Again it is simply not true there was *no* looting in Japan after earthquake and tsunami. There was but it was eclipsed in the news by the enormity of the natural disaster and the nuclear situation. The authorities moved quickly and efficiently to stop the looting before it became a secondary disaster.
Another point is that I am a human and would never loot and hoard.
I hope so, but you can't really credibly make that claim until you've found yourself in the kind of situation where people loot. But in all probability you won't loot. So far as I know I can't think of any instance of looting where *most* of the people in the population were involved.
As for myself, I am certain that I am less likely to loot than some, and reasonably confident I'm less likely than most. However, I'm far from certain I would *never* loot under *any* circumstances, no matter how desperate, fearful or angry I got. Haven't *you* ever done or said something under the influence of anger or fear that you would not have after sober consideration? If so, you're a better human being than I am, or indeed any that I have ever met.
The word "looting" covers a number of different things, from organized pillaging to pure mob behavior. Your description of looter behavior corresponds to pillaging, not the mob response to disaster.
All small point about Occam's razor. It's about not introducing explanations without being forced to do so by data. So far as I can see there are no features or cluster of features here that could only be explained by assuming Muslims hate education. In fact, I've never seen *any* evidence that Muslims in general hate education in general. I haven't even seen proof that Muslim *extremists* hate western education in particular. They're often western educated themselves. Their beef with us obviously isn't entirely rational, so we can't expect them to be consistent, but it seems mostly to be related issues of disrespecting Islam, political hypocrisy, hobnobbing with hated regimes, and moral decadence.
The US can't be held responsible for stuff everything the population chooses to do there.
I agree. But I think the US can be held responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of its actions in Iraq, whether or not the people in charge actually foresaw them. If you don't think people are responsible for the foreseeable and controllable consequences of their actions, then you and I are using different.
We know that in sudden, widespread disruptive events people loot.
Like the Japanese at Fukushima? Not.
In fact there *was* looting after the earthquake ( citation). However the authorities moved quickly to quell the looting, before the looting ignited a vicious circle. Which brings us right back to the predictability of the looting response and the *effectiveness* of steps taken to restrain it.
Well, sure. It's not like people sit down and ask themselves, "what are the highest value places for me to loot today?" It's an instinctive behavior. The anthropologist I mentioned said that people were often mystified by the things they took, because they had no use or practical value.
I think looting libraries makes more sense if you look at the behavior in terms of its statistical benefit to a displaced population (i.e. like you were in charge of natural selection). If your goal is to have as many people in a community survive, you don't want them all hunting for the same optimal loot to take. You want everyone to go straight to the nearest thing of value and carry it off. They can sort it out later, there will be more diverse loot, and you won't have a lot redundant effort with everyone looting the same few things.
It's also possible that in a fight or flight situation, grabbing stuff is a low marginal cost addition to flight that occasionally pays off. That would be consistent with the way looting follows in the *wake* of the disaster. Imagine a village being attacked in a cattle raid. In the early stages they grab their weapons and secure their valuables. If they lose the fight, in the later stages of the raid (i.e. the looting and raping stage) it makes sense for the losers to grab anything they can and run away.
Some [wikipedia.org] have even suggested that it was on purpose.
...
Seriously though, the primary thing to blame for the end of Iraq's universities is Islam.
This is a good opportunity to put Occam's razor to use. We know that in sudden, widespread disruptive events people loot. It doesn't matter whether it is natural disaster, invasion, or just a neighborhood breakdown in public order. This even includes ordinary people who would not ordinarily steal. I once talked to an anthropologist whose work on a Caribbean island was interrupted by an unusually powerful hurricane. There was looting, but several days later many people sheepishly returned things they'd stolen, unable to explain why they'd taken them in the panic.
Looting is probably an instinctive human response to the rapid onset of environmental or social disorder. But we don't have to accept that. We only have to accept that disasters cause looting. Introducing the hypothetical intellectual backwardness of Islam simply multiplies causes unnecessarily. The looting would have occurred whether or not Islam was as you characterize it. The looting is neither proof nor disproof of your notions about Islam. Your notions of Islam have no bearing on the looting, even if you had actual evidence (which you don't) of the motivations of the crowd.
Now as for the looting of important cultural institutions being an intended consequence, Occam's razor applies here as well. The administration's general lack of preparation or even awareness of basic facts about Iraq that was evident in the aftermath of the invasion. That is enough to explain the lack of steps to protect universities and libraries. To suggest that was part of the invasion suggests an awareness of the importance of intellectual inquiry that was not otherwise evidenced in any of the administration's other behavior. This was a president who proudly said he made decisions by gut instead of reason, as if that were an admirable thing. It is more plausible that it never occurred to the Bush Administration that a country like Iraq *had* important cultural institutions .
It really makes no difference whether the looting was an intended consequence or not -- either practically or ethically. Undertaking drastic, irreversible actions fatal to so many is not excused by ignorance. Doing that in unexamined ignorance is arguably worse than causing many of the things that happened after the invasion intentionally. Arguably somebody who *wanted* those things would have to be sick. Somebody who is just intellectually lazy deserves no pity. The uncaring deserve less pity than the honestly depraved.
People get emotional about this stuff, then lose sight the obvious middle ground. They should just contrive the computer installation so people can't see what other people are looking at. Nobody sees anything he doesn't want to, and nobody has to worry about busybodies looking over their shoulder.
I was always taught that it was enacted to prevent States from restricting trade between neighboring states... not to prevent trade.
Nobody advocates regulation to *prevent* trade in general. Some trade is *always* restricted by regulation, but the intent and effect of the regulation may be to encourage trade overall. For example if there weren't federal standards for auto emissions, more states might follow California's lead and develop their own regulatory standards. By establishing a nation-wide regulatory regime, a larger and more efficient market results.
On the other hand federal laws *do* effectively prevent *in state* trade in recreational drugs. If anything that's much *more* of an overstepping of federal powers, because the intent is not to provide a uniform regulatory regime for trade in recreational drugs across the country, but to *forbid* the use of recreational drugs *anywhere*. It's seldom questioned because both major parties agree that recreational drug use should be forbidden everywhere.
This is Commerce Clause of the US Constitution: "[Congress will have the power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes. That's it. That's all there is. The plain text of the clause doesn't simply prevent Congress or the States from restricting trade to favor one state's produce over another (that's actually covered in Article 1, Sections 9 and 10). The clause appears to give Congress power to regulate interstate commerce *for any reason it sees fit*. If so, Congress can intentionally *restrict trade* between the states if it believes that trade is not in the national interest. And it does, and will continue to do so. If there's ever successful nation-wide restrictions on abortion, those restrictions will be made possible by the Commerce Clause.
You could reasonably argue that this is *too* much power to give Congress. It wouldn't be the only case. I think the powers the Constitution grants Congress in copyrights and patents almost certainly enable Congress to pass laws that would be repulsive to the framers. But the framers while intending to create a government with circumscribed and carefully enumerated powers couldn't possibly have anticipated *all* the uses to which any one power could be put.
They claim that a Dragon capsule so-equipped will be able to land on "any surface" in the solar system.
In *theory*, sure. But if they tried to land on Mars, the intelligence arm of Mars' Planetary Defense Agency would arrange for the capsule to have one of their trademark "mysterious accidents".
Whenever you're given a comparison like this, you ought to look closely at the things being compared.
Crook County OR has roughly 21 thousand residents spread out over almost three thousand square miles. The urban suburb I grew up in (Somerville, MA) has over *75* thousand residents crammed into four square miles. For that matter the Queensbridge Housing Project in NYC has almost seven thousand residents in an area about 20-30 acres. You could say, "Facebook's data center uses two and a half times theenergy as the households in a two block radius of the intersection of 41st Ave and 12th St in New York," or, "Facebook uses about as much power as the entire Union Square neighborhood in Somerville, MA." Doesn't sound quite as shocking, does it?
Yes, Facebook's datacenter uses an impressive amount of power, but it's not exactly surprising that it is so large relative to the rest of the county. No doubt they chose the location because it had a lot of electricity generation potential relative to local demand.
Well, McCarthyism and Naziism have a lot in common. They both were heavy on fear-mongering and scapegoating.
But history never quite repeats itself. There's always a different wrinkle. In some ways contemporary America resembles the environment in which far right and fascist parties rose to power in post-Depression Europe. There's economic dislocation and uncertainty, albeit milder, the same longing for a simple explanation to our problems that assigns responsibility for solving them to anyone but us.
On the other hand, the experiences of WW2, McCarthyism and the Civil Rights Movement have left us less inclined to scapegoat our neighbors; maybe even the least inclined anyone has ever been in the history of civilization. I think it's remarkable that there hasn't been a major resurgence of anti-semitism after the banking crisis of 2008. That's almost unprecedented.
There's the anti-immigrant movement, but I don't think most people who are in the anti-immigrant camp actually think that Mexican braseros picking crops is the source of our economic or international problems. Sure there's bound to be a few, but the sense I get is that what drives the thing is a feeling the world has got out of control, and this issue is one that ought to have a straightforward solution. The immigration issue is like a canvas on which you can paint simple sounding solutions to exerting control (like building a wall -- excuse me, *fence -- along the border).
But then we'll always have race. Racism is alive in this country, yet it's hobbled, forced to take bizarre forms like birtherism because nearly *everybody* agrees racism is wrong. If you don't think that's remarkable, go back and look at papers, magazines and books of the 1930s. Racism was actually seen as respectable, * scientific* even. If that seems inconceivable to us, that represents real progress We still have racism, but it has to pretend to be something else. Politicians who want to exploit have to dance around it. Racism today is a puny, petty thing, still able to damage, but deprived of most of its terrifying weapons. Nobody in the mainstream dares to call for concentration camps, lynchings, or overt racial discrimination in public or economic life. Today it is the norm for even *racists* to reject racism.
It's like Dicken's said. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That has always been and always will be true.
The short answer is no. "They" (by which I assume you mean the US govt) cannot delete the data. What they *can* do is take steps which will almost certainly result in the data being deleted by the third parties hosting it.
The result is something like an extrajudicial execution. They've ensured Megaupload will die, even if the company is exonerated in the courts.
driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative.
When I read that a chill went down my spine. And not the good kind of chill, either.
It's not that I'm against private industry playing an even larger role than it did in Apollo, it's that in this case "empowering private industry" means giving it boatloads of taxpayer money and "take the initiative" means letting them spend it without meaningful oversight. It'll be the Iraq reconstruction contractor bonanza -- in space.
of the value of interleaving at least when it comes to learning an athletic skill like serving a tennis ball.
Suppose on Monday only had time to practice your serve twenty times. You'd put all your mental and physical resources into each attempt. Now suppose on Tuesday you had plenty of time, so you set out to do a *thousand* serves. Would your first twenty serves on Tuesday look anything like the twenty you did on Monday? Of course not. You know darn well you've got 980 more to go, so you *hold back*.
The net result of over-practicing any skill this way is that you end up drilling in lazy and sloppy habits. It always feel virtuous to put in a long session at something, but that's easy virtue that everybody can demonstrate under pressure. Consistent practice of moderate duration and extremely high quality has no substitute.
Interleaving a series of drills works better because you exploit fresh muscles and balance repetition with mental stimulation, which is also critical to learning.
Consistency is a virtue in academic study as well, although if you are being genuinely productive it doesn't hurt to keep working as long as it last. But being in the zone is nothing like forcing yourself to cram at the last minute. One is about exploiting an opportunity, another is about making up for lost opportunities.
I always had a very good memory for lecture material. I typically took notes, then never had to look at them again. Nor do I pay *any* attention to notes while I am taking them. I just scribble along, focused on the instructor, or sometimes jotting thoughts that are provoked. In fact I think worrying about structuring your notes as you take them just distracts you from the material you're supposed to be learning. My study time tends to be spent on *reasoning* about the material, or working practice problems, not driving facts into my skull long hoping they'll stay there long enough for me to use them on the test.
So if I never refer to my notes, why take them at all? Because when I didn't take notes, the magic didn't work. It's possible taking notes ensured I was paying attention, but I think there' s more to it than that. I'm reasonably certain that physical activity that's tied to the visual and auditory information did something to fix the material in my memory.
If that is true, why it should be so is beyond me. The brain is complicated, ad hoc hunk of goo that evolved to keep us alive and procreating on the African savanna. It's got its own way of doing things, and doesn't have to play by the rules set by our theories of education or psychology. But to this day I never go to an important meeting without a stack of paper and pencils.
The Department of Defense is making cutbacks? I can't believe what I'm hearing!
Well, "cutback" in a certain, culturally specific sense. What we're talking about is a DoD "cutback". A DoD cutback involves keeping one program on indefinite life support while the scope and costs of its replacement swell to grotesque, unrecognizable proportions. A DoD cutback is roughly like changing horses in midstream, only we're expecting the horse we ride in on to give birth to the horse we intend to ride out on while we're in the drink.
That assumes that the average consumer can or should be able to make intelligent decisions about "who he trusts to review and approve apps".
Not really. It assumes *some* consumers are able to make intelligent decisions and that there is benefit to addressing their needs and costs to sweeping them in with consumers who are less savvy. By that reasoning, there should be no *Consumer Reports* and we should rely upon the Consumer Products Safety Commission to make decisions for you.
In reality it would be the malware company with the biggest marketing budget.
This is probably depends on the *kind* of malware. Take privacy intrusion. Privacy intrusion for collecting marketing data would surely be a problem, because it's legal. But it goes on anyhow, you just don't see it and it's not running on your equipment. The point of entry to the surveillance network is the retailer. Privacy intrusion for purposes of identity theft would not be a problem *for the certification system* because the "big marketing budget" provides a trail back to the perpetrators.
The idea that a consumer should first spend weeks getting up to speed in the mapping or racing simulator communities before they can safely try out a couple apps is ridiculous.
I'll ignore the various shortcomings of the scenario you propose and cut to the chase: The real issue with the system I proposed is that it cannot overcome impatience, and it conflicts with the needs of marketing, which exploits impatience. There's an app that's gone viral, but it hasn't been certified yet by anyone you've heard of. It might take weeks for the stodgy certifiers everyone uses to get around to examining the thing, during which you'll have to live without this app you feel you can't live without. So you choose to grant an exception, or worse -- to trust a dodgy certifier. In fact, the system I proposes creates a new avenue for social engineering attack in which malware authors entice consumers to trust a malicious certifier because they want their free game *right now*.
So why do I think it's a good idea? Because my standard of success is different than yours. You want a system that will protect foolish people from their choices. I want a system in which it is *possible* to make and enforce good decisions. While I think it is unfortunate that fools are exploited, I see no way of protecting them absolutely without posing unreasonable restrictions of freedom.
Because the question in question is not "who can *everyone* trust?", the question is "who can everyone trust not to serve up malware".
Well, if you can answer that, you make those agents the *default* trusted authorities. The problem I have with platform-vendor-chooses-who-everyone-has-to-trust solution is that everyone is not the same. A hospital securing its mobile devices used in health care delivery is different from a teenager who is messing with his game console. People feel differently about privacy too, and their stance may vary depending on device. That teenager might choose different universes of apps for his game console and phone.
The problem with the current system is that it relies on people being able to draw inferences about developer intent from specific permissions an app requests. How insane is that? Even an expert who understands what a permission *does* can't reliably anticipate everything it can *accomplish*, much less the *intent* of the developer in asking for it.
Consider the difference between the following questions:
(1) Who can *you* trust? (2) Who can *everyone* trust?
The problem with the Apple market, and with your idea too, is that it is predicated on having an answer to the second question other than "nobody".
It seems clear to me that a better solution could be built around the first question. That entails letting the consumer decide who he trusts to review and approve apps, then giving him the tools to implement that trust. That'd involve some kind of network to distribute digitally signed approvals. You wouldn't have to have different app stores. You could use any store or combination of stores you wanted. What matters is whether you can find a certification for an app from an authority you trust.
Consumers would subscribe to different authorities based on their concerns. Businesses might choose different kinds of reviewers to trust than gamers. Different functions in a business might choose different reviewers based on the kind of information they handle (e.g. whether the device running the app has sensitive or privacy related data). Evangelical Christians might choose review authorities that reject apps that promote pornography, and porn-hounds would choose authorities that reject apps promoting Christianity.
And exactly how is the talent pool ever supposed to expand without a few blue water projects where a ambitious young developer can go out win himself some glory, instead of having his patches being sneered at by the old boys club?
Well, it's not a matter of intellectual impoverishment as it is a tendency of menus to acquire bloat at such a rate it's a pointless burden to keep up with them.
Another thing to consider with app menus is that menus are structured according to the developer's ontology of functions. Not only would a user sometimes organize functions differently, often the arrangement chosen by the developer makes no sense. I'm looking at gedit now, which has both the standard "File" menu and a "Document" menu. The "Document" menu combines both window management functions (new tab, move document to new window) and document management functions ("save all", "close all").
Gedit is not a problem because it's a simple app. But what about something like The Gimp (which I *love*, by the way, if any developers are reading this). Now the Gimp folks have labored mightily to corral all the functions of the app, but they have made some choices that might puzzle users. There's both a "select" menu and a "tool" menu with a "selection tools" sub-menu. The distinction between what goes on the "Selection" menu and the "Selection Tools" menu sort of makes sense. Things that manipulate selections with a mouse go on "selection tools" and transformations of the current selection go on "Selection". But I don't think users think this way; I think they have a mental target of what they want to select, and the process sometimes involves a "tool" and sometimes some kind of transformation.
Complicating this is the fact that Gimp selection tools can also combine the mouse actions with the existing selections. The "select by color" is probably nearly always used in an iterative fashion, so uniquely among the selection tools it goes on *both* menus, to make sure the user can find it. I think that's the right decision, but there's only so often you can do something like that before you've got an unnavigable mess. "Colors" menu functions for the most part resemble things found on the "Filters" menu, but Color related stuff is so frequently used it gets yanked to the top of the taxonomic hierarchy.
And, oh yes; my installation has an "FX Foundry" menu, which has functions that mostly go with things on the "Filter" menu, but also have things that resemble "Select" or "Image" functions. That means my copy has four different ways to organize functions: (1) by mechanics ("selection tools" vs. "selection"); (2) by target object ("Image" vs. "Layer"); (3) by class of attribute ("Colors"); and (4) by *origin* ("FXFoundry").
None of this hinders my Gimp usage at all, because I use it fairly often, but my system has *hundreds* of apps, each of which reflects a different person's way of thinking.
Gnome, KDE and Unity all seem to be trying to deal with the issue of launcher menu bloat, with various degrees of success. This "HUD" business is not particularly groundbreaking in its mechanics; KDE's launcher menu, Chromium's omnibox URL widget, and many websites using DHTML employ similar UI mechanics. I think it makes sense to extend these mechanics to menus, since all the metadata to do it is already there. Just so long as they don't take menus *away*. Something like this can be a useful complement to existing UI conventions without being an adequate replacement.
Society can have no higher purpose than to produce a world full of people who are more like me.
Everyone thinks this, whether they're a software engineer or a sous chef. And we're all right, because we're imagining training future generations to be more like the *best* of ourselves and never the worst. We coders imagine a society full of creative problem solvers. We don't imagine a future full of people who are arrogant toward anyone they can find a reason to feel superior to.
Now I happen to think TFA does a poor job of arguing its point. It claims that coding will teach "logic and reason",but it uses these terms in a very loose way. On this basis a businessman has just as much claim that learning to make decisions about allocating resources teaches "logic and reason". A landscape painter could argue that learning to paint teaches "logic and reason", because you have to work according to aesthetic principles. If you think art is a bit loosey goosey, consider how a pure mathematician looks at coding; sure it's *governed* by mathematical logic, but what isn't? Clearly everyone should be trained in the methods of philosophical investigation.
Coding is very much akin to fine art. Yes, you've got to satisfy the compiler and produce a consistently working product, but the real secret sauce in coding is *imagination*. Coding is about transforming your mental representation of a problem from something you don't know what to do with to something that can be broken down with a little persistence. B-trees, hash tables, web services, function closures... none of these things were discovered by studying nature, but through feats of imagination.
It'd be great if everyone learned the kind of intellectual skills that coding sharpens. The problem with this idea is that it doesn't make room for all the other really valuable lessons other disciplines have. Yes it would be great if *everyone* was trained in coding, and *nothing else had to be thrown out of the curriculum*. The same goes for accounting, law or military strategy. But soon you get the point where you've claimed *all* childrens' free time. You're nowhere near teaching them everything that would be handy to know, but you've taken away time that they could use learning to direct their own energies and imagination.
I think teaching *everything to somebody* is a good idea, but teaching *everything to everybody* is a bad one.
There is such a thing as too much standardization in education. A little standardization is a good thing; we want everyone to be able to read and calculate and understand their roles as citizens. But taken to an extreme, you run up against an unforgiving truth: you can't teach someone *everything* that they might need to know. If you try, you end up with things that nobody learns that somebody ought to. Education ought to embrace both *standardization* and *diversity* as goals, both pursued in moderation. At present I believe the pendulum in the US at least has swung too far toward standardization.
There's only one thing I'd want to see added to education everywhere, and it's more a matter of attitude than knowledge. There's altogether too many people who when faced with a difficult problem say things like "I'm no good at math", "I'm no good at foreign languages" or "I have no artistic talent". I think it's important for people to recognize and acknowledge thier limitations, but also to believe they can overcome those limitations. A homeowner confronted with a geometry problem should think, "I'm no good at math, but if I applied myself I could figure this out." A nurse in an emergency room might think, "I'm no good at languages, but I tried I could learn enough Cambodian to ask patients to point to what hurts."
Well, not yet, and that's from somebody who thinks that anthropogenic climate change is probably a true hypothesis.
For one thing the thinning or melting of sea ice itself has no direct effect on sea level -- just like melting ice cubes don't change the level of water in a glass. The picture the article paints is far more complex. In a nutshell, thinning Arctic ice may allow winds to mix colder surface water with warmer deep water. This would cause more ice thinning faster than changes in the atmosphere (if any) could drive change. Any effect on sea level would be indirect.
What I'm much more concerned with is human responses to this development -- or rather *political* responses. Russia is making territorial claims in the Arctic Ocean based on some creative interpretation of international law, because they think that climate change may open the Arctic to resource exploration. If they find oil up there, there could be a polar conflict between Russia the US and strained relations between Canada and the US.
The TSA's jack-booted goons can steal $40,000 (real money, not imaginary money) from your luggage and only get 6 months for it.
Oh buh-ruther. The TSA doesn't have that much style. They probably wear cheap Chinese made oxfords with laces that break. But they work for *us* at a pay rate set by *us* under laws passed by legislators *we* elected. We're too chicken to accept that flying has *some* risk; too cheap to do anything about it; and so mentally indolent we let government vendors set security priorities.
There's nothing outstandingly evil about a man who can't resist the temptation of pocketing a huge wad of unguarded cash that passes through his hands. The wickedness in our character is too petty for us to be served by genuine, glamorous evil (the SS in their jackboots and Hugo Boss designed uniforms). No, we get a mirror of our national character. We get *venality*.
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Again it is simply not true there was *no* looting in Japan after earthquake and tsunami. There was but it was eclipsed in the news by the enormity of the natural disaster and the nuclear situation. The authorities moved quickly and efficiently to stop the looting before it became a secondary disaster.
Another point is that I am a human and would never loot and hoard.
I hope so, but you can't really credibly make that claim until you've found yourself in the kind of situation where people loot. But in all probability you won't loot. So far as I know I can't think of any instance of looting where *most* of the people in the population were involved.
As for myself, I am certain that I am less likely to loot than some, and reasonably confident I'm less likely than most. However, I'm far from certain I would *never* loot under *any* circumstances, no matter how desperate, fearful or angry I got. Haven't *you* ever done or said something under the influence of anger or fear that you would not have after sober consideration? If so, you're a better human being than I am, or indeed any that I have ever met.
The word "looting" covers a number of different things, from organized pillaging to pure mob behavior. Your description of looter behavior corresponds to pillaging, not the mob response to disaster.
All small point about Occam's razor. It's about not introducing explanations without being forced to do so by data. So far as I can see there are no features or cluster of features here that could only be explained by assuming Muslims hate education. In fact, I've never seen *any* evidence that Muslims in general hate education in general. I haven't even seen proof that Muslim *extremists* hate western education in particular. They're often western educated themselves. Their beef with us obviously isn't entirely rational, so we can't expect them to be consistent, but it seems mostly to be related issues of disrespecting Islam, political hypocrisy, hobnobbing with hated regimes, and moral decadence.
The US can't be held responsible for stuff everything the population chooses to do there.
I agree. But I think the US can be held responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of its actions in Iraq, whether or not the people in charge actually foresaw them. If you don't think people are responsible for the foreseeable and controllable consequences of their actions, then you and I are using different.
We know that in sudden, widespread disruptive events people loot.
Like the Japanese at Fukushima? Not.
In fact there *was* looting after the earthquake ( citation). However the authorities moved quickly to quell the looting, before the looting ignited a vicious circle. Which brings us right back to the predictability of the looting response and the *effectiveness* of steps taken to restrain it.
They loot libraries?
Well, sure. It's not like people sit down and ask themselves, "what are the highest value places for me to loot today?" It's an instinctive behavior. The anthropologist I mentioned said that people were often mystified by the things they took, because they had no use or practical value.
I think looting libraries makes more sense if you look at the behavior in terms of its statistical benefit to a displaced population (i.e. like you were in charge of natural selection). If your goal is to have as many people in a community survive, you don't want them all hunting for the same optimal loot to take. You want everyone to go straight to the nearest thing of value and carry it off. They can sort it out later, there will be more diverse loot, and you won't have a lot redundant effort with everyone looting the same few things.
It's also possible that in a fight or flight situation, grabbing stuff is a low marginal cost addition to flight that occasionally pays off. That would be consistent with the way looting follows in the *wake* of the disaster. Imagine a village being attacked in a cattle raid. In the early stages they grab their weapons and secure their valuables. If they lose the fight, in the later stages of the raid (i.e. the looting and raping stage) it makes sense for the losers to grab anything they can and run away.
Some [wikipedia.org] have even suggested that it was on purpose.
...
Seriously though, the primary thing to blame for the end of Iraq's universities is Islam.
This is a good opportunity to put Occam's razor to use. We know that in sudden, widespread disruptive events people loot. It doesn't matter whether it is natural disaster, invasion, or just a neighborhood breakdown in public order. This even includes ordinary people who would not ordinarily steal. I once talked to an anthropologist whose work on a Caribbean island was interrupted by an unusually powerful hurricane. There was looting, but several days later many people sheepishly returned things they'd stolen, unable to explain why they'd taken them in the panic.
Looting is probably an instinctive human response to the rapid onset of environmental or social disorder. But we don't have to accept that. We only have to accept that disasters cause looting. Introducing the hypothetical intellectual backwardness of Islam simply multiplies causes unnecessarily. The looting would have occurred whether or not Islam was as you characterize it. The looting is neither proof nor disproof of your notions about Islam. Your notions of Islam have no bearing on the looting, even if you had actual evidence (which you don't) of the motivations of the crowd.
Now as for the looting of important cultural institutions being an intended consequence, Occam's razor applies here as well. The administration's general lack of preparation or even awareness of basic facts about Iraq that was evident in the aftermath of the invasion. That is enough to explain the lack of steps to protect universities and libraries. To suggest that was part of the invasion suggests an awareness of the importance of intellectual inquiry that was not otherwise evidenced in any of the administration's other behavior. This was a president who proudly said he made decisions by gut instead of reason, as if that were an admirable thing. It is more plausible that it never occurred to the Bush Administration that a country like Iraq *had* important cultural institutions .
It really makes no difference whether the looting was an intended consequence or not -- either practically or ethically. Undertaking drastic, irreversible actions fatal to so many is not excused by ignorance. Doing that in unexamined ignorance is arguably worse than causing many of the things that happened after the invasion intentionally. Arguably somebody who *wanted* those things would have to be sick. Somebody who is just intellectually lazy deserves no pity. The uncaring deserve less pity than the honestly depraved.
People get emotional about this stuff, then lose sight the obvious middle ground. They should just contrive the computer installation so people can't see what other people are looking at. Nobody sees anything he doesn't want to, and nobody has to worry about busybodies looking over their shoulder.
I would argue a less efficient market results from the excessive regulations.
If you qualify your statement that way, it's hard to argue with.
I was always taught that it was enacted to prevent States from restricting trade between neighboring states... not to prevent trade.
Nobody advocates regulation to *prevent* trade in general. Some trade is *always* restricted by regulation, but the intent and effect of the regulation may be to encourage trade overall. For example if there weren't federal standards for auto emissions, more states might follow California's lead and develop their own regulatory standards. By establishing a nation-wide regulatory regime, a larger and more efficient market results.
On the other hand federal laws *do* effectively prevent *in state* trade in recreational drugs. If anything that's much *more* of an overstepping of federal powers, because the intent is not to provide a uniform regulatory regime for trade in recreational drugs across the country, but to *forbid* the use of recreational drugs *anywhere*. It's seldom questioned because both major parties agree that recreational drug use should be forbidden everywhere.
This is Commerce Clause of the US Constitution: "[Congress will have the power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes. That's it. That's all there is. The plain text of the clause doesn't simply prevent Congress or the States from restricting trade to favor one state's produce over another (that's actually covered in Article 1, Sections 9 and 10). The clause appears to give Congress power to regulate interstate commerce *for any reason it sees fit*. If so, Congress can intentionally *restrict trade* between the states if it believes that trade is not in the national interest. And it does, and will continue to do so. If there's ever successful nation-wide restrictions on abortion, those restrictions will be made possible by the Commerce Clause.
You could reasonably argue that this is *too* much power to give Congress. It wouldn't be the only case. I think the powers the Constitution grants Congress in copyrights and patents almost certainly enable Congress to pass laws that would be repulsive to the framers. But the framers while intending to create a government with circumscribed and carefully enumerated powers couldn't possibly have anticipated *all* the uses to which any one power could be put.
They claim that a Dragon capsule so-equipped will be able to land on "any surface" in the solar system.
In *theory*, sure. But if they tried to land on Mars, the intelligence arm of Mars' Planetary Defense Agency would arrange for the capsule to have one of their trademark "mysterious accidents".
Whenever you're given a comparison like this, you ought to look closely at the things being compared.
Crook County OR has roughly 21 thousand residents spread out over almost three thousand square miles. The urban suburb I grew up in (Somerville, MA) has over *75* thousand residents crammed into four square miles. For that matter the Queensbridge Housing Project in NYC has almost seven thousand residents in an area about 20-30 acres. You could say, "Facebook's data center uses two and a half times theenergy as the households in a two block radius of the intersection of 41st Ave and 12th St in New York," or, "Facebook uses about as much power as the entire Union Square neighborhood in Somerville, MA." Doesn't sound quite as shocking, does it?
Yes, Facebook's datacenter uses an impressive amount of power, but it's not exactly surprising that it is so large relative to the rest of the county. No doubt they chose the location because it had a lot of electricity generation potential relative to local demand.
Well, McCarthyism and Naziism have a lot in common. They both were heavy on fear-mongering and scapegoating.
But history never quite repeats itself. There's always a different wrinkle. In some ways contemporary America resembles the environment in which far right and fascist parties rose to power in post-Depression Europe. There's economic dislocation and uncertainty, albeit milder, the same longing for a simple explanation to our problems that assigns responsibility for solving them to anyone but us.
On the other hand, the experiences of WW2, McCarthyism and the Civil Rights Movement have left us less inclined to scapegoat our neighbors; maybe even the least inclined anyone has ever been in the history of civilization. I think it's remarkable that there hasn't been a major resurgence of anti-semitism after the banking crisis of 2008. That's almost unprecedented.
There's the anti-immigrant movement, but I don't think most people who are in the anti-immigrant camp actually think that Mexican braseros picking crops is the source of our economic or international problems. Sure there's bound to be a few, but the sense I get is that what drives the thing is a feeling the world has got out of control, and this issue is one that ought to have a straightforward solution. The immigration issue is like a canvas on which you can paint simple sounding solutions to exerting control (like building a wall -- excuse me, *fence -- along the border).
But then we'll always have race. Racism is alive in this country, yet it's hobbled, forced to take bizarre forms like birtherism because nearly *everybody* agrees racism is wrong. If you don't think that's remarkable, go back and look at papers, magazines and books of the 1930s. Racism was actually seen as respectable, * scientific* even. If that seems inconceivable to us, that represents real progress We still have racism, but it has to pretend to be something else. Politicians who want to exploit have to dance around it. Racism today is a puny, petty thing, still able to damage, but deprived of most of its terrifying weapons. Nobody in the mainstream dares to call for concentration camps, lynchings, or overt racial discrimination in public or economic life. Today it is the norm for even *racists* to reject racism.
It's like Dicken's said. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That has always been and always will be true.
The short answer is no. "They" (by which I assume you mean the US govt) cannot delete the data. What they *can* do is take steps which will almost certainly result in the data being deleted by the third parties hosting it.
The result is something like an extrajudicial execution. They've ensured Megaupload will die, even if the company is exonerated in the courts.
except for the following bit:
driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative.
When I read that a chill went down my spine. And not the good kind of chill, either.
It's not that I'm against private industry playing an even larger role than it did in Apollo, it's that in this case "empowering private industry" means giving it boatloads of taxpayer money and "take the initiative" means letting them spend it without meaningful oversight. It'll be the Iraq reconstruction contractor bonanza -- in space.
of the value of interleaving at least when it comes to learning an athletic skill like serving a tennis ball.
Suppose on Monday only had time to practice your serve twenty times. You'd put all your mental and physical resources into each attempt. Now suppose on Tuesday you had plenty of time, so you set out to do a *thousand* serves. Would your first twenty serves on Tuesday look anything like the twenty you did on Monday? Of course not. You know darn well you've got 980 more to go, so you *hold back*.
The net result of over-practicing any skill this way is that you end up drilling in lazy and sloppy habits. It always feel virtuous to put in a long session at something, but that's easy virtue that everybody can demonstrate under pressure. Consistent practice of moderate duration and extremely high quality has no substitute.
Interleaving a series of drills works better because you exploit fresh muscles and balance repetition with mental stimulation, which is also critical to learning.
Consistency is a virtue in academic study as well, although if you are being genuinely productive it doesn't hurt to keep working as long as it last. But being in the zone is nothing like forcing yourself to cram at the last minute. One is about exploiting an opportunity, another is about making up for lost opportunities.
I always had a very good memory for lecture material. I typically took notes, then never had to look at them again. Nor do I pay *any* attention to notes while I am taking them. I just scribble along, focused on the instructor, or sometimes jotting thoughts that are provoked. In fact I think worrying about structuring your notes as you take them just distracts you from the material you're supposed to be learning. My study time tends to be spent on *reasoning* about the material, or working practice problems, not driving facts into my skull long hoping they'll stay there long enough for me to use them on the test.
So if I never refer to my notes, why take them at all? Because when I didn't take notes, the magic didn't work. It's possible taking notes ensured I was paying attention, but I think there' s more to it than that. I'm reasonably certain that physical activity that's tied to the visual and auditory information did something to fix the material in my memory.
If that is true, why it should be so is beyond me. The brain is complicated, ad hoc hunk of goo that evolved to keep us alive and procreating on the African savanna. It's got its own way of doing things, and doesn't have to play by the rules set by our theories of education or psychology. But to this day I never go to an important meeting without a stack of paper and pencils.
The Department of Defense is making cutbacks? I can't believe what I'm hearing!
Well, "cutback" in a certain, culturally specific sense. What we're talking about is a DoD "cutback". A DoD cutback involves keeping one program on indefinite life support while the scope and costs of its replacement swell to grotesque, unrecognizable proportions. A DoD cutback is roughly like changing horses in midstream, only we're expecting the horse we ride in on to give birth to the horse we intend to ride out on while we're in the drink.
That assumes that the average consumer can or should be able to make intelligent decisions about "who he trusts to review and approve apps".
Not really. It assumes *some* consumers are able to make intelligent decisions and that there is benefit to addressing their needs and costs to sweeping them in with consumers who are less savvy. By that reasoning, there should be no *Consumer Reports* and we should rely upon the Consumer Products Safety Commission to make decisions for you.
In reality it would be the malware company with the biggest marketing budget.
This is probably depends on the *kind* of malware. Take privacy intrusion. Privacy intrusion for collecting marketing data would surely be a problem, because it's legal. But it goes on anyhow, you just don't see it and it's not running on your equipment. The point of entry to the surveillance network is the retailer. Privacy intrusion for purposes of identity theft would not be a problem *for the certification system* because the "big marketing budget" provides a trail back to the perpetrators.
The idea that a consumer should first spend weeks getting up to speed in the mapping or racing simulator communities before they can safely try out a couple apps is ridiculous.
I'll ignore the various shortcomings of the scenario you propose and cut to the chase: The real issue with the system I proposed is that it cannot overcome impatience, and it conflicts with the needs of marketing, which exploits impatience. There's an app that's gone viral, but it hasn't been certified yet by anyone you've heard of. It might take weeks for the stodgy certifiers everyone uses to get around to examining the thing, during which you'll have to live without this app you feel you can't live without. So you choose to grant an exception, or worse -- to trust a dodgy certifier. In fact, the system I proposes creates a new avenue for social engineering attack in which malware authors entice consumers to trust a malicious certifier because they want their free game *right now*.
So why do I think it's a good idea? Because my standard of success is different than yours. You want a system that will protect foolish people from their choices. I want a system in which it is *possible* to make and enforce good decisions. While I think it is unfortunate that fools are exploited, I see no way of protecting them absolutely without posing unreasonable restrictions of freedom.
Because the question in question is not "who can *everyone* trust?", the question is "who can everyone trust not to serve up malware".
Well, if you can answer that, you make those agents the *default* trusted authorities. The problem I have with platform-vendor-chooses-who-everyone-has-to-trust solution is that everyone is not the same. A hospital securing its mobile devices used in health care delivery is different from a teenager who is messing with his game console. People feel differently about privacy too, and their stance may vary depending on device. That teenager might choose different universes of apps for his game console and phone.
The problem with the current system is that it relies on people being able to draw inferences about developer intent from specific permissions an app requests. How insane is that? Even an expert who understands what a permission *does* can't reliably anticipate everything it can *accomplish*, much less the *intent* of the developer in asking for it.
Consider the difference between the following questions:
(1) Who can *you* trust?
(2) Who can *everyone* trust?
The problem with the Apple market, and with your idea too, is that it is predicated on having an answer to the second question other than "nobody".
It seems clear to me that a better solution could be built around the first question. That entails letting the consumer decide who he trusts to review and approve apps, then giving him the tools to implement that trust. That'd involve some kind of network to distribute digitally signed approvals. You wouldn't have to have different app stores. You could use any store or combination of stores you wanted. What matters is whether you can find a certification for an app from an authority you trust.
Consumers would subscribe to different authorities based on their concerns. Businesses might choose different kinds of reviewers to trust than gamers. Different functions in a business might choose different reviewers based on the kind of information they handle (e.g. whether the device running the app has sensitive or privacy related data). Evangelical Christians might choose review authorities that reject apps that promote pornography, and porn-hounds would choose authorities that reject apps promoting Christianity.
No, it's much more akin to mechanical engineering.
In our dreams.
And exactly how is the talent pool ever supposed to expand without a few blue water projects where a ambitious young developer can go out win himself some glory, instead of having his patches being sneered at by the old boys club?
Well, it's not a matter of intellectual impoverishment as it is a tendency of menus to acquire bloat at such a rate it's a pointless burden to keep up with them.
Another thing to consider with app menus is that menus are structured according to the developer's ontology of functions. Not only would a user sometimes organize functions differently, often the arrangement chosen by the developer makes no sense. I'm looking at gedit now, which has both the standard "File" menu and a "Document" menu. The "Document" menu combines both window management functions (new tab, move document to new window) and document management functions ("save all", "close all").
Gedit is not a problem because it's a simple app. But what about something like The Gimp (which I *love*, by the way, if any developers are reading this). Now the Gimp folks have labored mightily to corral all the functions of the app, but they have made some choices that might puzzle users. There's both a "select" menu and a "tool" menu with a "selection tools" sub-menu. The distinction between what goes on the "Selection" menu and the "Selection Tools" menu sort of makes sense. Things that manipulate selections with a mouse go on "selection tools" and transformations of the current selection go on "Selection". But I don't think users think this way; I think they have a mental target of what they want to select, and the process sometimes involves a "tool" and sometimes some kind of transformation.
Complicating this is the fact that Gimp selection tools can also combine the mouse actions with the existing selections. The "select by color" is probably nearly always used in an iterative fashion, so uniquely among the selection tools it goes on *both* menus, to make sure the user can find it. I think that's the right decision, but there's only so often you can do something like that before you've got an unnavigable mess. "Colors" menu functions for the most part resemble things found on the "Filters" menu, but Color related stuff is so frequently used it gets yanked to the top of the taxonomic hierarchy.
And, oh yes; my installation has an "FX Foundry" menu, which has functions that mostly go with things on the "Filter" menu, but also have things that resemble "Select" or "Image" functions. That means my copy has four different ways to organize functions: (1) by mechanics ("selection tools" vs. "selection"); (2) by target object ("Image" vs. "Layer"); (3) by class of attribute ("Colors"); and (4) by *origin* ("FXFoundry").
None of this hinders my Gimp usage at all, because I use it fairly often, but my system has *hundreds* of apps, each of which reflects a different person's way of thinking.
Gnome, KDE and Unity all seem to be trying to deal with the issue of launcher menu bloat, with various degrees of success. This "HUD" business is not particularly groundbreaking in its mechanics; KDE's launcher menu, Chromium's omnibox URL widget, and many websites using DHTML employ similar UI mechanics. I think it makes sense to extend these mechanics to menus, since all the metadata to do it is already there. Just so long as they don't take menus *away*. Something like this can be a useful complement to existing UI conventions without being an adequate replacement.
Society can have no higher purpose than to produce a world full of people who are more like me.
Everyone thinks this, whether they're a software engineer or a sous chef. And we're all right, because we're imagining training future generations to be more like the *best* of ourselves and never the worst. We coders imagine a society full of creative problem solvers. We don't imagine a future full of people who are arrogant toward anyone they can find a reason to feel superior to.
Now I happen to think TFA does a poor job of arguing its point. It claims that coding will teach "logic and reason",but it uses these terms in a very loose way. On this basis a businessman has just as much claim that learning to make decisions about allocating resources teaches "logic and reason". A landscape painter could argue that learning to paint teaches "logic and reason", because you have to work according to aesthetic principles. If you think art is a bit loosey goosey, consider how a pure mathematician looks at coding; sure it's *governed* by mathematical logic, but what isn't? Clearly everyone should be trained in the methods of philosophical investigation.
Coding is very much akin to fine art. Yes, you've got to satisfy the compiler and produce a consistently working product, but the real secret sauce in coding is *imagination*. Coding is about transforming your mental representation of a problem from something you don't know what to do with to something that can be broken down with a little persistence. B-trees, hash tables, web services, function closures ... none of these things were discovered by studying nature, but through feats of imagination.
It'd be great if everyone learned the kind of intellectual skills that coding sharpens. The problem with this idea is that it doesn't make room for all the other really valuable lessons other disciplines have. Yes it would be great if *everyone* was trained in coding, and *nothing else had to be thrown out of the curriculum*. The same goes for accounting, law or military strategy. But soon you get the point where you've claimed *all* childrens' free time. You're nowhere near teaching them everything that would be handy to know, but you've taken away time that they could use learning to direct their own energies and imagination.
I think teaching *everything to somebody* is a good idea, but teaching *everything to everybody* is a bad one.
There is such a thing as too much standardization in education. A little standardization is a good thing; we want everyone to be able to read and calculate and understand their roles as citizens. But taken to an extreme, you run up against an unforgiving truth: you can't teach someone *everything* that they might need to know. If you try, you end up with things that nobody learns that somebody ought to. Education ought to embrace both *standardization* and *diversity* as goals, both pursued in moderation. At present I believe the pendulum in the US at least has swung too far toward standardization.
There's only one thing I'd want to see added to education everywhere, and it's more a matter of attitude than knowledge. There's altogether too many people who when faced with a difficult problem say things like "I'm no good at math", "I'm no good at foreign languages" or "I have no artistic talent". I think it's important for people to recognize and acknowledge thier limitations, but also to believe they can overcome those limitations. A homeowner confronted with a geometry problem should think, "I'm no good at math, but if I applied myself I could figure this out." A nurse in an emergency room might think, "I'm no good at languages, but I tried I could learn enough Cambodian to ask patients to point to what hurts."
Well, not yet, and that's from somebody who thinks that anthropogenic climate change is probably a true hypothesis.
For one thing the thinning or melting of sea ice itself has no direct effect on sea level -- just like melting ice cubes don't change the level of water in a glass. The picture the article paints is far more complex. In a nutshell, thinning Arctic ice may allow winds to mix colder surface water with warmer deep water. This would cause more ice thinning faster than changes in the atmosphere (if any) could drive change. Any effect on sea level would be indirect.
What I'm much more concerned with is human responses to this development -- or rather *political* responses. Russia is making territorial claims in the Arctic Ocean based on some creative interpretation of international law, because they think that climate change may open the Arctic to resource exploration. If they find oil up there, there could be a polar conflict between Russia the US and strained relations between Canada and the US.
Why does everyone want to build a base inside a giant gravity well?
To stock it with moon babes in purple wigs and silver catsuits. Duh.
The TSA's jack-booted goons can steal $40,000 (real money, not imaginary money) from your luggage and only get 6 months for it.
Oh buh-ruther. The TSA doesn't have that much style. They probably wear cheap Chinese made oxfords with laces that break. But they work for *us* at a pay rate set by *us* under laws passed by legislators *we* elected. We're too chicken to accept that flying has *some* risk; too cheap to do anything about it; and so mentally indolent we let government vendors set security priorities.
There's nothing outstandingly evil about a man who can't resist the temptation of pocketing a huge wad of unguarded cash that passes through his hands. The wickedness in our character is too petty for us to be served by genuine, glamorous evil (the SS in their jackboots and Hugo Boss designed uniforms). No, we get a mirror of our national character. We get *venality*.