"but consider how much of you code is just boilerplate, and doesn't really do anything algorithmically interesting. Usually around 99%."
That right there is telling you something.
If you're writing a hundred times more code than you need to, and you know it, then you're seriously using the wrong language. Probably one that doesn't have macros.
Git is basically just a generic distributed versioning-filesystem layer, right? Source control is its current killer app, but it's got no particular hooks to make it dependent on that domain.
So if we combined Git + Bittorrent... does that give us a generalised peer-to-peer distributed filesystem?
If so, that's a whole lot more interesting than just a way to share source code fast. Imagine a true peer-to-peer Web built on something like this.
Imagine, for instance, posting blog or wiki posts as little paragraphs of text, each as a separate file, not uploaded to a 'server' but just put out onto the grid. Cache every chunk of data as it moves through servers, maybe have a name-resolution layer like DNS over the top so that one server is 'authoritative' for your blog posts, but that server doesn't need to be online all the time as long as another one has replicated the data. Add a language which allows transclusion of chunks and/or functional manipulation of them, so you don't have to use messy AJAX tricks which bust the caches.
"There's a newer use of the term, or a synonym that describes a broadly similar way of structuring applications that is different in many key technical ways"
"Some return is possible because of increasing demand to live in that spot as population grows, but people believed in endless/high/ returns on a simple home."
The thing that gets me, and which always bugged me about the housing bubble (or any other bull market) is that higher-than-sensible 'returns on investment' *by definition* mean that someone else is PAYING higher-than-sensible FEES. And sacrificing something else to do so - like education or healthcare - that maybe they oughtn't be sacrificing, for the long-term good of us all.
All those people paying more money than they should, just for a place to live, that can't be healthy for either society or the economy. So the cost of housing 'crashing' should be CELEBRATED. It's a return to sanity. It's a return to affordability.
It's a return to the market doing what it's designed to do: provide real goods and services for an honest price, and no more.
And yet, when a market even thinks of returning to sanity like this, when it starts WORKING, when a huge exploitable pricing bug finally begins to be patched -- ie, when a bubble bursts -- suddenly it's a HUGE DISASTER!!! OH NOES!! and everyone's running screaming about the end of civilisation? What the? What's going on with that?
Just how insane *are* the economic rules we've forced ourselves to live by?
"I've personally always seen the "totally free market" people as Anarchists myself, not libertarian or republican, despite their own misunderstandings of what they stand for."
There's very little between the positions of Libertarianism, Anarcho-Capitalism, and Anarcho-Socialism, yes, even though the A-C's and the A-S's tend to hate each other. Anarcho-Capitalists tend to be a bit more rosy-eyed towards Adam Smith and Anarcho-Socialists a bit more rosy-eyed toward Karl Marx, but both share the idea that The State Is Evil and that self-organisation and voluntary cooperation between small groups of individuals is the answer. Libertarians are willing to tolerate a small night-watchman State as well.
(I have a problem with anarchists of both stripe who on the one hand decry the State as inherently violent, and on the other see it as a moral duty for the individual to defend themselves with force. Once you employ force to defend turf, you *are* a mini-State; that's how gangs and militias form, as mutual self-defence organisations. Then effective organisation requires leaders, which requires obedience, which recreates a social hierarchy and welcome back to the tribal-feudal world.)
Quite true. The "cars and trucks" or "animal" kind of tutorial OOP metaphor, understandable as it seems, actually seems to be one of the worst abuses of OOP; people take the advice literally, and write all these hardcoded class hierarchies of their business objects.
Without realising that in the real world, a "customer" might morph into a "user" just by signing a document, but if they've been created as CustomerPerson and UserPerson entities by someone diligently following Object-Oriented Design methodology, there's no way the system can make that happen, because objects can't change their class at runtime.
"However, in practice, you use object orientation to avoid zillions of "if" statements, special case code, large blocks of almost-but-not-quite duplicated code."
And then in actual actual practice, what we often end up doing in OOP is the reverse: duplicating, for example, a SQL database schema in a ton of cut-and-pasted boilerplate 'business object' class definitions.
And then we compound the pain with that final abomination of OOP 'best practice', getter and setter methods. Whose whole reason for existence is to be a cause of almost-but-not-quite-duplicated code!
Oy. We do it to ourselves, and that's what really hurts.
And consultants still get to sell Object Oriented Analysis and Design as if it's *not* snake oil.
"A good software engineer has learned that there is a time and place for both object oriented solutions and procedural solutions."
That's a very depressing sentence. 'Object oriented' and 'procedural' are the two paradigms? That's like saying 'I like both kinds of music, country and western'.
Where does, eg, functional programming get a look in? 50 years of Lisp and lambda calulus... anything?
How about combinatory logic and concatenative languages?
How about logic programming? Does anyone now even *remember* what Prolog was? It only had the potential to revolutionise the software industry, and it had nearly zero impedance mismatch with relational databases; but we ignored it. Now it's been censored from history like it never existed.
What about dataflow and flow-based programming?
One of my deep annoyances with object oriented programming (after the fact that it's so vaguely specified that even the top OOP advocates *disagree* publically on what its fundamental axioms are - Smalltalk and Java are about as far away from each other as you can get, and Io and Javascript don't have much in common either, and don't even get me started on Liskov Substitutability and how easily that's subverted by runtime reflection) - is that it's built entirely on the *procedural* paradigm.
OOP emerged from the Lisp world, then spent most of its lifetime doing its best to *abandon* everything Lisp taught us, and reformulate itself on top of Algol.
That was a huge mistake which we're still paying for, and I blame C++ for taking us headlong down that dead-end path.
If we're going to do 'objects', we should at least have the decency to build them on top of functional programming. But it will probably take another 50 years before we realise that.
"Your analogy fails because leaving a gun out is gross negligence. It's a dangerous thing, and that's fairly obvious. A computer isn't."
But a computer *is* dangerous. No, the danger is not obvious, but that awareness is starting to change. This isn't about elitism - not even all the computer scientists picked up on the danger at first.
An internet-connected computer that can host worms is dangerous in the same way an unmaintained car is, or a stagnant pond in which mosquitos can breed. We accept car licencing and vehicle checks. We accept health restrictions on what we can put in our garbage and what food we can sell. Why don't we accept mandatory computer licensing, or a category of 'infohazard' like 'biohazard'?
Well, because we're also afraid of censorship, and that's also a valid fear. One person's freedom of speech could be another person's infohazard. Even 'anti-phishing' browser plugins are blurring the line - who gets to maintain those site blacklists, and how much would it take to bribe them?
Not really, we're not in Plan 9 world yet. Processes, network ports, X windows, none of those things are files. Should be, but no. The Unix 'small tools' philosophy is great, but it fell apart somewhere in the 1980s. Completely went to crap in the 1990s with the rise of the monolithic component frameworks and desktop environments.
Which, by the way, for all that effort are still not anywhere near interoperating. CORBA/Bonobo, OpenOffice's UNO, KParts, D-BUS, Java, Mono, C++, Gobject, GnuStep and that's not to even get started on all the other 'standard scripting languages' with no defined object interface that get used somewhere in the basement of the average Linux distro: bash, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Guile Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Sawmill's Reptile, Lua, Emacs Lisp, m4, autoconfig,... then all those wonderful one-off config file syntaxes that might as well be languages: fstab, rc.d, routed, sendmail, X11, apache, apt sources, gconf... how many have I missed?
'Everything is just a text file' and choice of language is great. Being able to actually *communicate* is possibly even better.
"Fixed already. Extra attributes have been available for a long time. Feel free to use them."
Er. You think a kernel API is the same thing as a versioning system...?
'I want a door for my house, please.'
'Here's some pine seedlings and an 1868 plan for an iron foundry in Siberia. I'll throw in some flint and steel to rub together, it's cold up there. Watch out for the mammoths. Well? Better get started, you've got a long trek. What're you waiting for?'
'Er... someone to sell me a door?'
'Whiner! NEXT! Bloody users, it's like they've never even carved an industrial empire from the snow with their bare hands or something!'
"The simple fact is that most computers, both hardware and software, are generally "good enough" these days. "
That, and that upgrades are generally "bad enough" that it's really, really not worth doing unless you have absolutely no choice. Every upgrade is traumatic, and not just emotionally. Data gets lost. Programs refuse to run, or worse, break subtly and at awkward times. Institutional capacity is downgraded. Taking that hit is not worth it unless there's a good reason.
And yes, that includes moving to Linux - moving from Win32 to POSIX is far more disruptive for a business than moving from one Win32 OS to another.
If we lived in a world where there really did exist sensible, standardised, cross-platform platforms... but that's a contradiction in terms, isn't it?
"All for the greater good of the Earth, and it doesn't matter that billions will die because we just "backed off" and discarded all our technology to the point that tigers can eat us for lunch!"
What the heck is with this argument? I keep hearing it from anti-environmentalists. It makes no sense.
The point isn't that we should "save the planet" IN EXCHANGE FOR human wellbeing. Nobody's arguing that!
The point is that we should save the planet TO SUPPORT human wellbeing. Because we, y'know, live here? And rely on a functioning ecosystem to, eg, eat and breathe? Do you want to continue doing that? Then perhaps you'd like to continue to have some trees to make the oxygen and something living to eat? As opposed to a dead high-tech sea of glass and asphalt willed into existence by John Galt and his heroic band?
Yes, stone age society would suck. But if our only options are a stone-age society or complete mass extinction... which of those options would YOU rather take?
I'm not saying those necessarily *are* our actual options - they're the potential extremes. But "dialing back" a bit on the industrial revolution is not this mass flight from reason and sanity that some of the weirder voices on the Right seem to think it is. It's about finding a way to stop our breathing privileges from being revoked because we've cut down all the trees to build parking lots.
"If it turns out that a random selection of 20 users are typically too lazy to rate the songs that are submitted to them, you could even make artists submit $10 to have their songs rated by the focus group, and pay each of the 20 raters $0.50 each for their trouble."
So, you are proposing... mandatory focus groups before groups get airtime.
Isn't that just exactly what the large media corporations already do to work out which of their acts is likely to become popular, and save marketing money upfront? And which the alt/indie scene constantly rail against as 'dumbing down for the lowest common denominator'?
Not that I'm saying your conclusion is wrong, but it seems you're arguing for a system essentially unchanged from the current one, just with a thin 'Web 2.0' veneer over the top.
"A necessary condition for being among the "best" essays would be to convince the most people of something that they didn't believe before, without resorting to tricks such as blatantly fabricating statistics or attributing made-up quotes. This is not a sufficient condition for merit -- maybe the point of view that you're convincing people of, is still wrong -- but I submit that if you're not at least changing some people's minds, then there's no point."
And this exists too, it's called 'debate club'.
However, you're assuming the only point to blog writing is rhetoric - swaying people's opinions, regardless of the truth of the facts.
Maybe some people also write to convey honest information honestly, and don't care whether people agree or disagree or change their minds afterwards? Maybe some bloggers *aren't* primarily in it to be playas in the ideological power game, but want to document their little piece of the world as they see it?
I know a lot of political bloggers only care about swaying hearts and minds, but frankly those writers scare me. It's like they're hired guns and whatever they decided to make me believe, they'd try to sell me, just to see if they could. I don't trust those kind of people, and I'd trust them a lot less if entry to 'the blogging club' was somehow formally administered based on how effective an opinion-swayer they were.
"Encouraging your students to go "improve" Wikipedia articles isn't encouraging them to speak up, seek knowledge, or debate."
Huh?
How is writing a contribution on a public website, and then defending that contribution from others who want to revert it, not "speaking up" and "debating"?
"it certainly seems like the best use that land can be put to is actually raising cattle, because that's the use that actually makes the money for the owners."
Er. Since when has 'making money' had any relation to the most efficient use of farming resources?
The current world financial crisis indicates that money and market pricing has been severely delinked from reality. A year ago, commodity prices were skyrocketing; right now, they're plummeting. The exact same commodities, same caloric value, same chemicals, same life-supporting value. Yet the infinite wisdom of the market suddenly prices them differently just because some bankers' computer model spat some zeros at the wrong time.
This is not a sane way of living rationally in an ecology. Oxygen, water, carbohydrate, protein, microfauna, minerals, shelter, language, communication, knowledge - *these* are realities, which directly affect our survival.
Money is nothing. At best, it's a huge distraction. At worst, trusting it to value things properly could destroy our entire civilisation.
"There is right and wrong, and then there are things that are personal choices, for which the terms "right" and "wrong" simply don't apply."
Yes, exactly. Thank you for saying this. It's very common and trendy today to say "your moral system is only a personal choice", but that's begging the question of what morality *is*, and replacing it with a contradictory definition.
Morality is about the nature of reality; if it were merely a question of personal *taste*, that's not morality.
We can have different *ideas* of what is and isn't moral, but by definition, morality *itself* cannot be dependent on the individual.
Slashdot Mirror
"The question is, how can we/could we have convince nations like China or Imperial Japan that the United States isn't as soft as we sometimes appear."
Hmm... kill a whole lot of people in the Middle East? That might help. Would be great diplomacy, too.
The world was a different place before WW2. For one thing, the USA was a net oil *exporter*.
Hard to believe, but true.
"but consider how much of you code is just boilerplate, and doesn't really do anything algorithmically interesting. Usually around 99%."
That right there is telling you something.
If you're writing a hundred times more code than you need to, and you know it, then you're seriously using the wrong language. Probably one that doesn't have macros.
Vidishing?
Camishing?
Pishing?
And welcome back to , circa 1964.
There were some great ideas in Multics which never made their way into Unix. Maybe in another 44 years we'll reinvent them.
Git is basically just a generic distributed versioning-filesystem layer, right? Source control is its current killer app, but it's got no particular hooks to make it dependent on that domain.
So if we combined Git + Bittorrent... does that give us a generalised peer-to-peer distributed filesystem?
If so, that's a whole lot more interesting than just a way to share source code fast. Imagine a true peer-to-peer Web built on something like this.
Imagine, for instance, posting blog or wiki posts as little paragraphs of text, each as a separate file, not uploaded to a 'server' but just put out onto the grid. Cache every chunk of data as it moves through servers, maybe have a name-resolution layer like DNS over the top so that one server is 'authoritative' for your blog posts, but that server doesn't need to be online all the time as long as another one has replicated the data. Add a language which allows transclusion of chunks and/or functional manipulation of them, so you don't have to use messy AJAX tricks which bust the caches.
We could get a few steps closer toward Xanadu.
"There's a newer use of the term, or a synonym that describes a broadly similar way of structuring applications that is different in many key technical ways"
In other words, there's a WRONG use of the term.
"They ignore it because the price of it is volatile."
And this volatility in staple consumables fails to translate into the real cost of living for real people how?
Isn't the whole point of caring about inflation that at some point it hurts real people, rather than just being a numbers game?
Oh... sorry, my mistake.
"Some return is possible because of increasing demand to live in that spot as population grows, but people believed in endless /high/ returns on a simple home."
The thing that gets me, and which always bugged me about the housing bubble (or any other bull market) is that higher-than-sensible 'returns on investment' *by definition* mean that someone else is PAYING higher-than-sensible FEES. And sacrificing something else to do so - like education or healthcare - that maybe they oughtn't be sacrificing, for the long-term good of us all.
All those people paying more money than they should, just for a place to live, that can't be healthy for either society or the economy. So the cost of housing 'crashing' should be CELEBRATED. It's a return to sanity. It's a return to affordability.
It's a return to the market doing what it's designed to do: provide real goods and services for an honest price, and no more.
And yet, when a market even thinks of returning to sanity like this, when it starts WORKING, when a huge exploitable pricing bug finally begins to be patched -- ie, when a bubble bursts -- suddenly it's a HUGE DISASTER!!! OH NOES!! and everyone's running screaming about the end of civilisation? What the? What's going on with that?
Just how insane *are* the economic rules we've forced ourselves to live by?
"I've personally always seen the "totally free market" people as Anarchists myself, not libertarian or republican, despite their own misunderstandings of what they stand for."
There's very little between the positions of Libertarianism, Anarcho-Capitalism, and Anarcho-Socialism, yes, even though the A-C's and the A-S's tend to hate each other. Anarcho-Capitalists tend to be a bit more rosy-eyed towards Adam Smith and Anarcho-Socialists a bit more rosy-eyed toward Karl Marx, but both share the idea that The State Is Evil and that self-organisation and voluntary cooperation between small groups of individuals is the answer. Libertarians are willing to tolerate a small night-watchman State as well.
(I have a problem with anarchists of both stripe who on the one hand decry the State as inherently violent, and on the other see it as a moral duty for the individual to defend themselves with force. Once you employ force to defend turf, you *are* a mini-State; that's how gangs and militias form, as mutual self-defence organisations. Then effective organisation requires leaders, which requires obedience, which recreates a social hierarchy and welcome back to the tribal-feudal world.)
I wonder how Dijkstra learned maths?
Quite true. The "cars and trucks" or "animal" kind of tutorial OOP metaphor, understandable as it seems, actually seems to be one of the worst abuses of OOP; people take the advice literally, and write all these hardcoded class hierarchies of their business objects.
Without realising that in the real world, a "customer" might morph into a "user" just by signing a document, but if they've been created as CustomerPerson and UserPerson entities by someone diligently following Object-Oriented Design methodology, there's no way the system can make that happen, because objects can't change their class at runtime.
"However, in practice, you use object orientation to avoid zillions of "if" statements, special case code, large blocks of almost-but-not-quite duplicated code."
And then in actual actual practice, what we often end up doing in OOP is the reverse: duplicating, for example, a SQL database schema in a ton of cut-and-pasted boilerplate 'business object' class definitions.
And then we compound the pain with that final abomination of OOP 'best practice', getter and setter methods. Whose whole reason for existence is to be a cause of almost-but-not-quite-duplicated code!
Oy. We do it to ourselves, and that's what really hurts.
And consultants still get to sell Object Oriented Analysis and Design as if it's *not* snake oil.
"A good software engineer has learned that there is a time and place for both object oriented solutions and procedural solutions."
That's a very depressing sentence. 'Object oriented' and 'procedural' are the two paradigms? That's like saying 'I like both kinds of music, country and western'.
Where does, eg, functional programming get a look in? 50 years of Lisp and lambda calulus... anything?
How about combinatory logic and concatenative languages?
How about logic programming? Does anyone now even *remember* what Prolog was? It only had the potential to revolutionise the software industry, and it had nearly zero impedance mismatch with relational databases; but we ignored it. Now it's been censored from history like it never existed.
What about dataflow and flow-based programming?
One of my deep annoyances with object oriented programming (after the fact that it's so vaguely specified that even the top OOP advocates *disagree* publically on what its fundamental axioms are - Smalltalk and Java are about as far away from each other as you can get, and Io and Javascript don't have much in common either, and don't even get me started on Liskov Substitutability and how easily that's subverted by runtime reflection) - is that it's built entirely on the *procedural* paradigm.
OOP emerged from the Lisp world, then spent most of its lifetime doing its best to *abandon* everything Lisp taught us, and reformulate itself on top of Algol.
That was a huge mistake which we're still paying for, and I blame C++ for taking us headlong down that dead-end path.
If we're going to do 'objects', we should at least have the decency to build them on top of functional programming. But it will probably take another 50 years before we realise that.
"Your analogy fails because leaving a gun out is gross negligence. It's a dangerous thing, and that's fairly obvious. A computer isn't."
But a computer *is* dangerous. No, the danger is not obvious, but that awareness is starting to change. This isn't about elitism - not even all the computer scientists picked up on the danger at first.
An internet-connected computer that can host worms is dangerous in the same way an unmaintained car is, or a stagnant pond in which mosquitos can breed. We accept car licencing and vehicle checks. We accept health restrictions on what we can put in our garbage and what food we can sell. Why don't we accept mandatory computer licensing, or a category of 'infohazard' like 'biohazard'?
Well, because we're also afraid of censorship, and that's also a valid fear. One person's freedom of speech could be another person's infohazard. Even 'anti-phishing' browser plugins are blurring the line - who gets to maintain those site blacklists, and how much would it take to bribe them?
"Great, now I have that song in my head..."
You're welcome. You can thank us after you've taken your polygraph.
"Everything *is* a file"
Not really, we're not in Plan 9 world yet. Processes, network ports, X windows, none of those things are files. Should be, but no. The Unix 'small tools' philosophy is great, but it fell apart somewhere in the 1980s. Completely went to crap in the 1990s with the rise of the monolithic component frameworks and desktop environments.
Which, by the way, for all that effort are still not anywhere near interoperating. CORBA/Bonobo, OpenOffice's UNO, KParts, D-BUS, Java, Mono, C++, Gobject, GnuStep and that's not to even get started on all the other 'standard scripting languages' with no defined object interface that get used somewhere in the basement of the average Linux distro: bash, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Guile Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Sawmill's Reptile, Lua, Emacs Lisp, m4, autoconfig, ... then all those wonderful one-off config file syntaxes that might as well be languages: fstab, rc.d, routed, sendmail, X11, apache, apt sources, gconf... how many have I missed?
'Everything is just a text file' and choice of language is great. Being able to actually *communicate* is possibly even better.
"Fixed already. Extra attributes have been available for a long time. Feel free to use them."
Er. You think a kernel API is the same thing as a versioning system...?
'I want a door for my house, please.'
'Here's some pine seedlings and an 1868 plan for an iron foundry in Siberia. I'll throw in some flint and steel to rub together, it's cold up there. Watch out for the mammoths. Well? Better get started, you've got a long trek. What're you waiting for?'
'Er... someone to sell me a door?'
'Whiner! NEXT! Bloody users, it's like they've never even carved an industrial empire from the snow with their bare hands or something!'
"The simple fact is that most computers, both hardware and software, are generally "good enough" these days. "
That, and that upgrades are generally "bad enough" that it's really, really not worth doing unless you have absolutely no choice. Every upgrade is traumatic, and not just emotionally. Data gets lost. Programs refuse to run, or worse, break subtly and at awkward times. Institutional capacity is downgraded. Taking that hit is not worth it unless there's a good reason.
And yes, that includes moving to Linux - moving from Win32 to POSIX is far more disruptive for a business than moving from one Win32 OS to another.
If we lived in a world where there really did exist sensible, standardised, cross-platform platforms... but that's a contradiction in terms, isn't it?
"All for the greater good of the Earth, and it doesn't matter that billions will die because we just "backed off" and discarded all our technology to the point that tigers can eat us for lunch!"
What the heck is with this argument? I keep hearing it from anti-environmentalists. It makes no sense.
The point isn't that we should "save the planet" IN EXCHANGE FOR human wellbeing. Nobody's arguing that!
The point is that we should save the planet TO SUPPORT human wellbeing. Because we, y'know, live here? And rely on a functioning ecosystem to, eg, eat and breathe? Do you want to continue doing that? Then perhaps you'd like to continue to have some trees to make the oxygen and something living to eat? As opposed to a dead high-tech sea of glass and asphalt willed into existence by John Galt and his heroic band?
Yes, stone age society would suck. But if our only options are a stone-age society or complete mass extinction... which of those options would YOU rather take?
I'm not saying those necessarily *are* our actual options - they're the potential extremes. But "dialing back" a bit on the industrial revolution is not this mass flight from reason and sanity that some of the weirder voices on the Right seem to think it is. It's about finding a way to stop our breathing privileges from being revoked because we've cut down all the trees to build parking lots.
Seriously, what are you guys smoking over there?
"If it turns out that a random selection of 20 users are typically too lazy to rate the songs that are submitted to them, you could even make artists submit $10 to have their songs rated by the focus group, and pay each of the 20 raters $0.50 each for their trouble."
So, you are proposing... mandatory focus groups before groups get airtime.
Isn't that just exactly what the large media corporations already do to work out which of their acts is likely to become popular, and save marketing money upfront? And which the alt/indie scene constantly rail against as 'dumbing down for the lowest common denominator'?
Not that I'm saying your conclusion is wrong, but it seems you're arguing for a system essentially unchanged from the current one, just with a thin 'Web 2.0' veneer over the top.
"A necessary condition for being among the "best" essays would be to convince the most people of something that they didn't believe before, without resorting to tricks such as blatantly fabricating statistics or attributing made-up quotes. This is not a sufficient condition for merit -- maybe the point of view that you're convincing people of, is still wrong -- but I submit that if you're not at least changing some people's minds, then there's no point."
And this exists too, it's called 'debate club'.
However, you're assuming the only point to blog writing is rhetoric - swaying people's opinions, regardless of the truth of the facts.
Maybe some people also write to convey honest information honestly, and don't care whether people agree or disagree or change their minds afterwards? Maybe some bloggers *aren't* primarily in it to be playas in the ideological power game, but want to document their little piece of the world as they see it?
I know a lot of political bloggers only care about swaying hearts and minds, but frankly those writers scare me. It's like they're hired guns and whatever they decided to make me believe, they'd try to sell me, just to see if they could. I don't trust those kind of people, and I'd trust them a lot less if entry to 'the blogging club' was somehow formally administered based on how effective an opinion-swayer they were.
"Encouraging your students to go "improve" Wikipedia articles isn't encouraging them to speak up, seek knowledge, or debate."
Huh?
How is writing a contribution on a public website, and then defending that contribution from others who want to revert it, not "speaking up" and "debating"?
Sounds like a great idea to me.
[Followup deleted by meds]
"it certainly seems like the best use that land can be put to is actually raising cattle, because that's the use that actually makes the money for the owners."
Er. Since when has 'making money' had any relation to the most efficient use of farming resources?
The current world financial crisis indicates that money and market pricing has been severely delinked from reality. A year ago, commodity prices were skyrocketing; right now, they're plummeting. The exact same commodities, same caloric value, same chemicals, same life-supporting value. Yet the infinite wisdom of the market suddenly prices them differently just because some bankers' computer model spat some zeros at the wrong time.
This is not a sane way of living rationally in an ecology. Oxygen, water, carbohydrate, protein, microfauna, minerals, shelter, language, communication, knowledge - *these* are realities, which directly affect our survival.
Money is nothing. At best, it's a huge distraction. At worst, trusting it to value things properly could destroy our entire civilisation.
What exactly is 'natural morality'?
"There is right and wrong, and then there are things that are personal choices, for which the terms "right" and "wrong" simply don't apply."
Yes, exactly. Thank you for saying this. It's very common and trendy today to say "your moral system is only a personal choice", but that's begging the question of what morality *is*, and replacing it with a contradictory definition.
Morality is about the nature of reality; if it were merely a question of personal *taste*, that's not morality.
We can have different *ideas* of what is and isn't moral, but by definition, morality *itself* cannot be dependent on the individual.