The problem with Creationists--and the reason it has NO place in a science class
No, the actual problem is that the public school system forces government to make decisions about what is true and what is false. Sometimes government gets it right and sometimes government gets it wrong. Eugenics, forced sterilizations, and racism weren't just widely practiced in the US and Europe, they were justified with scientific results and taught as science in public schools. In particular, many public school textbooks in the US were profoundly racist. Although the goal of having an educated public is a good one, public schools and state-mandated curricula are an instrument of political indoctrination for the ruling classes. In 19th century Germany, for example, the state nationalized Catholic schools because it didn't like what they taught.
It is far better not to seek one absolute truth that government should teach through the school system, but to let parents make their own decisions. Parents will also sometimes get it wrong (as in the case of fundamentalist Christians choosing to teach creationism), but a minority teaching their kids stupid things is less harmful than a government, subject to lobbying and political pressures, imposing a curriculum on an entire state or the nation.
A droplet computer is certainly new and interesting, but people should remember that computers using pneumatic or fluidic elements are actually quite old.
NASA getting out of the launch business and dedicating its budget purely to science is the ideal way to maximize science.
Really? Where does the money NASA "invests in multiple American companies" to develop crew launch capabilities come from?
To accelerate the program’s efforts and reduce the gap in American human spaceflight capabilities, NASA awarded more than $8.2 billion in Space Act Agreements (SAAs)
If you're dreaming of the day where Joe Blow from Statesville Tech launches his own Cassini, you're going to be dreaming for a very, very long time.
So the dichotomy you pose is "Joe Blew from Statesville Tech" vs massive NASA crony capitalist spending; are you just being a dishonest debater or is that really the only two alternatives you understand?
All NASA needs for its scientific missions are launch capabilities for probes, and there is plenty of commercial incentive for providing those even without NASA spending or funding. Furthermore, if NASA thinks that its spending is needed to create those launch capabilities, it should do so without playing favorites with particular companies; that is, it should say "we will order 50 launches at a maximum price of $X per launch".
Overpriced? Commercial Crew has led to - after decades of stagnation - a sudden and massive drop in launch prices. How is it not something to be heralded?
How does "basic interplanetary research" require handing vast amounts of money to US aerospace companies for launching people into space?
Claiming that NASA is only focusing on science is a lie, and calling its crony capitalist spending "private space flight" is also a lie. NASA is the same old inefficient boondoggle it has always been, and instead of helping us get into space faster, it is impeding space exploration and space flight. We'd be better off without NASA; we'd be sacrificing some nice science in the short term but it would be worth it.
It struck me as absurd that one could amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college.
If you take out a loan to get a graduate degree in philosophy, you are engaging in "reckless borrowing and spending". A Ferrari would be a more worthwhile "investment" than that.
That's not just "certainly an improvement", that's the very thing that I think almost all of us here want to see. And this is the chief executive officer of the Planetary Society speaking. So...?
The "investment" he is talking about is public funding for private launch capabilities, not private space exploration. In the end, their policy ideas seem to be largely "give NASA more funding, just change a little what they do":
Whatever Tyson said (Tyson just being a board member),
Nonprofits select board members that reflect their ideals. And the Planetary Society behaves consistent with what Tyson is saying.
Commercial Crew
Take it from NASA:
NASA's Commercial Crew Program is a partnership between the agency and aerospace industry to develop and fly human space transportation systems.
That is just NASA giving money and resources to aerospace companies so that those companies can then develop overpriced launch capabilities and enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. That has nothing to do with "private space exploration" and everything with crony capitalism. It's just more business as usual, and it's what got NASA into trouble in the first place.
you're letting that ruin your view of the Planetary Society as a whole?
No, what "ruined" my view of the planetary society is what they are doing and what they are advocating.
The Planetary Society just wants to see space exploration and the advances in technology that make it possible.
Almost everybody wants that. The question is how to go about it. Nye wants to redirect funding within NASA from programs like the ISS to interplanetary probes and pure science, which is certainly an improvement. Tyson, on the other hand, talks a lot about the supposed impossibility of financing private space exploration, which is a bad thing.
In the end, I think both of these guys simple have stepped into shoes that are too big for them to fill and have no credible agenda for advancing the cause of space exploration. By needlessly speaking out against private space exploration, Tyson actually causes harm; he could easily take a more conciliatory tone even if he thinks public funding is important.
I used to support the Planetary Society, but I don't think it's worthwhile anymore.
It seems like there was a lot of hubris that went into this project
That would be the case if the primary purpose of this mission was scientific or engineering related. But it really seems mostly publicity-related. After all, the people running the Planetary Society do not believe in private space exploration; they are mainly just advocating more funding for NASA. A cynic might say that if they produce a mission that barely limps along, that's the best outcome for their goals: it gets people involved while at the same time "demonstrating" the need for large amounts of government funding.
how many engineers out there haven't read Clarke's "The Wind from the Sun" and been inspired by it?
I don't know what inspired you, but the idea of space travel by solar sails is much older than that. I used to enjoy Clarke, but as I have gotten older, have found him too much of a statist for my taste.
I think it is mildly incredible that within the next year or two, we might see a fucking Kickstarted spacecraft leave low earth orbit using a solar sail.
Yes, particularly incredible given that the people who run the Planetary Society constaly speak out against the possibility of privately funded space exploration and are strongly lobbying for more government funding for NASA.
But, then, the CubeSat launches appear to be subsidized by government, making the whole thing rather circular: NASA subsidizes CubeSat, which subsidizes the Planetary Society, which then advocates increased funding for NASA.
Please point out a single example of an unregulated free market that has never collapsed.
What you call a "collapse" is more properly called a "correction". They are a normal part of markets. If you try to prevent them via regulation, they'll only get worse when they happen. And if you try to soften them via bailouts, you only end up engaging in crony capitalism.
You must be a conservative if you are quoting Friedman.
Irrelevant ad hominem. Friedman's analysis is correct.
Your fallacy is that you assume greedy men will work to the benefit of society when unconstrained by rule of law.
Not at all. I'm assuming greedy men will work for their own benefit. In a free market, that results in benefits to society. In a government regulated market, it usually results in crony capitalism and rent seeking.
As someone who actually has worked in the finance industry you could not be more wrong.
And thereby you illustrate my general point that the financial industry was full of incompetent people who shouldn't have been there. Since you use the past tense, I assume that has been corrected in your case.
The cause of the meltdown was poorly regulated derivative financial instruments
Corrections don't have any "causes"; markets are stochastic and chaotic systems and corrections are unavoidable. The fact that the magnitude was so large, however, was the result of just the kinds of regulations you advocate, namely regulations to try to prevent corrections. The more you try to prevent these corrections through regulations, the worse they will be when they do happen.
See, markets aren't like nuclear reactions (runaway positive feedback), they are more like earth quake faults: they build up tension that needs to get released. And the longer the tension builds, the more destructive the release.
Markets are not magic and they need some amount of rules to actually function.
Indeed they do need rules to function. Those rules just shouldn't be set by politicians.
Just because you think of it as an out-of-control chain reaction doesn't make it so. In fact, free markets are exactly the opposite: market mechanisms give you negative feedback, not positive feedback.
With the right controls in place and good oversight (but not too much) it can be a hugely powerful force for good. This requires sensible rules fairly enforced.
As Milton Friedman put it, your fallacy is that you assume that "government is a way that you put unselfish and un-greedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men." Obviously, that can't work: if government gets the power, then selfish and greedy men will go into government, which is exactly what we are seeing. And that is far worse than having the selfish and greedy men operate in a free market: in a free market, you can choose not to do business with them, once they are in charge of government, they send people with guns to your door to make you do business with them and their cronies.
Too few rules and the meltdown occurs (see 2008 financial crisis).
Financial markets were heavily regulated even in 2008; the idea that the cause of the "financial crisis" was lack of regulation is ludicrous.
It may be "morally questionable", but that's not the issue. It's not fraud to advise people to do things against their own interest. And it doesn't change the fact that if more people had done what he did, the real estate bubble would have been less severe.
Turns out Adam Smith's insight lacked an intriguing quality of meta-robustness. When you feed it back into the system as an assumption, as we started to do beginning with the Reagan–Thatcher–Greenspan–Rand cult, it ceases to remain valid.
Really? Can you construct a logical argument why it should lack "meta robustness"?
When you allow greedy assholes to have the run of a giant black box, pretty soon you find yourself underwriting a trillion dollars.
No, you find yourself underwriting a trillion dollars when you elect greedy assholes as politicians and give them unlimited powers to tax and regulate, on the theory that they will suddenly become humanitarians and spend trillions for your and my benefit.
And by "paid shills" you mean people like yourself, deeply steeped in a culture of government-supported educational institutions and government-funded projects?
My usual gut instinct is to think that many Wall St. guys are just greedy assholes
They are greedy assholes. Even Adam Smith recognized that. The insight Smith had that greedy assholes actually produce beneficial outcomes for society.
rigging the system for more profit
"The system" is the set of laws, rules, and regulations that govern Wall Street. Greedy Wall Street assholes can try to rig these in their favor, but whether they succeed is ultimately only up to our elected officials. And that kind of "rigging" is usually sold to us as "financial regulation for the benefit of the little guy", when in fact it is the opposite.
actually end up exploiting nothing other than the institutional greed and myopia of Wall Street
And if government stopped insuring, bailing out, and subsidizing Wall Street, that "greed and myopia" would find a quick end because the people engaging in it would quickly run out of money.
What he did only profits the inner circles of the finance industry
The reason you can't make the same bets Paulson can make is because "consumer protection laws" "protect" you from taking these kinds of risks. And make no mistake, Paulson's bets were very risky for him.
Whether those consumer protection laws and regulations are a good thing or not depends on whether you're more concerned about gullible small investors gambling away their nestegg, or smart small investors being prevented from participating in potentially very lucrative investment opportunities. What is clear is that you can't have both strong protection and high returns for small investors.
The question is what is implied with that "he convinced the banks to create the securities that could bet against". That might be fraud or at least morally questionable.
No, it is neither fraud nor morally questionable. To the contrary, if more people had done what he did, the housing bubble wouldn't have grown as big and the crash wouldn't have been as bad.
So how can a Python developer certify at packaging time (which is prior to runtime) that by a particular point in a program, x and y will always have types amenable to operator +?
No, but it can and does guarantee that the type error will be detected; that is what is relevant from a security point of view. C, for example, does not guarantee that. For security, type safety is the important feature, not static type checking.
In addition, static type systems are too weak to capture most of the invariants and properties of programs anyway. If you really want your program to be robust, you need to express, check, and test all those other properties anyway; making sure the types are right and/or type errors are handled properly is simple in comparison.
What creative expression has Java copied from Smalltalk or C++?
The general structure and design of APIs. If APIs are copyrightable like literature, then translation of an API from Smalltalk to Java should fall under the original copyright just like translations do for literature. Even within the same programming language, literary plots can be copyrighted, so if APIs are copyrightable, then the structure of an API should also be protected, just like a literary plot. And if there is any creativity in the Java APIs at all, it is in just those parts that were "inspired" by Smalltalk and other languages.
In any case, I don't think APIs should enjoy any copyright protection and I think it would be very bad for the industry if API copyrights were created. However, if Oracle wins this case, at least it will kill that abomination called "Java", and I suppose that is a nice consolation prize.
Note that if Java's API were judged to be a creative work, then Java's APIs themselves would be violating many other copyrights, since they are derived from APIs found in Smalltalk, C++, and others.
Based on the current legal situation (they haven't received copyright protection in the past), and based on the fact that most of them are simply functional.
Copyright encourages people/companies to create stuff by ensuring no one can copy/use their creation without payment, i.e., it blocks freeloaders.
It's unproven that copyright accomplishes that even for the stuff it clearly applies to (books, music, etc.).
But as far as APIs are concerned, even that argument falls flat, since APIs are a necessary functional element of creating software, so they do not require any additional incentive for companies to create or publish.
Also once you declare a variable is it so hard to declare a type, union of types or a polymorphic type? Does it not help in catch bugs? Dynamically typed languages are an academic solution in search of a problem.
You're entitled to your opinion, stupid and uninformed as it may be. But I think we settled the original point: dynamic typing does not per se violate type safety.
Unless an API is explicitly published for the purpose of use by alternative implementations, it is proprietary.
APIs have historically not been protected by copyrights, therefore they haven't been "proprietary" (i.e., they haven't been owned). If they had been proprietary, the world would look very different today.
Remember that the default for published works is that all rights are reserved by the copyright holder
Yes, but not everything you publish is copyrightable. The question isn't whether people can arbitrarily violate Oracle's copyright, it's whether Oracle has a copyright in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the actual problem is that the public school system forces government to make decisions about what is true and what is false. Sometimes government gets it right and sometimes government gets it wrong. Eugenics, forced sterilizations, and racism weren't just widely practiced in the US and Europe, they were justified with scientific results and taught as science in public schools. In particular, many public school textbooks in the US were profoundly racist. Although the goal of having an educated public is a good one, public schools and state-mandated curricula are an instrument of political indoctrination for the ruling classes. In 19th century Germany, for example, the state nationalized Catholic schools because it didn't like what they taught.
It is far better not to seek one absolute truth that government should teach through the school system, but to let parents make their own decisions. Parents will also sometimes get it wrong (as in the case of fundamentalist Christians choosing to teach creationism), but a minority teaching their kids stupid things is less harmful than a government, subject to lobbying and political pressures, imposing a curriculum on an entire state or the nation.
A droplet computer is certainly new and interesting, but people should remember that computers using pneumatic or fluidic elements are actually quite old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Really? Where does the money NASA "invests in multiple American companies" to develop crew launch capabilities come from?
So the dichotomy you pose is "Joe Blew from Statesville Tech" vs massive NASA crony capitalist spending; are you just being a dishonest debater or is that really the only two alternatives you understand?
All NASA needs for its scientific missions are launch capabilities for probes, and there is plenty of commercial incentive for providing those even without NASA spending or funding. Furthermore, if NASA thinks that its spending is needed to create those launch capabilities, it should do so without playing favorites with particular companies; that is, it should say "we will order 50 launches at a maximum price of $X per launch".
How does "basic interplanetary research" require handing vast amounts of money to US aerospace companies for launching people into space?
Claiming that NASA is only focusing on science is a lie, and calling its crony capitalist spending "private space flight" is also a lie. NASA is the same old inefficient boondoggle it has always been, and instead of helping us get into space faster, it is impeding space exploration and space flight. We'd be better off without NASA; we'd be sacrificing some nice science in the short term but it would be worth it.
If you take out a loan to get a graduate degree in philosophy, you are engaging in "reckless borrowing and spending". A Ferrari would be a more worthwhile "investment" than that.
The "investment" he is talking about is public funding for private launch capabilities, not private space exploration. In the end, their policy ideas seem to be largely "give NASA more funding, just change a little what they do":
http://www.planetary.org/press...
http://www.planetary.org/press...
Nonprofits select board members that reflect their ideals. And the Planetary Society behaves consistent with what Tyson is saying.
Take it from NASA:
That is just NASA giving money and resources to aerospace companies so that those companies can then develop overpriced launch capabilities and enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. That has nothing to do with "private space exploration" and everything with crony capitalism. It's just more business as usual, and it's what got NASA into trouble in the first place.
No, what "ruined" my view of the planetary society is what they are doing and what they are advocating.
http://bigthink.com/videos/nei...
http://articles.latimes.com/20...
Almost everybody wants that. The question is how to go about it. Nye wants to redirect funding within NASA from programs like the ISS to interplanetary probes and pure science, which is certainly an improvement. Tyson, on the other hand, talks a lot about the supposed impossibility of financing private space exploration, which is a bad thing.
In the end, I think both of these guys simple have stepped into shoes that are too big for them to fill and have no credible agenda for advancing the cause of space exploration. By needlessly speaking out against private space exploration, Tyson actually causes harm; he could easily take a more conciliatory tone even if he thinks public funding is important.
I used to support the Planetary Society, but I don't think it's worthwhile anymore.
That would be the case if the primary purpose of this mission was scientific or engineering related. But it really seems mostly publicity-related. After all, the people running the Planetary Society do not believe in private space exploration; they are mainly just advocating more funding for NASA. A cynic might say that if they produce a mission that barely limps along, that's the best outcome for their goals: it gets people involved while at the same time "demonstrating" the need for large amounts of government funding.
I don't know what inspired you, but the idea of space travel by solar sails is much older than that. I used to enjoy Clarke, but as I have gotten older, have found him too much of a statist for my taste.
Yes, particularly incredible given that the people who run the Planetary Society constaly speak out against the possibility of privately funded space exploration and are strongly lobbying for more government funding for NASA.
But, then, the CubeSat launches appear to be subsidized by government, making the whole thing rather circular: NASA subsidizes CubeSat, which subsidizes the Planetary Society, which then advocates increased funding for NASA.
What you call a "collapse" is more properly called a "correction". They are a normal part of markets. If you try to prevent them via regulation, they'll only get worse when they happen. And if you try to soften them via bailouts, you only end up engaging in crony capitalism.
Irrelevant ad hominem. Friedman's analysis is correct.
Not at all. I'm assuming greedy men will work for their own benefit. In a free market, that results in benefits to society. In a government regulated market, it usually results in crony capitalism and rent seeking.
And thereby you illustrate my general point that the financial industry was full of incompetent people who shouldn't have been there. Since you use the past tense, I assume that has been corrected in your case.
Corrections don't have any "causes"; markets are stochastic and chaotic systems and corrections are unavoidable. The fact that the magnitude was so large, however, was the result of just the kinds of regulations you advocate, namely regulations to try to prevent corrections. The more you try to prevent these corrections through regulations, the worse they will be when they do happen.
See, markets aren't like nuclear reactions (runaway positive feedback), they are more like earth quake faults: they build up tension that needs to get released. And the longer the tension builds, the more destructive the release.
Indeed they do need rules to function. Those rules just shouldn't be set by politicians.
Just because you think of it as an out-of-control chain reaction doesn't make it so. In fact, free markets are exactly the opposite: market mechanisms give you negative feedback, not positive feedback.
As Milton Friedman put it, your fallacy is that you assume that "government is a way that you put unselfish and un-greedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men." Obviously, that can't work: if government gets the power, then selfish and greedy men will go into government, which is exactly what we are seeing. And that is far worse than having the selfish and greedy men operate in a free market: in a free market, you can choose not to do business with them, once they are in charge of government, they send people with guns to your door to make you do business with them and their cronies.
Financial markets were heavily regulated even in 2008; the idea that the cause of the "financial crisis" was lack of regulation is ludicrous.
It may be "morally questionable", but that's not the issue. It's not fraud to advise people to do things against their own interest. And it doesn't change the fact that if more people had done what he did, the real estate bubble would have been less severe.
Really? Can you construct a logical argument why it should lack "meta robustness"?
No, you find yourself underwriting a trillion dollars when you elect greedy assholes as politicians and give them unlimited powers to tax and regulate, on the theory that they will suddenly become humanitarians and spend trillions for your and my benefit.
And by "paid shills" you mean people like yourself, deeply steeped in a culture of government-supported educational institutions and government-funded projects?
They are greedy assholes. Even Adam Smith recognized that. The insight Smith had that greedy assholes actually produce beneficial outcomes for society.
"The system" is the set of laws, rules, and regulations that govern Wall Street. Greedy Wall Street assholes can try to rig these in their favor, but whether they succeed is ultimately only up to our elected officials. And that kind of "rigging" is usually sold to us as "financial regulation for the benefit of the little guy", when in fact it is the opposite.
And if government stopped insuring, bailing out, and subsidizing Wall Street, that "greed and myopia" would find a quick end because the people engaging in it would quickly run out of money.
The reason you can't make the same bets Paulson can make is because "consumer protection laws" "protect" you from taking these kinds of risks. And make no mistake, Paulson's bets were very risky for him.
Whether those consumer protection laws and regulations are a good thing or not depends on whether you're more concerned about gullible small investors gambling away their nestegg, or smart small investors being prevented from participating in potentially very lucrative investment opportunities. What is clear is that you can't have both strong protection and high returns for small investors.
No, it is neither fraud nor morally questionable. To the contrary, if more people had done what he did, the housing bubble wouldn't have grown as big and the crash wouldn't have been as bad.
No, but it can and does guarantee that the type error will be detected; that is what is relevant from a security point of view. C, for example, does not guarantee that. For security, type safety is the important feature, not static type checking.
In addition, static type systems are too weak to capture most of the invariants and properties of programs anyway. If you really want your program to be robust, you need to express, check, and test all those other properties anyway; making sure the types are right and/or type errors are handled properly is simple in comparison.
No, that's not really the question. Writing the same code from memory doesn't protect you against claims of copyright infringement.
The issue here is whether the code is "creative" and whether it is "substantial". Arguably, it is neither.
That's bullshit. If that were the case, we wouldn't be having this discussion and this case wouldn't be going to SCOTUS.
http://bfy.tw/Ctv
The general structure and design of APIs. If APIs are copyrightable like literature, then translation of an API from Smalltalk to Java should fall under the original copyright just like translations do for literature. Even within the same programming language, literary plots can be copyrighted, so if APIs are copyrightable, then the structure of an API should also be protected, just like a literary plot. And if there is any creativity in the Java APIs at all, it is in just those parts that were "inspired" by Smalltalk and other languages.
In any case, I don't think APIs should enjoy any copyright protection and I think it would be very bad for the industry if API copyrights were created. However, if Oracle wins this case, at least it will kill that abomination called "Java", and I suppose that is a nice consolation prize.
Note that if Java's API were judged to be a creative work, then Java's APIs themselves would be violating many other copyrights, since they are derived from APIs found in Smalltalk, C++, and others.
Based on the current legal situation (they haven't received copyright protection in the past), and based on the fact that most of them are simply functional.
It's unproven that copyright accomplishes that even for the stuff it clearly applies to (books, music, etc.).
But as far as APIs are concerned, even that argument falls flat, since APIs are a necessary functional element of creating software, so they do not require any additional incentive for companies to create or publish.
You're entitled to your opinion, stupid and uninformed as it may be. But I think we settled the original point: dynamic typing does not per se violate type safety.
APIs have historically not been protected by copyrights, therefore they haven't been "proprietary" (i.e., they haven't been owned). If they had been proprietary, the world would look very different today.
Yes, but not everything you publish is copyrightable. The question isn't whether people can arbitrarily violate Oracle's copyright, it's whether Oracle has a copyright in the first place.
Because OpenJDK is bloated and slow, and because it comes with unacceptable legal restrictions attached to it.