As bad as some things the US Government does are, we are still a liberal democracy, and as such are far, far more beholden to the common interest than a converted Communist/Stalinist superpower like Russia with a chip on its shoulder about becoming a dominant player so it can help its buddies, like the Serbs, and sell arms to terrorists and rogue nations. Sounds great, huh?
That's exactly why USA is more dangerous than Russia: it hasn't got any experience of Stalinism. So nothing can prevent it from becoming a totalitarian society over time. Russia has got its antidote - basically, Russians don't believe what they are told in the media. Since totalitarism is about brain-washing much more than about guns and concentration camps, the States have a far and interesting way to go.
Scary.
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By the time you have reached perfection, there's nobody around you to share it with.
Actually, one of the ideas behind the "classic" LISP was to make for an alternative theory of computability. J. MacCarthy (the one who invented the "MacCarthy conditional" if-then-else, and the principal author of the first LISPs) has a paper on its history, written as far back as in 1979 (http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp.h tml): there, among other things, he says:
These simplifications made LISP into a way of describing computable functions much neater than the Turing machines or the general recursive definitions used in recursive function theory. The fact that Turing machines constitute an awkward programming language doesn't much bother recursive function theorists, because they almost never have any reason to write particular recursive definitions, since the theory concerns recursive functions in general. They often have reason to prove that recursive functions with specific properties exist, but this can be done by an informal argument without having to write them down explicitly. In the early days of computing, some people developed programming languages based on Turing machines; perhaps it seemed more scientific. Anyway, I decided to write a paper describing LISP both as a programming language and as a formalism for doing recursive function theory. The paper was
Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, part I (McCarthy 1960). Part II was never written but was intended to contain applications to computing with algebraic expressions. The paper had no influence on recursive function theorists, because it didn't address the questions that interested them.
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By the time you have reached perfection, there's nobody around you to share it with.
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That's exactly why USA is more dangerous than Russia: it hasn't got any experience of Stalinism. So nothing can prevent it from becoming a totalitarian society over time. Russia has got its antidote - basically, Russians don't believe what they are told in the media. Since totalitarism is about brain-washing much more than about guns and concentration camps, the States have a far and interesting way to go. Scary.
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By the time you have reached perfection, there's nobody around you to share it with.
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By the time you have reached perfection, there's nobody around you to share it with.