I confess that we Americans can be pretty illogical with our language. (We say somebody's "in jail" or "in school" but "in the hospital", that last one sounds really weird to you other English speakers doesn't it?) However, this American never uses the expression "begs the question." It's just too darn unclear. And I've very seldom heard it used by anyone else, certainly not in a day to day conversation. I'll say "raises the question" or I'll say "I don't agree with your implied assumptions", or maybe, if I've been watching too much Perry Mason, I'll say "You're assuming facts not in evidence." (Actually, I think they may have used the expression "begs the question" once or twice on Perry Mason, but I don't know if they used it correctly.)
I realize your role as Marc in the movie "Incubus" is pretty obscure, but I've been particularly intrigued by the movie ever since I managed to see it. I'd be able to ask several questions about it, but the most obviously unusual thing about it is that it was done in Esperanto. (I actually thought it was a pretty good little low budget movie and that you did a fine job in it.) I read somewhere that originally you and the other cast members were supposed to speak Volupuk but objected. But, to make this a question, I'll just ask what stays in your mind the most about making that movie?
The first pascaline up for auction? The first difference engine? The first Jacquard loom? The first Hollerith tabulator?
Actually, I probably go with Konrad Zuse's Z1 if any of these still existed. As it is, I think it would have to be the Smithsonian auctioning off ENIAC.
I'm not an anstronomer either, but the article summary did specifically say small star. The wikipedia article on red dwarfs mentions that as of 2009 there is a 'mystery' as to the absence of red dwarfs with no metals, and the preferred explanation is that without metals only large stars can form. So that theory allows for the bigger stars forming, creating heavier elements, and then exploding, spewing those elements out into the universe. Even if red dwarfs had been created at the beginning, they are so long lived they would not have exploded and released heavier elements into the rest of the universe yet anyway.
Praeterea censeo Micromolle non esse utendum. Hint: '-molle non esse utendum' means '-soft is not to be used'.
It's a paraphrase of a famous Latin quotation from Cato the Elder: "Praeterea censeo Carthaginem esse delendam" meaning "Furthermore, I declare Carthage is to be destroyed."
Cato supposedly ended all of his speeches in the Roman Senate with it. The idea being, I suppose, to show that whatever other business Rome had, they had to get rid of their rival, Carthage.
Sometimes the quote uses 'Ceterum' instead of 'Praeterea'. In this context they both mean pretty much the same thing.
I agree with Jedidiah, there were other options, in particular CP/M was an operating system for the 8 bit Intel 8080 and Zilog Z-80 with quite a bit of useful software written to run on top of it, and one could buy option cards for the S-100 bus to enhance the system physically.
If you can find an old computer magazine from the late 70s (BYTE, Dr Dobbs, Creative Computing, etc) you'll see ads for all kinds of different systems. It was like the early days of the automobile industry when there were many manufacturers that are all but forgotten now. Too many for it to last; there had to be what marketing people call a 'shakeout'. When IBM announced the PC, it legitimized these home computers in the minds of a lot of people who liked the idea of having a computer in their home with the 3 letters IBM on it.
But they were expensive and soon people were buying the cheaper clones. As I understand it, IBM was still mostly interested in their Mainframe business. They left the PC's architecture 'open', which allowed the cheap clones to be made. This was a decision that had important consequences I think. If IBM had suppressed the clones, what would have happened? Perhaps Apple would have become top dog in the home PC market, or perhaps some other company. Would there have ever been any 'open' architecture at all? The openness was spoiled by Microsoft cutting deals with the hardware manufacturers of those clones so that no other software had much of a chance. My feelings about Microsoft should be clear from my sig.
My big disappointment was that IBM chose to use the Intel 8086 chip. The Zilog Z8000 and Motorola 68000 were much more advanced, and I thought it was a pity that they became niche architectures by comparison. I realize IBM wasn't interested in creating something 'insanely great'. Mediocrity, or even downright inferiority prevailed. There were sound business reasons for IBM's decision at the time, but that doesn't mean I have to like the result.
'universe' comes from Latin words meaning something like "rolled into one". 'University' for example, was originally a synonym for 'guild'. Students in Bologna, Italy, in the Middle Ages formed a guild or university to have bargaining power with tradesmen, landlords, and teachers. The idea caught on and that's how European Universities got started.
So, 'multiverse' could mean 'rolled into many', which to me doesn't seem too far off the mark the way it's applied. Anonymous coward says he (or she or it) prefers 'cosmos' for a space time continuum. The word originally meant 'order' and was in opposition to 'chaos'. (According to the wikipedia, so it's almost certainly true.) It doesn't lend itself to a hierarchical terminology though, does it?
I think it's more productive to say we have a universe, all rolled up into a bundle, but there are other bundles out there, forming a multiverse in the cosmos, which may have come forth from a primordial chaos. But that's me.
Ahh, in the old days on usenet there used to be these fantastic flamewars over issues of sound quality. Tubes vs solid state, digital vs analog. Also, people would have their favorite manufacturer that they would rave about. It was kind of like debates about wine. People would denigrate double blind listening tests (just like they'd denigrate double blind tastings for wine.)
I have a pair of speakers I bought for $100 back in the 70s. They were home made by a guy who used components from a famous English manufacturer, Rogers. I had actually gone to his house to buy something else, (I didn't know the guy, I'd seen an ad in the paper) but he had all these speakers lying around and I just casually listened to this and that and said, hey I like the sound of these speakers. They were uncanny, I was looking around for the musicians because I heard them there in the room! He nodded and said those particular speakers were made to sound 'natural' but he didn't care about natural anymore, he wanted 'detail'. He sold them to me because his wife wanted him to get rid of some of the stuff that was crowding up the house. They weren't big speakers, just bookshelf size, but very heavy for their size.
I've had 'golden ear' types come visit me and played something for them, and their eyes would go wide over the sound of those speakers, without me even saying anything about them.
Olt-timers eh? OK, somebody's going to outdo me in the oldtimer department (at least I hope there's people older than me out there), but I haven't seen one of their posts here yet.
My credentials, I did my first, admittedly almost insignificant, bit of programming in 1966 on a PDP 8 in Fortran using punch cards. It was bad enough to make me stay away from computers for 10 years (4 of those years being in the Navy during the Viet-Nam War), but even so, I had a few years experience programming in assembler before the IBM PC came out. What made me mad was that IBM used the 8086 when the Motorola 68000 was already out, and even the Zilog Z-8000 was a lot better than the 8086. But the uninformed masses were oohing and aahing because of those 3 letters, 'IBM', on the side of the box.
I remember at my job back then, the hardware guys were always complaining about how the company we worked for always went with IBM components when somebody else's were a better deal. Hardware and software wise, it seemed like the PC was as bad as it could be and still sucker people in to using it. MS-DOS fit right in with that philosophy. (I've read that IBM's intentions were not a mass market computer but something to interface to their mainframes. I don't know if that's true, but it could explain a lot about their approach.)
Back in the 70s there had been a heady idealism about computers. Go look in old BYTE magazines to get an idea. Look at Dr Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia (Running Light Without Overbyte) for an even better idea. My brother, the hardware guy, built a homebrew computer with 256 bytes of eprom that we programmed using DIP switches so that it could read a hex touchpad. I think he got the basic plan from the 8080A Bugbook. So many possibilities! The idealism of the 60s about a lot of things was depleted, but with the home computer, it was still there. The IBM PC put an end to that as far as I'm concerned. Maybe if they had gone with Gary Kildall's operating system it would have been OK. I recommend looking for saved videos of the old Computer Chronicles TV shows hosted by Stewart Cheifeit which had Kildall as a frequent guest.
Funny, but I saw where my local PBS station is broadcasting even now a documentary about Louis Brandeis. I set up to record it after reading about him in the wikipedia. It seems he was instrumental in creating the notion of a right to privacy. I haven't seen the documentary yet, but it might be interesting to learn about his take on the subject. He was a brilliant man it seems, with the highest grades of anybody to graduate from Harvard, and he graduated at age 20 according to the wikipedia, so some of his stuff may be over my head.
As for human nature. I think that evolutionarily speaking, we haven't had a lot of pressure for privacy. People used to live in small hunter gatherer groups where everybody must have known everybody else's business, the ultimate small town situation. The notion of personal privacy is rather a new thing in human terms, but I think a very valuable thing. It goes with the notion of individualism, and with what I would call (in what I admit is a vague hand waving fashion) the "principles of the enlightenment". Those 'principles of the enlightenment' are, in my opinion, a very, very important invention in human history, but, because they are new, mankind's (that is, human nature's) grasp of the concept is very shaky, and very prone to be forgotten. So, the notion of privacy is kind of under attack, and most people, casually letting it slip away as they explore the wonderful new toy of the internet, may not realize what they are losing until it's too late. That's my concern.
The 'Chief Engineer' who led the Soviet Space Program during it's heyday in the early 60s was Sergey Korolyov. According to the wikipedia, in 1938 he was accused of deliberately slowing the work of a research insititute, arrested, tortured, and spent years in a labor camp.
I read a book on the Mitrokhin Archives, smuggled out of the Soviet Union just at its fall. I gathered from that that one of the most profitable ways the Russians could spend their money on research was espionage to steal secrets from the West.
I'm not going to defend Capitalism as ideal. Politics and special interests muck up any social system or organization. I'm just protesting that the post comparing the socialist system to the capitalist system is overly simplistic.
I also use ubuntu nowadays, currently still using 10.04 Lucid Lynx, the last long term maintenance release. During the 80s my jobs mostly involved using some form of Unix. I got introduced to linux through a 50 diskette distro of slackware around 1994. I used to be a real fan of slack, but I tried other distros, including Linux From Scratch and Beyond Linux From Scratch. Finally I got tired of all that. It's a bit like what happened with a guy I used to know. When I knew him he was a mechanical engineer fresh out of college who was really into cars. He'd buy old ones cheap and fix them up. Then one day he bought a brand new car with an automatic transmission so he could just drive it and not have to think about how it worked or whether or not it would work.
I don't know of any careful objective study of this phenomenon, but from my casual layman's reading of history and watching PBS programs, it seems that a lot of progress has been made by non-conformist groups. In England the Puritans were excluded from the ruling elite and their schools and so started their own schools. They made a large contribution to, among other things, the Industrial Revolution, Abraham Darby being the poster child. The Jews, a marginalized group, have a lot of achievements to their credit in science, the arts, and philosophy. It would seem that in many cases, Baruch Spinoza being an example, they caught a lot of flack from their own people by crossing over with their ideas and thinking. Many immigrant groups to the USA have revitalized American culture.
My own theory is that being outside the mainstream forces one to think outside the box, and to see the inconsistencies and hypocrisy of the conventional and conformist thinkers.
I've seen this argument many times. A popular argument for the metric system vs the imperial system is asking to convert furlongs to inches or something like that. But you never really need to convert furlongs to inches because they are used for different things. It's nice to have twelve inches to a foot because you can get halves, thirds, fourths, and sixths of a foot easily. Most liquid measures are powers of two, 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon. Sure, most people who don't deal with binary have trouble figuring that there's 16 cups to a gallon, but how often do they need to know that?
Granted, there would be many advantages to having a single standard around the world, whether it was the metric or the imperial, but I don't really think the metric is inherently superior.
IANAL (I am not a linguist), but I've read a few books for the layman on linguistics. The most complicated languages, from a grammatical point of view, are those spoken by relatively small communities. When European linguists first started learning Native American Languages, they were startled by the complexity of their polysynthetic structure. Classical Latin and Greek are more complex than their modern equivalents, presumably because they are closer to the 'primitive' original languages. I studied Latin and yuck, you have to memorize the endings for 5 cases (6 if you count the vocative) of nouns, which change depending on which of 5 declensions they are in, whether they're singular or plural, whether the noun happens to be masculine, feminine, or neuter. And then you have to do the same all over again for various pronouns. (That's the way it was presented in my textbooks. Some experts would argue with that characterisation, and there are many similarities between some of those declensions, but it's still a PITA trying to remember how a second declension adjective modifying a first declension noun, especially if it happens to be masculine, is supposed to work, ie "bonus nauta" [good sailor] vs "bona silva" [good forest]), and I haven't even started on the verbs! But, if you were living in a small community, where almost everybody's parents and grand parents and great parents had lived and died within 20 miles of where you were born, you'd know everybody in your little village intimately, and pick up on each individual's quirks of speech. Everybody you knew would be about as intimately familiar with your environment as you were, and familiar with specially coined words to name every plant and animal, and the various parts of each plant and animal, and distinguish whether they were in view or out of view, near or far. Family relations would be distinguished as to older or young sibling, their sex, ditto for paternal and maternal aunts, uncles, cousins. English has come a long way from that, with various complexities folded into a few standard forms, so instead of saying brethren we now say brothers, though we still say children (eventually we may substitute the name originally used for young goats for child and children and just say kid and kids). English has spread so that people from all over the world share it, but we still have, for example, separate words for young sheep (lambs), cows (calves), bears (cubs), and so on, instead of just saying sheepling, cowling, bearling, which harks back to a time when English was the language of a largely agricultural society.
heaven forbid that college should be about getting an education instead of necessary vocational training.
I think one could argue that the first Universities were vocational in nature. They produced lawyers, physicians, and theologians. The popes were concerned that correct orthodoxy was learned and disseminated and needed trained priests. They gave licenses to schools that allowed graduates to teach anywhere, and this was possibly the first form of accreditation for a school. There were other things besides theology though. The University of Bologna, which is often cited as the first western style university, placed an emphasis on law and it was run by the students, who took the initiative in forming the university. This was even before the popes started giving out their accreditation. The word university meant 'guild', and at Bologna it was a guild of students, who were mostly out of towners, easy to take advantage of, who needed a guild so they would have more clout than as individuals. They, the students who were paying the bills, dictated the terms for the teachers they hired. For example, the teachers were not allowed to skip class.
Sure there were scholars who loved knowledge for its own sake, and the university was a natural place for them to go. Chaucer writes of the poor scholar from Oxenford who would gladly learn and gladly teach, but there's always been a commercial side to the education system as well.
I also think that modern universities frequently sucker the students and their parents into buying an expensive education that will do them little good. That may not be such a new thing either. In his book, Walden, Henry David Thoreau comments about students going to college for the social experience rather than the education.
As an example, in Florida, native American populations used to live in Chickee huts with open sides. No privacy there, unless you wandered off into the swamp. I suspect that life in a place like that provided the ultimate in small town mentality, with everybody knowing everybody else's business, enforcing conformism. They would not have had 'big brother' in the impersonal distant government sense however. And this would have been the hunter gatherer environment that human nature was presumably shaped in. So I don't think it's a given that humans have a strong innate requirement for privacy, much as some of us, myself included, might like it.
It all boils down to how much one is allowed to be 'different'. Being different can mean being creative and innovative, thinking outside the box, or it can mean being a sociopath of some kind. In theory the 'good different' would be tolerated and the 'bad different' would be suppressed or corrected, but in practice, it would be different. (Taking a cue from the purported aphorisms of Yogi Berra.) There are enough anecdotes about people who were positive movers and shakers in society who were tormented by teasing, bullying, and the like as children to make me extremely skeptical about that. Of course, if only big brother had access to your private life, then only big brother would be putting all the pressure on to conform. Keeping you from complaining that the nuclear power plants or the off shore oil wells aren't safe, that the chemical warfare weapons really do exist and start properly stored, you know, that kind of thing.
The roboticists will have a real milestone when they make one that can outrun a real Cheetah, and maneuverable enough to catch a Thompson's Gazelle. When it catches the gazelle, it has to do it as quickly as a cheetah. No fair just wearing it down by having more stamina. (Okay, building a robot to chase down gazelles might be cruelty to animals, something I'm against. My point is to put the achievement in perspective. Building any robot on legs that can outrun a human is an achievement, I admit. I'm just kind of struck by the idea of them using a cheetah form to do it. I would've read the article but the link is slow.)
Maybe some researchers have 'shifting goal posts' if they think that they can define a test of AI. But, if it's human intelligence they are trying to emulate, then research into parsing algorithms and data searching, while useful in many ways, is probably not the path to take. There was a Nova documentary about this last week, before the big Jeopardy game was broadcast, and the researchers admitted that this was not the same as human thinking. In a way it's comforting because this kind of AI is unlikely to "turn on its masters" the way a real human like AI might, one can that could have genuine curiosity, develop its own research methodologies and generally think for itself. It also doesn't raise any moral or ethical issues about how to treat the AI since it doesn't have any feelings either.
"The Marching Morons" was a science fiction story I read a looong time ago, written by C. M. Kornbluth, whose most famous stories were probably "The Space Merchants" and "The Black Bag". The story didn't talk about religion, but about the more intelligent part of the population having fewer children, and speculated on the consequences. I guess that makes it sound like I'm equating intelligence with lacking in religiousness, which I don't think is quite true. But I do think decisions made for religious reasons are more apt to be wrong than plain old straightforward thinking type decisions. I also don't equate morality with religion. For example, slavery in America was defended on religious grounds and also attacked and criticized on religious grounds. But I think the anti-slavery forces had the moral high ground. They also used persuasive economic arguments that had nothing to do with religion.
He's not arguing that there's an evolutionary advantage to not believing in evolution. He's arguing something closer to the idea that there's an evolutionary advantage to having more children and that that is somehow connected to being religious. (Maybe religious taboos against birth control for example). I'm not sure he's even arguing that exactly, but it's sort of implied. Usually poor people have more children. Benjamin Franklin noticed this in the 18th Century, and even predicted that as America became more affluent the birthrate would go down, (which makes you wonder what would have happened if Malthus had read Franklin.) Anyway, I think religious people are usually poorer than wealthy people, particularly if you look at the world as a whole, not just Europe or America, and one could speculate that maybe there is some cause and effect among religiousness, poverty, ignorance, and high birthrate that is triggered by some instinct to procreate more in hard times and also to turn to some strong source of authority in hard times. However, having a lot of children tends to beget poverty, which might lead to a feedback loop or vicious circle. It's why the Chinese have tried to impose severe limits on their birthrate.
Most believers in evolution subscribe currently to the idea that we evolved as hunter gatherers. If true, then one can speculate that the 'religious' gene, if it exists, promoted group solidarity and cohesion, a willingness to submit to authority, which conferred an advantage in many circumstances. On the other hand, the non-conformists may have been the big innovators, and were probably more flexible in the face of change, like changing climate conditions, or exploring new terrain. I'm sure there's a science fiction novel or two buried in there somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I confess that we Americans can be pretty illogical with our language. (We say somebody's "in jail" or "in school" but "in the hospital", that last one sounds really weird to you other English speakers doesn't it?) However, this American never uses the expression "begs the question." It's just too darn unclear. And I've very seldom heard it used by anyone else, certainly not in a day to day conversation. I'll say "raises the question" or I'll say "I don't agree with your implied assumptions", or maybe, if I've been watching too much Perry Mason, I'll say "You're assuming facts not in evidence." (Actually, I think they may have used the expression "begs the question" once or twice on Perry Mason, but I don't know if they used it correctly.)
I realize your role as Marc in the movie "Incubus" is pretty obscure, but I've been particularly intrigued by the movie ever since I managed to see it. I'd be able to ask several questions about it, but the most obviously unusual thing about it is that it was done in Esperanto. (I actually thought it was a pretty good little low budget movie and that you did a fine job in it.) I read somewhere that originally you and the other cast members were supposed to speak Volupuk but objected. But, to make this a question, I'll just ask what stays in your mind the most about making that movie?
The first pascaline up for auction?
The first difference engine?
The first Jacquard loom?
The first Hollerith tabulator?
Actually, I probably go with Konrad Zuse's Z1 if any of these still existed. As it is, I think it would have to be the Smithsonian auctioning off ENIAC.
Note that up above there are linux analogies.
I'm not an anstronomer either, but the article summary did specifically say small star. The wikipedia article on red dwarfs mentions that as of 2009 there is a 'mystery' as to the absence of red dwarfs with no metals, and the preferred explanation is that without metals only large stars can form. So that theory allows for the bigger stars forming, creating heavier elements, and then exploding, spewing those elements out into the universe. Even if red dwarfs had been created at the beginning, they are so long lived they would not have exploded and released heavier elements into the rest of the universe yet anyway.
My sig is:
Praeterea censeo Micromolle non esse utendum. Hint: '-molle non esse utendum' means '-soft is not to be used'.
It's a paraphrase of a famous Latin quotation from Cato the Elder:
"Praeterea censeo Carthaginem esse delendam" meaning
"Furthermore, I declare Carthage is to be destroyed."
Cato supposedly ended all of his speeches in the Roman Senate with it. The idea being, I suppose, to show that whatever other business Rome had, they had to get rid of their rival, Carthage.
Sometimes the quote uses 'Ceterum' instead of 'Praeterea'. In this context they both mean pretty much the same thing.
I agree with Jedidiah, there were other options, in particular CP/M was an operating system for the 8 bit Intel 8080 and Zilog Z-80 with quite a bit of useful software written to run on top of it, and one could buy option cards for the S-100 bus to enhance the system physically.
If you can find an old computer magazine from the late 70s (BYTE, Dr Dobbs, Creative Computing, etc) you'll see ads for all kinds of different systems. It was like the early days of the automobile industry when there were many manufacturers that are all but forgotten now. Too many for it to last; there had to be what marketing people call a 'shakeout'. When IBM announced the PC, it legitimized these home computers in the minds of a lot of people who liked the idea of having a computer in their home with the 3 letters IBM on it.
But they were expensive and soon people were buying the cheaper clones. As I understand it, IBM was still mostly interested in their Mainframe business. They left the PC's architecture 'open', which allowed the cheap clones to be made. This was a decision that had important consequences I think. If IBM had suppressed the clones, what would have happened? Perhaps Apple would have become top dog in the home PC market, or perhaps some other company. Would there have ever been any 'open' architecture at all? The openness was spoiled by Microsoft cutting deals with the hardware manufacturers of those clones so that no other software had much of a chance. My feelings about Microsoft should be clear from my sig.
My big disappointment was that IBM chose to use the Intel 8086 chip. The Zilog Z8000 and Motorola 68000 were much more advanced, and I thought it was a pity that they became niche architectures by comparison. I realize IBM wasn't interested in creating something 'insanely great'. Mediocrity, or even downright inferiority prevailed. There were sound business reasons for IBM's decision at the time, but that doesn't mean I have to like the result.
'universe' comes from Latin words meaning something like "rolled into one". 'University' for example, was originally a synonym for 'guild'. Students in Bologna, Italy, in the Middle Ages formed a guild or university to have bargaining power with tradesmen, landlords, and teachers. The idea caught on and that's how European Universities got started.
So, 'multiverse' could mean 'rolled into many', which to me doesn't seem too far off the mark the way it's applied. Anonymous coward says he (or she or it) prefers 'cosmos' for a space time continuum. The word originally meant 'order' and was in opposition to 'chaos'. (According to the wikipedia, so it's almost certainly true.) It doesn't lend itself to a hierarchical terminology though, does it?
I think it's more productive to say we have a universe, all rolled up into a bundle, but there are other bundles out there, forming a multiverse in the cosmos, which may have come forth from a primordial chaos. But that's me.
Ahh, in the old days on usenet there used to be these fantastic flamewars over issues of sound quality. Tubes vs solid state, digital vs analog. Also, people would have their favorite manufacturer that they would rave about. It was kind of like debates about wine. People would denigrate double blind listening tests (just like they'd denigrate double blind tastings for wine.)
I have a pair of speakers I bought for $100 back in the 70s. They were home made by a guy who used components from a famous English manufacturer, Rogers. I had actually gone to his house to buy something else, (I didn't know the guy, I'd seen an ad in the paper) but he had all these speakers lying around and I just casually listened to this and that and said, hey I like the sound of these speakers. They were uncanny, I was looking around for the musicians because I heard them there in the room! He nodded and said those particular speakers were made to sound 'natural' but he didn't care about natural anymore, he wanted 'detail'. He sold them to me because his wife wanted him to get rid of some of the stuff that was crowding up the house. They weren't big speakers, just bookshelf size, but very heavy for their size.
I've had 'golden ear' types come visit me and played something for them, and their eyes would go wide over the sound of those speakers, without me even saying anything about them.
Olt-timers eh? OK, somebody's going to outdo me in the oldtimer department (at least I hope there's people older than me out there), but I haven't seen one of their posts here yet.
My credentials, I did my first, admittedly almost insignificant, bit of programming in 1966 on a PDP 8 in Fortran using punch cards. It was bad enough to make me stay away from computers for 10 years (4 of those years being in the Navy during the Viet-Nam War), but even so, I had a few years experience programming in assembler before the IBM PC came out. What made me mad was that IBM used the 8086 when the Motorola 68000 was already out, and even the Zilog Z-8000 was a lot better than the 8086. But the uninformed masses were oohing and aahing because of those 3 letters, 'IBM', on the side of the box.
I remember at my job back then, the hardware guys were always complaining about how the company we worked for always went with IBM components when somebody else's were a better deal. Hardware and software wise, it seemed like the PC was as bad as it could be and still sucker people in to using it. MS-DOS fit right in with that philosophy. (I've read that IBM's intentions were not a mass market computer but something to interface to their mainframes. I don't know if that's true, but it could explain a lot about their approach.)
Back in the 70s there had been a heady idealism about computers. Go look in old BYTE magazines to get an idea. Look at Dr Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia (Running Light Without Overbyte) for an even better idea. My brother, the hardware guy, built a homebrew computer with 256 bytes of eprom that we programmed using DIP switches so that it could read a hex touchpad. I think he got the basic plan from the 8080A Bugbook. So many possibilities! The idealism of the 60s about a lot of things was depleted, but with the home computer, it was still there. The IBM PC put an end to that as far as I'm concerned. Maybe if they had gone with Gary Kildall's operating system it would have been OK. I recommend looking for saved videos of the old Computer Chronicles TV shows hosted by Stewart Cheifeit which had Kildall as a frequent guest.
"The idea that if you gave me a program now it would still be working in 30-50 years when I am likely to die is pretty silly"
Counterexample: I can still play "Adventure".
Funny, but I saw where my local PBS station is broadcasting even now a documentary about Louis Brandeis. I set up to record it after reading about him in the wikipedia. It seems he was instrumental in creating the notion of a right to privacy. I haven't seen the documentary yet, but it might be interesting to learn about his take on the subject. He was a brilliant man it seems, with the highest grades of anybody to graduate from Harvard, and he graduated at age 20 according to the wikipedia, so some of his stuff may be over my head.
As for human nature. I think that evolutionarily speaking, we haven't had a lot of pressure for privacy. People used to live in small hunter gatherer groups where everybody must have known everybody else's business, the ultimate small town situation. The notion of personal privacy is rather a new thing in human terms, but I think a very valuable thing. It goes with the notion of individualism, and with what I would call (in what I admit is a vague hand waving fashion) the "principles of the enlightenment". Those 'principles of the enlightenment' are, in my opinion, a very, very important invention in human history, but, because they are new, mankind's (that is, human nature's) grasp of the concept is very shaky, and very prone to be forgotten. So, the notion of privacy is kind of under attack, and most people, casually letting it slip away as they explore the wonderful new toy of the internet, may not realize what they are losing until it's too late. That's my concern.
The 'Chief Engineer' who led the Soviet Space Program during it's heyday in the early 60s was Sergey Korolyov. According to the wikipedia, in 1938 he was accused of deliberately slowing the work of a research insititute, arrested, tortured, and spent years in a labor camp.
I read a book on the Mitrokhin Archives, smuggled out of the Soviet Union just at its fall. I gathered from that that one of the most profitable ways the Russians could spend their money on research was espionage to steal secrets from the West.
I'm not going to defend Capitalism as ideal. Politics and special interests muck up any social system or organization. I'm just protesting that the post comparing the socialist system to the capitalist system is overly simplistic.
Owls can rotate their heads 180 degrees. Actually, according to the wikipedia, they can go up to 270 degrees.
I also use ubuntu nowadays, currently still using 10.04 Lucid Lynx, the last long term maintenance release. During the 80s my jobs mostly involved using some form of Unix. I got introduced to linux through a 50 diskette distro of slackware around 1994. I used to be a real fan of slack, but I tried other distros, including Linux From Scratch and Beyond Linux From Scratch. Finally I got tired of all that. It's a bit like what happened with a guy I used to know. When I knew him he was a mechanical engineer fresh out of college who was really into cars. He'd buy old ones cheap and fix them up. Then one day he bought a brand new car with an automatic transmission so he could just drive it and not have to think about how it worked or whether or not it would work.
I don't know of any careful objective study of this phenomenon, but from my casual layman's reading of history and watching PBS programs, it seems that a lot of progress has been made by non-conformist groups. In England the Puritans were excluded from the ruling elite and their schools and so started their own schools. They made a large contribution to, among other things, the Industrial Revolution, Abraham Darby being the poster child. The Jews, a marginalized group, have a lot of achievements to their credit in science, the arts, and philosophy. It would seem that in many cases, Baruch Spinoza being an example, they caught a lot of flack from their own people by crossing over with their ideas and thinking. Many immigrant groups to the USA have revitalized American culture.
My own theory is that being outside the mainstream forces one to think outside the box, and to see the inconsistencies and hypocrisy of the conventional and conformist thinkers.
I've seen this argument many times. A popular argument for the metric system vs the imperial system is asking to convert furlongs to inches or something like that. But you never really need to convert furlongs to inches because they are used for different things. It's nice to have twelve inches to a foot because you can get halves, thirds, fourths, and sixths of a foot easily. Most liquid measures are powers of two, 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon. Sure, most people who don't deal with binary have trouble figuring that there's 16 cups to a gallon, but how often do they need to know that?
Granted, there would be many advantages to having a single standard around the world, whether it was the metric or the imperial, but I don't really think the metric is inherently superior.
IANAL (I am not a linguist), but I've read a few books for the layman on linguistics. The most complicated languages, from a grammatical point of view, are those spoken by relatively small communities. When European linguists first started learning Native American Languages, they were startled by the complexity of their polysynthetic structure. Classical Latin and Greek are more complex than their modern equivalents, presumably because they are closer to the 'primitive' original languages. I studied Latin and yuck, you have to memorize the endings for 5 cases (6 if you count the vocative) of nouns, which change depending on which of 5 declensions they are in, whether they're singular or plural, whether the noun happens to be masculine, feminine, or neuter. And then you have to do the same all over again for various pronouns. (That's the way it was presented in my textbooks. Some experts would argue with that characterisation, and there are many similarities between some of those declensions, but it's still a PITA trying to remember how a second declension adjective modifying a first declension noun, especially if it happens to be masculine, is supposed to work, ie "bonus nauta" [good sailor] vs "bona silva" [good forest]), and I haven't even started on the verbs! But, if you were living in a small community, where almost everybody's parents and grand parents and great parents had lived and died within 20 miles of where you were born, you'd know everybody in your little village intimately, and pick up on each individual's quirks of speech. Everybody you knew would be about as intimately familiar with your environment as you were, and familiar with specially coined words to name every plant and animal, and the various parts of each plant and animal, and distinguish whether they were in view or out of view, near or far. Family relations would be distinguished as to older or young sibling, their sex, ditto for paternal and maternal aunts, uncles, cousins. English has come a long way from that, with various complexities folded into a few standard forms, so instead of saying brethren we now say brothers, though we still say children (eventually we may substitute the name originally used for young goats for child and children and just say kid and kids). English has spread so that people from all over the world share it, but we still have, for example, separate words for young sheep (lambs), cows (calves), bears (cubs), and so on, instead of just saying sheepling, cowling, bearling, which harks back to a time when English was the language of a largely agricultural society.
heaven forbid that college should be about getting an education instead of necessary vocational training.
I think one could argue that the first Universities were vocational in nature. They produced lawyers, physicians, and theologians. The popes were concerned that correct orthodoxy was learned and disseminated and needed trained priests. They gave licenses to schools that allowed graduates to teach anywhere, and this was possibly the first form of accreditation for a school. There were other things besides theology though. The University of Bologna, which is often cited as the first western style university, placed an emphasis on law and it was run by the students, who took the initiative in forming the university. This was even before the popes started giving out their accreditation. The word university meant 'guild', and at Bologna it was a guild of students, who were mostly out of towners, easy to take advantage of, who needed a guild so they would have more clout than as individuals. They, the students who were paying the bills, dictated the terms for the teachers they hired. For example, the teachers were not allowed to skip class.
Sure there were scholars who loved knowledge for its own sake, and the university was a natural place for them to go. Chaucer writes of the poor scholar from Oxenford who would gladly learn and gladly teach, but there's always been a commercial side to the education system as well.
I also think that modern universities frequently sucker the students and their parents into buying an expensive education that will do them little good. That may not be such a new thing either. In his book, Walden, Henry David Thoreau comments about students going to college for the social experience rather than the education.
As an example, in Florida, native American populations used to live in Chickee huts with open sides. No privacy there, unless you wandered off into the swamp. I suspect that life in a place like that provided the ultimate in small town mentality, with everybody knowing everybody else's business, enforcing conformism. They would not have had 'big brother' in the impersonal distant government sense however. And this would have been the hunter gatherer environment that human nature was presumably shaped in. So I don't think it's a given that humans have a strong innate requirement for privacy, much as some of us, myself included, might like it.
It all boils down to how much one is allowed to be 'different'. Being different can mean being creative and innovative, thinking outside the box, or it can mean being a sociopath of some kind. In theory the 'good different' would be tolerated and the 'bad different' would be suppressed or corrected, but in practice, it would be different. (Taking a cue from the purported aphorisms of Yogi Berra.) There are enough anecdotes about people who were positive movers and shakers in society who were tormented by teasing, bullying, and the like as children to make me extremely skeptical about that. Of course, if only big brother had access to your private life, then only big brother would be putting all the pressure on to conform. Keeping you from complaining that the nuclear power plants or the off shore oil wells aren't safe, that the chemical warfare weapons really do exist and start properly stored, you know, that kind of thing.
The roboticists will have a real milestone when they make one that can outrun a real Cheetah, and maneuverable enough to catch a Thompson's Gazelle. When it catches the gazelle, it has to do it as quickly as a cheetah. No fair just wearing it down by having more stamina. (Okay, building a robot to chase down gazelles might be cruelty to animals, something I'm against. My point is to put the achievement in perspective. Building any robot on legs that can outrun a human is an achievement, I admit. I'm just kind of struck by the idea of them using a cheetah form to do it. I would've read the article but the link is slow.)
Yeah, I noticed the 'overtook' too. But is it really Bing surging ahead or Yahoo falling behind?
Maybe some researchers have 'shifting goal posts' if they think that they can define a test of AI. But, if it's human intelligence they are trying to emulate, then research into parsing algorithms and data searching, while useful in many ways, is probably not the path to take. There was a Nova documentary about this last week, before the big Jeopardy game was broadcast, and the researchers admitted that this was not the same as human thinking. In a way it's comforting because this kind of AI is unlikely to "turn on its masters" the way a real human like AI might, one can that could have genuine curiosity, develop its own research methodologies and generally think for itself. It also doesn't raise any moral or ethical issues about how to treat the AI since it doesn't have any feelings either.
"The Marching Morons" was a science fiction story I read a looong time ago, written by C. M. Kornbluth, whose most famous stories were probably "The Space Merchants" and "The Black Bag". The story didn't talk about religion, but about the more intelligent part of the population having fewer children, and speculated on the consequences. I guess that makes it sound like I'm equating intelligence with lacking in religiousness, which I don't think is quite true. But I do think decisions made for religious reasons are more apt to be wrong than plain old straightforward thinking type decisions. I also don't equate morality with religion. For example, slavery in America was defended on religious grounds and also attacked and criticized on religious grounds. But I think the anti-slavery forces had the moral high ground. They also used persuasive economic arguments that had nothing to do with religion.
He's not arguing that there's an evolutionary advantage to not believing in evolution. He's arguing something closer to the idea that there's an evolutionary advantage to having more children and that that is somehow connected to being religious. (Maybe religious taboos against birth control for example). I'm not sure he's even arguing that exactly, but it's sort of implied. Usually poor people have more children. Benjamin Franklin noticed this in the 18th Century, and even predicted that as America became more affluent the birthrate would go down, (which makes you wonder what would have happened if Malthus had read Franklin.) Anyway, I think religious people are usually poorer than wealthy people, particularly if you look at the world as a whole, not just Europe or America, and one could speculate that maybe there is some cause and effect among religiousness, poverty, ignorance, and high birthrate that is triggered by some instinct to procreate more in hard times and also to turn to some strong source of authority in hard times. However, having a lot of children tends to beget poverty, which might lead to a feedback loop or vicious circle. It's why the Chinese have tried to impose severe limits on their birthrate.
Most believers in evolution subscribe currently to the idea that we evolved as hunter gatherers. If true, then one can speculate that the 'religious' gene, if it exists, promoted group solidarity and cohesion, a willingness to submit to authority, which conferred an advantage in many circumstances. On the other hand, the non-conformists may have been the big innovators, and were probably more flexible in the face of change, like changing climate conditions, or exploring new terrain. I'm sure there's a science fiction novel or two buried in there somewhere.