It doesn't make any less sense or more sense for intellectual property either. It's just that we don't typically rent from builders - they do work for hire because that's the standard way of doign business in construction. But a builder *could* conceivably retain ownership of a house and charge rent or licence fee. Arguably that's exactly what some companies do: for example, set up a holding company to construct a new building, keep ownership, and sublet to tenants.
It would probably become a nightmare to manage all the cross-licencing for units smaller than a single building, though. Which is sort of exactly the situation we get with code smaller than independently compiled binary modules - and for some 'remixed' media, like say Mystery Science Theater 3000, where multiple entities own different parts and clearing the individual rights gets tricky.
Hence the situation with things like Marvel and Tolkien. Multiple creative bits added by lots of different builders over time. Even merchandising is a creative act.
"As Paul Graham(I think) said, "Pay to view content on the internet may as well not exist". Given that information not on the internet is becoming increasingly obsolete, this maxim can be extended to the conclusion that; the only content that will matter is that which is freely available online."
There is something to this. Paywalls do take facts out of the currency of discussion; for-pay copyrighted books or scholarly articles can be cited on Wikipedia, for example, but can't be directly linked and checked in realtime by anyone who doesn't have institutional journal access. For this reason, I think the Open access repositories movement is very important.
This situation is what my tagline refers to: the concept of a 'knowledge economy', in which all knowledge is regulated and can only be accessed for a fee, runs directly counter to the idea of a knowledge *society*. In fact, enforcing payment for knowledge results in the direct production of ignorance, because the exchange value of a commodity is linked to its rarity. You can only sell knowledge if you first create its absence, or at the very least prevent its dissemination outside the market system; and a system of gated knowledge, with elaborate checks and passwords to control those who are allowed to access it from those who aren't, starts to look very much like an old-fashioned secret society.
But the 'knowledge economy' was hyped as the way of the future, and outsourcing is devaluing physical production and putting gated intellectual production in its place. Meanwhile, crowdsourcing, open access and open culture is itself devaluing gated intellectual product - and like the triumph of Windows, 'worse is better' as long as it's good enough, pervasive and cheaper.
So our economy is moving from atoms to bits, but bits aren't a sensible base for our current rarity-based exchange value protocols since they have zero rarity. We're going to have to move from exchange value to use value, I think, and apart from Marx (which didn't work) we still don't have a coherent economic framework to deal with this. Piracy won't solve the problem of production; crowdsourcing might not solve the problem of quality (though Wikipedia is still a big argument in favour of good enough + free + updateable being hugely better than slightly better + slow + unavailable).
I wish we could have more serious dialogue about creating new economic systems rather that 'rar DRM bad Pirate Bay good'.
First you have to pick your preferred abstraction layer. Then you have to work around the things it abstracts that you actually need to know about, and the things it makes you do that you don't... and maybe you need portability between different abstraction layers, so you add your own library on top of the abstraction layer... and then you have to make sure that the abstraction library is kept up to date with fast-moving external targets... before you know it, you've got a dozen layers *all of which you need to understand their subtle quirks and interactions*.
Or you just pick one and go 'that's sorta close enough and almost correct and I don't have time to properly test it, we'll sort that out in beta', and voila, you get the current state of desktop software.
"GUIs can certainly be abstracted to the point where it's not an issue."
And yet, for some reason they're not. When was the last time you were able to, say, pipe the output of a bash script into a DataGrid control generated and displayed on the fly?
But it's doable in principle, right?
Just... not so much in practice? Perhaps because actually-existing GUI libraries are very tightly integrated with language VMs, OO class and type systems, calling conventions, ABIs, threading models, mutexes and semaphores, and because you have to get into the cogs and gears of whether you use C++ native objects, GObjects, Qt objects, KParts, COM objects, CORBA objects, OLE/VBX/ActiveX controls, ObjectiveC objects, WxWidgets wrappers, J2EE Beans, Plain Old Java Objects, Javascript objects, Ruby objects, PHP objects, and how (if) you can get any of them to share resources and exchange data?
Whereas if you're dealing with just text I/O streams and the occasional file, *all of this nonsense goes away* and is something you don't even have to think about?
(I often wonder if we couldn't decouple GUIs from object systems and get back to a stream-based interface that could work equally well with multiple language backends... but that would be yet another layer of abstraction onto the whole pile.)
"There is no quality control on the internet hive mind"
There's no quality control on the human hive mind either - despite the arts, academia, government and media's belief that they are the Second Foundation and above all that messy human emotional stuff. If you look at the history of human 'knowledge' it's actually a string of bitter arguments, some of them resolved by actual data, others resolved by sulks and tantrums and appeals to authority. And occasionally huge blunders are discovered and reversed. Others lie hidden in what we're taught as 'truth', yet to be revealed and viciously denounced.
"The thing is, the contractors have already established what the best tools are to use."
Actually, at least in the house building market in NZ, there's been a rash of really poor new buildings built in the last 20 years, by developers making a quick buck. Houses that leak, that rot, that are just poorly designed and shoddily built in every way. Whereas the houses built 50 years ago from older tools and materials are still going strong.
And this is by registered builders who really ought to know better.
Moral: It's not just IT that sacrifices quality for speed or cost and gets away with it - because the market doesn't always react in time, and the penalties for poor performance don't always catch up with the people who make the bad decisions.
"Again, "we have the capability to do X on demand" is a very different thing to "we routinely and automatically do X all the time to all traffic in the US (or anywhere else) and use it to pick up on trends for further analysis""
Agreed. The sheer bandwidth requirements of doing brute-force packet sniffing suggests to me that this would be probably more of an on-demand facility: if we can trace a Person of Interest to ISP X, then fire up black box at the big ISP or interconnect and start filtering all their packets.
However. I'm no spy, but if I were the NSA, or the Cybersecurity Czar, I'd be having quiet talks to 1) Google, 2) Yahoo, 3) Microsoft, 4) Facebook, and seeing what access I could get to their networks and data-mining. And I'd also be quietly backing the consolidation of Web 2.0 providers into a few large entities I could have those quiet chats to. So many people are now using those four services - I mean, back around 2003 lots of antiwar protestors (whose methods sometimes involved civil disobedience at the least and potential property damage) were using Yahoo Groups, of all things, to organise - that if you had realtime feeds from them, you wouldn't *need* brute-force packet sniffing to do a lot of social aggregation.
Not that necessarily sussing out social networks is going to completely help you find the hard-core terrorists. But you might well be able to get a sense of who their soft edges link to. And if they're using steganography to hide stuff in plain sight, traffic analysis of social networks might help.
Would Google cooperate with the NSA? Not according to their public profile, perhaps. But do they have to reveal everything they do? I could be wrong, but I believe Microsoft went on record a few years back as appointing an in-house antiterrorism czar.
My working assumption is that all the top US-headquartered mega-web players have been on the team for a while. It might be unfounded, but it would be the simplest way to help the government and feel good about it.
"More than a dozen people in the high reaches of government have later gone on to claim that UFO's stole their washing."
Nitpick, but US military/governmental interest in UFOs is actually very well documented in the declassified literature. http://two-roads.dailykos.com/ gives a good summary of the field. It's nothing like the sensationalism in pop culture, but lots of quiet investigation and acknowledgement of unexplained phenomena. Given that, it would be a conspiracy if high-level people all *denied* interest, and in fact, they don't.
"Any good woodworker will tell you that you can't do everything with one tool, even on a simple job. So why restrict yourself when programming"
Because programming *isn't* woodworking.
More specifically, because the power of any software system comes as much (or more) from the integration of its components as from the components themselves. It's the connections that hold the intelligence.
Using multiple languages prevents integration - or at least dampens it way down, due to impedance mismatches between calling conventions, ABIs, data format representations, etc. If I have a component written in language X which expects parameters in format X1, and I have another component in language Y which expects parameters in format Y1 - how am I going to get them to integrate?
The answer is either 'you just can't do that, so rewrite the entirety of component Y in language X' -- hello Linux -- or 'write language/convention Z as a buffer/converter'.
What usually happens in that case is that language Z isn't written as a proper language because it's just a hack to get X and Y to communicate, so it's missing all sorts of features which then have to be added ad-hoc, without integrity checking, and become a huge source of bugs. This is how we got COM, CORBA, the C ABI, the abominations which are the multiple C++ ABIS, CGI, DCOM, COM+, D-BUS... and then how do you get Java talking to JavaScript?.NET to Javascript?.NET to Java? PHP to Python? Common Lisp to Bash script?
Oh, you can't connect those two and you don't know why anyone would want to? Too bad, you just lost a chunk of expressiveness, and you *can't* 'use the right language tool for the job' in that case, because there's no way to launch that program / import the data / finesse the difference between an int32 and an Integer and a Variant and a text file and a registry key...
Remember, for every pair of languages X,Y there either has to be a new mapping created, maintained and debugged... or else a Z needs to be standardised.
Eventually, you come to the realisation that things are only maintainable if we standardise on ONE Z.
If we wait a very long time eventually we come to the next revelation that we could make Z an *actual Turing-complete language* with a fully standardised VM and ABI...
Or we could do that right up front, and spend the rest of our lives actually coding solutions instead of hacks around our multi-language Babel.
"Do you know why General Relativity fits the data we have collected so well? Have you even bothered to find out why scientists believe in these things?"
One might well wonder, because it's certainly not because GR is philosophically compatible with the rest of 20th century science.
As a matter of hobbyist curiosity, I'm reading up on the life of Einstein and his arguments with the QM people at the moment, and the curious thing that jumps out at me is how much Einstein believed that GR was only a provisional theory, and that the 'true' description of the universe had to be a geometrical theory of continuous fields. Which led him to various configurations of Unified Field Theories, and increasing isolation from the quantum hackers who believed that reality had to be fundamentally discontinuous.
John Wheeler tried to push UFT with geometrodynamics and gave up.
Today, UFT has a sort of funky steampunk aura about it, like quaternions. If it weren't for GR still holding a place in cosmology, Einstein's whole geometrical approach would be considered clever and ambitious but fatally flawed, just as his UFT is.
So yes - why *does* it fit the data? It's not necessarily because it's a literally correct representation of reality. At best it must be an approximation, because about the only thing we know for sure about modern physics is that neither GR nor QFT can be 'true' in a final sense.
Nobody seems to be pointing out the obvious implications of this: that corruption and nuclear energy make really, really bad bedfellows - but they're sleeping together nonetheless. And this is not the first time, and won't be the last. And it's not just a European thing.
So many people on Slashdot seem to think that resurrecting the nuclear power zombie will solve the world's energy problems. They seem to forget that the reason nuclear fell out of public favour in the first place - remember, in the 1950s the media and science fiction couldn't say 'atomic!' fast enough - was the big reactor corruption scandals of the 1970s. Not just Three Mile Island and Sellafield. Anyone here old enough to remember Karen Silkwood?
As the environmentalists keep pointing out - and most Slashdotters keep dismissing as 'fearmongering' - the big problem with fission is that it produces really nasty toxic byproducts. Okay, so we can manage these risks with careful storage and disposal. Science to the rescue, right? Nuclear has the best security and safety in the world, right?
Only, this isn't what's happening. A known criminal organisation can get itself deeply into the nuclear-safety loop without apparently all these best-practices safegrounds and checks and balances actually cutting in.
Rethink your assumptions. Nuclear isn't nearly as safe as you think it is because the organisations running it are not nearly as trustworthy as you think they are.
I mean, the current accepted philosophical basis of science is Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion, which is not a monotonic logic... yet we don't have anything like a universally accepted formalisation of nonmonotonic logic to deal with this kind of situation (where something believed 'true'at time A becomes 'false' at time B when new facts emerge). There's no standard way of dealing with this in logic - much foundational work was only *started* in the 1980s and the results are still very unclear. So the formal philosophical foundations of our current scientific paradigm are a massive pile of confusion. Yet we're charging ahead using science to make sweeping technological and social changes without properly thinking them through - without even the guarantee that we CAN think them through consistently. Shouldn't that worry us a lot more than it does?
Isn't that a contradiction in terms? If it's wrong now, it was just as wrong when it was being taught... knowledge doesn't get "outdated". Opinions and beliefs and fashionable ideas may change... but not actual *knowledge*.
Pedantic, I know, but I get creeped out by the subtle assumption that somehow the very foundations of reality change under us as the scientific consensus shifts. This sort of abuse of language and the misidentification of beliefs, teachings and opinions with fact, is exactly why the man in the street has grown to distrust "science".
I'm pretty horrified myself if this "muscle tearing" thing is in fact incorrect - because that's what I was taught in high school gym class. It sounded stupid and abusive to me at the time - why should destroying muscle be a *good* thing? - and it was used to justify the "if it doesn't hurt you're not doing it right" idea. If it turns out that that was a flat lie all along... yeah, I'm pretty pissed off. Shouldn't we hold off making *any* such "scientific" pronouncements until we're darn sure, for good and all, that we're NOT just saying crazy wrong things?
"Your average citizen doesn't care that pluto is only the first discovered Kuiper Belt object, they care that they learned it was a planet when they were a kid."
Actually I for one was glad to see Pluto reclassified. Bloody thing's orbit is all weird - it's a right nuisance.
"The problem is that on top of economy and culture, politicians also take into account... politics: what will benefit most MY home state, what will please MY core constituents most..."
That's not a problem, that's a correctly running democratic system. Elected politicians are *representatives* - they represent the interests of others. Standing up for these interests is *exactly* what they were elected to do, and exactly what good and ethical governance is about.
Oh, you don't *like* the interests of some group who legitimately and democratically elected a representative? Gee, that's too bad. Try convincing them that your viewpoint is in their interest and maybe they'll elect someone you like better.
If you can't do that - sorry, you don't get to be dictator.
Have they indeed? And yet deforestation and mass species extinction are still ongoing, last time I checked. Admittedly that was only a month or so ago.
I'm impressed that global industry has managed to turn on a dime and stop destroying the planetary biosphere and exploiting its workers so rapidly.
And yes, Bhopal still remains in my mind as one of the low points of a very dismal industrial regard for basic human rights and safety. But it's probably not the lowest we've hit yet.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't make any less sense or more sense for intellectual property either. It's just that we don't typically rent from builders - they do work for hire because that's the standard way of doign business in construction. But a builder *could* conceivably retain ownership of a house and charge rent or licence fee. Arguably that's exactly what some companies do: for example, set up a holding company to construct a new building, keep ownership, and sublet to tenants.
It would probably become a nightmare to manage all the cross-licencing for units smaller than a single building, though. Which is sort of exactly the situation we get with code smaller than independently compiled binary modules - and for some 'remixed' media, like say Mystery Science Theater 3000, where multiple entities own different parts and clearing the individual rights gets tricky.
Hence the situation with things like Marvel and Tolkien. Multiple creative bits added by lots of different builders over time. Even merchandising is a creative act.
"No, it's just a wall."
Roger Waters begs to differ.
"As Paul Graham(I think) said, "Pay to view content on the internet may as well not exist". Given that information not on the internet is becoming increasingly obsolete, this maxim can be extended to the conclusion that; the only content that will matter is that which is freely available online."
There is something to this. Paywalls do take facts out of the currency of discussion; for-pay copyrighted books or scholarly articles can be cited on Wikipedia, for example, but can't be directly linked and checked in realtime by anyone who doesn't have institutional journal access. For this reason, I think the Open access repositories movement is very important.
This situation is what my tagline refers to: the concept of a 'knowledge economy', in which all knowledge is regulated and can only be accessed for a fee, runs directly counter to the idea of a knowledge *society*. In fact, enforcing payment for knowledge results in the direct production of ignorance, because the exchange value of a commodity is linked to its rarity. You can only sell knowledge if you first create its absence, or at the very least prevent its dissemination outside the market system; and a system of gated knowledge, with elaborate checks and passwords to control those who are allowed to access it from those who aren't, starts to look very much like an old-fashioned secret society.
But the 'knowledge economy' was hyped as the way of the future, and outsourcing is devaluing physical production and putting gated intellectual production in its place. Meanwhile, crowdsourcing, open access and open culture is itself devaluing gated intellectual product - and like the triumph of Windows, 'worse is better' as long as it's good enough, pervasive and cheaper.
So our economy is moving from atoms to bits, but bits aren't a sensible base for our current rarity-based exchange value protocols since they have zero rarity. We're going to have to move from exchange value to use value, I think, and apart from Marx (which didn't work) we still don't have a coherent economic framework to deal with this. Piracy won't solve the problem of production; crowdsourcing might not solve the problem of quality (though Wikipedia is still a big argument in favour of good enough + free + updateable being hugely better than slightly better + slow + unavailable).
I wish we could have more serious dialogue about creating new economic systems rather that 'rar DRM bad Pirate Bay good'.
Ever hear the term "leaky abstraction"?
First you have to pick your preferred abstraction layer. Then you have to work around the things it abstracts that you actually need to know about, and the things it makes you do that you don't... and maybe you need portability between different abstraction layers, so you add your own library on top of the abstraction layer... and then you have to make sure that the abstraction library is kept up to date with fast-moving external targets... before you know it, you've got a dozen layers *all of which you need to understand their subtle quirks and interactions*.
Or you just pick one and go 'that's sorta close enough and almost correct and I don't have time to properly test it, we'll sort that out in beta', and voila, you get the current state of desktop software.
"GUIs can certainly be abstracted to the point where it's not an issue."
And yet, for some reason they're not. When was the last time you were able to, say, pipe the output of a bash script into a DataGrid control generated and displayed on the fly?
But it's doable in principle, right?
Just... not so much in practice? Perhaps because actually-existing GUI libraries are very tightly integrated with language VMs, OO class and type systems, calling conventions, ABIs, threading models, mutexes and semaphores, and because you have to get into the cogs and gears of whether you use C++ native objects, GObjects, Qt objects, KParts, COM objects, CORBA objects, OLE/VBX/ActiveX controls, ObjectiveC objects, WxWidgets wrappers, J2EE Beans, Plain Old Java Objects, Javascript objects, Ruby objects, PHP objects, and how (if) you can get any of them to share resources and exchange data?
Whereas if you're dealing with just text I/O streams and the occasional file, *all of this nonsense goes away* and is something you don't even have to think about?
(I often wonder if we couldn't decouple GUIs from object systems and get back to a stream-based interface that could work equally well with multiple language backends... but that would be yet another layer of abstraction onto the whole pile.)
"There is no quality control on the internet hive mind"
There's no quality control on the human hive mind either - despite the arts, academia, government and media's belief that they are the Second Foundation and above all that messy human emotional stuff. If you look at the history of human 'knowledge' it's actually a string of bitter arguments, some of them resolved by actual data, others resolved by sulks and tantrums and appeals to authority. And occasionally huge blunders are discovered and reversed. Others lie hidden in what we're taught as 'truth', yet to be revealed and viciously denounced.
The Internet is just a microcosm of the whole.
"None of my computers involve any glass any more"
So you're not running an iMac then?
"The thing is, the contractors have already established what the best tools are to use."
Actually, at least in the house building market in NZ, there's been a rash of really poor new buildings built in the last 20 years, by developers making a quick buck. Houses that leak, that rot, that are just poorly designed and shoddily built in every way. Whereas the houses built 50 years ago from older tools and materials are still going strong.
And this is by registered builders who really ought to know better.
Moral: It's not just IT that sacrifices quality for speed or cost and gets away with it - because the market doesn't always react in time, and the penalties for poor performance don't always catch up with the people who make the bad decisions.
"Again, "we have the capability to do X on demand" is a very different thing to "we routinely and automatically do X all the time to all traffic in the US (or anywhere else) and use it to pick up on trends for further analysis""
Agreed. The sheer bandwidth requirements of doing brute-force packet sniffing suggests to me that this would be probably more of an on-demand facility: if we can trace a Person of Interest to ISP X, then fire up black box at the big ISP or interconnect and start filtering all their packets.
However. I'm no spy, but if I were the NSA, or the Cybersecurity Czar, I'd be having quiet talks to 1) Google, 2) Yahoo, 3) Microsoft, 4) Facebook, and seeing what access I could get to their networks and data-mining. And I'd also be quietly backing the consolidation of Web 2.0 providers into a few large entities I could have those quiet chats to. So many people are now using those four services - I mean, back around 2003 lots of antiwar protestors (whose methods sometimes involved civil disobedience at the least and potential property damage) were using Yahoo Groups, of all things, to organise - that if you had realtime feeds from them, you wouldn't *need* brute-force packet sniffing to do a lot of social aggregation.
Not that necessarily sussing out social networks is going to completely help you find the hard-core terrorists. But you might well be able to get a sense of who their soft edges link to. And if they're using steganography to hide stuff in plain sight, traffic analysis of social networks might help.
Would Google cooperate with the NSA? Not according to their public profile, perhaps. But do they have to reveal everything they do? I could be wrong, but I believe Microsoft went on record a few years back as appointing an in-house antiterrorism czar.
My working assumption is that all the top US-headquartered mega-web players have been on the team for a while. It might be unfounded, but it would be the simplest way to help the government and feel good about it.
"blackbox in every ISP that monitors everything"
As I understand it, i's not every ISP that has an NSA tap room, it's a couple of key interconnect points. Much more easily manageable.
"More than a dozen people in the high reaches of government have later gone on to claim that UFO's stole their washing."
Nitpick, but US military/governmental interest in UFOs is actually very well documented in the declassified literature. http://two-roads.dailykos.com/ gives a good summary of the field. It's nothing like the sensationalism in pop culture, but lots of quiet investigation and acknowledgement of unexplained phenomena. Given that, it would be a conspiracy if high-level people all *denied* interest, and in fact, they don't.
"This enables the NSA to intercept not only most Asian e-mail messages but also the entire U.S. internal Internet traffic.":
I pity the poor NSA grunt who's assigned to 4chan.
It's probably a punishment post.
"Space exploration isn't pissing around in low Earth orbit. Which is what humanity has done for the past 37 years."
Got a warp drive?
Because without one, there's nowhere much we *can* go that's got a human-friendly biosphere.
In the meantime, we've been sending robots to lots of robot-friendly places and getting lots of nice data back.
"Any good woodworker will tell you that you can't do everything with one tool, even on a simple job. So why restrict yourself when programming"
Because programming *isn't* woodworking.
More specifically, because the power of any software system comes as much (or more) from the integration of its components as from the components themselves. It's the connections that hold the intelligence.
Using multiple languages prevents integration - or at least dampens it way down, due to impedance mismatches between calling conventions, ABIs, data format representations, etc. If I have a component written in language X which expects parameters in format X1, and I have another component in language Y which expects parameters in format Y1 - how am I going to get them to integrate?
The answer is either 'you just can't do that, so rewrite the entirety of component Y in language X' -- hello Linux -- or 'write language/convention Z as a buffer/converter'.
What usually happens in that case is that language Z isn't written as a proper language because it's just a hack to get X and Y to communicate, so it's missing all sorts of features which then have to be added ad-hoc, without integrity checking, and become a huge source of bugs. This is how we got COM, CORBA, the C ABI, the abominations which are the multiple C++ ABIS, CGI, DCOM, COM+, D-BUS... and then how do you get Java talking to JavaScript? .NET to Javascript? .NET to Java? PHP to Python? Common Lisp to Bash script?
Oh, you can't connect those two and you don't know why anyone would want to? Too bad, you just lost a chunk of expressiveness, and you *can't* 'use the right language tool for the job' in that case, because there's no way to launch that program / import the data / finesse the difference between an int32 and an Integer and a Variant and a text file and a registry key...
Remember, for every pair of languages X,Y there either has to be a new mapping created, maintained and debugged... or else a Z needs to be standardised.
Eventually, you come to the realisation that things are only maintainable if we standardise on ONE Z.
If we wait a very long time eventually we come to the next revelation that we could make Z an *actual Turing-complete language* with a fully standardised VM and ABI...
Or we could do that right up front, and spend the rest of our lives actually coding solutions instead of hacks around our multi-language Babel.
"Do you know why General Relativity fits the data we have collected so well? Have you even bothered to find out why scientists believe in these things?"
One might well wonder, because it's certainly not because GR is philosophically compatible with the rest of 20th century science.
As a matter of hobbyist curiosity, I'm reading up on the life of Einstein and his arguments with the QM people at the moment, and the curious thing that jumps out at me is how much Einstein believed that GR was only a provisional theory, and that the 'true' description of the universe had to be a geometrical theory of continuous fields. Which led him to various configurations of Unified Field Theories, and increasing isolation from the quantum hackers who believed that reality had to be fundamentally discontinuous.
John Wheeler tried to push UFT with geometrodynamics and gave up.
Today, UFT has a sort of funky steampunk aura about it, like quaternions. If it weren't for GR still holding a place in cosmology, Einstein's whole geometrical approach would be considered clever and ambitious but fatally flawed, just as his UFT is.
So yes - why *does* it fit the data? It's not necessarily because it's a literally correct representation of reality. At best it must be an approximation, because about the only thing we know for sure about modern physics is that neither GR nor QFT can be 'true' in a final sense.
nyway my bff Jill n i
r @ the pub on way 2 canty
2 b pilgrims n stuf
wtf lol its sum guys
omg theyre goin 2!!!
hehe gtg brb
"So we should stick to the same file systems, operating systems and programs forever to preserve their usefulness?"
If we want our cultural and scientific heritage to be readable by future generations - yeah.
It's worked for DNA.
Nobody seems to be pointing out the obvious implications of this: that corruption and nuclear energy make really, really bad bedfellows - but they're sleeping together nonetheless. And this is not the first time, and won't be the last. And it's not just a European thing.
So many people on Slashdot seem to think that resurrecting the nuclear power zombie will solve the world's energy problems. They seem to forget that the reason nuclear fell out of public favour in the first place - remember, in the 1950s the media and science fiction couldn't say 'atomic!' fast enough - was the big reactor corruption scandals of the 1970s. Not just Three Mile Island and Sellafield. Anyone here old enough to remember Karen Silkwood?
As the environmentalists keep pointing out - and most Slashdotters keep dismissing as 'fearmongering' - the big problem with fission is that it produces really nasty toxic byproducts. Okay, so we can manage these risks with careful storage and disposal. Science to the rescue, right? Nuclear has the best security and safety in the world, right?
Only, this isn't what's happening. A known criminal organisation can get itself deeply into the nuclear-safety loop without apparently all these best-practices safegrounds and checks and balances actually cutting in.
Rethink your assumptions. Nuclear isn't nearly as safe as you think it is because the organisations running it are not nearly as trustworthy as you think they are.
"i hope they soon realize the next time they order fish in a restaurant that the fish comes from the same ocean that they sunk those ship"
I do not recommend the fish today. The fishes, they are... sleeping with the... er. They have the concrete overshoes.
But "private security organisation" is exactly what libertarians promote, and the Mafia is an actually-existing implementation of it.
Do you have an actual flaw in his reasoning to point out?
I mean, the current accepted philosophical basis of science is Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion, which is not a monotonic logic... yet we don't have anything like a universally accepted formalisation of nonmonotonic logic to deal with this kind of situation (where something believed 'true'at time A becomes 'false' at time B when new facts emerge). There's no standard way of dealing with this in logic - much foundational work was only *started* in the 1980s and the results are still very unclear. So the formal philosophical foundations of our current scientific paradigm are a massive pile of confusion. Yet we're charging ahead using science to make sweeping technological and social changes without properly thinking them through - without even the guarantee that we CAN think them through consistently. Shouldn't that worry us a lot more than it does?
"outdated knowledge"
Isn't that a contradiction in terms? If it's wrong now, it was just as wrong when it was being taught... knowledge doesn't get "outdated". Opinions and beliefs and fashionable ideas may change... but not actual *knowledge*.
Pedantic, I know, but I get creeped out by the subtle assumption that somehow the very foundations of reality change under us as the scientific consensus shifts. This sort of abuse of language and the misidentification of beliefs, teachings and opinions with fact, is exactly why the man in the street has grown to distrust "science".
I'm pretty horrified myself if this "muscle tearing" thing is in fact incorrect - because that's what I was taught in high school gym class. It sounded stupid and abusive to me at the time - why should destroying muscle be a *good* thing? - and it was used to justify the "if it doesn't hurt you're not doing it right" idea. If it turns out that that was a flat lie all along... yeah, I'm pretty pissed off. Shouldn't we hold off making *any* such "scientific" pronouncements until we're darn sure, for good and all, that we're NOT just saying crazy wrong things?
"Your average citizen doesn't care that pluto is only the first discovered Kuiper Belt object, they care that they learned it was a planet when they were a kid."
Actually I for one was glad to see Pluto reclassified. Bloody thing's orbit is all weird - it's a right nuisance.
But I guess I'm not an average citizen.
"The problem is that on top of economy and culture, politicians also take into account... politics: what will benefit most MY home state, what will please MY core constituents most..."
That's not a problem, that's a correctly running democratic system. Elected politicians are *representatives* - they represent the interests of others. Standing up for these interests is *exactly* what they were elected to do, and exactly what good and ethical governance is about.
Oh, you don't *like* the interests of some group who legitimately and democratically elected a representative? Gee, that's too bad. Try convincing them that your viewpoint is in their interest and maybe they'll elect someone you like better.
If you can't do that - sorry, you don't get to be dictator.
"Yes, now they've fixed things."
Have they indeed? And yet deforestation and mass species extinction are still ongoing, last time I checked. Admittedly that was only a month or so ago.
I'm impressed that global industry has managed to turn on a dime and stop destroying the planetary biosphere and exploiting its workers so rapidly.
And yes, Bhopal still remains in my mind as one of the low points of a very dismal industrial regard for basic human rights and safety. But it's probably not the lowest we've hit yet.