Writing proofs is almost exactly like writing code, and it's not a coincidence.
Wrong.
Mathematics is always done in a fantasy world. For a trivial example, there are no lines extending to infinity, or perfect circles: to work with these you must create a fantasy world in which they exist. A set of axioms and theorems creates a fantasy world. Being able to do proofs requires working within that fantasy world.
Programming, on the other hand, requires interaction with the real world. Programs will run in a certain amount of real time, and take a certain amount of real disk space, and real memory on real machines. It is possible to do experiments, and often necessary to do so ("proving" correctness of real programs is often impractical), and thus we can and must approach programming as a science.
Understanding and working with the real world calls for a very different mindset from that which is required to be a mathematician. For example, a mathematician might claim that it is impossible to determine "in general" whether a program halts, but a programmer knows that all real programs will halt due to entropy. In the fantasy world of the mathematician, thermodynamics does not exist. Further, only the mathematician cares about "in general", the programmer is never looking at "in general" as the mathematician uses that term, but rather is looking at a specific program.
Similarly, in programming, because we are dealing with the real world, we need to manage complexity. Much as the engineer or physicist uses approximations to allow mathematics to be applied to the real world, by simplifying the mathematics, so to does the programmer use abstractions and approximations to simplify his or her work. The goal is not the logical correctness of a proof, but creating something that a) gets the job done, and b) is maintainable and well documented. A proof need be neither maintainable nor well documented, and MUST be logically correct.
We can't use the integers on computers, let alone the real numbers. All we can do is approximate these. In programming, we are constantly juggling approximations, without the luxury of dealing with the "perfect" or "ideal" quantities that are so characteristic of the world of the mathematician.
In programming, as in engineering or physics, mathematics is a tool, a means to an end, not an end in itself. Programming is not math.
As for me, business is always wrong because profit makes people eventually do evil. Capitalism makes people spiral to the bottom because of its nature. The excuse of "our bottom line" creates a mentality to destroy the commons and poison people. I have never seen an exception. Please, tell me when the profit motive has helped people over the long term. I would really like to know.
Please read a few history books, particularly those that discuss economic issues (commonplace in histories written in the past few decades). Your ignorance concerning this issue is awful. You might try reading Adam Smith as well.
Pay particular attention to histories that describe everyday life for ordinary people, and compare things in the old days to today -- you'll be shocked at the long term progress that industrialization has led to.
As you'll find when you read Adam Smith, capitalism rewards people for specializing in things society needs. Governments can't do that because the world is too complex -- the Communists proved that in Russia and China, and the Socialists proved it in India (all of which are now heavily capitalist).
Even back in the 18th century when Adam Smith was alive the world was far too complex for governments to understand and manage all the details of the economy, and things are exponentially more complex today.
Please read some books on manufacturing and logistics, so you'll have some idea of the complexity of the modern world.
What governments can do is penalize people for doing harm while pursuing profit, and regulate dangerous practices (including reasonable protection of the environment). The vast majority of companies play by the rules: people don't hear about this because it isn't news. We get bombarded with all the bad stuff, and those who are poorly educated assume as a result that everything is bad.
There is NO "spiral to the bottom" and there are a horde of "exceptions" -- you simply haven't bothered to educate yourself.
Yes, I am implying that Socialism is better over the long term.
It doesn't have a be a choice, one or the other. If you study successful instances of socialism, you'll inevitably find that socialism that depends heavily upon capitalism.
For example, socialist medical systems depend upon the "evil" capitalists to fund most of the research that leads to advanced techniques. Socialist medical systems depend upon the "evil" capitalists to build the advanced test equipment (MRI, Ultrasound, etc) needed to diagnose complex medical problems.
Socialist medical systems depend upon capitalism for the information, research, transportation, production, analysis, and logistics infrastructures needed to educate medical specialists, build the medical facilities, get the tools to the facilities, and get the patients to the facilities.
There is a huge difference between being able to produce small quantities of something, and being able to produce large quantities. Similarly, there is a big difference between doing many things on a small scale, and doing them on a large scale. There is no evidence that any socialist system can handle that jump in scale, and considerable evidence to the contrary (such as all the shortages experienced by the former Communist nations). If you don't understand this, educate yourself on the complexities of manufacturing and logistics, plus the Agricultural Revolution.
In short, successful socialism in the real world ALWAYS relies upon a capitalist foundation. You HAVE to have capitalism to build an excess of resources in order for some of those resources to be used in a socialist manner.
The error that is made in many place is to have more socialism than the capitalist production of resources can support. This leads to huge and unsustainable government debts. It's a problem for the US federal government, and a problem for many US state and local governments. It's also a problem for many other nations.
We built our society on the principle that the people who benefit the most from a product or service should pay the most for it.
Don't see that anywhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Nor does it fit my understanding of American history.
If you see somebody in government or a lobbying organization claiming that, I'd suggest looking carefully to see if it's a pretext hiding something else.
It's really hard in practice to define who "benefits the most" from something.
People do not benefit from the roads in proportion to their income.
I am unaware of any evidence that supports that hypothesis.
Transportation systems have played a key role in trade for much of human history. Trade in turn has played a key role in generating wealth.
Further, while it might seem that corporate CEO's high salaries are not directly dependant upon things like roads, those businesses still need supplies and personnel to operate, and these will move in part by road. Without the road network, there's no corporation, and hence no high salary.
This is true not just for production industries, but also for those that work with information, or stocks. The people on top depend on the people below them being able to work. The computers, network equipment, and food these people eat all come by road. Even those that just gain wealth through stock manipulations still depend upon those companies whose stock they are buying being able to function, which means a dependence on the roads.
it may make sense to start charging truckers their fair share for the damage trucks do to our roads.
In other words, we should raise the cost of all consumer goods, effectively taxing sales at a higher rate, which in turn hits the poor harder than everyone else, and also make it really hard for ANYBODY to know exactly how much tax they're paying each year (i.e. yet another hidden tax and thus another way for the government to hide what's really going on from a generally ignorant public).
Also: the higher you raise the tax, the greater the costs of enforcement, yet another burden on a government massively in debt.
No.
We should move in the opposite direction. Get rid of all sales, gas, and registration taxes, all tolls, all property tax, and have the sole source of government income be income tax (including inheritance as income). Have a simple formula, with no exceptions or deductions ("simple" doesn't mean the same thing as "flat"). It's the only sensible way to rationalize a highly defective tax code, and a good first step towards fixing a highly defective legal system.
How accurate was German bombing during the Battle of Britain?
If you want the short answer, the bombing was not very accurate.
To understand this in detail, it is best to be familiar with a little additional history.
The Luftwaffe had experimented with bombing an urban area during the Spanish Civil War. It was determined that this had little effect, and as a result Luftwaffe policy was to avoid primarily civilian targets. The British pursued a similar policy once WW2 started.
However, in the course of going after the docks and factories of London, some German bombs fell outside the prescribed target area.
This happened after many bombing raids had been going on for a long time, involving many different aircraft and crews, against a strenuous defence, and some kind of mistake along these lines was probably inevitable given the relatively primitive technology of the day and the chaos of war.
The German aircrew involved was immediately arrested after landing, but the damage had been done. The British decided to direct an air raid on Berlin in "retaliation", and even though it did little damage Hitler decided to escalate (one of his dumbest decisions in a career filled with them).
Since the Germans hadn't planned to attack civilian targets, they didn't have weapons, training, or doctrine to do it particularly well. Accuracy, in short, was poor. The British were equally limited. However, when attacking a densely populated city such as London it wasn't necessary to have good accuracy to do significant damage.
Estimates of casualties vary, but about 40k-50k civilian lives were lost during the Battle of Britain, with at least as many being injured. Total deaths for WW2 from all causes is around 55 million.
For both combatant's bomber arms, the attack built slowly enough, and was ineffective enough (in military terms) to give the defenders time to evolve an effective defence. Some of the defensive measures that were developed included the use of civilian shelters, radar, fighters, anti-aircraft guns, balloons, and considerable use of deception.
Defences such as anti-aircraft guns and balloons made bombing even less accurate as the planes had to attack from high up. Fighter interception often caused bombers to drop their bombs before reaching their targets (assuming they could identify those targets in the first place, not always a given). Deceptive measures often prevented bombs from being dropped on militarily significant targets, which probably wasn't much consolation to the people the bombs actually fell upon. In short, defensive measures tended to make inaccurate bombing even more so.
In both cases, the bombing effort eventually took such tremendous losses that each side concluded that they had to bomb at night, with huge losses in accuracy, if they were going to bomb at all (the Americans, in contrast, chose to bomb in the daylight, trusting to their Norden Bombsight to give them accuracy, a hope that was often foiled by the Northern European weather).
Some attempts were made by the Germans to use radio beams to guide planes to their targets, but these were quickly countered by the British.
The net effect of night bombing against defended targets was heavy civilian casualties. Over the course of the war the numbers of deaths from the inaccurate dropping of conventional bombs would dwarf the number of deaths resulting from the atomic bombs (well under 1% of the total wartime deaths resulted from the atomic weapons).
Recent books such as "The Bomber War" provide more detail, if you want it. Older books tend to have a lot of errors which have been corrected by modern scholarship, so while they sometimes provide useful data you have to be careful working with them.
Germany was pounding the RAF into the ground (figuratively and literally) to achieve air supremacy before invading across the Channel.
A popular myth, but long since corrected by modern research (which you can readily find in references published in the last ten or so years).
In reality, the Germans were taking unsustainable losses and failing to inflict proportionate damage well before the decision to attack London was made. A lot of craters were made in runways, but these were easily filled. The "Home Team" advantage was decisive, given the relative parity of the fighters, and the limited range of the German fighters.
In short, the Germans had very poor intelligence regarding the location of key British facilities, and didn't understand what was necessary to knock them out. Like the Allies (both at that point, and later in the war), they massively underestimated the effectiveness of strategic air attack given the primitive equipment and training available.
In the short run, provided the British didn't let internal politics hamstring them, there was no real chance of a German victory from the air.
In the long run, of course, the Germans would have had to confront the same problem that the Allies would eventually have to deal with, namely the need for a long range fighter escort and appropriate doctrine. They were never given the opportunity to do this.
Do the Russians also make their war machines using components from potential rivals or is this purely an American thing?
Specialization is a reality of the modern economic world, and has been for over a century. Few nations make everything needed to build the tools to build the tools to build the weapons, and even fewer have all the raw materials needed. This was true even when the weapon systems were much simpler.
Also, even when a nation can produce things in small quantities, it can't necessarily produce them in large enough quantities needed to make up for the attrition of war.
During WW2, for example, Russian manufacturing and logistics depending upon foreign aid for the vast majority of the supply of ball bearings, most of the machine tools, the vast majority of the rail and truck stock, the chemicals and chemical processing tools needed to produce high grade aviation fuel, enormous quantities of food and winter clothing, and lots of other stuff.
Many references exist if you're curious about this, such as the books by Weeks and Van Tuyll.
In short, without the aid of their capitalist rivals, the Russian armies would have gone into battle starving and freezing, and massively under-equipped in tanks, planes, artillery, and ammunition.
Dependence on other nations was by no means a solely Soviet phenomenon:
"The bleak historical truth is that those great symbols of British myth, the Battle of Britain Spitfire and Hurricane, and their Merlin engine, were largely fabricated on foreign machine tools; more, their armaments and much of their instrumentation too were foreign in design, and, in the case of their earlier production batches, foreign in manufacture as well." Correlli Barnett, "The Audit of War", pp 134.
In general, only a long lasting war, or the immanent threat of such a war, can force a nation to develop its internal resources towards self-sufficiency.
Why do we insist on speculating that animals have all of these magical abilities, like the ability to tell which way is north, ability to tell when an earthquake is coming, ability to tell when a person has cancer, etc? Humans are animals too, and yet we can't do any of these things (without tools).
Nobody in science suggests that animals have magical abilities.
They do, however, have many remarkable abilities that human beings lack. There is evidence to support all of the following:
1. Some snakes, for example, can "see" heat (infra-red vision), allowing incredible resolution in targeting their attacks. 2. Bats and several other types of animal can use sound waves to navigate in the dark (echolocation). 3. Sharks, skates, and rays can sense electric fields (electroreception). 4. Some animals that are capable of long distance migration are able to sense magnetic fields (including sharks). 5. Some fish can communicate using electric fields (electrocommunication). 6. Bees have an interesting ability to detect electric charge on flowers. 7. Scorpions have vibration sensors tuned to the bands of vibration frequencies carried through sand by their usual prey.
Incredible variation exists from one animal species to the next in the sense we human beings think of as touch, smell/taste, hearing, and vision, which can take very exotic forms in animals.
In many cases, the sensory systems of animals greatly exceeds what human beings can do without the aid of tools (or even with the aid of tools!).
None of this is magic.
In the case of the sharks, for example, a specialization of the hair cell that works as an antenna has been evolved. Since the shark has lots of these antennas, it also has a sophisticated signal processing mechanism in the nervous system to allow the shark to resolve direction. Since all living creatures generate electric fields, this provides a guide for the shark in the final moments of its attack, permitting attack in murky waters or at night.
There are many chemicals that are responsive to electromagnetic stimuli, and biological entities have evolved a variety to mechanisms to produce and use these chemicals. Human eyes, for example, have chemicals that respond to visual light (a form of electromagnetic radiation), allowing vision. Similarly, plants have chemicals that respond to light, this permits photosynthesis. The idea that a chemical can be used as part of a sensory receptor for an electric field is simply another application of this idea: not all that strange when you think about it.
Magnetic sensing is still not well understood, but you can read about the current ideas on how this might work by doing a search on "magnetoception". Once you allow the ability to sense a magnetic field, you essentially have a tool for navigation relative to the Earth's magnetic field (a primitive version of which is the compass).
Similarly, there are many chemical receptors that can be used to sense the presence of other chemicals. Often these involve complex organic molecules with a three dimensional shape that responds to the shape of other molecules on contact, much like a lock responds to a particular key. Many variations of this idea exist, allowing huge variation in the ability to sense chemicals (which human beings call "smell") from one creature to the next.
The usual search engines will provide lots of information on this topic, or you might get a book on animal physiology.
The full limits of the capabilities of animal sensory systems are something we're not even close to understanding at this point, and there's a lot of active research going on. Since most people know there's a lot we still don't understand, there's a lot of speculation concerning what these different sensory systems (and doubtless others we haven't discovered yet) might be capable of.
Even within the human species, considerable variation exists from one person to the next with respect to the ability to use the standard human senses. Some of this is biological, some of this is a function of environment and habit.
If you want to talk about safety, arguments from broad classes of things that have some nominal commonality are painfully useless. If you aren't at least introducing concepts related to dosage, population level statistical study, various epidemiological techniques, you are basically just waving your hands from first principles.
You make some excellent points. An additional point comes to mind, and I apologize if it seems like hand waving...
In the study of frequency dependent systems we often don't understand all the possible non-linear ways in which a given system can respond. As you mention, any system interaction with electro-magnetics is necessarily frequency dependent. It isn't clear to me how one would construct a medical study to take possible non-linearity of response into account.
In other words, a study might inject a signal at a particular frequency (yes, we can only approximately generate particular frequencies, but let's neglect that point) into living tissue, then vary the frequency to observe penetration depth as a function of frequency. But what if multiple frequencies are present at the same time? Might the system behave differently under some combination of signals than we would expect from the superposition of responses to the individual inputs?
It would seem that it would have to, since no real system is actually linear.
In medical studies of exposure to electro-magnetics, they are certainly exposing living tissue to some signal or combination of signals.
The question that then comes to mind is, what if the studies aren't generating the right combination of input signals to see a response that might indicate a problem? One could potentially do a lot of population studies without realizing that the inputs are wrong in every one, because we've made an unwarranted assumption regarding system linearity.
I think it's unlikely that any combination of low amplitude inputs would pose a problem, but who can be certain?
It seems like we would want some way of proving that any possible non-linear effect that can result is necessarily non-harmful.
It said right in the constitution that no laws concerning slavery could be passed until 1808, at which time they promptly outlawed the importation of slaves. So, this arrangement was morally wrong, but constitutional.
Incorrect. There is no limitation on laws regarding slavery in general in Article 5 (where the 1808 reference is found) or Article 1 Section 9 (where the importation reference is).
What is ACTUALLY said is that amendments can not prevent migration or importation of persons under state law until after this date. This is very specific. NOTHING is said about what new amendments can do with respect to limiting slavery AFTER a person has been imported or has migrated. In other words, laws concerning slavery COULD be passed both before and after 1808.
With the wording given, the federal government could simply allow slaves to be imported, then require they be set free at some point after landing. This would, after all, not constitute interference with the "import" process, which is complete once the ship arrives.
The specificity of this wording was probably deliberate: it can be taken as recognizing the current political strength of the pro-slavery faction while setting up the means to overturn slavery at some future date should that faction weaken. Recall that some of the Founding Fathers were strongly opposed to slavery, and these were very intelligent men who could easily have recognized the need to comprise in the present while setting up mechanisms to make sure that things would get corrected over time.
The word slave does not even appear in the Constitution: it is implied by Article 1 Section 2 and Article 4 Section 2, but even here the wording is quite careful. Article 1 Section 2 can be taken as implying, "you can force us to count the slaves for now, but nothing prevents us from removing slavery at a later date" and Article 4 Section 2 can be taken as saying "we won't let one STATE interface with the laws regarding forced servitude of another, but nothing prevents the FEDERAL government from doing this".
It is also interesting to note that Article 5 prevents prevents future Amendments from altering Senate membership, but doesn't say anything about Amendments altering membership in the House of Representatives, essentially providing a wide open invitation to alter Article 1 Section 2...
Further, an extremely strong argument can be made that the acceptance of the Constitution was conditional upon a Bill of Rights being added (two states outright rejected the Constitution without a Bill of Rights, in others promises were made by men of honour whose word was trusted to the effect that a Bill of Rights would be added), and as such, the Bill of Rights can and should be viewed as superseding ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in the original document in the event of a conflict.
Also, the 9th amendment implicitly gave the right to regulate slavery to the states.
Also incorrect. The 9th Amendment was added to the Bill of Rights to address the objection of the Anti-Federalists that any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete. By providing for the assertion of unspecified rights retained by the people, it allows the assertion of rights against government. Note that this is the assertion of rights against government at any level, not just the Federal Government. It is a myth that the Bill of Rights was only intended to limit the Federal Government: we know this 1) from James Madison's personal history, 2) from his original text for the Bill of Rights and 3) from the fact that the 1st Amendment specifically limits only CONGRESS and the other Amendments DON'T.
The Bill of Rights being open-ended, it could readily be argued that it implicitly gave the federal government the right to outlaw slavery. After all, some of the most fundamental rights the people might want to assert as being "retained by" them or "reserved to" them, and thus protected under the 9th and 10th Amendm
But, nope, to the simple minds of those in the 1800s, slaves were property not people, unless the new 13th amendment says otherwise.
It's more complicated than this. Many opposed slavery, even before the 1800s. Ben Franklin was the head of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery League and once justified the revolution as necessary because he claimed Britain would never end slavery voluntarily. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson freed their slaves (and Jefferson tried repeatedly to end slavery in Virginia). Gouverneur Morris gave a damning indictment of slavery at the Constitutional Convention.
So then, as now, there were people who realized what was going on was wrong and needed to change, but the forces of entrenched corruption were able to keep things going their way for a long time. Then, as now, it was -- as much as anything -- corruption in the legal profession that permitted the long term abuses of fundamental rights. It appears Judges swearing oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights find it inconvenient to acknowledge the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights (the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights retained by the people, the 10th Amendment for unspecified rights reserved to the people, thus requiring the government to NOT enforce any law that could reasonably be supposed to violate rights the people might want to assert, a check and balance over the system that many people overlook).
Presumably the people involved get offers to support them in their candidacy for higher positions in return for their decisions, though I suppose we shouldn't rule out straight cash payments or blackmail as motivators. The legal profession as a whole has an enormous vested interest in not acknowledging the open ended nature of the Bill of Rights, so that probably plays a role as well.
For some reason, judges and prosecutors are immune to retribution when they uphold laws that violate fundamental human rights, even when doing so is clearly contrary to the oaths that are preconditions for holding these offices (or for that matter, the oaths that are required to engage in the practice of law). One would suppose that a person acting contrary to an oath that is a precondition for office would, by their actions, immediately and permanently be disqualified from holding that office (or any other position of public trust or responsibility).
It is cleat that the lessons of Nuremberg regarding individual responsibility to do no wrong have yet to take hold in the US legal profession.
I'd need to see some evidence that a) beer drinking reduced sickness instead of increasing things like sclerosis
This one, at least, is easy: look up the work by biochemist George Armelagos on the tetracycline (antibiotic) found in mummies. Now we know why beer was found in all those ancient Egyptian medical texts...
Not quite the result you were looking for, and it may only have applied to beer found in part of the world...
There is some reason to suppose that workers in ancient Egypt may have been paid, at least some of the time, in beer and bread...
As far as the beer vs dirty water question goes, it's probably fair to suppose that many people drank water.
However, consider the following: the locals for a particular area would have some immunity to the diseases caused by micro-organisms found in their local water. We see the same phenomenon today (aka "Montezuma's Revenge"). Traders travelling from other places would not have this immunity, and would likely prefer beer to unfamiliar local water, presumably supplemented by water taken directly from rocky springs whenever possible. Thus, as trade became more important, beer would have become more important as well.
It's also worth considering that many foods contain water, and thus any small amount of dehydration caused by beer would not necessarily be significant in the overall diet. Also, between the time the beer is drunk, and the kidneys secrete urine, presumably much of the water from the beer is available for the body to use. It's not as if the beer instantaneously caused dehydration everywhere in the body.
The original MacOS had it right - there was no command line at all, at any level. The mechanism for manipulating the system at a low level was ResEdit, a tool for editing the resource fork of files.
The absence of a command line is why the software for the original Mac OS was written and tested on systems that DID have a command line. It simply wasn't practical to do this work by bootstrapping a graphical system. Too many tools had to be built and integrated, and wrapping a GUI around the development process would have hugely increased the time it took to get to market.
ResEdit, BTW, has many limitations (it got better over time and many releases), and if you were a Mac programmer in the old days you would have rolled a fair amount of your own code to work around these limitations. It's much easier -- if you need to generate a large number of resources -- to do so programatically than to wander through the same gui windows over, and over, and over, setting each resource individually with lots of mouse clicks and typing. Talk about carpal tunnel! ResEdit is really more a tool for tinkering, or making small changes, or building simple prototypes, than a complete and full-featured tool for low level manipulation of the system.
More generally, integrating a large number of different tools using a GUI is difficult at best, and often a disaster waiting to happen.
There are an enormous number of scientific and engineering tools out there that only solve PART of a problem or accomplish PART of a task. To solve a whole problem, or do the whole task, it is generally necessary to tie together a wide variety of tools. Typically you don't want to have to reinvent the wheel by rewriting all the tools! This integration process is HARD to do within a GUI environment. It's not an accident that tools for scientific computing, such as Matlab and Mathematica, are command line based.
Part of the genius in the design of Unix lies in the recognition of this difficulty: the designers provided very clever mechanisms (by the standard of the time) to support integrating disparate tools.
A classic example of an engineering task is chip design, which in spite of decades of work in developing graphical interfaces to support the design process still requires enormous amounts of automation and scripting.
Even in situations where some available GUI is capable of solving a problem, it's often a lot more efficient to roll your own solution, by integrating individual tools at the command line. The GUI designer might not have the right data structures needed to efficiently to solve any given problem. It's hard for a GUI designer to envision every possible circumstance under which an user might want to do something!
For these reasons is why it is absolutely necessary for developers -- if there's any chance they'll be doing scientific or engineering computing (doing this is the reason computers were invented in the first place) -- to know how to use either a command line or a scripting language to be considered competent and well rounded.
You put your car out in the public domain (on the streets/parking lots), yet you have some expectation of control over it and decency in how others treat it.
Yes, I do have quite a few expectations regarding control over my vehicle, even when it's parked in a public place. I expect other people not to slash the tires, break the windows, siphon the gas, or key the doors. If I'm dumb enough to park in a heavily trafficked area (or near kids playing ball), I don't have any legitimate basis to complain over minor damage to the vehicle, but there shouldn't be major damage. I expect other people not to steal the engine, the electronics, the license plates, or anything else, even if I foolishly leave the doors unlocked. I expect not to have anybody park too close to me, or to do anything that blocks me from leaving. I expect nobody will "borrow" the car without permission.
There are lots of special cases and exceptions, of course, for some or all of the above.
Decent, competent human beings treat the possessions of others, even in public, with respect.
Many of the expectations we have with respect to the treatment of our possessions in public are protected by laws in many jurisdictions, others rely on the integrity and competence of the public, or on tradition and custom.
In the modern world we have considerable expectation regarding control over our person and physical possessions when in public, and decency with respect to such. This goes even further in those jurisdictions with slander and libel laws, which provide protection not just over physical objects in public, but something intangible, namely one's reputation.
In my book respect has to be earned, even for the President.
That's a philosophy to live by. Courtesy is free, up to a point, but respect has to be earned. It doesn't come from a position, a title, a degree, age, or wealth.
Think of the Engineers and Scientists who made the a-Bomb. 1. Don't help and you will be the reason for a sustained war costing millions of lives of mostly military personnel. 2. Make the A-Bomb that will kill ten thousand civilians and end the war.
Far more than ten thousand civilians died from the atomic bombs.
On the other hand, typical estimates for civilian casualties associated with the battle for Okinawa place the total between 140k-150k, depending upon the reference you look at (including suicides). Military casualties from this battle were about the same as the civilian casualties.
It was the most dreadful single battle of the war, by any standard I can think of. The deaths were by no means limited to "mostly military personnel".
The numbers for total casualties associated with the (conventional) battle of Okinawa and both atomic bombings are not all that different in magnitude.
There's a lot of uncertainty over the exact numbers in both cases, especially given that the word "casualty" may mean different things to different people, making it hard to know what is being counted.
Still, it's not unreasonable to assert as many people died during the fighting for this single island as from the use of one atomic bomb, and possibly as many died during this single battle as from the use of both atomic bombs put together.
If you like, as a thought exercise, look up the population of Okinawa in WW2, determine the ratio of civilians that became casualties to the total population, and extrapolate to the population of the remaining islands of Japan. This gives you one estimate of the civilian lives that might have been lost in the event of a conventional (non-nuclear) military campaign to finish Japan.
It is balanced against the rights of others, including, for example, the right to take photos or video recordings of public places
In the ancient past (i.e. the Pre-Digital Age) this was sometimes seen as a reasonable balance. Today we know better.
Even in the ancient past, this was a flawed policy. Even in public places there can be expectations of privacy. For example, if one steps away from a trail and goes behind a tree while hiking in a national forest, another person should not be able to take a picture of one relieving oneself, even though this is legally a public place.
Further, there have always been issues with the ability of advanced technology devices to spy into private lots or into private homes, or other clearly private spaces, even from locations far away, locations that may actually be public. Camera zoom capabilities, parabolic microphones, possibly even phased array or extended baseline systems can all potentially be used to intrude into spaces where people reasonably expect to be private. A seemingly empty beach, for example, creates a reasonable expectation of privacy, and a photographer hidden in the dunes nearby is violating that expectation when they take pictures of a woman sunning herself.
We can only expect sensor technology to get better over time, and who knows what new sensor modalities will be developed in the future.
Hence, a policy better suited to modern technology would be that one can only take pictures or make other recordings with the explicit permission of all the uniquely identifiable subjects in the sensory field of the recording device. An exception can be made for security cameras in appropriate settings, or for recording devices intended to capture other forms of sociopathic conduct (such as recording an attempt by a con artist to engage in fraud). Another exception can be made for recording government officials in the performance of their duties. Even in such cases, strict limits can be placed on what can be done with the recordings.
It is appropriate to recognize a right to privacy arising under the 9th Amendment, superseding the right to freedom of the press in many circumstances.
It is morally wrong because it requires intervention to prevent two parties from engaging in what both deem is a mutually-beneficial contract.
This is patent nonsense, once you understand that a "mutually beneficial contract" is a fiction that already needs intervention to enforce. Contracts are pieces of paper with no value. They only have meaning and value because some government intervenes by deploying police with guns, and books with laws written in them, to prevent two parties from treating contracts as meaningless, which is what they naturally are in the absence of said enforcement.
In reality, of course, people have to have money to live. They have to have jobs, and a place to stay. Their lifespan is finite and they don't necessarily have the time to become experts at all the obscure details of Contract Law. The whole philosophical concept of people freely entering into mutually beneficial contracts is thus flawed in many practical situations.
Further, in order to be able to get a job in the modern technological world, people have to be able to learn to modern technological tools, which in many cases means access to software and other electronic media. Many such tools are commercial, and even the ones that aren't often require other commercial tools (such as an operation system), and as the use of commercial tools is often governed by "shrink-wrap" contracts, thus we run into yet another situation where the myth of two parties freely entering into a mutually beneficial agreement simply doesn't work in the real world.
If you listen to a typical Bar Review audio course on Contract Law, you'll probably hear the instructor plainly state that the vast majority of contracts are never read. Thus, the legal profession knows full well that these "mutually-beneficial contracts made with the full knowledge of the involved parties", are in reality nothing of the sort.
In the USA, understanding the law relating to contracts is extremely difficult. It's not simply a question of reading a textbook on Contract Law (which would be a challenging enough task in its own right, just from the length of the typical textbook). There's also a significant consideration most people don't think about (which might not even be mentioned in the textbook): in the USA the highest law in the land is the Bill of Rights. Clearly, as the Bill of Rights is the highest law in the land, it necessarily supersedes Contract Law when the two come in conflict.
To further complicate matters, James Madison deliberately gave the US an open-ended Bill of Rights, with unspecified rights "retained by the people" (9th Amendment) and "reserved to the people" (10th Amendment). He did this to deal with the objections made by the Anti-Federalists to the original Constitution, which the Bill of Rights would then supersede, namely that any Bill of Rights would be incomplete and would leave out really important rights that the people would sooner or later need to assert. This in turn has implications for Contract Law as it is ultimately up to the people to determine the rights retained by them, and those rights will supersede the established principles of Contract Law.
Consider the following: if any rights the people might want to assert as "retained by" or "reserved to" them could be taken away by the legal profession or by the government by any means, including some mechanism of Contract Law (or any court ruling or precedent), they would no longer be "retained by" the people: a contradiction.
For a concrete example, a right that might reasonably be asserted as being "retained by the people" is the right to long term oversight over business (we might also assert a parallel right to long term oversight over government, but that can be a discussion for another day). We don't, for example, want peanut butter companies letting rats get in their peanut butter that they sell: this used to happen, and hopefully as a result of public oversight over the conduct of
Twenty some years later, we developed a weapon that could destroy a modest size city with a single bomb.
Historically speaking, the famines and diseases that usually followed warfare often destroyed the population of entire cities and ravaged entire "nations" (look up the 30 Years War for an example). Until relatively recent time, far more people died of disease associated with warfare than in battle.
Then there were groups like the Mongols, who executed the populations of entire cities (presumably excepting those that became slaves) if the cities refused to surrender.
Sacks of conquered cities were pretty barbaric in general, and that phenomenon was not just limited to the Mongols.
Deaths in huge numbers is nothing new in warfare.
Estimates for the total deaths resulting from the Mongol conquests range from 30 million to 70 million people (including deaths resulting from disease and famine), although it's not clear how reliable the numbers can be for a period that long ago. If those numbers are reliable, the totals are not that different from what the modern world achieved in WW2, with all its advanced technology.
What struck people at the time about WWI is that, rather than having to kill people onesy-twosey, it could now be done on an industrial scale.
Knowledgeable observers of history already understood this, as the carnage of the US Civil War had already demonstrated it well before WWI. Consider the battle of Antietam, for example, where over 23,000 people died in a single day. Unfortunately, the leaders of Europe failed to draw the appropriate conclusions, which I'd call criminal negligence.
Overall, there is good reason to suppose far more human beings have been killed by pre-industrial warfare (and its consequences) over the centuries than by the recent wars using modern technological devices. The Mongols, for example, managed to kill far more people than the two atomic bombs, even if we accept the lowest estimate, by a factor of about 100x.
The real difference between modern industrial warfare and the historical kind is not that we are killing people in larger numbers, the real difference is we can do it faster than ever before.
But advertisers don't ruin everything about the Internet... they actually are responsible for 95% of the Internet being free of charge.
The concept that commercial content providers should be able to make their content only available with advertisements is opposed by huge numbers of people (hence the common use of home recording systems to skip the ads on TV, and the massive use of ad-blockers in browsers).
This whole situation ultimately ends up creating yet another nail in the coffin for the whole concepts of a copyright system, which hurts people with a genuine stake in copyright (bad) as well as the sleazy entities (good). It also harms the legal system, by providing yet another justification for the public to view that system with contempt.
There has to be a middle ground (or another option) between the sites supported by ad-sponsored materials and the sites supported by the public (a lot of stuff gets mirrored by universities and government agencies, which ultimately is funded by our tax dollars), and a way to cleanly separate the ad-based content from the rest.
The system that some providers have, where people pay a small amount each year ($20) to have ad-free email seems like a good model.
If the content providers aren't smart enough to figure this out, eventually the public will start demanding that some of these "essential" services be treated like utilities, and regulated by the government. Intellectual property protection is a privilege, and if enough of the children continue to misbehave and abuse this privilege it will be taken away.
It is clear fom Slashdot comments that Americans have a deep built-in phobia about anything done by government. No doubt this is rooted in the "free man" culture with which the USA was founded, the fact that the USA industialised after the worst period of laissez faire capitalist exploitation in Europe, and the myth of British tyrranic governance which fuelled the revolution; but it does gets beyond reason at times.
Wrong. Only a tiny minority of people in the USA would claim that the core services that government provides could or should be provided without government.
Regulating capitalism, maintaining the roads, public education, providing or regulating public utilities, the police, long term medical and scientific research, maintaining public libraries, protecting public lands, and protecting the environment: all of these (within reason) are legitimate functions of government (as are doubtless many other things I haven't listed), and you will find relatively few people in the USA that dispute this.
The problem is not that government is bad as an abstract concept, the problem is that government as realized in the USA is sometimes corrupt, is often excessively bureaucratic, and is sometimes just plain incompetent.
Hence, there is no phobia about "anything" done by government, but rather there is deep concern about the current state of government.
A government that is massively in debt, with an out-of-control legal system driven by ethical conflict of interest (and with an ever-increasing rate of abuse of fundamental rights), is not a government that generates much trust or goodwill.
No amount of propaganda by the mainstream political parties and politicians can keep people from seeing the problems, but the fact that the propaganda exists in the first place makes people very suspicious that anything useful will be done to correct the problems. That's not a phobia, just plain common sense.
The right wing in America is pro- all the personal freedoms enjoyed by a typical white male middle class homeowner in, say, Lexington Kentucky. Freedom to do what you want with your land? Check.
Actually, this whole issue is about the freedom to do what you want with your land. In particular, it is about having the freedom to breathe clean air on your land.
Just as an individual's right to wave their fist around ends at somebody else's personal space, so to does an individuals right to create sound, light, or chemical pollution end when the products of that pollution enter another person's property. This is merely a straightforward application of long recognized (but seldom enforced) legal principles.
Further, I would assert the right to be protected from unwanted pollution is a fundamental right arising under the 9th Amendment "rights retained by the people", and thus, in protecting those rights, the government is doing exactly what it should be doing here (for a change).
If somebody wants a wood burning stove, or a big Christmas light display, or a barking dog, or a noisy piece of machinery, that's fine, however, they have a responsibility to keep any chemical, light, or noise pollution generated by these sources from entering other people's property.
Find some way of filtering the pollutants, or get permission to do this from every other affected property owner and/or resident, or don't do it at all.
In order to prevent the "ex post facto" issue, the government might offer reasonable compensation for the depreciated value of the existing stoves that do not meet the emission requirement.
"I can't think of a way to measure contribution precisely, even though there have been loads of effective worker cooperatives across the world, therefore socialism as an ideal does not reward labour."
The issue is doing this on the large scale. It works fine for many small groups, especially those that are working on fairly simple stuff without a lot of dependencies, or even some particular complex tasks that human beings have thousands of years of experience at (such as small scale farming).
I'm not sure I understand this belief that capitalism best response to demand with supply
Look into the reasons the Soviet Union failed. They tried to determine what needed to be produced, and when it needed to be produced. They couldn't do it. There were huge shortages of many things (except, perhaps, in the stores serving the privileged few, but even those were often inferior to what the average European or American can get in a quick trip to an ordinary store). On the other hand, to complement these shortages, they also ended up with warehouses of other stuff that wasn't being used. Find some of the papers produced by post-Cold War Soviet economists for the details.
The problems of getting different organizations within the Soviet system to work with each other were so hard that many of the organizations built their own spare parts and tools because they couldn't rely on the other groups to produce what they needed, when they needed it. That's very inefficient. They couldn't focus on what they did well, but had to try to be good at everything, which wasn't possible (nobody can be good at everything).
The reason they couldn't do manage production on a collective basis comes from the fact that the economy is vastly more complex than most people realize. Outside of engineering, few people realize how complex the processes are to manufacture many of the things we take for granted every day. Even 1940's technology was a LOT more complex than most people realise: look at a book on wood or metal working with machine tools to get a feel for that (you might also look at the part count for a WW2 fighter, or even a WW1 warship: you'll be surprised!).
Modern technology is even more complex: the physics of small devices is very different than the physics of large devices, for a variety of reasons (such as quantum mechanics, critical to understanding modern semiconductor devices), and the physics of very fast devices (such as cell phones and computers) is different than the physics of slow devices (as speed goes up, lumped models become impractical and one has to use fundamentally different techniques: glance at a "microwave" book if you're interested).
A typical cell phone, for example, is built with at least one custom ASIC, and that will be an enormously complicated piece of technology. A typical ASIC fabrication process takes hundreds of steps and requires a multi-billion dollar facility, and there are so many different fabs, and processes, and details involved that no single engineer understands all the details of making a typical chip! Then we have the equally complex issues of packaging and testing the thing, each of which is a speciality in itself!
There are layers upon layers of technology that go into building the tools to refine the materials to build the products we use, and the mix is constantly changing.
Then we have the enormously complex issues of logistics, i.e. getting things where they're needed, when they're needed. It's such a complex subject that in military science it's said that amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics. Again, doing things on a small scale is one thing. Doing them on a large scale (and in a timely manner) often involves a lot of complications one doesn't encounter in toy or small scale projects.
The mechanisms of cost and price and profit provide a means by which organizations can measure their performance, and that measurement becomes the basis for improvin
It's never worked. There is no reason to suppose it ever will work on the large scale. Somebody has to define how to measure contribution. It can't be done. There are too many people, too many trades, too many skills, too many goods, too many variables, too many potential exchanges, too many dependencies.
Many of the aspects of contribution overlap, and others are hard to measure in their own right. How do you measure leadership and determine the relative worth of it compared to other contributions? If a minor team member finds a fatal flaw in a product that nobody else saw, allowing it to be corrected before it goes out the door, what is their contribution? Is it equal to the contribution of somebody that has spent years of their life designing the thing? Is it worth more? Where do we draw the line? How do we come up with a system that people are willing to accept, given that we have to keep large numbers of people happy with the solution?
What about people skills, how important are they? Most work is done in teams today, but how does one measure the contributions of individual team members? That's a really hard problem, with lots of bad solutions that create more problems than they solve.
The measurement problem -- measurement being the basis of science -- is ultimately one of the hardest aspects of all science. It's particularly difficult in the areas to which the social sciences are applicable. At present, we don't have the tools. It's unlikely we will any time soon.
Capitalism, on the other hand, is not about selfishness. It's about markets expressing supply and demand to provide for the efficient exchange of goods and services whose value can not be measured any other way. The need for exact measurement goes away.
Some regulation of this process is needed, because any group of human beings contain sociopaths who will try to defraud others, or not honor their given word, or will do other things that cause long term harm to the environment or to society. Any system must deal with these people. It's not capitalism that's the problem, it's coming up with better ways to deal with these people.
Over-control is actually a bad thing, because it prevents markets from expressing supply and demand accurately or in a timely manner, causing inefficient or bad decisions to be made.
The selfish person robs others at the point of a weapon, or steals by cooking the books, or engages in cons, or plunders a retirement account. This isn't the norm in capitalism. Most people are decent and honest, and the best deals are those in which both parties walk away satisfied.
If anything, a lot of non-selfish behaviour happens as a result of capitalism. There is a long history of immigrants to capitalist places sending large amounts of money back to their families in their homelands to make life for them better (and that money in turn stimulated the economy in those far away places).
In the case of the USA, the history clearly shows the Irish did this, the Chinese did this, the Japanese did this, the Jews did this, and so forth. We have lots of accounts of people receiving money from their families. Many groups continue to do this. It was capitalism that made this extremely non-selfish behaviour possible, to the long term benefit of the world as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
Sparse coding is good, but can become 'obfuscated' code pretty quickly.
Otherwise known as Perl.
Writing proofs is almost exactly like writing code, and it's not a coincidence.
Wrong.
Mathematics is always done in a fantasy world. For a trivial example, there are no lines extending to infinity, or perfect circles: to work with these you must create a fantasy world in which they exist. A set of axioms and theorems creates a fantasy world. Being able to do proofs requires working within that fantasy world.
Programming, on the other hand, requires interaction with the real world. Programs will run in a certain amount of real time, and take a certain amount of real disk space, and real memory on real machines. It is possible to do experiments, and often necessary to do so ("proving" correctness of real programs is often impractical), and thus we can and must approach programming as a science.
Understanding and working with the real world calls for a very different mindset from that which is required to be a mathematician. For example, a mathematician might claim that it is impossible to determine "in general" whether a program halts, but a programmer knows that all real programs will halt due to entropy. In the fantasy world of the mathematician, thermodynamics does not exist. Further, only the mathematician cares about "in general", the programmer is never looking at "in general" as the mathematician uses that term, but rather is looking at a specific program.
Similarly, in programming, because we are dealing with the real world, we need to manage complexity. Much as the engineer or physicist uses approximations to allow mathematics to be applied to the real world, by simplifying the mathematics, so to does the programmer use abstractions and approximations to simplify his or her work. The goal is not the logical correctness of a proof, but creating something that a) gets the job done, and b) is maintainable and well documented. A proof need be neither maintainable nor well documented, and MUST be logically correct.
We can't use the integers on computers, let alone the real numbers. All we can do is approximate these. In programming, we are constantly juggling approximations, without the luxury of dealing with the "perfect" or "ideal" quantities that are so characteristic of the world of the mathematician.
In programming, as in engineering or physics, mathematics is a tool, a means to an end, not an end in itself. Programming is not math.
As for me, business is always wrong because profit makes people eventually do evil. Capitalism makes people spiral to the bottom because of its nature. The excuse of "our bottom line" creates a mentality to destroy the commons and poison people. I have never seen an exception. Please, tell me when the profit motive has helped people over the long term. I would really like to know.
Please read a few history books, particularly those that discuss economic issues (commonplace in histories written in the past few decades). Your ignorance concerning this issue is awful. You might try reading Adam Smith as well.
Pay particular attention to histories that describe everyday life for ordinary people, and compare things in the old days to today -- you'll be shocked at the long term progress that industrialization has led to.
As you'll find when you read Adam Smith, capitalism rewards people for specializing in things society needs. Governments can't do that because the world is too complex -- the Communists proved that in Russia and China, and the Socialists proved it in India (all of which are now heavily capitalist).
Even back in the 18th century when Adam Smith was alive the world was far too complex for governments to understand and manage all the details of the economy, and things are exponentially more complex today.
Please read some books on manufacturing and logistics, so you'll have some idea of the complexity of the modern world.
What governments can do is penalize people for doing harm while pursuing profit, and regulate dangerous practices (including reasonable protection of the environment). The vast majority of companies play by the rules: people don't hear about this because it isn't news. We get bombarded with all the bad stuff, and those who are poorly educated assume as a result that everything is bad.
There is NO "spiral to the bottom" and there are a horde of "exceptions" -- you simply haven't bothered to educate yourself.
Yes, I am implying that Socialism is better over the long term.
It doesn't have a be a choice, one or the other. If you study successful instances of socialism, you'll inevitably find that socialism that depends heavily upon capitalism.
For example, socialist medical systems depend upon the "evil" capitalists to fund most of the research that leads to advanced techniques. Socialist medical systems depend upon the "evil" capitalists to build the advanced test equipment (MRI, Ultrasound, etc) needed to diagnose complex medical problems.
Socialist medical systems depend upon capitalism for the information, research, transportation, production, analysis, and logistics infrastructures needed to educate medical specialists, build the medical facilities, get the tools to the facilities, and get the patients to the facilities.
There is a huge difference between being able to produce small quantities of something, and being able to produce large quantities. Similarly, there is a big difference between doing many things on a small scale, and doing them on a large scale. There is no evidence that any socialist system can handle that jump in scale, and considerable evidence to the contrary (such as all the shortages experienced by the former Communist nations). If you don't understand this, educate yourself on the complexities of manufacturing and logistics, plus the Agricultural Revolution.
In short, successful socialism in the real world ALWAYS relies upon a capitalist foundation. You HAVE to have capitalism to build an excess of resources in order for some of those resources to be used in a socialist manner.
The error that is made in many place is to have more socialism than the capitalist production of resources can support. This leads to huge and unsustainable government debts. It's a problem for the US federal government, and a problem for many US state and local governments. It's also a problem for many other nations.
We built our society on the principle that the people who benefit the most from a product or service should pay the most for it.
Don't see that anywhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Nor does it fit my understanding of American history.
If you see somebody in government or a lobbying organization claiming that, I'd suggest looking carefully to see if it's a pretext hiding something else.
It's really hard in practice to define who "benefits the most" from something.
People do not benefit from the roads in proportion to their income.
I am unaware of any evidence that supports that hypothesis.
Transportation systems have played a key role in trade for much of human history. Trade in turn has played a key role in generating wealth.
Further, while it might seem that corporate CEO's high salaries are not directly dependant upon things like roads, those businesses still need supplies and personnel to operate, and these will move in part by road. Without the road network, there's no corporation, and hence no high salary.
This is true not just for production industries, but also for those that work with information, or stocks. The people on top depend on the people below them being able to work. The computers, network equipment, and food these people eat all come by road. Even those that just gain wealth through stock manipulations still depend upon those companies whose stock they are buying being able to function, which means a dependence on the roads.
it may make sense to start charging truckers their fair share for the damage trucks do to our roads.
In other words, we should raise the cost of all consumer goods, effectively taxing sales at a higher rate, which in turn hits the poor harder than everyone else, and also make it really hard for ANYBODY to know exactly how much tax they're paying each year (i.e. yet another hidden tax and thus another way for the government to hide what's really going on from a generally ignorant public).
Also: the higher you raise the tax, the greater the costs of enforcement, yet another burden on a government massively in debt.
No.
We should move in the opposite direction. Get rid of all sales, gas, and registration taxes, all tolls, all property tax, and have the sole source of government income be income tax (including inheritance as income). Have a simple formula, with no exceptions or deductions ("simple" doesn't mean the same thing as "flat"). It's the only sensible way to rationalize a highly defective tax code, and a good first step towards fixing a highly defective legal system.
How accurate was German bombing during the Battle of Britain?
If you want the short answer, the bombing was not very accurate.
To understand this in detail, it is best to be familiar with a little additional history.
The Luftwaffe had experimented with bombing an urban area during the Spanish Civil War. It was determined that this had little effect, and as a result Luftwaffe policy was to avoid primarily civilian targets. The British pursued a similar policy once WW2 started.
However, in the course of going after the docks and factories of London, some German bombs fell outside the prescribed target area.
This happened after many bombing raids had been going on for a long time, involving many different aircraft and crews, against a strenuous defence, and some kind of mistake along these lines was probably inevitable given the relatively primitive technology of the day and the chaos of war.
The German aircrew involved was immediately arrested after landing, but the damage had been done. The British decided to direct an air raid on Berlin in "retaliation", and even though it did little damage Hitler decided to escalate (one of his dumbest decisions in a career filled with them).
Since the Germans hadn't planned to attack civilian targets, they didn't have weapons, training, or doctrine to do it particularly well. Accuracy, in short, was poor. The British were equally limited. However, when attacking a densely populated city such as London it wasn't necessary to have good accuracy to do significant damage.
Estimates of casualties vary, but about 40k-50k civilian lives were lost during the Battle of Britain, with at least as many being injured. Total deaths for WW2 from all causes is around 55 million.
For both combatant's bomber arms, the attack built slowly enough, and was ineffective enough (in military terms) to give the defenders time to evolve an effective defence. Some of the defensive measures that were developed included the use of civilian shelters, radar, fighters, anti-aircraft guns, balloons, and considerable use of deception.
Defences such as anti-aircraft guns and balloons made bombing even less accurate as the planes had to attack from high up. Fighter interception often caused bombers to drop their bombs before reaching their targets (assuming they could identify those targets in the first place, not always a given). Deceptive measures often prevented bombs from being dropped on militarily significant targets, which probably wasn't much consolation to the people the bombs actually fell upon. In short, defensive measures tended to make inaccurate bombing even more so.
In both cases, the bombing effort eventually took such tremendous losses that each side concluded that they had to bomb at night, with huge losses in accuracy, if they were going to bomb at all (the Americans, in contrast, chose to bomb in the daylight, trusting to their Norden Bombsight to give them accuracy, a hope that was often foiled by the Northern European weather).
Some attempts were made by the Germans to use radio beams to guide planes to their targets, but these were quickly countered by the British.
The net effect of night bombing against defended targets was heavy civilian casualties. Over the course of the war the numbers of deaths from the inaccurate dropping of conventional bombs would dwarf the number of deaths resulting from the atomic bombs (well under 1% of the total wartime deaths resulted from the atomic weapons).
Recent books such as "The Bomber War" provide more detail, if you want it. Older books tend to have a lot of errors which have been corrected by modern scholarship, so while they sometimes provide useful data you have to be careful working with them.
Germany was pounding the RAF into the ground (figuratively and literally) to achieve air supremacy before invading across the Channel.
A popular myth, but long since corrected by modern research (which you can readily find in references published in the last ten or so years).
In reality, the Germans were taking unsustainable losses and failing to inflict proportionate damage well before the decision to attack London was made. A lot of craters were made in runways, but these were easily filled. The "Home Team" advantage was decisive, given the relative parity of the fighters, and the limited range of the German fighters.
In short, the Germans had very poor intelligence regarding the location of key British facilities, and didn't understand what was necessary to knock them out. Like the Allies (both at that point, and later in the war), they massively underestimated the effectiveness of strategic air attack given the primitive equipment and training available.
In the short run, provided the British didn't let internal politics hamstring them, there was no real chance of a German victory from the air.
In the long run, of course, the Germans would have had to confront the same problem that the Allies would eventually have to deal with, namely the need for a long range fighter escort and appropriate doctrine. They were never given the opportunity to do this.
Do the Russians also make their war machines using components from potential rivals or is this purely an American thing?
Specialization is a reality of the modern economic world, and has been for over a century. Few nations make everything needed to build the tools to build the tools to build the weapons, and even fewer have all the raw materials needed. This was true even when the weapon systems were much simpler.
Also, even when a nation can produce things in small quantities, it can't necessarily produce them in large enough quantities needed to make up for the attrition of war.
During WW2, for example, Russian manufacturing and logistics depending upon foreign aid for the vast majority of the supply of ball bearings, most of the machine tools, the vast majority of the rail and truck stock, the chemicals and chemical processing tools needed to produce high grade aviation fuel, enormous quantities of food and winter clothing, and lots of other stuff.
Many references exist if you're curious about this, such as the books by Weeks and Van Tuyll.
In short, without the aid of their capitalist rivals, the Russian armies would have gone into battle starving and freezing, and massively under-equipped in tanks, planes, artillery, and ammunition.
Dependence on other nations was by no means a solely Soviet phenomenon:
"The bleak historical truth is that those great symbols of British myth, the Battle of Britain Spitfire and Hurricane, and their Merlin engine, were largely fabricated on foreign machine tools; more, their armaments and much of their instrumentation too were foreign in design, and, in the case of their earlier production batches, foreign in manufacture as well." Correlli Barnett, "The Audit of War", pp 134.
In general, only a long lasting war, or the immanent threat of such a war, can force a nation to develop its internal resources towards self-sufficiency.
Why do we insist on speculating that animals have all of these magical abilities, like the ability to tell which way is north, ability to tell when an earthquake is coming, ability to tell when a person has cancer, etc? Humans are animals too, and yet we can't do any of these things (without tools).
Nobody in science suggests that animals have magical abilities.
They do, however, have many remarkable abilities that human beings lack. There is evidence to support all of the following:
1. Some snakes, for example, can "see" heat (infra-red vision), allowing incredible resolution in targeting their attacks.
2. Bats and several other types of animal can use sound waves to navigate in the dark (echolocation).
3. Sharks, skates, and rays can sense electric fields (electroreception).
4. Some animals that are capable of long distance migration are able to sense magnetic fields (including sharks).
5. Some fish can communicate using electric fields (electrocommunication).
6. Bees have an interesting ability to detect electric charge on flowers.
7. Scorpions have vibration sensors tuned to the bands of vibration frequencies carried through sand by their usual prey.
Incredible variation exists from one animal species to the next in the sense we human beings think of as touch, smell/taste, hearing, and vision, which can take very exotic forms in animals.
In many cases, the sensory systems of animals greatly exceeds what human beings can do without the aid of tools (or even with the aid of tools!).
None of this is magic.
In the case of the sharks, for example, a specialization of the hair cell that works as an antenna has been evolved. Since the shark has lots of these antennas, it also has a sophisticated signal processing mechanism in the nervous system to allow the shark to resolve direction. Since all living creatures generate electric fields, this provides a guide for the shark in the final moments of its attack, permitting attack in murky waters or at night.
There are many chemicals that are responsive to electromagnetic stimuli, and biological entities have evolved a variety to mechanisms to produce and use these chemicals. Human eyes, for example, have chemicals that respond to visual light (a form of electromagnetic radiation), allowing vision. Similarly, plants have chemicals that respond to light, this permits photosynthesis. The idea that a chemical can be used as part of a sensory receptor for an electric field is simply another application of this idea: not all that strange when you think about it.
Magnetic sensing is still not well understood, but you can read about the current ideas on how this might work by doing a search on "magnetoception". Once you allow the ability to sense a magnetic field, you essentially have a tool for navigation relative to the Earth's magnetic field (a primitive version of which is the compass).
Similarly, there are many chemical receptors that can be used to sense the presence of other chemicals. Often these involve complex organic molecules with a three dimensional shape that responds to the shape of other molecules on contact, much like a lock responds to a particular key. Many variations of this idea exist, allowing huge variation in the ability to sense chemicals (which human beings call "smell") from one creature to the next.
The usual search engines will provide lots of information on this topic, or you might get a book on animal physiology.
The full limits of the capabilities of animal sensory systems are something we're not even close to understanding at this point, and there's a lot of active research going on. Since most people know there's a lot we still don't understand, there's a lot of speculation concerning what these different sensory systems (and doubtless others we haven't discovered yet) might be capable of.
Even within the human species, considerable variation exists from one person to the next with respect to the ability to use the standard human senses. Some of this is biological, some of this is a function of environment and habit.
If you want to talk about safety, arguments from broad classes of things that have some nominal commonality are painfully useless. If you aren't at least introducing concepts related to dosage, population level statistical study, various epidemiological techniques, you are basically just waving your hands from first principles.
You make some excellent points. An additional point comes to mind, and I apologize if it seems like hand waving ...
In the study of frequency dependent systems we often don't understand all the possible non-linear ways in which a given system can respond. As you mention, any system interaction with electro-magnetics is necessarily frequency dependent. It isn't clear to me how one would construct a medical study to take possible non-linearity of response into account.
In other words, a study might inject a signal at a particular frequency (yes, we can only approximately generate particular frequencies, but let's neglect that point) into living tissue, then vary the frequency to observe penetration depth as a function of frequency. But what if multiple frequencies are present at the same time? Might the system behave differently under some combination of signals than we would expect from the superposition of responses to the individual inputs?
It would seem that it would have to, since no real system is actually linear.
In medical studies of exposure to electro-magnetics, they are certainly exposing living tissue to some signal or combination of signals.
The question that then comes to mind is, what if the studies aren't generating the right combination of input signals to see a response that might indicate a problem? One could potentially do a lot of population studies without realizing that the inputs are wrong in every one, because we've made an unwarranted assumption regarding system linearity.
I think it's unlikely that any combination of low amplitude inputs would pose a problem, but who can be certain?
It seems like we would want some way of proving that any possible non-linear effect that can result is necessarily non-harmful.
It said right in the constitution that no laws concerning slavery could be passed until 1808, at which time they promptly outlawed the importation of slaves. So, this arrangement was morally wrong, but constitutional.
Incorrect. There is no limitation on laws regarding slavery in general in Article 5 (where the 1808 reference is found) or Article 1 Section 9 (where the importation reference is).
What is ACTUALLY said is that amendments can not prevent migration or importation of persons under state law until after this date. This is very specific. NOTHING is said about what new amendments can do with respect to limiting slavery AFTER a person has been imported or has migrated. In other words, laws concerning slavery COULD be passed both before and after 1808.
With the wording given, the federal government could simply allow slaves to be imported, then require they be set free at some point after landing. This would, after all, not constitute interference with the "import" process, which is complete once the ship arrives.
The specificity of this wording was probably deliberate: it can be taken as recognizing the current political strength of the pro-slavery faction while setting up the means to overturn slavery at some future date should that faction weaken. Recall that some of the Founding Fathers were strongly opposed to slavery, and these were very intelligent men who could easily have recognized the need to comprise in the present while setting up mechanisms to make sure that things would get corrected over time.
The word slave does not even appear in the Constitution: it is implied by Article 1 Section 2 and Article 4 Section 2, but even here the wording is quite careful. Article 1 Section 2 can be taken as implying, "you can force us to count the slaves for now, but nothing prevents us from removing slavery at a later date" and Article 4 Section 2 can be taken as saying "we won't let one STATE interface with the laws regarding forced servitude of another, but nothing prevents the FEDERAL government from doing this".
It is also interesting to note that Article 5 prevents prevents future Amendments from altering Senate membership, but doesn't say anything about Amendments altering membership in the House of Representatives, essentially providing a wide open invitation to alter Article 1 Section 2 ...
Further, an extremely strong argument can be made that the acceptance of the Constitution was conditional upon a Bill of Rights being added (two states outright rejected the Constitution without a Bill of Rights, in others promises were made by men of honour whose word was trusted to the effect that a Bill of Rights would be added), and as such, the Bill of Rights can and should be viewed as superseding ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in the original document in the event of a conflict.
Also, the 9th amendment implicitly gave the right to regulate slavery to the states.
Also incorrect. The 9th Amendment was added to the Bill of Rights to address the objection of the Anti-Federalists that any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete. By providing for the assertion of unspecified rights retained by the people, it allows the assertion of rights against government. Note that this is the assertion of rights against government at any level, not just the Federal Government. It is a myth that the Bill of Rights was only intended to limit the Federal Government: we know this 1) from James Madison's personal history, 2) from his original text for the Bill of Rights and 3) from the fact that the 1st Amendment specifically limits only CONGRESS and the other Amendments DON'T.
The Bill of Rights being open-ended, it could readily be argued that it implicitly gave the federal government the right to outlaw slavery. After all, some of the most fundamental rights the people might want to assert as being "retained by" them or "reserved to" them, and thus protected under the 9th and 10th Amendm
But, nope, to the simple minds of those in the 1800s, slaves were property not people, unless the new 13th amendment says otherwise.
It's more complicated than this. Many opposed slavery, even before the 1800s. Ben Franklin was the head of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery League and once justified the revolution as necessary because he claimed Britain would never end slavery voluntarily. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson freed their slaves (and Jefferson tried repeatedly to end slavery in Virginia). Gouverneur Morris gave a damning indictment of slavery at the Constitutional Convention.
So then, as now, there were people who realized what was going on was wrong and needed to change, but the forces of entrenched corruption were able to keep things going their way for a long time. Then, as now, it was -- as much as anything -- corruption in the legal profession that permitted the long term abuses of fundamental rights. It appears Judges swearing oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights find it inconvenient to acknowledge the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights (the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights retained by the people, the 10th Amendment for unspecified rights reserved to the people, thus requiring the government to NOT enforce any law that could reasonably be supposed to violate rights the people might want to assert, a check and balance over the system that many people overlook).
Presumably the people involved get offers to support them in their candidacy for higher positions in return for their decisions, though I suppose we shouldn't rule out straight cash payments or blackmail as motivators. The legal profession as a whole has an enormous vested interest in not acknowledging the open ended nature of the Bill of Rights, so that probably plays a role as well.
For some reason, judges and prosecutors are immune to retribution when they uphold laws that violate fundamental human rights, even when doing so is clearly contrary to the oaths that are preconditions for holding these offices (or for that matter, the oaths that are required to engage in the practice of law). One would suppose that a person acting contrary to an oath that is a precondition for office would, by their actions, immediately and permanently be disqualified from holding that office (or any other position of public trust or responsibility).
It is cleat that the lessons of Nuremberg regarding individual responsibility to do no wrong have yet to take hold in the US legal profession.
I'd need to see some evidence that a) beer drinking reduced sickness instead of increasing things like sclerosis
This one, at least, is easy: look up the work by biochemist George Armelagos on the tetracycline (antibiotic) found in mummies. Now we know why beer was found in all those ancient Egyptian medical texts ...
Not quite the result you were looking for, and it may only have applied to beer found in part of the world ...
There is some reason to suppose that workers in ancient Egypt may have been paid, at least some of the time, in beer and bread ...
As far as the beer vs dirty water question goes, it's probably fair to suppose that many people drank water.
However, consider the following: the locals for a particular area would have some immunity to the diseases caused by micro-organisms found in their local water. We see the same phenomenon today (aka "Montezuma's Revenge"). Traders travelling from other places would not have this immunity, and would likely prefer beer to unfamiliar local water, presumably supplemented by water taken directly from rocky springs whenever possible. Thus, as trade became more important, beer would have become more important as well.
It's also worth considering that many foods contain water, and thus any small amount of dehydration caused by beer would not necessarily be significant in the overall diet. Also, between the time the beer is drunk, and the kidneys secrete urine, presumably much of the water from the beer is available for the body to use. It's not as if the beer instantaneously caused dehydration everywhere in the body.
The original MacOS had it right - there was no command line at all, at any level. The mechanism for manipulating the system at a low level was ResEdit, a tool for editing the resource fork of files.
The absence of a command line is why the software for the original Mac OS was written and tested on systems that DID have a command line. It simply wasn't practical to do this work by bootstrapping a graphical system. Too many tools had to be built and integrated, and wrapping a GUI around the development process would have hugely increased the time it took to get to market.
ResEdit, BTW, has many limitations (it got better over time and many releases), and if you were a Mac programmer in the old days you would have rolled a fair amount of your own code to work around these limitations. It's much easier -- if you need to generate a large number of resources -- to do so programatically than to wander through the same gui windows over, and over, and over, setting each resource individually with lots of mouse clicks and typing. Talk about carpal tunnel! ResEdit is really more a tool for tinkering, or making small changes, or building simple prototypes, than a complete and full-featured tool for low level manipulation of the system.
More generally, integrating a large number of different tools using a GUI is difficult at best, and often a disaster waiting to happen.
There are an enormous number of scientific and engineering tools out there that only solve PART of a problem or accomplish PART of a task. To solve a whole problem, or do the whole task, it is generally necessary to tie together a wide variety of tools. Typically you don't want to have to reinvent the wheel by rewriting all the tools! This integration process is HARD to do within a GUI environment. It's not an accident that tools for scientific computing, such as Matlab and Mathematica, are command line based.
Part of the genius in the design of Unix lies in the recognition of this difficulty: the designers provided very clever mechanisms (by the standard of the time) to support integrating disparate tools.
A classic example of an engineering task is chip design, which in spite of decades of work in developing graphical interfaces to support the design process still requires enormous amounts of automation and scripting.
Even in situations where some available GUI is capable of solving a problem, it's often a lot more efficient to roll your own solution, by integrating individual tools at the command line. The GUI designer might not have the right data structures needed to efficiently to solve any given problem. It's hard for a GUI designer to envision every possible circumstance under which an user might want to do something!
For these reasons is why it is absolutely necessary for developers -- if there's any chance they'll be doing scientific or engineering computing (doing this is the reason computers were invented in the first place) -- to know how to use either a command line or a scripting language to be considered competent and well rounded.
You put your car out in the public domain (on the streets/parking lots), yet you have some expectation of control over it and decency in how others treat it.
Yes, I do have quite a few expectations regarding control over my vehicle, even when it's parked in a public place. I expect other people not to slash the tires, break the windows, siphon the gas, or key the doors. If I'm dumb enough to park in a heavily trafficked area (or near kids playing ball), I don't have any legitimate basis to complain over minor damage to the vehicle, but there shouldn't be major damage. I expect other people not to steal the engine, the electronics, the license plates, or anything else, even if I foolishly leave the doors unlocked. I expect not to have anybody park too close to me, or to do anything that blocks me from leaving. I expect nobody will "borrow" the car without permission.
There are lots of special cases and exceptions, of course, for some or all of the above.
Decent, competent human beings treat the possessions of others, even in public, with respect.
Many of the expectations we have with respect to the treatment of our possessions in public are protected by laws in many jurisdictions, others rely on the integrity and competence of the public, or on tradition and custom.
In the modern world we have considerable expectation regarding control over our person and physical possessions when in public, and decency with respect to such. This goes even further in those jurisdictions with slander and libel laws, which provide protection not just over physical objects in public, but something intangible, namely one's reputation.
In my book respect has to be earned, even for the President.
That's a philosophy to live by. Courtesy is free, up to a point, but respect has to be earned. It doesn't come from a position, a title, a degree, age, or wealth.
Think of the Engineers and Scientists who made the a-Bomb.
1. Don't help and you will be the reason for a sustained war costing millions of lives of mostly military personnel.
2. Make the A-Bomb that will kill ten thousand civilians and end the war.
Far more than ten thousand civilians died from the atomic bombs.
On the other hand, typical estimates for civilian casualties associated with the battle for Okinawa place the total between 140k-150k, depending upon the reference you look at (including suicides). Military casualties from this battle were about the same as the civilian casualties.
It was the most dreadful single battle of the war, by any standard I can think of. The deaths were by no means limited to "mostly military personnel".
The numbers for total casualties associated with the (conventional) battle of Okinawa and both atomic bombings are not all that different in magnitude.
There's a lot of uncertainty over the exact numbers in both cases, especially given that the word "casualty" may mean different things to different people, making it hard to know what is being counted.
Still, it's not unreasonable to assert as many people died during the fighting for this single island as from the use of one atomic bomb, and possibly as many died during this single battle as from the use of both atomic bombs put together.
If you like, as a thought exercise, look up the population of Okinawa in WW2, determine the ratio of civilians that became casualties to the total population, and extrapolate to the population of the remaining islands of Japan. This gives you one estimate of the civilian lives that might have been lost in the event of a conventional (non-nuclear) military campaign to finish Japan.
It is balanced against the rights of others, including, for example, the right to take photos or video recordings of public places
In the ancient past (i.e. the Pre-Digital Age) this was sometimes seen as a reasonable balance. Today we know better.
Even in the ancient past, this was a flawed policy. Even in public places there can be expectations of privacy. For example, if one steps away from a trail and goes behind a tree while hiking in a national forest, another person should not be able to take a picture of one relieving oneself, even though this is legally a public place.
Further, there have always been issues with the ability of advanced technology devices to spy into private lots or into private homes, or other clearly private spaces, even from locations far away, locations that may actually be public. Camera zoom capabilities, parabolic microphones, possibly even phased array or extended baseline systems can all potentially be used to intrude into spaces where people reasonably expect to be private. A seemingly empty beach, for example, creates a reasonable expectation of privacy, and a photographer hidden in the dunes nearby is violating that expectation when they take pictures of a woman sunning herself.
We can only expect sensor technology to get better over time, and who knows what new sensor modalities will be developed in the future.
Hence, a policy better suited to modern technology would be that one can only take pictures or make other recordings with the explicit permission of all the uniquely identifiable subjects in the sensory field of the recording device. An exception can be made for security cameras in appropriate settings, or for recording devices intended to capture other forms of sociopathic conduct (such as recording an attempt by a con artist to engage in fraud). Another exception can be made for recording government officials in the performance of their duties. Even in such cases, strict limits can be placed on what can be done with the recordings.
It is appropriate to recognize a right to privacy arising under the 9th Amendment, superseding the right to freedom of the press in many circumstances.
It is morally wrong because it requires intervention to prevent two parties from engaging in what both deem is a mutually-beneficial contract.
This is patent nonsense, once you understand that a "mutually beneficial contract" is a fiction that already needs intervention to enforce. Contracts are pieces of paper with no value. They only have meaning and value because some government intervenes by deploying police with guns, and books with laws written in them, to prevent two parties from treating contracts as meaningless, which is what they naturally are in the absence of said enforcement.
In reality, of course, people have to have money to live. They have to have jobs, and a place to stay. Their lifespan is finite and they don't necessarily have the time to become experts at all the obscure details of Contract Law. The whole philosophical concept of people freely entering into mutually beneficial contracts is thus flawed in many practical situations.
Further, in order to be able to get a job in the modern technological world, people have to be able to learn to modern technological tools, which in many cases means access to software and other electronic media. Many such tools are commercial, and even the ones that aren't often require other commercial tools (such as an operation system), and as the use of commercial tools is often governed by "shrink-wrap" contracts, thus we run into yet another situation where the myth of two parties freely entering into a mutually beneficial agreement simply doesn't work in the real world.
If you listen to a typical Bar Review audio course on Contract Law, you'll probably hear the instructor plainly state that the vast majority of contracts are never read. Thus, the legal profession knows full well that these "mutually-beneficial contracts made with the full knowledge of the involved parties", are in reality nothing of the sort.
In the USA, understanding the law relating to contracts is extremely difficult. It's not simply a question of reading a textbook on Contract Law (which would be a challenging enough task in its own right, just from the length of the typical textbook). There's also a significant consideration most people don't think about (which might not even be mentioned in the textbook): in the USA the highest law in the land is the Bill of Rights. Clearly, as the Bill of Rights is the highest law in the land, it necessarily supersedes Contract Law when the two come in conflict.
To further complicate matters, James Madison deliberately gave the US an open-ended Bill of Rights, with unspecified rights "retained by the people" (9th Amendment) and "reserved to the people" (10th Amendment). He did this to deal with the objections made by the Anti-Federalists to the original Constitution, which the Bill of Rights would then supersede, namely that any Bill of Rights would be incomplete and would leave out really important rights that the people would sooner or later need to assert. This in turn has implications for Contract Law as it is ultimately up to the people to determine the rights retained by them, and those rights will supersede the established principles of Contract Law.
Consider the following: if any rights the people might want to assert as "retained by" or "reserved to" them could be taken away by the legal profession or by the government by any means, including some mechanism of Contract Law (or any court ruling or precedent), they would no longer be "retained by" the people: a contradiction.
For a concrete example, a right that might reasonably be asserted as being "retained by the people" is the right to long term oversight over business (we might also assert a parallel right to long term oversight over government, but that can be a discussion for another day). We don't, for example, want peanut butter companies letting rats get in their peanut butter that they sell: this used to happen, and hopefully as a result of public oversight over the conduct of
Twenty some years later, we developed a weapon that could destroy a modest size city with a single bomb.
Historically speaking, the famines and diseases that usually followed warfare often destroyed the population of entire cities and ravaged entire "nations" (look up the 30 Years War for an example). Until relatively recent time, far more people died of disease associated with warfare than in battle.
Then there were groups like the Mongols, who executed the populations of entire cities (presumably excepting those that became slaves) if the cities refused to surrender.
Sacks of conquered cities were pretty barbaric in general, and that phenomenon was not just limited to the Mongols.
Deaths in huge numbers is nothing new in warfare.
Estimates for the total deaths resulting from the Mongol conquests range from 30 million to 70 million people (including deaths resulting from disease and famine), although it's not clear how reliable the numbers can be for a period that long ago. If those numbers are reliable, the totals are not that different from what the modern world achieved in WW2, with all its advanced technology.
What struck people at the time about WWI is that, rather than having to kill people onesy-twosey, it could now be done on an industrial scale.
Knowledgeable observers of history already understood this, as the carnage of the US Civil War had already demonstrated it well before WWI. Consider the battle of Antietam, for example, where over 23,000 people died in a single day. Unfortunately, the leaders of Europe failed to draw the appropriate conclusions, which I'd call criminal negligence.
Overall, there is good reason to suppose far more human beings have been killed by pre-industrial warfare (and its consequences) over the centuries than by the recent wars using modern technological devices. The Mongols, for example, managed to kill far more people than the two atomic bombs, even if we accept the lowest estimate, by a factor of about 100x.
The real difference between modern industrial warfare and the historical kind is not that we are killing people in larger numbers, the real difference is we can do it faster than ever before.
But advertisers don't ruin everything about the Internet ... they actually are responsible for 95% of the Internet being free of charge.
The concept that commercial content providers should be able to make their content only available with advertisements is opposed by huge numbers of people (hence the common use of home recording systems to skip the ads on TV, and the massive use of ad-blockers in browsers).
This whole situation ultimately ends up creating yet another nail in the coffin for the whole concepts of a copyright system, which hurts people with a genuine stake in copyright (bad) as well as the sleazy entities (good). It also harms the legal system, by providing yet another justification for the public to view that system with contempt.
There has to be a middle ground (or another option) between the sites supported by ad-sponsored materials and the sites supported by the public (a lot of stuff gets mirrored by universities and government agencies, which ultimately is funded by our tax dollars), and a way to cleanly separate the ad-based content from the rest.
The system that some providers have, where people pay a small amount each year ($20) to have ad-free email seems like a good model.
If the content providers aren't smart enough to figure this out, eventually the public will start demanding that some of these "essential" services be treated like utilities, and regulated by the government. Intellectual property protection is a privilege, and if enough of the children continue to misbehave and abuse this privilege it will be taken away.
It is clear fom Slashdot comments that Americans have a deep built-in phobia about anything done by government. No doubt this is rooted in the "free man" culture with which the USA was founded, the fact that the USA industialised after the worst period of laissez faire capitalist exploitation in Europe, and the myth of British tyrranic governance which fuelled the revolution; but it does gets beyond reason at times.
Wrong. Only a tiny minority of people in the USA would claim that the core services that government provides could or should be provided without government.
Regulating capitalism, maintaining the roads, public education, providing or regulating public utilities, the police, long term medical and scientific research, maintaining public libraries, protecting public lands, and protecting the environment: all of these (within reason) are legitimate functions of government (as are doubtless many other things I haven't listed), and you will find relatively few people in the USA that dispute this.
The problem is not that government is bad as an abstract concept, the problem is that government as realized in the USA is sometimes corrupt, is often excessively bureaucratic, and is sometimes just plain incompetent.
Hence, there is no phobia about "anything" done by government, but rather there is deep concern about the current state of government.
A government that is massively in debt, with an out-of-control legal system driven by ethical conflict of interest (and with an ever-increasing rate of abuse of fundamental rights), is not a government that generates much trust or goodwill.
No amount of propaganda by the mainstream political parties and politicians can keep people from seeing the problems, but the fact that the propaganda exists in the first place makes people very suspicious that anything useful will be done to correct the problems. That's not a phobia, just plain common sense.
The right wing in America is pro- all the personal freedoms enjoyed by a typical white male middle class homeowner in, say, Lexington Kentucky. Freedom to do what you want with your land? Check.
Actually, this whole issue is about the freedom to do what you want with your land. In particular, it is about having the freedom to breathe clean air on your land.
Just as an individual's right to wave their fist around ends at somebody else's personal space, so to does an individuals right to create sound, light, or chemical pollution end when the products of that pollution enter another person's property. This is merely a straightforward application of long recognized (but seldom enforced) legal principles.
Further, I would assert the right to be protected from unwanted pollution is a fundamental right arising under the 9th Amendment "rights retained by the people", and thus, in protecting those rights, the government is doing exactly what it should be doing here (for a change).
If somebody wants a wood burning stove, or a big Christmas light display, or a barking dog, or a noisy piece of machinery, that's fine, however, they have a responsibility to keep any chemical, light, or noise pollution generated by these sources from entering other people's property.
Find some way of filtering the pollutants, or get permission to do this from every other affected property owner and/or resident, or don't do it at all.
In order to prevent the "ex post facto" issue, the government might offer reasonable compensation for the depreciated value of the existing stoves that do not meet the emission requirement.
"I can't think of a way to measure contribution precisely, even though there have been loads of effective worker cooperatives across the world, therefore socialism as an ideal does not reward labour."
The issue is doing this on the large scale. It works fine for many small groups, especially those that are working on fairly simple stuff without a lot of dependencies, or even some particular complex tasks that human beings have thousands of years of experience at (such as small scale farming).
I'm not sure I understand this belief that capitalism best response to demand with supply
Look into the reasons the Soviet Union failed. They tried to determine what needed to be produced, and when it needed to be produced. They couldn't do it. There were huge shortages of many things (except, perhaps, in the stores serving the privileged few, but even those were often inferior to what the average European or American can get in a quick trip to an ordinary store). On the other hand, to complement these shortages, they also ended up with warehouses of other stuff that wasn't being used. Find some of the papers produced by post-Cold War Soviet economists for the details.
The problems of getting different organizations within the Soviet system to work with each other were so hard that many of the organizations built their own spare parts and tools because they couldn't rely on the other groups to produce what they needed, when they needed it. That's very inefficient. They couldn't focus on what they did well, but had to try to be good at everything, which wasn't possible (nobody can be good at everything).
The reason they couldn't do manage production on a collective basis comes from the fact that the economy is vastly more complex than most people realize. Outside of engineering, few people realize how complex the processes are to manufacture many of the things we take for granted every day. Even 1940's technology was a LOT more complex than most people realise: look at a book on wood or metal working with machine tools to get a feel for that (you might also look at the part count for a WW2 fighter, or even a WW1 warship: you'll be surprised!).
Modern technology is even more complex: the physics of small devices is very different than the physics of large devices, for a variety of reasons (such as quantum mechanics, critical to understanding modern semiconductor devices), and the physics of very fast devices (such as cell phones and computers) is different than the physics of slow devices (as speed goes up, lumped models become impractical and one has to use fundamentally different techniques: glance at a "microwave" book if you're interested).
A typical cell phone, for example, is built with at least one custom ASIC, and that will be an enormously complicated piece of technology. A typical ASIC fabrication process takes hundreds of steps and requires a multi-billion dollar facility, and there are so many different fabs, and processes, and details involved that no single engineer understands all the details of making a typical chip! Then we have the equally complex issues of packaging and testing the thing, each of which is a speciality in itself!
There are layers upon layers of technology that go into building the tools to refine the materials to build the products we use, and the mix is constantly changing.
Then we have the enormously complex issues of logistics, i.e. getting things where they're needed, when they're needed. It's such a complex subject that in military science it's said that amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics. Again, doing things on a small scale is one thing. Doing them on a large scale (and in a timely manner) often involves a lot of complications one doesn't encounter in toy or small scale projects.
The mechanisms of cost and price and profit provide a means by which organizations can measure their performance, and that measurement becomes the basis for improvin
To each according to his contribution
It's never worked. There is no reason to suppose it ever will work on the large scale. Somebody has to define how to measure contribution. It can't be done. There are too many people, too many trades, too many skills, too many goods, too many variables, too many potential exchanges, too many dependencies.
Many of the aspects of contribution overlap, and others are hard to measure in their own right. How do you measure leadership and determine the relative worth of it compared to other contributions? If a minor team member finds a fatal flaw in a product that nobody else saw, allowing it to be corrected before it goes out the door, what is their contribution? Is it equal to the contribution of somebody that has spent years of their life designing the thing? Is it worth more? Where do we draw the line? How do we come up with a system that people are willing to accept, given that we have to keep large numbers of people happy with the solution?
What about people skills, how important are they? Most work is done in teams today, but how does one measure the contributions of individual team members? That's a really hard problem, with lots of bad solutions that create more problems than they solve.
The measurement problem -- measurement being the basis of science -- is ultimately one of the hardest aspects of all science. It's particularly difficult in the areas to which the social sciences are applicable. At present, we don't have the tools. It's unlikely we will any time soon.
Capitalism, on the other hand, is not about selfishness. It's about markets expressing supply and demand to provide for the efficient exchange of goods and services whose value can not be measured any other way. The need for exact measurement goes away.
Some regulation of this process is needed, because any group of human beings contain sociopaths who will try to defraud others, or not honor their given word, or will do other things that cause long term harm to the environment or to society. Any system must deal with these people. It's not capitalism that's the problem, it's coming up with better ways to deal with these people.
Over-control is actually a bad thing, because it prevents markets from expressing supply and demand accurately or in a timely manner, causing inefficient or bad decisions to be made.
The selfish person robs others at the point of a weapon, or steals by cooking the books, or engages in cons, or plunders a retirement account. This isn't the norm in capitalism. Most people are decent and honest, and the best deals are those in which both parties walk away satisfied.
If anything, a lot of non-selfish behaviour happens as a result of capitalism. There is a long history of immigrants to capitalist places sending large amounts of money back to their families in their homelands to make life for them better (and that money in turn stimulated the economy in those far away places).
In the case of the USA, the history clearly shows the Irish did this, the Chinese did this, the Japanese did this, the Jews did this, and so forth. We have lots of accounts of people receiving money from their families. Many groups continue to do this. It was capitalism that made this extremely non-selfish behaviour possible, to the long term benefit of the world as a whole.