think this _should_ be illegal. But it is, AFAIK, and the laws should be used aggressively against the people who asked for them.
I thought Japan was already changing its constitution to allow having a regular military, implying that they aren't fully confident that the US has their backs?
As for NATO, you are entirely correct. In fact, we promised Russia to not do what we have actually done. The situation we should have carefully sought to avoid is that of a cornered bear. In doing just the opposite, our stupidity is extinction worthy.
Yes you are quite right. I really just wanted to express the irony of government competence occurring mostly when the.gov is doing stuff counter to the well being of its citizens.
Does anyone see that there is something fundamentally wrong with legislating about every highly specific scenario?
We are a species with a technological civilization complete with nuclear bombs, and we can't even figure out how to define right and wrong as it pertains to the human condition in general terms. There's something really fucked up about us. There should really only be about 2 pages of laws for people, 5-10 for small businesses, and maybe up to about a hundred for corps., not including standards.
No, I'd say they do know the law very well and use the widest possible interpretation of it to develop any excuse they can to stop and detain people. Once detained they will attempt to provoke you. Then they will arrest you for disorderly conduct or something, and when you protest you get beat up and charged with resisting arrest. Which of course is ridiculous since you wouldn't have gotten an attitude in the first place if you hadn't been threatened with arrest for no good cause.
At this time, if you simply call the cops to complain about something, and they come to your house, you stand a very good chance of getting beaten up and arrested.
On principle since you lodged the complaint, you should be able to order the cops off your property at any time, whether politely or with curse words, and it should be a serious crime for them to not immediately comply. But in reality, if they don't want to leave, your ordering them out will be interpreted as a threat to them. They will then arrest you for resisting arrest, and beat the shit out of you in your own home.
All of this is fueled by the law, both legislation and case law. Laws are interpreted in ways never intended, to turn ordinary people into criminals.
Everyone must understand, that the state doesn't give a shit about crime, the common good, or any such nonsense. The state is an entity composed of people, who act according to the incentives they face. For cops, it is simple: They are rewarded for arresting people. Period. They can paint "to protect and to serve" on their cars, but their true purpose is to arrest people. And so they will arrest people for any fucking reason they can find, and go to great lengths to find ways and means of arresting more people. Including by subverting the law and Constitution which protects citizens.
Even if they break the law, the usual consequence is that you will be bankrupted to defend yourself, and case law may result that will make their overreach unlikely to affect someone else. Even if you sue, and win, it won't be the cops who pay. It will be the municipality. The taxpayers. The victim!
Even the laws which are designed to protect you will be used against you. E.g. "wiretapping" laws were intended to prohibit only the state from recording your communications without a warrant. Then it was turned around and used to criminalize people for recording private conversations without consent.
It's to the point now where everyone is conditioned to believe that this is acceptable. When the opposite should actually be true--anyone should have the right to record freely any communication directed at them from any source, regardless of consent.
Additional insanity prevails with the shit about kids sending their nude photos and getting busted for "distributing child porn." when it's their own fucking bodies! Then if you happen to be a recipient of such a photo, of a minor, you can get busted for possession regardless of intent to acquire such a thing.
The only law that should apply here is that kidnapping, extortion, etc., ie., any form of *coercion* to obtain images of anyone, adult OR child, against their will (and psychological manipulation of a child by a caretaker would constitute coercion)--that and only that can be a crime. As it stands we have instead criminalized nature itself (nudity cannot ever be a crime, as it is simply nature) and/or the collection of light waves travelling through space.
By the simple fact that these are logical absurdities one can confidently predict that unless we stop this shit, and instead generalize and simplify our laws around a small set of fundamental prohibitions that when violated clearly deprive a victim of life, liberty, or property, then we will continue marching on toward dystopia. As for the cops, first the unions have to go. Next, violations of fundamental rights of citizens must carry the same criminal AND civil penalties that a normal person would face, and where the individual cop can be exposed to full personal liability after getting fired.
Or they could just make a car be a fucking car, and use something called wires to connect shit together! There is no need for "infotainment" integrated into a car. Passengers can use portable devices. I won't buy a car with a built-in TV, internet connected or not. And it's looking like I will never buy a new car again for the rest of my stay on this planet. I'll be seeking out used vehicles only with wires only inside.
The problem with data is that it means nothing to the individual. I don't want to be the ONE that gets attacked by a criminal and have no means of defense.
Furthermore, the probability of accident is something that I can influence heavily--frankly, it's stupid people that shoot themselves or leave guns laying around loaded, I can do many things to ensure I'm not one of them.
Also, the past is not a predictor of the future. If there is an event, e.g. Hurricane Katrina, then the odds of getting victimized by criminals (or rouge state actors) may increase dramatically.
Utilitarian ethics have little place in a free society. Governance must not destroy the lives of a few just because the statistics say that many will benefit. If you could truly imagine yourself in the shoes of one of those few, you would understand what I am saying.
Look, I support the fundamental right to gun ownership for reasons I will explain in a moment, but I think their ownership could be governed much differently, while still preserving the essence of the fundamental right. What is frustrating is how unoriginal the ideas always are. I do not have the time to explain alternatives here. More importantly, on why the right afforded by the 2nd Amendment *should* exist:
Self-ownership is and must be a defining characteristic of a free society. The right to life as well. It follows from this that one MUST be able to defend themselves from threats to one's own life. Only an idiot would posit that the government can defend us. Plus, governments can and do fail in general.
So, to be free, the right to own a weapon must exist. At this time, the gun is the one tool that still best serves this aim. I don't like this state of affairs, but I accept its reality.
The alternative, a society in which one's individual existence can be discounted through statistics, and in which you are not permitted to preserve your own life is you happen to fall out of favor, is not free. It is collectivism, where the individual has no significance. All that matters is optimizing the statistics, and if you are one of those in the statistical "few" who loose, tough shit.
Collectivism must not be accepted. It should be fought.
And many of those who successfully predicted it, made faulty investment choices in response to it! Just seeing it coming was no predictor of being able to profit from it--mainly because the whole system is just too complicated! Economists are getting deep into models based on a few questionably measured variables, hoping to predict the behavior of a system with what, quadrillions of variables that we don't even understand yet?
At this point, I've come to the conclusion that all government is illegitimate unless a working predictive model of human society is forthcoming. Since the psychology and social sciences can't even agree on the significance of a one or two basic variables in predicting the outcome of a single human development from childhood to adulthood, I don't think that predictive model is going to arrive any time soon.
THIS is the problem with global warming--the science may very well be right. But those arrogant scientists and those who think they are so intelligent therefore they must know how to run the world suddenly slip into cognitive dissonance when they advocate that government should "do something" about it, since, neither government, or anyone, has any working model of society. So how can we predict the probability of the success of any solutions? We can't, and in fact, the likelihood of precipitating even worse disaster may be just as high as solving the problem.
Even the simplest program flow control with nothing but a few if then else statements is logic, yes indeed.
Here we go with the "anybody can code" theory again. I will only say this--I think it's bullshit because there is much more to it than just being able to spell things out step by step. I will simply give an anecdote. If you think it's meaningless, fine. Hopefully some will "see" the meaning here:
I once hired an intern to help me with electronics design work. Part of his job would be to learn to use the scripting facilities of a PCB CAD program, then write a program to take human data entry input descriptions of high pin count devices and automatically turn them into the functional and mechanical models needed within the program, a process which, to do by hand, is extremely tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming.
Well this kid absolutely kicked ass on this problem, and wrote a piece of software that is now an important asset to my operation, in just about 2 months.
He also tried to make a few actual PCBs. Here he didn't fare so well. The first run had a serious oversight--forgot to see if the mechanical orientation of a connector mated correctly with another--that sort of thing. So he revised it and we did a 2nd run. Uh-oh, another few small mistakes that made it not quite useful. I think the 3rd rev. turned out Ok.
Now this sort of success rate is not quite good enough in the hardware design world, because, re-spins of boards are $$$. What's even worse is when lack of attention to detail results in faults you don't discover until some time down the road, when suddenly 1000s of products come back on warranty because someone didn't take the time to read every single fucking word of fine print in a datasheet, and investigate the potential significance of every single ambiguity!
Can anyone do this? No fucking way!
I am not trying to say that my intern could not have developed more attention to detail with experience, or that all people who aren't inherently this perfectionist can never develop satisfactory attention to detail. It is highly possible and probable that some might. But I am absolutely certain that there are also some people who can never, ever, develop the sort of attention to detail needed to do engineering with a success rate high enough (in the >=95%, preferably 99% range, or even much higher, depending on the sub-field) to be successful, regardless of their overall intelligence.
Now what has this got to do with whether anyone can code or not, since clearly they are different, or else why did my intern do so well at the programming problem and not so well at the hardware design?
For starters, programming has a much shorter feedback period. You blow two board designs, and by the time the 3rd is working, your competitor has had a several month lead in the marketplace. But if you are playing footloose with code, you notice the big errors, and are able to correct them, in minutes or seconds.
However, what separates programming from recipe writing is that you are dealing with a machine that has absolutely no idea what you really mean, and so ultimately, the level of attention to detail required to get programs to work right is actually very high. High enough in fact, that when combined with the fact that one must learn a programming language, which involves some unavoidable level of abstractions as well as all sorts of weird arbitrary rules, the result is that there will be a proportion of people, again regardless of intelligence, who will simply be unable to deal with it and will give up due to frustration.
The programmers who persist and get past the frustration do so because there is something that makes them inherently like programming, and this, by definition, cannot be learned or taught.
Finally, there will be some who will struggle to grasp even basic abstractions, and even more who will forever be baffled by higher abstractions. Now many might be able to accomplish useful goals through progr
I think based on a number of factors, and observe, that men and women are very different indeed. I do not think that women contribute nothing different than men, for that would be an unwarranted conclusion, ie., there just isn't enough evidence. The truth is I just don't know. So I have two perspectives on this:
1. As you implied, men and women are emotionally different, as well as different in many ways which we probably don't even know about, plus the other kinds of differences we do know about. Though, the last time I looked into this, there didn't seem to be any remarkable science suggesting that we differ radically in cognitive approach, though there are probably some more subtle general differences that may become better understood in time. There does seem to be slight differences in variance of IQ for ex., though this is probably only relevant at the tails, and not so much for the -0/+2 sigma band likely to account for most programmers. Nor is it clear how differences in IQ map to cognitive skill distributions.
The point being, that I strongly disagree with the self-contradictory nature of feminist arguments, that on one hand gender differences are all socially constructed, yet in the next breath, I hear them tell me how having diversity of gender, race, sexuality, etc. leads to "more solutions."
I don't think there is any proof of this at all. But I will grant you that it is, remotely, plausible.
But if we are going to accept that as an open hypothesis, then there's a big problem with "all gender differences are socially constructed" don't you think? Because, IF the socially constructed theory is true, THEN it is the only mechanism by which diversity of people types can lead to "more solutions!" Yet it is the goal of feminists to ELIMINATE socially constructed conditioning, isn't it? Which means feminism's goals are mutually exclusive. If you eliminate the sources of social conditioning, you are left with an amorphous mass of undifferentiated personalities--in which diversity does not and cannot exist!
2. So to approach this scientifically, we need two things: a) evidence that diversity of gender leads to better solutions--however you want to judge what constitutes better is open to debate. But just "more" solutions I don't think really matters because having more shitty solutions does no one any good, which doesn't help our crusade to make the world a better place does it?
b) We need further evidence that *gender* itself is the CAUSE of better solutions. This is tricky, because the social dynamics of co-ed vs. predominantly unisex environments may differ. For pete's sake, there are even pheromones! We have only begun to scratch the surface as to how many subtle variables may be involved, many of which are side effects of gender and yet which may affect outcome.
At this point, I'm quite certain that no such evidence exists for gender being causative of "better solutions". Frankly, I don't even think human beings are capable of carrying out this science objectively in the first place.
So what if it's true anyway? What does it mean? Does it justify force of law to compel male dominated coding communities to invite and "be nice" to women, since it seems the slightest offense can make the typical women completely loose confidence in her most deeply held interests?
Once again we run into a serious problem of logical contradictions and mutually exclusive goals if we go down this road, because remember--the premise is that men and women ARE fundamentally different, or else diversity is FALSE. And so if we are still working with that premise, and we really have no choice because it is true and everybody knows it--then it is also possible (and even likely) that men and women differ significantly in the degree to which their average personalities are drawn to programming!
Therefore, this entire issue of "there aren't enough women in programming" is a non-issue because IT IS THE VERY MANIFESTATION OF DIVERSITY!
Why on earth would you teach Java to young students with on average next to zero programming experience? Are you trying your best to ensure that they never want anything to do with programming again for the rest of their lives?
Java is pedagogically useless at a minimum and at worst counterproductive as an introductory language. WTF is a "class" supposed to mean to someone who doesn't even know what a variable is, or why a semicolon is needed? Here, this guy says it better than I can:
Slashdot Mirror
Holy shit, someone who gets it!
So someone giving a Ted talk constitutes a proof?
Yeah, let's just liquidate the Fortune 500 and re-distribute it all. Are you sure the world will be a much better place?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I think the answer to your ending "why" is that statism ends up evoking the same form of behaviors as religions. Saying "we need more laws" is like a prayer or chant. The minds of most people simply don't seem to be able to operate in a conceptual framework of general principles. Which may also be why they are also unable to see absurd logical contradictions btw. the conflicting belief systems in their heads.
That's right, we need more laws! Will another 120000pages do, or isn't that enough? Is there any limit to how many laws we should have?
Did you know there's a law against trespassing? Why not simply define one's property to be some number of meters above, say 50, and be done with it? Then we don't need another law to be interpreted in ways never intended to bust people for all the wrong reasons. We can just use the existing laws.
Do you know what "generalization" means???
BTW, no one really can "look" into your windows, rather, you radiate light waves out of them. If you don't want people collecting those light waves, close your fucking curtains or blinds!
And do you really believe that laws to protect people from spying, by government, will be enforced? Who is going to enforce them, the government? See any problem with that?
At this point, we lack institutions to enforce law on the government. Many laws to protect citizens are written in such a way that there is no penalty for government entities breaking them anyway. And even when there are penalties, it's much more difficult to initiate an indictment vs. if you break a law. We need some radically different mechanism to handle this, such as having a citizen owned bank clear all the tax payments to .gov. Then have standing grand juries which can be petitioned by citizens to investigate alleged crimes by .gov agents. If a prosecutor then fails to prosecute an indictment brought by the grand jury, the jury can instruct the bank to pull the plug on funding that entire branch of .gov. Just shut the fucking thing down. Gone. Ie., there must be mechanisms for the citizenry to peacefully de-legitimize and dissolve the .gov at various levels for failure to abide by the law.
You may have been able to simply rename the encrypted file .pdf, and it would fly through the filter. Then instruct them to rename it on their end, if need be.
They should know not to have any sort of personally identifiable information of any employees other than themselves on a personally owned computer, or a work owned computer lacking an encrypted drive. That is a big no-no. Not nearly as big as having classified outside of where it belongs, but still a thing that if someone does it, they should be seriously demoted. Someone at the level of a director should not be fucking up like this.
No. There is no objective definition of the "spirit" of anything. Law must not be subjective, or else it is impossible for anyone to ever be sure that they are not breaking a law.
A law was passed making it is a crime to intercept someone's phone conversation by "wiretapping" (well understood to mean law enforcement authorities going to the phone company and plugging their recorder into your line) without a warrant. The "spirit" of this law was in fact to protect people's constitutional rights. That is often how laws are sold. The unintended consequences are rarely understood in advance.
But the authorities decided that the "spirit" of this law meant something entirely different--that if an ordinary person records a phone call without informing the caller, then they are guilty of wiretapping.
99% of people now accept this like some sort of religious dogma. But it is utterly insane. It's not a crime for me to remember what a caller said using my brain right? But the moment I add a recorder, I become a felon?
He said iridium, not indium! Geez, I hope you aren't a pharmacist!
Besides, indium as used in LEDs isn't fabricated into anything as metallic, elemental indium, but rather as part of compounds with other elements, aka, InGaN, InGaAs, etc.
There are laws against discrimination based on gender among other things, right, passed by these same idiots? Not that I think this _should_ be illegal. But it is, AFAIK, and the laws should be used aggressively against the people who asked for them.
I thought Japan was already changing its constitution to allow having a regular military, implying that they aren't fully confident that the US has their backs?
As for NATO, you are entirely correct. In fact, we promised Russia to not do what we have actually done. The situation we should have carefully sought to avoid is that of a cornered bear. In doing just the opposite, our stupidity is extinction worthy.
Yes you are quite right. I really just wanted to express the irony of government competence occurring mostly when the .gov is doing stuff counter to the well being of its citizens.
Does anyone see that there is something fundamentally wrong with legislating about every highly specific scenario?
We are a species with a technological civilization complete with nuclear bombs, and we can't even figure out how to define right and wrong as it pertains to the human condition in general terms. There's something really fucked up about us. There should really only be about 2 pages of laws for people, 5-10 for small businesses, and maybe up to about a hundred for corps., not including standards.
No, I'd say they do know the law very well and use the widest possible interpretation of it to develop any excuse they can to stop and detain people. Once detained they will attempt to provoke you. Then they will arrest you for disorderly conduct or something, and when you protest you get beat up and charged with resisting arrest. Which of course is ridiculous since you wouldn't have gotten an attitude in the first place if you hadn't been threatened with arrest for no good cause.
At this time, if you simply call the cops to complain about something, and they come to your house, you stand a very good chance of getting beaten up and arrested.
On principle since you lodged the complaint, you should be able to order the cops off your property at any time, whether politely or with curse words, and it should be a serious crime for them to not immediately comply. But in reality, if they don't want to leave, your ordering them out will be interpreted as a threat to them. They will then arrest you for resisting arrest, and beat the shit out of you in your own home.
All of this is fueled by the law, both legislation and case law. Laws are interpreted in ways never intended, to turn ordinary people into criminals.
Everyone must understand, that the state doesn't give a shit about crime, the common good, or any such nonsense. The state is an entity composed of people, who act according to the incentives they face. For cops, it is simple: They are rewarded for arresting people. Period. They can paint "to protect and to serve" on their cars, but their true purpose is to arrest people. And so they will arrest people for any fucking reason they can find, and go to great lengths to find ways and means of arresting more people. Including by subverting the law and Constitution which protects citizens.
Even if they break the law, the usual consequence is that you will be bankrupted to defend yourself, and case law may result that will make their overreach unlikely to affect someone else. Even if you sue, and win, it won't be the cops who pay. It will be the municipality. The taxpayers. The victim!
Even the laws which are designed to protect you will be used against you. E.g. "wiretapping" laws were intended to prohibit only the state from recording your communications without a warrant. Then it was turned around and used to criminalize people for recording private conversations without consent.
It's to the point now where everyone is conditioned to believe that this is acceptable. When the opposite should actually be true--anyone should have the right to record freely any communication directed at them from any source, regardless of consent.
Additional insanity prevails with the shit about kids sending their nude photos and getting busted for "distributing child porn." when it's their own fucking bodies! Then if you happen to be a recipient of such a photo, of a minor, you can get busted for possession regardless of intent to acquire such a thing.
The only law that should apply here is that kidnapping, extortion, etc., ie., any form of *coercion* to obtain images of anyone, adult OR child, against their will (and psychological manipulation of a child by a caretaker would constitute coercion)--that and only that can be a crime. As it stands we have instead criminalized nature itself (nudity cannot ever be a crime, as it is simply nature) and/or the collection of light waves travelling through space.
By the simple fact that these are logical absurdities one can confidently predict that unless we stop this shit, and instead generalize and simplify our laws around a small set of fundamental prohibitions that when violated clearly deprive a victim of life, liberty, or property, then we will continue marching on toward dystopia. As for the cops, first the unions have to go. Next, violations of fundamental rights of citizens must carry the same criminal AND civil penalties that a normal person would face, and where the individual cop can be exposed to full personal liability after getting fired.
Or they could just make a car be a fucking car, and use something called wires to connect shit together! There is no need for "infotainment" integrated into a car. Passengers can use portable devices. I won't buy a car with a built-in TV, internet connected or not. And it's looking like I will never buy a new car again for the rest of my stay on this planet. I'll be seeking out used vehicles only with wires only inside.
The NSA appears to be one of the few competent .gov agencies. Quite ironic that the government only does well mostly things it really shouldn't do.
Like you can ban drugs. How's that working out?
How you can appear to be a student of the founding documents of the USA and not comprehend that positive rights are a contradiction is beyond me.
The problem with data is that it means nothing to the individual. I don't want to be the ONE that gets attacked by a criminal and have no means of defense.
Furthermore, the probability of accident is something that I can influence heavily--frankly, it's stupid people that shoot themselves or leave guns laying around loaded, I can do many things to ensure I'm not one of them.
Also, the past is not a predictor of the future. If there is an event, e.g. Hurricane Katrina, then the odds of getting victimized by criminals (or rouge state actors) may increase dramatically.
Utilitarian ethics have little place in a free society. Governance must not destroy the lives of a few just because the statistics say that many will benefit. If you could truly imagine yourself in the shoes of one of those few, you would understand what I am saying.
Look, I support the fundamental right to gun ownership for reasons I will explain in a moment, but I think their ownership could be governed much differently, while still preserving the essence of the fundamental right. What is frustrating is how unoriginal the ideas always are. I do not have the time to explain alternatives here. More importantly, on why the right afforded by the 2nd Amendment *should* exist:
Self-ownership is and must be a defining characteristic of a free society. The right to life as well. It follows from this that one MUST be able to defend themselves from threats to one's own life. Only an idiot would posit that the government can defend us. Plus, governments can and do fail in general.
So, to be free, the right to own a weapon must exist. At this time, the gun is the one tool that still best serves this aim. I don't like this state of affairs, but I accept its reality.
The alternative, a society in which one's individual existence can be discounted through statistics, and in which you are not permitted to preserve your own life is you happen to fall out of favor, is not free. It is collectivism, where the individual has no significance. All that matters is optimizing the statistics, and if you are one of those in the statistical "few" who loose, tough shit.
Collectivism must not be accepted. It should be fought.
I just want to point out that most people here think that for a finite amount of money, they should be able to receive an infinite amount of bits.
And many of those who successfully predicted it, made faulty investment choices in response to it! Just seeing it coming was no predictor of being able to profit from it--mainly because the whole system is just too complicated! Economists are getting deep into models based on a few questionably measured variables, hoping to predict the behavior of a system with what, quadrillions of variables that we don't even understand yet?
At this point, I've come to the conclusion that all government is illegitimate unless a working predictive model of human society is forthcoming. Since the psychology and social sciences can't even agree on the significance of a one or two basic variables in predicting the outcome of a single human development from childhood to adulthood, I don't think that predictive model is going to arrive any time soon.
THIS is the problem with global warming--the science may very well be right. But those arrogant scientists and those who think they are so intelligent therefore they must know how to run the world suddenly slip into cognitive dissonance when they advocate that government should "do something" about it, since, neither government, or anyone, has any working model of society. So how can we predict the probability of the success of any solutions? We can't, and in fact, the likelihood of precipitating even worse disaster may be just as high as solving the problem.
Even the simplest program flow control with nothing but a few if then else statements is logic, yes indeed.
Here we go with the "anybody can code" theory again. I will only say this--I think it's bullshit because there is much more to it than just being able to spell things out step by step. I will simply give an anecdote. If you think it's meaningless, fine. Hopefully some will "see" the meaning here:
I once hired an intern to help me with electronics design work. Part of his job would be to learn to use the scripting facilities of a PCB CAD program, then write a program to take human data entry input descriptions of high pin count devices and automatically turn them into the functional and mechanical models needed within the program, a process which, to do by hand, is extremely tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming.
Well this kid absolutely kicked ass on this problem, and wrote a piece of software that is now an important asset to my operation, in just about 2 months.
He also tried to make a few actual PCBs. Here he didn't fare so well. The first run had a serious oversight--forgot to see if the mechanical orientation of a connector mated correctly with another--that sort of thing. So he revised it and we did a 2nd run. Uh-oh, another few small mistakes that made it not quite useful. I think the 3rd rev. turned out Ok.
Now this sort of success rate is not quite good enough in the hardware design world, because, re-spins of boards are $$$. What's even worse is when lack of attention to detail results in faults you don't discover until some time down the road, when suddenly 1000s of products come back on warranty because someone didn't take the time to read every single fucking word of fine print in a datasheet, and investigate the potential significance of every single ambiguity!
Can anyone do this? No fucking way!
I am not trying to say that my intern could not have developed more attention to detail with experience, or that all people who aren't inherently this perfectionist can never develop satisfactory attention to detail. It is highly possible and probable that some might. But I am absolutely certain that there are also some people who can never, ever, develop the sort of attention to detail needed to do engineering with a success rate high enough (in the >=95%, preferably 99% range, or even much higher, depending on the sub-field) to be successful, regardless of their overall intelligence.
Now what has this got to do with whether anyone can code or not, since clearly they are different, or else why did my intern do so well at the programming problem and not so well at the hardware design?
For starters, programming has a much shorter feedback period. You blow two board designs, and by the time the 3rd is working, your competitor has had a several month lead in the marketplace. But if you are playing footloose with code, you notice the big errors, and are able to correct them, in minutes or seconds.
However, what separates programming from recipe writing is that you are dealing with a machine that has absolutely no idea what you really mean, and so ultimately, the level of attention to detail required to get programs to work right is actually very high. High enough in fact, that when combined with the fact that one must learn a programming language, which involves some unavoidable level of abstractions as well as all sorts of weird arbitrary rules, the result is that there will be a proportion of people, again regardless of intelligence, who will simply be unable to deal with it and will give up due to frustration.
The programmers who persist and get past the frustration do so because there is something that makes them inherently like programming, and this, by definition, cannot be learned or taught.
Finally, there will be some who will struggle to grasp even basic abstractions, and even more who will forever be baffled by higher abstractions. Now many might be able to accomplish useful goals through progr
I think based on a number of factors, and observe, that men and women are very different indeed. I do not think that women contribute nothing different than men, for that would be an unwarranted conclusion, ie., there just isn't enough evidence. The truth is I just don't know. So I have two perspectives on this:
1. As you implied, men and women are emotionally different, as well as different in many ways which we probably don't even know about, plus the other kinds of differences we do know about. Though, the last time I looked into this, there didn't seem to be any remarkable science suggesting that we differ radically in cognitive approach, though there are probably some more subtle general differences that may become better understood in time. There does seem to be slight differences in variance of IQ for ex., though this is probably only relevant at the tails, and not so much for the -0/+2 sigma band likely to account for most programmers. Nor is it clear how differences in IQ map to cognitive skill distributions.
The point being, that I strongly disagree with the self-contradictory nature of feminist arguments, that on one hand gender differences are all socially constructed, yet in the next breath, I hear them tell me how having diversity of gender, race, sexuality, etc. leads to "more solutions."
I don't think there is any proof of this at all. But I will grant you that it is, remotely, plausible.
But if we are going to accept that as an open hypothesis, then there's a big problem with "all gender differences are socially constructed" don't you think? Because, IF the socially constructed theory is true, THEN it is the only mechanism by which diversity of people types can lead to "more solutions!" Yet it is the goal of feminists to ELIMINATE socially constructed conditioning, isn't it? Which means feminism's goals are mutually exclusive. If you eliminate the sources of social conditioning, you are left with an amorphous mass of undifferentiated personalities--in which diversity does not and cannot exist!
2. So to approach this scientifically, we need two things: a) evidence that diversity of gender leads to better solutions--however you want to judge what constitutes better is open to debate. But just "more" solutions I don't think really matters because having more shitty solutions does no one any good, which doesn't help our crusade to make the world a better place does it? b) We need further evidence that *gender* itself is the CAUSE of better solutions. This is tricky, because the social dynamics of co-ed vs. predominantly unisex environments may differ. For pete's sake, there are even pheromones! We have only begun to scratch the surface as to how many subtle variables may be involved, many of which are side effects of gender and yet which may affect outcome.
At this point, I'm quite certain that no such evidence exists for gender being causative of "better solutions". Frankly, I don't even think human beings are capable of carrying out this science objectively in the first place.
So what if it's true anyway? What does it mean? Does it justify force of law to compel male dominated coding communities to invite and "be nice" to women, since it seems the slightest offense can make the typical women completely loose confidence in her most deeply held interests?
Once again we run into a serious problem of logical contradictions and mutually exclusive goals if we go down this road, because remember--the premise is that men and women ARE fundamentally different, or else diversity is FALSE. And so if we are still working with that premise, and we really have no choice because it is true and everybody knows it--then it is also possible (and even likely) that men and women differ significantly in the degree to which their average personalities are drawn to programming!
Therefore, this entire issue of "there aren't enough women in programming" is a non-issue because IT IS THE VERY MANIFESTATION OF DIVERSITY!
What else would you expect from the sort of people to whom 2+2=5, if it suits their objectives?
Why on earth would you teach Java to young students with on average next to zero programming experience? Are you trying your best to ensure that they never want anything to do with programming again for the rest of their lives?
Java is pedagogically useless at a minimum and at worst counterproductive as an introductory language. WTF is a "class" supposed to mean to someone who doesn't even know what a variable is, or why a semicolon is needed? Here, this guy says it better than I can:
http://prog21.dadgum.com/93.html
http://prog21.dadgum.com/156.html