The only way "public financing" will eliminate the corrupting influence of money in politics is if you forbid ALL political advertising not paid for by public funding. Which pretty much puts paid to the First Amendment, since as long as it exists *I* (or you) could buy an ad for my (your) favorite politician
Under my proposal you'd still be free to do anything with your money that you now do. You can give money to your favorite politician, although that would trigger a matching grant. You could take out a totally independent ad which would not trigger a matching grant, but experience has shown that such ads tend to reflect the political positions of the purchaser rather than the marketing message of the candidate.
Would rich people still be more influential under my proposal? Sure. I am not proposing the establishment of an egalitarian paradise; I am proposing throwing up roadblocks to government by cronyism.
Could the system be gamed in certain ways? Probably. The idea is not to make the purchasing of influence impossible, any more than safes make theft impossible. But as with a safe, the idea is to make misconduct more expensive, cumbersome, and risky.
Except that begging the question, isn't it? If chimps should be considered persons, then we're no more entitled to use them as non-consenting research subjects than we're entitled to use humans that way. In fact why not use non-consenting humans? Surely it would benefit the human race as a whole to sacrifice individual humans as research subjects, especially in the kind of numbers we use chimps for. A few thousand human is not that many when weighed against the seven billion on the plant.
Most of us would agree that experimenting on humans without informed consent is wrong no matter what the collective benefit, so there must be something entailed in being a human which makes that unacceptable. And it's perfectly reasonable to ask whether some other animals have that very same thing. This is a philosophical question. If persons have rights, then (a) those rights have to be entailed in our definition of "person" and (b) the criteria for that definition have to be applied impartially, not according to our preconceptions. It shouldn't matter if the subject is a member of an "inferior race", an artificial intelligence, an extraterrestrial visitor, or a familiar animal we simply haven't considered fully yet.
This is a little bit like math. Most people take the statement "1 + 1 = 2" as self-evident; but to a mathematician it's anything but. In day to day life we take human rights as self-evident -- we in fact "hold these truths to be self evident". But to an ethicist what we call "human rights" have to come from something more fundamental. If an ethicist simply assumes that human beings have a right to life and liberty, then he has to accept that the contrary assumption is equally valid. If the contrary assumption is not equally valid, then there must be some more fundamental principles by which we're evaluating these propositions.
So to show that chimps do not have a right to life and liberty, we have to define a category of beings that have such rights in such a way that all humans are members of that category, but no chimps are. I must confess this is beyond me as a philosophical layman just as algebraic fields are to mathematical laymen. I just go through life taking "1 + 1 = 2" and "humans have rights" for granted, and it works for me. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be people out there studying abstract algebra or ethics, or that these fields have no important practical applications.
Don't forget training and consulting. That brings in quite a bit of revenue too. In my experience most ArcGIS installations aren't actually functional because they don't have people who can work the software. Even after training most installations don't have the personnel to dedicate to keep up with it; they maybe produce a report or two, and then the software sits on the shelf, then they need to send someone else to training.
In this environment a lot of people using ArcGIS might as well be using QGIS. If there were training and support for QGIS, this would build a user base which would attract developers. I think a lot more could be done in getting users to adopt web based mapping -- WMS and WMF -- too. The web is such moving platform that the kind of desktop based entrenchment ArcGIS enjoys is less significant.
And what's more trying to restrict the flow of money has the perverse but economically predictable effect of making influence cheap to buy. The typical congressman spends five hours a day in fundraising related activities, and two hours a day doing constituent services. That alone should tell you who they really work for.
If you banned political contributions outright, then congressmen would just spend *more* time trying to drum up support for people to spend on their behalf. There's really only one way to eliminate the corrupting influence of money in politics: public financing. I don't particularly like that option, but it's the only one that is guaranteed to work, the only way to restore the status quo ante, before the rise of mass media campaigning, where elections were entirely a matter between the politicians running and the voters.
Sooo true. My first car was a 1976 Buick Century with 231 cc V6 engine, normally aspirated. The engine wasn't half-bad -- this was before emissions controls other than a PCV, EGR and catalytic converters so it *was* simple to work on -- but in every other respect it was dreadful by modern standards. 105 horsepower to move 3800+ pounds equals 0-60 in 17 seconds and 15 miles to the gallon, baby.
But aside from power to weight ratios, the thing which really sucked about old cars was the suspension and handling. Every time I see a car chase in a movie from the 1970s I laugh because I *remember* driving cars like that. By modern standards they cornered like inebriated hippos on roller skates.
By that argument why bother excavating garbage pits, when temples and mausoleums are so much sexier? Well, because temples and mausoleums are consciously built by high status people to convey messages. Garbage (and by extension pollution) tell you things about everyone, including things they didn't think worthy of documenting but turn out to be interesting.
Spoken like someone with absolutely no engineering experience. Engineering as a discipline has this impish habit delivering things most people never imagined possible. This misleads them into thinking that engineering can give them anything they can imagine, particularly if the concept seems simple to them.
Take the suggestion elsewhere in this discussion that water be piped from the Great Lakes to California. Nothing could be simpler in conception -- a 2000 mile long pipe. We've built oil pipelines longer than that. The longest crude oil pipeline in the world is the 2500 mile Druzhba pipeline from Russia to Germany, so a 2000 mile long water pipe should be a cinch, right?
Here we get to the place where engineering starts being a bitch. You see, it's one thing to imagine a cost-is-no-object project, but the truth is cost is the single most important limitation on water use. It does no good to supply water to California almond farmers if they have to sell their almonds at the same price/weight as gold to pay for it. We use a *lot* more water than oil, and we expect it to be way, way cheaper. The current spot price for crude oil is about $57 per barrel -- roughly $1.36/gallon. Agricultural users in California pay something like 3/10 of a penny a gallon -- roughly speaking they expect water to be about 500x cheaper per gallon than oil. If pumping adds a penny to the price per gallon to the price of crude oil, that's no big deal, less than 1%. Add a penny per gallon to the price of water and you've quadrupled your farmer's water cost.
A system that delivers water can be expensive to build, but it has to operate cheaply and reliably. That's why water systems engineers avoid pumps and rely on gravity to do most of the work of moving water. The longest water supply pipeline I know of is the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme, which transports water 330 miles with the aid of 20 pump stations. The economic justification for this project? To support gold mining. To give you an idea of how much expense was tolerated when the Goldfields system was built, it replaced a system where water was packed in by camel train. Today users there pay 7x as much per gallon as users in California do for water. Assuming the CA system could be operated for the same price, you could actually dispense with actually building the system. Raising the water price from $0.003 to $0.02 would reduce water consumption in California to sustainable rates -- even under drought conditions. It'd do so by causing agriculture to move out of state. Probably some population too.
Right, and for an encore they can figure out how to get the water from that desalination plant to flow uphill.
People don't realize how much water distribution networks rely on gravity; yes you can pump water to create more head but it raises the operational cost of the system astronomically. It's only practical to supply coastal cities, and then only if there is no water that can feasibly be piped from elsewhere. In California's case that doesn't really solve the problem, which is that their agricultural economy is going to collapse.
Well, keeping you out of the public eye is an appropriate punishment when you're convicted of a political crime. But we shouldn't recognize political crimes.
If people want to pay attention to what this guy has to say because he gyrocoptered in restricted airspace, that's their business. Even though it's a pretty stupid reason, it shouldn't be a judge's role to sit in judgment of that.
THere's an important flip side to freedom of speech that is often overlooked: freedom of listening. As a citizen you should be able to hear what the government doesn't want you to hear, unless the government has a compelling reason, and even then the restrictions should be narrowly tailored. "That guy just pulled a stupid stunt," is not a compelling reason to intervene in what people choose to listen to.
You can't fire a faculty member because outside the scope of his duties he expresses an opinion you don't like -- even if it's a clearly crackpot opinion. If you could, Stanford would have kicked Linus Pauling out when he became a Vitamin C crackpot.
The difference, though, is that Pauling was a sincere crackpot -- brilliant people are often susceptible to crackpottery because they're so used to being more right than their neighbors. Dr. Oz is a snake-oil salesman; when he's faced with people who are educated -- not necessarily scientists but critical thinkers -- in a forum he doesn't control, he speaks in a much more equivocal fashion. That shows he knows the language he uses on his show and in his magazine is irresponsible.
So selling snake-oil isn't crackpottery, it's misconduct. But somebody's got to find, chapter and verse, the specific institutional rules of conduct Dr. Oz's misconduct violates. There will have to be due process, particularly if he's a tenured professor, which will probably require lesser disciplinary measures than dismissal be tried first.
Does it harm you for them to spend their money this way?
Not directly. Not as an individual. But diverting resources to quackery is bad for society; not so bad in this case that it's high on my list as "health supplements", but not totally benign either.
So... They didn't test the iPad / content combo to establish usability / feasibility / usefulness prior to dropping all this cash?
That's speculation. Feasibility is no guarantee of performance.
I read the attached article, and there were two specific complaints cited. The first was security, which is a non-functional requirement; that could well be a failure of the customer to do his homework on requirements but presumably a competent and honest vendor could have done a better job on security. It's often the vendor's job to anticipate customer needs, particularly in projects of the type customers don't necessarily have experience with.
The other complaint is that the curriculum wasn't completely implemented. If the vendor failed to deliver something it agreed to, that's purely the vendor's fault.
Sometimes bad vendors happen to good customers. Bad vendors happen more often to bad customers, but every project involves taking a calculated risk.
Well, until the details of how the contract was awarded and how the vendor failed have been thoroughly investigated, it's premature to fire anyone.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for accountability and decisiveness, but picking someone plausible and throwing them under the bus isn't accountability. In fact that may actually shield whoever was responsible.
Everyone loves the benefits of government-funded infrastructure if someone else is paying for them.
That's not entirely true. If you are in the top %0.001 of the population for income, you could feasibly pay for your own private infrastructure. You buy a plot of land, put a wall around it and hire a bunch of people to protect you, take care of you and cater to your needs. But your standard of living wouldn't actually be any objectively better than it is in contemporary America. In fact it would probably be somewhat worse. Historically societies that organized themselves along these feudal lines were not by modern standards innovative. You mustn't imagine living your untaxed castle enjoying Internet access and the other benefits of a modern science. In the rule by and for the wealthy, guys like Jon Postel or Vint Cerf would most likely have been serfs.
Humanity's greatest resource is the creativity of people -- a resource that tends to be squandered either by totalitarian control on one hand or anarchistic neglect on the other. People who can see no middle ground aren't just blind as futurists, they're historically blind.
Great idea. 2000 years ago they nailed someone to a tree for saying that.
And by a thousand years ago they were going to war in his name. People will seize on anything to rationalize what they want to do, aided by the bottomless human capacity for inconsistency. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if someday to learn there were "Gandhian" terrorists.
Don't get me wrong, I think ideals are important. But we shouldn't expect too much from them. An ideal is only as good as the people who espouse it.
Wake me when tape is reliable AND costs 10% of the $/GB of hard drive storage.
No, you have to get up before that so you can shlep 22 10 TB hard drives to the backup site.
The truth is that there is no simple solution for backup -- not if you consider preparing for future contingencies. Backup to hard drives? Your backup data is an asset that needs constant maintenance less bit-rot set in.
I don't see how anyone could be "awesome at CS" without being strong at math. Being skilled at *programming* and bad at math? Sure, although that would be a significant handicap.
Programming isn't CS, just like machining isn't mechanical engineering. Sure, machinists and mechanical engineers tend to have a basic seat-of-the-pants understanding of each others' disciplines, but that doesn't mean they can do each others' jobs.
Of course CS is different, in that many if not most people with CS degrees make their livings as programmers. And probably quite a few of them are mediocre at math in a way no mechanical engineer would be, but I wouldn't call those people "awesome at CS"; I'd call them over-credentialed programmers. On the flip side there are programmers without degrees in CS who are awesome at CS, but that's because they've self-taught, and are pretty much by definition good at math. They may have deficits in specific areas like geometry or calculus, but they're going to be good at stuff like abstract algebra and graph theory. If someone is "awesome at CS" they should be able to follow Euler's solution to the Konigsberg bridge problem. If they can't follow it they may be quite useful as programmers but they're not going to be designing any novel networking algorithms.
As far as making CS a core subject? That seems a bit extreme to me, and I actually have a CS degree. I think most people who are destined for STEM careers would benefit from some programming experience in something like MATLAB, but they'd benefit *more* from additional probability and statistics. There is certainly little call to teach them actual CS. It's questionable to me whether people heading into non-STEM careers benefit at all from CS or programming, and they'd certainly benefit more from additional courses in writing.
If you've ever been on a jury hearing a trial for a violent felony, you'd understand. Despite the feeling you have that the world is full of irresponsible morons, when you put people in that jury room most of them understand that they have a man's life in their hands on one hand, and the safety and order of society in the other.
It's very likely the most serious and important thing you'll do ever do in your entire life. You do not want to f*ck it up, even if the answer seems obvious when you walk into deliberations.
I highly recommend Anita Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages, which is interesting to a sci-fi fan because it covers not only the obvious cases like Klingon, but serious attempts to create "philosophical" languages which are alluded to in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.
It was interesting to me as a long time database and system designer because the seriously undermines the impulse that arises once in every generation of system designers that systems can be integrated "merely" by adopting a common, standardized ontological model.
It doesn't matter why an author does what he does. What matters is if he gets away with it.
The whole write for yourself/write for your audience thing is a false dichotomy. If you write *solely* for yourself you won't connect with other people. If you write solely for other people you won't have anything to say.
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The only way "public financing" will eliminate the corrupting influence of money in politics is if you forbid ALL political advertising not paid for by public funding. Which pretty much puts paid to the First Amendment, since as long as it exists *I* (or you) could buy an ad for my (your) favorite politician
Under my proposal you'd still be free to do anything with your money that you now do. You can give money to your favorite politician, although that would trigger a matching grant. You could take out a totally independent ad which would not trigger a matching grant, but experience has shown that such ads tend to reflect the political positions of the purchaser rather than the marketing message of the candidate.
Would rich people still be more influential under my proposal? Sure. I am not proposing the establishment of an egalitarian paradise; I am proposing throwing up roadblocks to government by cronyism.
Could the system be gamed in certain ways? Probably. The idea is not to make the purchasing of influence impossible, any more than safes make theft impossible. But as with a safe, the idea is to make misconduct more expensive, cumbersome, and risky.
Except that begging the question, isn't it? If chimps should be considered persons, then we're no more entitled to use them as non-consenting research subjects than we're entitled to use humans that way. In fact why not use non-consenting humans? Surely it would benefit the human race as a whole to sacrifice individual humans as research subjects, especially in the kind of numbers we use chimps for. A few thousand human is not that many when weighed against the seven billion on the plant.
Most of us would agree that experimenting on humans without informed consent is wrong no matter what the collective benefit, so there must be something entailed in being a human which makes that unacceptable. And it's perfectly reasonable to ask whether some other animals have that very same thing. This is a philosophical question. If persons have rights, then (a) those rights have to be entailed in our definition of "person" and (b) the criteria for that definition have to be applied impartially, not according to our preconceptions. It shouldn't matter if the subject is a member of an "inferior race", an artificial intelligence, an extraterrestrial visitor, or a familiar animal we simply haven't considered fully yet.
This is a little bit like math. Most people take the statement "1 + 1 = 2" as self-evident; but to a mathematician it's anything but. In day to day life we take human rights as self-evident -- we in fact "hold these truths to be self evident". But to an ethicist what we call "human rights" have to come from something more fundamental. If an ethicist simply assumes that human beings have a right to life and liberty, then he has to accept that the contrary assumption is equally valid. If the contrary assumption is not equally valid, then there must be some more fundamental principles by which we're evaluating these propositions.
So to show that chimps do not have a right to life and liberty, we have to define a category of beings that have such rights in such a way that all humans are members of that category, but no chimps are. I must confess this is beyond me as a philosophical layman just as algebraic fields are to mathematical laymen. I just go through life taking "1 + 1 = 2" and "humans have rights" for granted, and it works for me. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be people out there studying abstract algebra or ethics, or that these fields have no important practical applications.
Don't forget training and consulting. That brings in quite a bit of revenue too. In my experience most ArcGIS installations aren't actually functional because they don't have people who can work the software. Even after training most installations don't have the personnel to dedicate to keep up with it; they maybe produce a report or two, and then the software sits on the shelf, then they need to send someone else to training.
In this environment a lot of people using ArcGIS might as well be using QGIS. If there were training and support for QGIS, this would build a user base which would attract developers. I think a lot more could be done in getting users to adopt web based mapping -- WMS and WMF -- too. The web is such moving platform that the kind of desktop based entrenchment ArcGIS enjoys is less significant.
And what's more trying to restrict the flow of money has the perverse but economically predictable effect of making influence cheap to buy. The typical congressman spends five hours a day in fundraising related activities, and two hours a day doing constituent services. That alone should tell you who they really work for.
If you banned political contributions outright, then congressmen would just spend *more* time trying to drum up support for people to spend on their behalf. There's really only one way to eliminate the corrupting influence of money in politics: public financing. I don't particularly like that option, but it's the only one that is guaranteed to work, the only way to restore the status quo ante, before the rise of mass media campaigning, where elections were entirely a matter between the politicians running and the voters.
Cars from the 60's-70's suck big time.
Sooo true. My first car was a 1976 Buick Century with 231 cc V6 engine, normally aspirated. The engine wasn't half-bad -- this was before emissions controls other than a PCV, EGR and catalytic converters so it *was* simple to work on -- but in every other respect it was dreadful by modern standards. 105 horsepower to move 3800+ pounds equals 0-60 in 17 seconds and 15 miles to the gallon, baby.
But aside from power to weight ratios, the thing which really sucked about old cars was the suspension and handling. Every time I see a car chase in a movie from the 1970s I laugh because I *remember* driving cars like that. By modern standards they cornered like inebriated hippos on roller skates.
By that argument why bother excavating garbage pits, when temples and mausoleums are so much sexier? Well, because temples and mausoleums are consciously built by high status people to convey messages. Garbage (and by extension pollution) tell you things about everyone, including things they didn't think worthy of documenting but turn out to be interesting.
Spoken like someone with absolutely no engineering experience. Engineering as a discipline has this impish habit delivering things most people never imagined possible. This misleads them into thinking that engineering can give them anything they can imagine, particularly if the concept seems simple to them.
Take the suggestion elsewhere in this discussion that water be piped from the Great Lakes to California. Nothing could be simpler in conception -- a 2000 mile long pipe. We've built oil pipelines longer than that. The longest crude oil pipeline in the world is the 2500 mile Druzhba pipeline from Russia to Germany, so a 2000 mile long water pipe should be a cinch, right?
Here we get to the place where engineering starts being a bitch. You see, it's one thing to imagine a cost-is-no-object project, but the truth is cost is the single most important limitation on water use. It does no good to supply water to California almond farmers if they have to sell their almonds at the same price/weight as gold to pay for it. We use a *lot* more water than oil, and we expect it to be way, way cheaper. The current spot price for crude oil is about $57 per barrel -- roughly $1.36/gallon. Agricultural users in California pay something like 3/10 of a penny a gallon -- roughly speaking they expect water to be about 500x cheaper per gallon than oil. If pumping adds a penny to the price per gallon to the price of crude oil, that's no big deal, less than 1%. Add a penny per gallon to the price of water and you've quadrupled your farmer's water cost.
A system that delivers water can be expensive to build, but it has to operate cheaply and reliably. That's why water systems engineers avoid pumps and rely on gravity to do most of the work of moving water. The longest water supply pipeline I know of is the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme, which transports water 330 miles with the aid of 20 pump stations. The economic justification for this project? To support gold mining. To give you an idea of how much expense was tolerated when the Goldfields system was built, it replaced a system where water was packed in by camel train. Today users there pay 7x as much per gallon as users in California do for water. Assuming the CA system could be operated for the same price, you could actually dispense with actually building the system. Raising the water price from $0.003 to $0.02 would reduce water consumption in California to sustainable rates -- even under drought conditions. It'd do so by causing agriculture to move out of state. Probably some population too.
Right, and for an encore they can figure out how to get the water from that desalination plant to flow uphill.
People don't realize how much water distribution networks rely on gravity; yes you can pump water to create more head but it raises the operational cost of the system astronomically. It's only practical to supply coastal cities, and then only if there is no water that can feasibly be piped from elsewhere. In California's case that doesn't really solve the problem, which is that their agricultural economy is going to collapse.
Well, keeping you out of the public eye is an appropriate punishment when you're convicted of a political crime. But we shouldn't recognize political crimes.
If people want to pay attention to what this guy has to say because he gyrocoptered in restricted airspace, that's their business. Even though it's a pretty stupid reason, it shouldn't be a judge's role to sit in judgment of that.
THere's an important flip side to freedom of speech that is often overlooked: freedom of listening. As a citizen you should be able to hear what the government doesn't want you to hear, unless the government has a compelling reason, and even then the restrictions should be narrowly tailored. "That guy just pulled a stupid stunt," is not a compelling reason to intervene in what people choose to listen to.
You can't fire a faculty member because outside the scope of his duties he expresses an opinion you don't like -- even if it's a clearly crackpot opinion. If you could, Stanford would have kicked Linus Pauling out when he became a Vitamin C crackpot.
The difference, though, is that Pauling was a sincere crackpot -- brilliant people are often susceptible to crackpottery because they're so used to being more right than their neighbors. Dr. Oz is a snake-oil salesman; when he's faced with people who are educated -- not necessarily scientists but critical thinkers -- in a forum he doesn't control, he speaks in a much more equivocal fashion. That shows he knows the language he uses on his show and in his magazine is irresponsible.
So selling snake-oil isn't crackpottery, it's misconduct. But somebody's got to find, chapter and verse, the specific institutional rules of conduct Dr. Oz's misconduct violates. There will have to be due process, particularly if he's a tenured professor, which will probably require lesser disciplinary measures than dismissal be tried first.
Does it harm you for them to spend their money this way?
Not directly. Not as an individual. But diverting resources to quackery is bad for society; not so bad in this case that it's high on my list as "health supplements", but not totally benign either.
So... They didn't test the iPad / content combo to establish usability / feasibility / usefulness prior to dropping all this cash?
That's speculation. Feasibility is no guarantee of performance.
I read the attached article, and there were two specific complaints cited. The first was security, which is a non-functional requirement; that could well be a failure of the customer to do his homework on requirements but presumably a competent and honest vendor could have done a better job on security. It's often the vendor's job to anticipate customer needs, particularly in projects of the type customers don't necessarily have experience with.
The other complaint is that the curriculum wasn't completely implemented. If the vendor failed to deliver something it agreed to, that's purely the vendor's fault.
Sometimes bad vendors happen to good customers. Bad vendors happen more often to bad customers, but every project involves taking a calculated risk.
Well, until the details of how the contract was awarded and how the vendor failed have been thoroughly investigated, it's premature to fire anyone.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for accountability and decisiveness, but picking someone plausible and throwing them under the bus isn't accountability. In fact that may actually shield whoever was responsible.
If only there were a two-wheeled vehicle where your legs moved. They could even be used to *power* the device.
The open internet is one of the most democratizing things we have in a modern society...
I think you answered your own question right there.
Everyone loves the benefits of government-funded infrastructure if someone else is paying for them.
That's not entirely true. If you are in the top %0.001 of the population for income, you could feasibly pay for your own private infrastructure. You buy a plot of land, put a wall around it and hire a bunch of people to protect you, take care of you and cater to your needs. But your standard of living wouldn't actually be any objectively better than it is in contemporary America. In fact it would probably be somewhat worse. Historically societies that organized themselves along these feudal lines were not by modern standards innovative. You mustn't imagine living your untaxed castle enjoying Internet access and the other benefits of a modern science. In the rule by and for the wealthy, guys like Jon Postel or Vint Cerf would most likely have been serfs.
Humanity's greatest resource is the creativity of people -- a resource that tends to be squandered either by totalitarian control on one hand or anarchistic neglect on the other. People who can see no middle ground aren't just blind as futurists, they're historically blind.
Great idea. 2000 years ago they nailed someone to a tree for saying that.
And by a thousand years ago they were going to war in his name. People will seize on anything to rationalize what they want to do, aided by the bottomless human capacity for inconsistency. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if someday to learn there were "Gandhian" terrorists.
Don't get me wrong, I think ideals are important. But we shouldn't expect too much from them. An ideal is only as good as the people who espouse it.
Wake me when tape is reliable AND costs 10% of the $/GB of hard drive storage.
No, you have to get up before that so you can shlep 22 10 TB hard drives to the backup site.
The truth is that there is no simple solution for backup -- not if you consider preparing for future contingencies. Backup to hard drives? Your backup data is an asset that needs constant maintenance less bit-rot set in.
That's only if you don't count the unused solar energy as waste.
I don't see how anyone could be "awesome at CS" without being strong at math. Being skilled at *programming* and bad at math? Sure, although that would be a significant handicap.
Programming isn't CS, just like machining isn't mechanical engineering. Sure, machinists and mechanical engineers tend to have a basic seat-of-the-pants understanding of each others' disciplines, but that doesn't mean they can do each others' jobs.
Of course CS is different, in that many if not most people with CS degrees make their livings as programmers. And probably quite a few of them are mediocre at math in a way no mechanical engineer would be, but I wouldn't call those people "awesome at CS"; I'd call them over-credentialed programmers. On the flip side there are programmers without degrees in CS who are awesome at CS, but that's because they've self-taught, and are pretty much by definition good at math. They may have deficits in specific areas like geometry or calculus, but they're going to be good at stuff like abstract algebra and graph theory. If someone is "awesome at CS" they should be able to follow Euler's solution to the Konigsberg bridge problem. If they can't follow it they may be quite useful as programmers but they're not going to be designing any novel networking algorithms.
As far as making CS a core subject? That seems a bit extreme to me, and I actually have a CS degree. I think most people who are destined for STEM careers would benefit from some programming experience in something like MATLAB, but they'd benefit *more* from additional probability and statistics. There is certainly little call to teach them actual CS. It's questionable to me whether people heading into non-STEM careers benefit at all from CS or programming, and they'd certainly benefit more from additional courses in writing.
If you've ever been on a jury hearing a trial for a violent felony, you'd understand. Despite the feeling you have that the world is full of irresponsible morons, when you put people in that jury room most of them understand that they have a man's life in their hands on one hand, and the safety and order of society in the other.
It's very likely the most serious and important thing you'll do ever do in your entire life. You do not want to f*ck it up, even if the answer seems obvious when you walk into deliberations.
I highly recommend Anita Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages, which is interesting to a sci-fi fan because it covers not only the obvious cases like Klingon, but serious attempts to create "philosophical" languages which are alluded to in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.
It was interesting to me as a long time database and system designer because the seriously undermines the impulse that arises once in every generation of system designers that systems can be integrated "merely" by adopting a common, standardized ontological model.
A politician? With an agenda? Doesn't our socialist Muslim Kenyan president know that politicians aren't supposed to try to accomplish anything?
It doesn't matter why an author does what he does. What matters is if he gets away with it.
The whole write for yourself/write for your audience thing is a false dichotomy. If you write *solely* for yourself you won't connect with other people. If you write solely for other people you won't have anything to say.
Better to call it "terrorism by proxy".