The whole idea behind a democracy is that the power stems from the people.
As I see it (and I'm not a political theorist, but I think my ideas are valid), the basis of a democracy is that everyone in the democracy has equal power, and no one can deprive anyone else of their power. That's the fundamental basis, everything else stems from it. (That may not be what the political theorists say, but it's what I've observed from living in a democracy and watching other democracies in action)
Governments only come into democracies because having power distributed so completely is not very efficient for running countries (and countries do need to be run - they need police, they need infrastructure, they even need armed forces, generally). So, what happens is people agree to delegate their power to some group of people who then use it to do the stuff that can only be done for the nation as a whole. Voila! We have a Government.
The point to note is this: _all_ the power that the government wields (in a true democracy) is power delegated to it by the people. This is important, because it implies that if the people decide they don't like what their government is doing, they can take their delegated power back, and thus remove power from the government. That's why governments get freaked out by elections - they know that they are at risk of losing their power, if the people decide to delegate their power to someone else.
The upshot of this is that in a democracy the only threat to the nation is going to be external - since everyone has the same amount of power and can't take power away from anyone else, and since the government is entirely reliant on the people for it's power, the only thing you have to do to retain you `liberty' is to make sure you vote. Make sure you participate in choosing where your power goes. I suppose you could say that's a form of `eternal vigilance', but it's from an entirely different viewpoint to the one that you're espousing. Your argument seems to be that you have to keep on watching that all powerful government to make sure that it doesn't try to take away your liberty (though if the government really is all powerful, how are you going to stop it?). Whereas my argument is more one of good housekeeping - make sure you help decide who gets your power for this term of office, because if you don't the idiot down the road will . . .
Note that I'm not saying anything about external threats to a nation - that's why I said democracies often need armed forces. Also, it is possible for the people of a nation to choose to give up their power en masse - that's pretty much what happened in Germany before WWII. Interestingly, though, that's also pretty much what the British population decided to do during the war - they handed their power over to Churchill's War Cabinet for the duration. The difference between Germany and Britain there was that the Germans gave their power to an insane megalomaniac, whereas the British gave their power to a farily responsible group. Also, the Germans don't seem to have reserved the right to take their power back - they gave it up wholly to one man, rather than to the people who just happened to be leading their country. The British, on the other hand, gave their power to the Government, rather than to Churchill, so that the power remained with the nation rather than an individual.
In any case, my argument is basically that governments in a democracy are not something to be feared - the people of the democracy can take power away from the government without needing to fight them. The case of the US War of Independance was an _external_ threat - another nation imposing it's will. You can't extrapolate from that case to the case of a democratically elected government.
himi I may not have been a political theorist before, but I'm perilously close now . . .
But not for the House of Reps. In an election for a seat in the House of Reps you have to number all the candidates in order of your preferences. That's why it's called a preferential voting system. Sure, senate ballot papers can get ridiculous, and that's why they introduced party votes (that may not be the correct term for them, but they do work as you've said) - at some point it got so that the number of invalid votes in the senate was becoming disproportionate due to people making mistakes, so they had to simplify it. But the two systems are _completely_seperate_. Just because you can vote by party for the Senate doesn't mean you can for the House of Reps, and the mere fact that it's possible in the Senate doesn't mean that you have to.
As for our Constitution . . . You do realise that the Constitution _purposely_ says nothing about "the people of Australian"? When they were writing the thing they were trying to create a federation of states, and the constitution reflects that - it's all about how powers are divided up between the states and the federal government. What you have to realise also is that when they wrote that constitution they were expecting to have it reviewed (a la the Constituional Convention) on a regular basis (like every ten or twenty years). Part of the reason why our Constitution is the way that it is is because we haven't changed it as we've changed over time. The other reason it's the way it is stems from the fact that our constitution is only really relevant to political power distribution - since it's so irrelevant to just about everything else, we've made a point of making everything else up as we go along. All our personal rights and obligations and so forth are founded either in laws made by various parliaments or in common law as laid down by the courts. And you know what? That works. It works a damn sight better (for most things) than the US system of making all their rights stem from the constitution - which they then don't change any more often than we do. If you think our constitution is almost irrelevant to the real world we live in, you might try considering a constitution that actually enshrines people's `right' to bear arms, just in case they need to overthrow their democratically elected government! If that isn't stupid, I don't know what is. Sure, the US constitution also does things like define rights to privacy and so forth, but whoopdedoo! Do they have such a wonderful society, merely because they happen to have their `fundamental democratic rights' written down on some pieces of paper somewhere? No. Australia is, in many, many ways a far better place to live than the US, and part of the reason is because we _don't_ get our rights from a piece of paper someone wrote two hundred years ago. Our rights are constantly being redefined, according to what _we_the_Australian_people_ agree is important. That's Democracy at work. If you don't like it, then you can bugger off to some tinpot little dictatorship where you can have fun writing a constitution for the revolutionaries. Have a go at it and see if you can do a better job!
If a seat goes to preferences then votes are distributed according to the preferences _you_ list, not according to your first preference's directions. That's why you have to number _all_ the boxes. When parties hand out how to vote cards on election day they're merely that party's suggestions about how they would like you to vote, not a hard and fast set of rules you have to follow.
Also, it's really very rare (at least in federal politics) for a seat to go uncontested, and it's almost as rare in state politics.
Please, if you're going to whine about our political system, make sure you get your facts right. There's enough crap here on/. about Australia without even more being piled on.
Just about everyone here has been making the same mistake - they've been equating ability in one area (generally abstract thinking - I mean hey, we're all programmers/thinkers/etc here at/.) with `intelligence'. This isn't just narrow minded - it's plain wrong. If things were that simple, then how would you rate my Dad's old friend, who's one of the best diesel mechanics you're likely to find - I could `think' rings around him, but I sincerely doubt I could ever be as good a mechanic as him. My ability to think effectively in the abstract doesn't translate particularly well into grasping what's going wrong with a complex piece of machinery that pretty much has a mind of it's own. His ability to understand how bits of the physical world interact with each other doesn't necessarily translate well into grasping how a program works. Abstract thinking is wonderful stuff, but it isn't the be-all and end-all of the world. The basic assumption behind many of these posts, that the kind of abstract thinking that we all do, all the time, and often get payed lots of money to do, is somehow the only form of intelligence worthy of the name is fundamentally wrong.
To get back on topic . . . This research doesn't say anything about a causal link between high numbers of synapses in the brain and in intellectually challenging job. Neither does it say anything about the converse. What the research seems to show (according to the report - I haven't read the original paper) is that people in some types of jobs (engineers and teachers were the examples cited) have higher numbers of synapses in a particular part of the brain. Not the whole brain, merely a particular part. What this suggests to me (though I'm not a neuroscientist) is that that particular part of the brain is primarily where the kind of abstract thinking that engineers/teacher/thinkers in general tend to do takes place. Since I'm not a neuroscientist or pshycologist or anything of that ilk I can't comment on how these results relate to current models of brain function, but I wouldn't be surprised if these were quite important findings - researchers don't normally get excited about stuff that's not important.
Whatever the case, it'd be a really good idea if people got over this - yes you're intelligent and yes you probably have the same kind of synaptic complexity that these people are talking about, but Who Cares!!! It doesn't mean anything in the real world. The only real way to judge intelligence is by what it does, not by how many brain cells made it happen.
I think that's being a little bit simplistic. I mean just because you've perfected an approach to thinking about a particular group of problems (programming problems, say, or engineering problems, or teaching) doesn't mean you're any more intelligent than you were before you perfected it, and vice versa. And then there's the fact that there isn't any definite link between the number of synapses in your brain and your intelligence . . .
And hey, since we're talking about intelligence: define it. Come up with a good, consistent definition that properly covers all areas of intelligence . . . and then see if they give you a Nobel Prize or something. Thing is, there isn't really a good quantifiable definition of intelligence, so any talk of `high intellect' jobs and `more intelligent' is on fairly shaky ground. Sure, you can talk about someone's ability to handle abstract concepts (which is what most people think of as intelligent, and which you probably mean when you talk about high intellect jobs and so forth), but how about a gifted motor mechanic's ability to understand the workings of an engine? How does that relate to `intelligence'? And how does it relate to the number of synapses in a brain?
My point is that looking at this research and reading into it the idea that `intellectualism' => lots of synapses => high intelligence is most likely a load of crap. What this research is more likely to show is what areas of the brain are related to the things that `highly intellectual' jobs entail - and without a much more comprehensive model of how the brain works, trying to take it beyond that is _very_ scientifically risky. It's the kind of approach that has, in the past, lead to things like those crackpots who said Africans are fundamentally less intelligent than Caucasians because the samples they tested tended to have smaller skulls . . .
On a lighter note, it is interesting research, and the fact that they could observe this kind of level of detail means that we're probably getting much closer to being able to understand the mechanisms at work in our brains . . . Which will hopefully lead us to a better understanding of intelligence, and thence on to the ultimate goal of all SF fans - Artificial Intelligence! I want to be able to think I'm talking to a *_real_* woma . . . er, yeah, well, you know what I mean . . .;-)
If they were young (in their twenties) then this might be interpreted as being a result of fundamental differences in brain structure, but if they were older than that it might simply be that their experiences over time effected the structures.
Probably the only way you could come up with a causal link between synaptic complexity and the `intellectualism' of your profession would be with a long term study, starting with children and following them through to middle age . . . Which is bit of a problem, really - by the time they'd collected enough data over a long enough time to get reasonable results, we'd probably know enough about our brains to make the results moot . . .
In any case, these findings are interesting, but they're hardly earth shattering. I mean, one of the researchers was quoted as saying that they back up observations made on animals - human brains may be vastly more complex than any other animal's, but they're still made of the same stuff, so it's not that surprising they seem to develop similarly . . .
himi My intellectualism is exponential - it decays exponentially with time after my last caffeine hit . . .
If there's a new release every month in the development tree then people wouldn't get so worked up about it, and they wouldn't have distributions doing dumb things like that. The way things are, when they release something people assume that it's production code, because that's all we ever see from them. If they weren't so shy about releasing code people would be more careful about using their development releases.
What it gets down to is that the XFree developers have a different approach to development. Coming from the Linux world that approach seems a little bit silly . . . But hey, it's their code . . .
All that aside, though, they've done a great job. X might not be perfect, but it works, and the free Unices would be nowhere near as popular as they are without it. So more power to them . . . and as much good code as possible to everyone!
I hate to carp about something like this (I'm generally one of those "shut up and code" type people), but I really do think the XFree people could release more snapshots, and more development code. It's been what, three, four months since they released 3.9.16, and only now are they releasing 3.9.17. How many revisions has even the stable kernel gone through in that time, let alone the development kernel . . .
Which isn't to say that things would necessarily be going faster if they did, but they'd be much more likely to get people using the snapshots if they were obviously working on them. I'm not going to use development code unless I can be fairly sure that any bugs that are found are going to be fixed _and_released_ in good time. That's why so many people are happy using development kernels - they can see the improvements between versions, and if they find a bug they can see the fixes going on in real time. This just isn't happening with X at the moment, unfortunately.
Oh well. At least they're still working on it, even if it's not as open as we might like.
himi
Excellent essay, really . . .
on
Interface Zen
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The only thing that grated a tad were the continuous comments about emacs - there's not that much difference between regularly switching modes and using meta-combinations. They're both just as automatic as the other after a while.
That said, I personally would love to have the movement commands in emacs changed to Ctrl-h, Ctrl-j, etc. I love the convenience of the hjkl controls, but I don't want to throw away all the wonderful things that emacs offers just for them . . .
On a broader note, I think a large part of the changes away from the keyboard result from `ordinary users' finding keyboards intimidating. Neal Stephenson made a really good point in his "In the beginning" essay: when you use a command line (and keyboard shortcuts are in the same league), you have to express your instructions in a completely non-ambiguos form, and that's hard work for most people. You can be really vague about searching through menus and so forth without losing any functionality, but if you're vague about your shell commands you get nothing done. You can see this in all those Windows keyboards - they have half a dozen different keys that aren't shortcuts to any particular command, but instead to menus. Once you've got the menu up you can move over to the mouse and go back to your normal searching routine, or you can search using the arrows or whatever, but it's all still oriented toward searching for an option rather than giving explicit commands. In fact, the whole thing with Windows' `user-friendliness' revolves around this point: you don't have to remember anything, all you have to do is recognise the option that you want to use from some menu. The biggest complaint you hear about command line interfaces is "all those things you have to remember". There seems to be a movement away from believing that you have to learn stuff in order to do useful things, to the attitude that if you have to learn stuff it's obviously the software's fault for not being easy enough. Which is moderately sickening, really (it'd make me physically ill, but I've had a long time to get used to it).
In the end I don't think you can blame the keyboard makers or the mouse manufacturers or whatever for the ergonomic stuffups you see - it's the people who quite simply aren't prepared to learn an efficient interface who are to blame. And the only thing to be done about them is . . . well, I was going to say take them out the back and shoot them, but I don't think there are enough bullets in the world. Maybe we should just leave them to use Windows. A fitting punishment, I think . . .
Sorry, sometimes I just assume everyone on/. is a yank . . .
About representative democracy, I don't think you're doing it justice - it definitely isn't perfect, but saying it causes more trouble than it's worth is a biiig stretch. If there's a significantly better way to run a country for everyone then I don't think anyone's invented it yet . . .
Why is there always this thing with Americans about overthrowing governments? I thought the whole point of a democratically elected govt. was that the people could decide not to elect them next time . . .
Voting is far more efficient than revolution, particularly when all you need is a relatively small change. I'm certainly going to vote against this current govt. at the next election, and I reckon there's going to be lots like me . . . Ain't democracy wonderful?
The first time someone uses evidence gained this way, or even uses evidence from someone's computer, this will be pounced on by the defense lawyers. And once that first bit of evidence has been thrown out there's a precedent, and all future evidence of that type will be challenged at every opportunity.
As everyone has been saying, this is a rather stupid law. But hey, isn't that what governments are all about? /cynicism> (on second thoughts, I think I'll keep my cynicism firmly in place . . . )
Technically this post is mostly correct, but the first time the Queen did that we'd have an instant referendum and become a Republic.
Oh, and we're the Commonwealth of Australia - we're not "a British commonwealth". A sovereign nation, who just happens to share a Monarch with the British. And no, I don't particularly like it.
I sometime wonder just how little Americans understand about little things like democracy. You live in a democratic society, and yet you have completely warped ideas about what that means.
IANAP(olitical)T(heorist), but I've given this matter a lot of thought. My conclusions probably clash with a lot of theories about democracy, but hey, they're only political theories - there's no evidence to back them up, so they probably don't even rate as hypotheses. So mine's as good as yours . . .
Anyway: the whole idea behind a democracy is that every person has exactly the same amount of power as any other person. Generally that power is understood as being the vote, which is why voting's as important as it is, but voting isn't fundamental to Democracy - the totally equal distribution of power is. In a sense this is like an anarchistic society, but there's a difference - in a Democracy, no one is allowed to take another person's power away from them. In an anarchistic society, anyone can do that. So, a deomcratic society is one in which everyone has equal power, and no one has the right to take another's power away from them. Those are the fundamental concepts underlying Democracy.
The problem with this as a practical political system is that this kind of distributed power is very inefficient at dealing with all those things that a nation has to do, like interact with other nations, defend the nation's border, etc. So what happens is people delegate their individual power to someone else, and they do so en masse. This is where voting comes in - when you vote for someone you're saying "I'd like to delegate my democratic powers to this person for a little while". Depending on your political system a group of people are selected on the basis of how much power was delegated to them in the election, and those people take up the task of doing those things that the nation can only do as a whole, rather than as a collection of individuals - this is the government.
So what does all this guff mean? Well, it means that no matter how powerful the government might look, it is exactly as powerful as the citizens of that nation allow it to be. Also, a government can only have power as long as people delegate their power to it - the people who make up the government have no more power in a democracy than anyone else. Ever noticed how governments get really freaked out at election time? They're worried about people deciding not to give their power back. And they have every reason to worry - even the most deranged and power crazed governments have, in a genuine democracy, been removed. In countries that aren't really democracies, where government power is rooted in something other than delegated power, this doesn't work so well, but even then it can be successful.
So, what has all this got to do with this thread? It's simple: you don't need a gun to have rights in a democracy. I'll repeat that one, because lots of Americans seem to have trouble with it: You Don't Need A Gun To Have Rights In A Democracy. If you live in a democracy, then all you need to to retain your civil rights is a voting slip. All you need is some way to exercise your fundamental democratic power. I'm Australian. Australia is a Democracy. So I don't need to worry about having some way to throw the government out the window by force - I can do it by writing a few numbers on a bit of paper every so often. It might result in some complete morons having power every so often (well, more often than not, really), but I'm prepared to pay that price in order to have the benefits of living in a Democracy.
If all you US citizens out there genuinely need guns to retain your democratic rights, then I'm afraid you aren't living in a democracy. If you are living in a democracy, then nothing and no one can ever take your democratic rights away. Take your pick: either you need guns, the US isn't a genuine Democracy and your 2nd Amendment is the foundation of your Civil Rights, or you are a Democracy, and the guns thing is complete bunkum. You can't have it both ways.
And finally, I would thank you all to shut up about the supposed link between Australian/UK/European gun laws and our freedom of speech/civil rights/whatever being eroded. There isn't one. Period.
The problem with an argument like that is that there's no way that you can come up with a global definition of "basic freedoms". Just as an example (and a controversial one, at that), here in Australia we don't believe that people have a fundamental right to bear arms, whereas in the US you do. That kind of difference makes it incredibly difficult to argue coherently across national/cultural boundaires about this sort of thing.
On top of that, I would take issue with your reasoning about why people don't riot in the streets. You have to understand that most people believe that things like Police surveilance are an acceptable price to pay for what it gains - a more effective policing of the law. The fact that these powers can be abused is part of the price, and yet we still come to the conclusion that the price is worth paying. Doesn't that tell you comething about other people's values? That maybe they don't think about things the same way that you do? Perhaps you should stop assuming that people who have different opinions to yours are ignorant, foolish or stupid, and instead wonder whether there are reasons behind their opinions.
And finally, in case you think I'm foolish and stupid, I _do_ think this legislation is a really bad idea. It sounds to me like the people who wrote it don't realise that if you can change just enough to break in, then you can change just about anything, and once the courts realise that the evidence is going to be useless. Either that or they thought the information gained would be useful enough in other ways to balance that out. Note that I'm _not_ fundamentally against that kind of surveilance - I think it has it's place. I am against anything which would make it that easy to fabricate evidence, which is where our legal system would start breaking down. That possibility _does_ worry me. All of which won't stop me from making my box as hard as possible to break into . . .
Anyway, I'd suggest you go off and have a really long think about someone like Ghandi, or the Dalai Lama, or someone along those lines - it might restore a modicum of your faith in your species.
I recently read through a number of Hannibal's old tech articles on Arstechnica, and they're _good_ - this guy isn't some kind of idiot ZD* writer with only half a clue on a good day.
The point is, _any_ journalist out there, be they in the print/television/radio or Internet worlds, _earn_ their credibility. They write enough stories that we get to know them and trust what they say. It's like Karma here on/., only not so organised;-)
Multiple competing versions of windows wouldn't be competing to try and define the defacto standard API. What they would be aiming for is to be the one that would run the most legacy apps.
The thing is, there is just so much software out there written to the various versions of the win32 API that any new windows OS would die a very quick death if they tried to introduce incompatibilities with that API. People don't want to have to buy new versions of their old software just because they upgraded their OS - if one of the competitors fixed things so that they had to, then that version would be spurned like the plague. To put it another way, the environment where the different windows versions would be competing isn't in the API space, it's in the application space. Given that the vast majority of that application space is already written to a particular set of APIs, there would be absolutely nothing to be gained by trying to compete in the API space - you'd be forced to establish an essentially completely new API, which is where Judge Jackson's "Applications barrier to entry" comes in.
If this was a normal case of OS competition then yes, things would probably pan out the way that you think, but it wouldn't be normal. New windows versions would be competing to make money from an established set of applications, rather than from an entirely new platform, and so incompatibilities that broke those applications would be suicidal. And if the applications work, who cares about anything else?
A constitution basically amounts to a contract between the government of a country and that country's people. If the government decides to break that contract somehow then that wonderfully worded and incredibly moving and patriotic constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper.
The whole idea of democracy is that the power in a nation is vested in *the people*, *all the people*, not in some small group, be they the government or some nobles or whatever. Elections are merely a means of delegating that power to a group that's small enough to run a country reasonably practically.
This is something that most Americans seem to have forgotten - no matter how powerful their government might be, that power comes _directly_ from the populace. All the power in a democratic nation is owned by all of the people. If that isn't the case, then that nation isn't really democratic - it just thinks it is. And that seems to be where the US is heading, based on the way that a majority of people don't even vote, and on the number of people who seem to think that the government is some all-powerful group that has to be threatened with armed retaliation in order to stop them doing nasty things to people. Truth is, the government couldn't give a damn about armed retaliation - they're infinitely more worried about being voted out in the next election. There's your power over the government, and you don't need a gun to use it. Vote! Vote every damn time you get a chance, because if you don't you're abrogating the power that you rightfully have as a member of a democracy - it doesn't matter what rights a constitution gives you, they mean nothing if you don't use them.
And we've had just as much free speech as anywhere else in the world - far more, in fact, than most of the world, including many places where no one would dream of stopping people owning guns.
I couldn't give a fuck what you Americans think about this - the "right" to bear arms is a crock of shit. If you can't come up with a better way to retain your freedom of speech (a little hint here for the intelligence impaired: it starts with a `D' and sounds absolutely identical to `Democracy') then you're probably too stupid to be safe with firearms. And don't try telling me that you need to fight to get democracy in the first place, because that's pure bullshit - Australia, that poor little nation whose citizens you seem to despise so much, never fired a single shot in it's move toward democracy. No, we somehow managed to get there by deciding that we wanted to, working out how we were going to do it, and then _peacefully_ telling Britain that we wanted our independance. Force of arms is _not_ a necessary precondition for freedom. Nor is the idea that the populace should be able to win a war with it's own government. So please, just shut up. And you might want to consider looking at the history of those nations that have managed to remain peaceful and prosperous without fighting wars left right and center. You can start with Australia, then maybe consider Canada, New Zealand, the UK, most of Scandinavia . . .
We don't need Britain to guide us, we need some way of selecting politicians with a modicum of intelligence to run the country. Unfortunately that's probably impossible ("politician with intelligence" has got to be the classic oxymoron).
What is it with guns and Americans? Why do so many of you seem to think that the only way to achieve and maintain freedom is by force of arms? Are you completely impervious to the lessons of history, in places like India (everyone seems to revere Ghandi as some kind of demi-god, but they conveniently forget that he taught people a way to achieve freedom _without_ using force), and in Australia, too. We were once a penal colony, ruled by Britain; now we're a free, sovereign nation who are on the verge of cutting the last of our ties with Britain. Did we ever even dream of fighting a war _against_ Britain? No. You see, we didn't need to - all we needed to do was ask them, and provide them with what we considered to be a good constitution, which they gladly ratified and set us free to follow our own course.
Please, will someone explain to me why this kind of thing is so hard for Americans to accept? Is there something in your psyche that makes you blind to the possibility that things do not have to be done exactly as you did them? That there might be other ways of life that are just as valid, and possibly more so, than your own? Why in gods name do you have to try and force your morals, your ideals, your way of life onto the rest of the world? Please, leave us to make our own way, without having to slavishly bow down before _your_ gods and heroes. We are not part of your country, nor do we want to be - we want to make our own decisions, and do things the way that we see fit. I'd prefer to live with my own mistakes than yours.
himi (and no, I don't support any of these censorship bills, and I don't support the idea that governments know better than individuals what is right or wrong. But all too often these days I find myself absolutely _HATING_ America and how they interact with the rest of the world. It's not much fun, believe me)
I'd hate to suggest that you might be wrong, but I think you haven't really looked at the rest of the world very thouroughly. Australia is at least as (if not more) "multicultural" as the US, but we have violent crime rates an order of magnitude lower. The UK is also extremely culturally diverse (despite what the rest of the world might think), and has similarly low crime rates. I could cite many other countries in the same situation: this suggests to me that the US is the anomaly, not the norm. I wouldn't blame it all on guns, or drugs, or the poverty of black americans, or any of those nice easy targets, but there is _something_ that's disfunctional about the US. Simply saying that it's because you're bigger, badder, meaner, whatever seems to be arguing from the symptoms, rather than the cause.
My 0.02 A$ . . . but if people put enough of them in, it might add up to something useful . . .
I've just re-read my original post, and I'm beginning to doubt my sanity. I didn't actually say anything nasty, argumentative, offensive, or disrespectful - all I did was disagree with your argument, in a fairly clear and calm manner. I was not being immature, unles they have changed the definition of maturity in the last few days.
Getting to your points: "Or stated differently if you teach theories just to be teaching theories then you are not learning to think but only to recite by rote." Please enlighten me: where did I suggest that people should be taught theories for the sake of teaching them theories? I advocated teaching theories as a means of exposure to the thought processes behind them - this is about as far from "rote learning" as you can get. As a side effect, in the teaching of science, the pupil comes out of the teaching with knowledge of scientific theories, which can be extremely powerful tools. How can anyone argue sensibly against that sort of teaching?
"As for the comment challenging beliefs the earlier the better. I disagree, human development limits what can be taught when." Once again you miss the point I was trying to make. I wasn't advocating teaching kindergarten kids relativity (unless they ask for it), I was advocating that they be exposed to as many different kinds of ideas as possible. Human development might limit what can be taught, but it doesn't limit the flexibility of the young in dealing with a broad range of experience and ideas. In fact, children are generally _far_ more flexible in this than most adults, even the least anomalous of them. And if you can give them that broad experience of ideas, there's a good chance that they'll develop to the point where they can deal with the more complex things much earlier. Saying "Oh, that's too hard for the poor children, we'll leave it for a year or two" is almost certainly underestimating their capabilities.
"And finally, conformity of thought (or teaching for that matter) does not really promote advances." Straw Man Alert! Straw Man Alert! I didn't say anything like that - in fact, rather than promote conformity of thought, I was advocating _exactly_ the opposite.
"Needless to say, from what I have read of your postings, you have made up your mind about evolution and expect everyone else to agree with you." Well, yes, I have made up my mind about evolution. In fact, I made it up so long ago that I can't even remember when it happened, though I was probably seven or eight at the time . . . And yes, I suppose I do expect everyone else to agree with me, at least provisionally, because the evidence for evolution is so _convincing_. Pretty much the only way to argue with the validity of evolutionary theory is by rejecting chunks of it outright, generally on the basis of little or no evidence. That's what creationists do, and that's what those scientists who have a problem with evolution do ("Macroevolution is different from Microevolution!" How?). It's a bit of a generalisation, but the scientific community in general doesn't even wonder about evolution's validity any more, the evidence is so strong. I realise you've probably read at least half a dozen equivalent recomendations, but go have a look at the talk.origins web site, and read the FAQS. There's a hell of a lot more about evolution there than I can carry around in my head, and they list very good references.
Oh, and I have read about creation "theory". What's more, I've read the bible (admittedly a long time ago, but even so). The problem is, the kind of thing that creation theory claims is extraordinarily hard to accept, for someone with training in physics - unless you distort the words to the point where it's an exercise in semantics, rather than science, there is nothing in them that presents a more coherent, consistent explanation of the origin of the universe and our planet than that presented by science. Given that, and using the famous "Ockhams razor", I am pretty much forced to discard creation theory in favour of science's explanations. It would take some very powerful evidence to shift me, and I haven't seen anything that even approaches that coming out of the creationist camp.
I'm sorry if this seems unreasonable and immature to you, or even (god forbid!) disrespectful, but I can't help how you react to my honest and deeply thought out opinions. I'm not going to stop expressing them, particularly not for an AC on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole idea behind a democracy is that the power stems from the people.
As I see it (and I'm not a political theorist, but I think my ideas are valid), the basis of a democracy is that everyone in the democracy has equal power, and no one can deprive anyone else of their power. That's the fundamental basis, everything else stems from it. (That may not be what the political theorists say, but it's what I've observed from living in a democracy and watching other democracies in action)
Governments only come into democracies because having power distributed so completely is not very efficient for running countries (and countries do need to be run - they need police, they need infrastructure, they even need armed forces, generally). So, what happens is people agree to delegate their power to some group of people who then use it to do the stuff that can only be done for the nation as a whole. Voila! We have a Government.
The point to note is this: _all_ the power that the government wields (in a true democracy) is power delegated to it by the people. This is important, because it implies that if the people decide they don't like what their government is doing, they can take their delegated power back, and thus remove power from the government.
That's why governments get freaked out by elections - they know that they are at risk of losing their power, if the people decide to delegate their power to someone else.
The upshot of this is that in a democracy the only threat to the nation is going to be external - since everyone has the same amount of power and can't take power away from anyone else, and since the government is entirely reliant on the people for it's power, the only thing you have to do to retain you `liberty' is to make sure you vote. Make sure you participate in choosing where your power goes.
I suppose you could say that's a form of `eternal vigilance', but it's from an entirely different viewpoint to the one that you're espousing. Your argument seems to be that you have to keep on watching that all powerful government to make sure that it doesn't try to take away your liberty (though if the government really is all powerful, how are you going to stop it?). Whereas my argument is more one of good housekeeping - make sure you help decide who gets your power for this term of office, because if you don't the idiot down the road will . . .
Note that I'm not saying anything about external threats to a nation - that's why I said democracies often need armed forces. Also, it is possible for the people of a nation to choose to give up their power en masse - that's pretty much what happened in Germany before WWII. Interestingly, though, that's also pretty much what the British population decided to do during the war - they handed their power over to Churchill's War Cabinet for the duration. The difference between Germany and Britain there was that the Germans gave their power to an insane megalomaniac, whereas the British gave their power to a farily responsible group. Also, the Germans don't seem to have reserved the right to take their power back - they gave it up wholly to one man, rather than to the people who just happened to be leading their country. The British, on the other hand, gave their power to the Government, rather than to Churchill, so that the power remained with the nation rather than an individual.
In any case, my argument is basically that governments in a democracy are not something to be feared - the people of the democracy can take power away from the government without needing to fight them. The case of the US War of Independance was an _external_ threat - another nation imposing it's will. You can't extrapolate from that case to the case of a democratically elected government.
himi
I may not have been a political theorist before, but I'm perilously close now . . .
But not for the House of Reps. In an election for a seat in the House of Reps you have to number all the candidates in order of your preferences. That's why it's called a preferential voting system.
Sure, senate ballot papers can get ridiculous, and that's why they introduced party votes (that may not be the correct term for them, but they do work as you've said) - at some point it got so that the number of invalid votes in the senate was becoming disproportionate due to people making mistakes, so they had to simplify it.
But the two systems are _completely_seperate_. Just because you can vote by party for the Senate doesn't mean you can for the House of Reps, and the mere fact that it's possible in the Senate doesn't mean that you have to.
As for our Constitution . . . You do realise that the Constitution _purposely_ says nothing about "the people of Australian"? When they were writing the thing they were trying to create a federation of states, and the constitution reflects that - it's all about how powers are divided up between the states and the federal government.
What you have to realise also is that when they wrote that constitution they were expecting to have it reviewed (a la the Constituional Convention) on a regular basis (like every ten or twenty years). Part of the reason why our Constitution is the way that it is is because we haven't changed it as we've changed over time.
The other reason it's the way it is stems from the fact that our constitution is only really relevant to political power distribution - since it's so irrelevant to just about everything else, we've made a point of making everything else up as we go along. All our personal rights and obligations and so forth are founded either in laws made by various parliaments or in common law as laid down by the courts. And you know what? That works. It works a damn sight better (for most things) than the US system of making all their rights stem from the constitution - which they then don't change any more often than we do. If you think our constitution is almost irrelevant to the real world we live in, you might try considering a constitution that actually enshrines people's `right' to bear arms, just in case they need to overthrow their democratically elected government! If that isn't stupid, I don't know what is.
Sure, the US constitution also does things like define rights to privacy and so forth, but whoopdedoo! Do they have such a wonderful society, merely because they happen to have their `fundamental democratic rights' written down on some pieces of paper somewhere? No. Australia is, in many, many ways a far better place to live than the US, and part of the reason is because we _don't_ get our rights from a piece of paper someone wrote two hundred years ago. Our rights are constantly being redefined, according to what _we_the_Australian_people_ agree is important. That's Democracy at work. If you don't like it, then you can bugger off to some tinpot little dictatorship where you can have fun writing a constitution for the revolutionaries. Have a go at it and see if you can do a better job!
himi
If a seat goes to preferences then votes are distributed according to the preferences _you_ list, not according to your first preference's directions. That's why you have to number _all_ the boxes. When parties hand out how to vote cards on election day they're merely that party's suggestions about how they would like you to vote, not a hard and fast set of rules you have to follow.
/. about Australia without even more being piled on.
Also, it's really very rare (at least in federal politics) for a seat to go uncontested, and it's almost as rare in state politics.
Please, if you're going to whine about our political system, make sure you get your facts right. There's enough crap here on
himi
Just about everyone here has been making the same mistake - they've been equating ability in one area (generally abstract thinking - I mean hey, we're all programmers/thinkers/etc here at /.) with `intelligence'. This isn't just narrow minded - it's plain wrong.
If things were that simple, then how would you rate my Dad's old friend, who's one of the best diesel mechanics you're likely to find - I could `think' rings around him, but I sincerely doubt I could ever be as good a mechanic as him. My ability to think effectively in the abstract doesn't translate particularly well into grasping what's going wrong with a complex piece of machinery that pretty much has a mind of it's own. His ability to understand how bits of the physical world interact with each other doesn't necessarily translate well into grasping how a program works.
Abstract thinking is wonderful stuff, but it isn't the be-all and end-all of the world. The basic assumption behind many of these posts, that the kind of abstract thinking that we all do, all the time, and often get payed lots of money to do, is somehow the only form of intelligence worthy of the name is fundamentally wrong.
To get back on topic . . .
This research doesn't say anything about a causal link between high numbers of synapses in the brain and in intellectually challenging job. Neither does it say anything about the converse.
What the research seems to show (according to the report - I haven't read the original paper) is that people in some types of jobs (engineers and teachers were the examples cited) have higher numbers of synapses in a particular part of the brain. Not the whole brain, merely a particular part. What this suggests to me (though I'm not a neuroscientist) is that that particular part of the brain is primarily where the kind of abstract thinking that engineers/teacher/thinkers in general tend to do takes place. Since I'm not a neuroscientist or pshycologist or anything of that ilk I can't comment on how these results relate to current models of brain function, but I wouldn't be surprised if these were quite important findings - researchers don't normally get excited about stuff that's not important.
Whatever the case, it'd be a really good idea if people got over this - yes you're intelligent and yes you probably have the same kind of synaptic complexity that these people are talking about, but Who Cares!!! It doesn't mean anything in the real world. The only real way to judge intelligence is by what it does, not by how many brain cells made it happen.
himi
I think that's being a little bit simplistic. I mean just because you've perfected an approach to thinking about a particular group of problems (programming problems, say, or engineering problems, or teaching) doesn't mean you're any more intelligent than you were before you perfected it, and vice versa. And then there's the fact that there isn't any definite link between the number of synapses in your brain and your intelligence . . .
;-)
And hey, since we're talking about intelligence: define it. Come up with a good, consistent definition that properly covers all areas of intelligence . . . and then see if they give you a Nobel Prize or something. Thing is, there isn't really a good quantifiable definition of intelligence, so any talk of `high intellect' jobs and `more intelligent' is on fairly shaky ground.
Sure, you can talk about someone's ability to handle abstract concepts (which is what most people think of as intelligent, and which you probably mean when you talk about high intellect jobs and so forth), but how about a gifted motor mechanic's ability to understand the workings of an engine? How does that relate to `intelligence'? And how does it relate to the number of synapses in a brain?
My point is that looking at this research and reading into it the idea that `intellectualism' => lots of synapses => high intelligence is most likely a load of crap. What this research is more likely to show is what areas of the brain are related to the things that `highly intellectual' jobs entail - and without a much more comprehensive model of how the brain works, trying to take it beyond that is _very_ scientifically risky. It's the kind of approach that has, in the past, lead to things like those crackpots who said Africans are fundamentally less intelligent than Caucasians because the samples they tested tended to have smaller skulls . . .
On a lighter note, it is interesting research, and the fact that they could observe this kind of level of detail means that we're probably getting much closer to being able to understand the mechanisms at work in our brains . . . Which will hopefully lead us to a better understanding of intelligence, and thence on to the ultimate goal of all SF fans - Artificial Intelligence! I want to be able to think I'm talking to a *_real_* woma . . . er, yeah, well, you know what I mean . . .
himi
If they were young (in their twenties) then this might be interpreted as being a result of fundamental differences in brain structure, but if they were older than that it might simply be that their experiences over time effected the structures.
Probably the only way you could come up with a causal link between synaptic complexity and the `intellectualism' of your profession would be with a long term study, starting with children and following them through to middle age . . . Which is bit of a problem, really - by the time they'd collected enough data over a long enough time to get reasonable results, we'd probably know enough about our brains to make the results moot . . .
In any case, these findings are interesting, but they're hardly earth shattering. I mean, one of the researchers was quoted as saying that they back up observations made on animals - human brains may be vastly more complex than any other animal's, but they're still made of the same stuff, so it's not that surprising they seem to develop similarly . . .
himi
My intellectualism is exponential - it decays exponentially with time after my last caffeine hit . . .
If there's a new release every month in the development tree then people wouldn't get so worked up about it, and they wouldn't have distributions doing dumb things like that. The way things are, when they release something people assume that it's production code, because that's all we ever see from them. If they weren't so shy about releasing code people would be more careful about using their development releases.
What it gets down to is that the XFree developers have a different approach to development. Coming from the Linux world that approach seems a little bit silly . . . But hey, it's their code . . .
All that aside, though, they've done a great job. X might not be perfect, but it works, and the free Unices would be nowhere near as popular as they are without it. So more power to them . . . and as much good code as possible to everyone!
himi
I hate to carp about something like this (I'm generally one of those "shut up and code" type people), but I really do think the XFree people could release more snapshots, and more development code. It's been what, three, four months since they released 3.9.16, and only now are they releasing 3.9.17. How many revisions has even the stable kernel gone through in that time, let alone the development kernel . . .
Which isn't to say that things would necessarily be going faster if they did, but they'd be much more likely to get people using the snapshots if they were obviously working on them. I'm not going to use development code unless I can be fairly sure that any bugs that are found are going to be fixed _and_released_ in good time. That's why so many people are happy using development kernels - they can see the improvements between versions, and if they find a bug they can see the fixes going on in real time. This just isn't happening with X at the moment, unfortunately.
Oh well. At least they're still working on it, even if it's not as open as we might like.
himi
The only thing that grated a tad were the continuous comments about emacs - there's not that much difference between regularly switching modes and using meta-combinations. They're both just as automatic as the other after a while.
That said, I personally would love to have the movement commands in emacs changed to Ctrl-h, Ctrl-j, etc. I love the convenience of the hjkl controls, but I don't want to throw away all the wonderful things that emacs offers just for them . . .
On a broader note, I think a large part of the changes away from the keyboard result from `ordinary users' finding keyboards intimidating. Neal Stephenson made a really good point in his "In the beginning" essay: when you use a command line (and keyboard shortcuts are in the same league), you have to express your instructions in a completely non-ambiguos form, and that's hard work for most people. You can be really vague about searching through menus and so forth without losing any functionality, but if you're vague about your shell commands you get nothing done.
You can see this in all those Windows keyboards - they have half a dozen different keys that aren't shortcuts to any particular command, but instead to menus. Once you've got the menu up you can move over to the mouse and go back to your normal searching routine, or you can search using the arrows or whatever, but it's all still oriented toward searching for an option rather than giving explicit commands.
In fact, the whole thing with Windows' `user-friendliness' revolves around this point: you don't have to remember anything, all you have to do is recognise the option that you want to use from some menu. The biggest complaint you hear about command line interfaces is "all those things you have to remember". There seems to be a movement away from believing that you have to learn stuff in order to do useful things, to the attitude that if you have to learn stuff it's obviously the software's fault for not being easy enough. Which is moderately sickening, really (it'd make me physically ill, but I've had a long time to get used to it).
In the end I don't think you can blame the keyboard makers or the mouse manufacturers or whatever for the ergonomic stuffups you see - it's the people who quite simply aren't prepared to learn an efficient interface who are to blame. And the only thing to be done about them is . . . well, I was going to say take them out the back and shoot them, but I don't think there are enough bullets in the world. Maybe we should just leave them to use Windows.
A fitting punishment, I think . . .
himi
My, aren't I cynical today . . .
Sorry, sometimes I just assume everyone on /. is a yank . . .
About representative democracy, I don't think you're doing it justice - it definitely isn't perfect, but saying it causes more trouble than it's worth is a biiig stretch. If there's a significantly better way to run a country for everyone then I don't think anyone's invented it yet . . .
himi
Why is there always this thing with Americans about overthrowing governments? I thought the whole point of a democratically elected govt. was that the people could decide not to elect them next time . . .
Voting is far more efficient than revolution, particularly when all you need is a relatively small change. I'm certainly going to vote against this current govt. at the next election, and I reckon there's going to be lots like me . . .
Ain't democracy wonderful?
himi
I hate being rude to people I haven't met, but I'm not a moderator so I can't really respond more constructively.
As I said, Fuck You!
himi
Hates all those fucking American morons . . .
The first time someone uses evidence gained this way, or even uses evidence from someone's computer, this will be pounced on by the defense lawyers. And once that first bit of evidence has been thrown out there's a precedent, and all future evidence of that type will be challenged at every opportunity.
As everyone has been saying, this is a rather stupid law. But hey, isn't that what governments are all about?
/cynicism>
(on second thoughts, I think I'll keep my cynicism firmly in place . . . )
himi
Technically this post is mostly correct, but the first time the Queen did that we'd have an instant referendum and become a Republic.
Oh, and we're the Commonwealth of Australia - we're not "a British commonwealth". A sovereign nation, who just happens to share a Monarch with the British.
And no, I don't particularly like it.
himi
I sometime wonder just how little Americans understand about little things like democracy. You live in a democratic society, and yet you have completely warped ideas about what that means.
IANAP(olitical)T(heorist), but I've given this matter a lot of thought. My conclusions probably clash with a lot of theories about democracy, but hey, they're only political theories - there's no evidence to back them up, so they probably don't even rate as hypotheses. So mine's as good as yours . . .
Anyway: the whole idea behind a democracy is that every person has exactly the same amount of power as any other person. Generally that power is understood as being the vote, which is why voting's as important as it is, but voting isn't fundamental to Democracy - the totally equal distribution of power is.
In a sense this is like an anarchistic society, but there's a difference - in a Democracy, no one is allowed to take another person's power away from them. In an anarchistic society, anyone can do that.
So, a deomcratic society is one in which everyone has equal power, and no one has the right to take another's power away from them. Those are the fundamental concepts underlying Democracy.
The problem with this as a practical political system is that this kind of distributed power is very inefficient at dealing with all those things that a nation has to do, like interact with other nations, defend the nation's border, etc. So what happens is people delegate their individual power to someone else, and they do so en masse. This is where voting comes in - when you vote for someone you're saying "I'd like to delegate my democratic powers to this person for a little while". Depending on your political system a group of people are selected on the basis of how much power was delegated to them in the election, and those people take up the task of doing those things that the nation can only do as a whole, rather than as a collection of individuals - this is the government.
So what does all this guff mean? Well, it means that no matter how powerful the government might look, it is exactly as powerful as the citizens of that nation allow it to be.
Also, a government can only have power as long as people delegate their power to it - the people who make up the government have no more power in a democracy than anyone else. Ever noticed how governments get really freaked out at election time? They're worried about people deciding not to give their power back. And they have every reason to worry - even the most deranged and power crazed governments have, in a genuine democracy, been removed. In countries that aren't really democracies, where government power is rooted in something other than delegated power, this doesn't work so well, but even then it can be successful.
So, what has all this got to do with this thread? It's simple: you don't need a gun to have rights in a democracy.
I'll repeat that one, because lots of Americans seem to have trouble with it: You Don't Need A Gun To Have Rights In A Democracy.
If you live in a democracy, then all you need to to retain your civil rights is a voting slip. All you need is some way to exercise your fundamental democratic power.
I'm Australian. Australia is a Democracy. So I don't need to worry about having some way to throw the government out the window by force - I can do it by writing a few numbers on a bit of paper every so often. It might result in some complete morons having power every so often (well, more often than not, really), but I'm prepared to pay that price in order to have the benefits of living in a Democracy.
If all you US citizens out there genuinely need guns to retain your democratic rights, then I'm afraid you aren't living in a democracy. If you are living in a democracy, then nothing and no one can ever take your democratic rights away.
Take your pick: either you need guns, the US isn't a genuine Democracy and your 2nd Amendment is the foundation of your Civil Rights, or you are a Democracy, and the guns thing is complete bunkum. You can't have it both ways.
And finally, I would thank you all to shut up about the supposed link between Australian/UK/European gun laws and our freedom of speech/civil rights/whatever being eroded. There isn't one. Period.
himi
The problem with an argument like that is that there's no way that you can come up with a global definition of "basic freedoms". Just as an example (and a controversial one, at that), here in Australia we don't believe that people have a fundamental right to bear arms, whereas in the US you do. That kind of difference makes it incredibly difficult to argue coherently across national/cultural boundaires about this sort of thing.
On top of that, I would take issue with your reasoning about why people don't riot in the streets. You have to understand that most people believe that things like Police surveilance are an acceptable price to pay for what it gains - a more effective policing of the law. The fact that these powers can be abused is part of the price, and yet we still come to the conclusion that the price is worth paying. Doesn't that tell you comething about other people's values? That maybe they don't think about things the same way that you do? Perhaps you should stop assuming that people who have different opinions to yours are ignorant, foolish or stupid, and instead wonder whether there are reasons behind their opinions.
And finally, in case you think I'm foolish and stupid, I _do_ think this legislation is a really bad idea. It sounds to me like the people who wrote it don't realise that if you can change just enough to break in, then you can change just about anything, and once the courts realise that the evidence is going to be useless. Either that or they thought the information gained would be useful enough in other ways to balance that out.
Note that I'm _not_ fundamentally against that kind of surveilance - I think it has it's place. I am against anything which would make it that easy to fabricate evidence, which is where our legal system would start breaking down. That possibility _does_ worry me.
All of which won't stop me from making my box as hard as possible to break into . . .
Anyway, I'd suggest you go off and have a really long think about someone like Ghandi, or the Dalai Lama, or someone along those lines - it might restore a modicum of your faith in your species.
himi
I recently read through a number of Hannibal's old tech articles on Arstechnica, and they're _good_ - this guy isn't some kind of idiot ZD* writer with only half a clue on a good day.
/., only not so organised ;-)
The point is, _any_ journalist out there, be they in the print/television/radio or Internet worlds, _earn_ their credibility. They write enough stories that we get to know them and trust what they say. It's like Karma here on
himi
Multiple competing versions of windows wouldn't be competing to try and define the defacto standard API. What they would be aiming for is to be the one that would run the most legacy apps.
The thing is, there is just so much software out there written to the various versions of the win32 API that any new windows OS would die a very quick death if they tried to introduce incompatibilities with that API. People don't want to have to buy new versions of their old software just because they upgraded their OS - if one of the competitors fixed things so that they had to, then that version would be spurned like the plague.
To put it another way, the environment where the different windows versions would be competing isn't in the API space, it's in the application space. Given that the vast majority of that application space is already written to a particular set of APIs, there would be absolutely nothing to be gained by trying to compete in the API space - you'd be forced to establish an essentially completely new API, which is where Judge Jackson's "Applications barrier to entry" comes in.
If this was a normal case of OS competition then yes, things would probably pan out the way that you think, but it wouldn't be normal. New windows versions would be competing to make money from an established set of applications, rather than from an entirely new platform, and so incompatibilities that broke those applications would be suicidal. And if the applications work, who cares about anything else?
himi
A constitution basically amounts to a contract between the government of a country and that country's people. If the government decides to break that contract somehow then that wonderfully worded and incredibly moving and patriotic constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper.
The whole idea of democracy is that the power in a nation is vested in *the people*, *all the people*, not in some small group, be they the government or some nobles or whatever. Elections are merely a means of delegating that power to a group that's small enough to run a country reasonably practically.
This is something that most Americans seem to have forgotten - no matter how powerful their government might be, that power comes _directly_ from the populace. All the power in a democratic nation is owned by all of the people. If that isn't the case, then that nation isn't really democratic - it just thinks it is. And that seems to be where the US is heading, based on the way that a majority of people don't even vote, and on the number of people who seem to think that the government is some all-powerful group that has to be threatened with armed retaliation in order to stop them doing nasty things to people.
Truth is, the government couldn't give a damn about armed retaliation - they're infinitely more worried about being voted out in the next election. There's your power over the government, and you don't need a gun to use it. Vote! Vote every damn time you get a chance, because if you don't you're abrogating the power that you rightfully have as a member of a democracy - it doesn't matter what rights a constitution gives you, they mean nothing if you don't use them.
himi
And we've had just as much free speech as anywhere else in the world - far more, in fact, than most of the world, including many places where no one would dream of stopping people owning guns.
I couldn't give a fuck what you Americans think about this - the "right" to bear arms is a crock of shit. If you can't come up with a better way to retain your freedom of speech (a little hint here for the intelligence impaired: it starts with a `D' and sounds absolutely identical to `Democracy') then you're probably too stupid to be safe with firearms. And don't try telling me that you need to fight to get democracy in the first place, because that's pure bullshit - Australia, that poor little nation whose citizens you seem to despise so much, never fired a single shot in it's move toward democracy. No, we somehow managed to get there by deciding that we wanted to, working out how we were going to do it, and then _peacefully_ telling Britain that we wanted our independance.
Force of arms is _not_ a necessary precondition for freedom. Nor is the idea that the populace should be able to win a war with it's own government. So please, just shut up. And you might want to consider looking at the history of those nations that have managed to remain peaceful and prosperous without fighting wars left right and center. You can start with Australia, then maybe consider Canada, New Zealand, the UK, most of Scandinavia . . .
himi
We don't need Britain to guide us, we need some way of selecting politicians with a modicum of intelligence to run the country. Unfortunately that's probably impossible ("politician with intelligence" has got to be the classic oxymoron).
himi
What is it with guns and Americans? Why do so many of you seem to think that the only way to achieve and maintain freedom is by force of arms? Are you completely impervious to the lessons of history, in places like India (everyone seems to revere Ghandi as some kind of demi-god, but they conveniently forget that he taught people a way to achieve freedom _without_ using force), and in Australia, too. We were once a penal colony, ruled by Britain; now we're a free, sovereign nation who are on the verge of cutting the last of our ties with Britain. Did we ever even dream of fighting a war _against_ Britain? No. You see, we didn't need to - all we needed to do was ask them, and provide them with what we considered to be a good constitution, which they gladly ratified and set us free to follow our own course.
Please, will someone explain to me why this kind of thing is so hard for Americans to accept? Is there something in your psyche that makes you blind to the possibility that things do not have to be done exactly as you did them? That there might be other ways of life that are just as valid, and possibly more so, than your own? Why in gods name do you have to try and force your morals, your ideals, your way of life onto the rest of the world?
Please, leave us to make our own way, without having to slavishly bow down before _your_ gods and heroes. We are not part of your country, nor do we want to be - we want to make our own decisions, and do things the way that we see fit. I'd prefer to live with my own mistakes than yours.
himi
(and no, I don't support any of these censorship bills, and I don't support the idea that governments know better than individuals what is right or wrong. But all too often these days I find myself absolutely _HATING_ America and how they interact with the rest of the world. It's not much fun, believe me)
I'd hate to suggest that you might be wrong, but I think you haven't really looked at the rest of the world very thouroughly. Australia is at least as (if not more) "multicultural" as the US, but we have violent crime rates an order of magnitude lower. The UK is also extremely culturally diverse (despite what the rest of the world might think), and has similarly low crime rates.
I could cite many other countries in the same situation: this suggests to me that the US is the anomaly, not the norm. I wouldn't blame it all on guns, or drugs, or the poverty of black americans, or any of those nice easy targets, but there is _something_ that's disfunctional about the US. Simply saying that it's because you're bigger, badder, meaner, whatever seems to be arguing from the symptoms, rather than the cause.
My 0.02 A$ . . . but if people put enough of them in, it might add up to something useful . . .
himi
I've just re-read my original post, and I'm beginning to doubt my sanity. I didn't actually say anything nasty, argumentative, offensive, or disrespectful - all I did was disagree with your argument, in a fairly clear and calm manner. I was not being immature, unles they have changed the definition of maturity in the last few days.
Getting to your points:
"Or stated differently if you teach theories just to be teaching theories then you are not learning to think but only to recite by rote."
Please enlighten me: where did I suggest that people should be taught theories for the sake of teaching them theories? I advocated teaching theories as a means of exposure to the thought processes behind them - this is about as far from "rote learning" as you can get. As a side effect, in the teaching of science, the pupil comes out of the teaching with knowledge of scientific theories, which can be extremely powerful tools. How can anyone argue sensibly against that sort of teaching?
"As for the comment challenging beliefs the earlier the better. I disagree, human development limits what can be taught when."
Once again you miss the point I was trying to make. I wasn't advocating teaching kindergarten kids relativity (unless they ask for it), I was advocating that they be exposed to as many different kinds of ideas as possible. Human development might limit what can be taught, but it doesn't limit the flexibility of the young in dealing with a broad range of experience and ideas. In fact, children are generally _far_ more flexible in this than most adults, even the least anomalous of them. And if you can give them that broad experience of ideas, there's a good chance that they'll develop to the point where they can deal with the more complex things much earlier. Saying "Oh, that's too hard for the poor children, we'll leave it for a year or two" is almost certainly underestimating their capabilities.
"And finally, conformity of thought (or teaching for that matter) does not really promote advances."
Straw Man Alert! Straw Man Alert! I didn't say anything like that - in fact, rather than promote conformity of thought, I was advocating _exactly_ the opposite.
"Needless to say, from what I have read of your postings, you have made up your mind about evolution and expect everyone else to agree with you."
Well, yes, I have made up my mind about evolution. In fact, I made it up so long ago that I can't even remember when it happened, though I was probably seven or eight at the time . . . And yes, I suppose I do expect everyone else to agree with me, at least provisionally, because the evidence for evolution is so _convincing_. Pretty much the only way to argue with the validity of evolutionary theory is by rejecting chunks of it outright, generally on the basis of little or no evidence. That's what creationists do, and that's what those scientists who have a problem with evolution do ("Macroevolution is different from Microevolution!" How?). It's a bit of a generalisation, but the scientific community in general doesn't even wonder about evolution's validity any more, the evidence is so strong.
I realise you've probably read at least half a dozen equivalent recomendations, but go have a look at the talk.origins web site, and read the FAQS. There's a hell of a lot more about evolution there than I can carry around in my head, and they list very good references.
Oh, and I have read about creation "theory". What's more, I've read the bible (admittedly a long time ago, but even so). The problem is, the kind of thing that creation theory claims is extraordinarily hard to accept, for someone with training in physics - unless you distort the words to the point where it's an exercise in semantics, rather than science, there is nothing in them that presents a more coherent, consistent explanation of the origin of the universe and our planet than that presented by science. Given that, and using the famous "Ockhams razor", I am pretty much forced to discard creation theory in favour of science's explanations. It would take some very powerful evidence to shift me, and I haven't seen anything that even approaches that coming out of the creationist camp.
I'm sorry if this seems unreasonable and immature to you, or even (god forbid!) disrespectful, but I can't help how you react to my honest and deeply thought out opinions. I'm not going to stop expressing them, particularly not for an AC on Slashdot.
himi
Australian Science Rules!!! Yay! Yay!
I was mixing up alpha and beta decay there . . .
Aside from that, I was not mistaken in my understanding of the concept.
Thanks for the clarification, though.
himi