There is no need to have a government, if its sole function is to uphold the rules of the majority. If the Fed didn't exist, people would still agree that, say, stealing is bad; we don't need a government to affirm this conviction.
Of course you need a government to uphold the rules of the majority. Even the most deeply held social rules won't enforce themselves just because most people agree that, in principle, and as long as they don't personally need to do anything, they're sort of a good idea, for other people but not them.
Do you want a society where the majority agrees that stealing is wrong, nod their heads gravely, and then stand by and do nothing while all their possessions are stolen by three guys in a Combi van who have a radically innovative ethical stance on the issue of property?
Or are you thinking that if the majority of homeowners believe stealing is wrong, but a minority think it's perfectly okay, then each individual citizen can solve the issue themselves by resorting to vigilante violence in the streets? Because that might "work", for values of work approaching civil war.
It's possible that governments are unnecessary, but "upholding the rules" is exactly the reason why they exist. Usually political questions turn on which rules a government ought to uphold and why - not on whether rules might be able to magically uphold themselves when less than 100% of people agree with them.
What you don't see is more research of private businesses into the nuclear energy, and this stopped just after they came up with the atomic bomb
I wonder why that was? Just a coincidence, most probably.
I'm sure we're all eagerly awaiting a future where you can buy a 15 megaton thermonuclear device at your local Wal*Mart and use it before you get home.
But ultimately, truth is, in fact, democratically determined, both in the sciences and in democracies.
No, it isn't. Truth simply is, and it's our job to find out what it is and adjust our beliefs accordingly. Our beliefs about truth may or may not be democratically determined, and beliefs may change from day to day and place to place as the whims of politics and fashion blow, but none of our beliefs can ever change the truth one bit.
Where did this weird idea that 'truth' is something that people create come from? It's just bizarre and nonsensical.
That may fail sometimes, but the alternative is that truth is determined by popularity contests and official credentials, and that is far worse.
Er, but "democratically determined" is a popularity contest. That's what democracy means!
Consider this test: imagine somebody created a programming language, not for actual use, but to prove a point. Would you consider learning that language?
Possibly, depending on what the point was. Joy for example, isn't entirely a 'real' language but has very interesting ideas behind it and is worth studying for that reason. If the ideas are interesting enough, eventually someone will translate them into a real language for doing actual work.
Both idea and implementation are important, and both need rigor and testability. The ideas have to come first, and necessarily won't be fully formed initially, but if the ideas can't ever actually be implemented, then they're probably incorrect - implementation is to philosophy as experiment is to science.
I think the 'bad' side of intellectualism, which people rightly dislike, is a tendency to merely promote ideas without ever considering if they are implementable in practice, or even to look down on implementation as a distraction from 'pure' ideology. Which would be like theorists in science looking down on experimentalists as misguided fools - 'we don't need to check against reality, we already know our ideas are correct. Just do it already, dammit!'
This stereotype of the ' ivory tower academic' promoting socially destructive ideas without checking if they are in fact correct (such as the right-wing bete noire, Marxism-Leninism - or the left-wing equivalent, 'Washington Consensus laissez-faire') is what think of when they say 'intellectual' with a sneer. A person who thinks, and teaches, but doesn't check their thinking and teaching against reality by consulting the lower, implementing, classes.
I'd like to think this stereotype is completely false - but, well, have you ever read a Lisp forum? In some cases, this attitude is alive and well even in computer science. Why are there so few working Lisp implementations? There's lots of discussion over the pure ideas, very little over the hard nuts-and-bolts of implementation, and often a sense that producing a working implementation fo a possibly-good-idea is somehow 'beneath' a 'real' computer scientist, because it's mere details which someone else lower down the pecking order should do.
Heck, I've seen that attitude right here in the phrase 'computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has with telescopes'.
If it is legitimate to spend one's own time considering the best recons to Batmans' timeline, why can't some one spend their time trying to find out predictive experiments out of string theory?
Because most fanfic writers don't consider what they are doing to be "work" and ask for grant money for it, while most string theorists and cultural theorists do? That's the big difference. Once you start asking for money from the public purse, people get justified wondering why what you're doing is worth their money.
You could make an interesting comparison between, say, the Star Wars/Batman/X-Men fanfic community and hackers on the one hand, and George Lucas, DC, Marvel and university faculty on the other hand.
The first team is unorganised, unpaid, amateurl, and produces a mixture of brilliant original work and crud.
The second team is organised, paid, professional - and seem from a distance, also seems to produce a mixture of both brilliant work and crud.
In some cases, the professionals seem to do a lot worse work than the amateurs. George Lucas, for instance.
Are the Star Wars amateurs 'anti-science-fictionalist' by pointing out that the professionals aren't always better just by being professional? Are the science amateurs 'antiintellectualist' by pointing out that their professionals aren't always better either?
-- the best musicians will make the most money, because they produce the most widely-loved music;... Someone who lacks logic, intellectual rigor, and the ability to synthesize disparate facts into a rational whole would largely be unable to function in a "libertarian" model.
Meanwhile, in our universe, the rigorous free-market process has currently selected Lady Gaga as the "best" musician of our era. Are we to derive from this that Lady Gaga's music is, in fact, the product of strict intellectual rigor and rationalism, and encourages intellectualism in every citizen?
I mean, I'm sure she's a smart lady and all, having worked out the perfect pop formula, and it's obviously working for her. But does it say the same for her fans?
Or you can follow the American Constitutional model. Keep decisions like this as local as problem and limit the scope of the failure if something really stupid is done.
That would actually be a good idea if applied to multinational corporations. They seem to be an end-run around the whole concept of states' rights and local decisionmaking.
Academia is the formal practice of generating and passing on knowledge, to be against formal education is to be against the scientific method that develop it and informs it.
I think your definition begs the question somewhat: you are claiming that formal instutitions are both necessary and sufficient for the generation of knowledge.
Granted I don't have a formal university education, so by the very terms of your question any analysis I could make that rebuts this statement would be disallowed - but my impression from an informal study of history is that institutional formality is not at all the same thing as the generation and transmission of knowledge: for one thing, institutions don't actually embody formal processes 100% correctly, nor do formal processes 100% correctly embody knowledge - and that assuming that knowledge and institutions which claim to embody that knowledge are identical is pretty close to the foundational error of all civilisations which have fallen in the history of the world.
I mean, a moment's reflection should advise you that if your claim is correct, no knowledge-generating social institution should ever have made errors - their formal processes for accumulating knowledge should have prevented them from doing so. But they have and they do, time and time again. Rejecting an institution is not the same thing as rejecting the ideals of an institution, nor is rejecting any particular institutional knowledge claim the same as rejecting knowledge itself.
If you define "college" to be a subset of "intellectual pursuits" then geekdom is anti-intellectual (for at least some of the subset of intellectual pursuits).
Er? That doesn't seem to be a valid logical proposition at all. Are you sure you went to college?
LET COLLEGE = SUBSET (INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS) LET GEEK = NOT COLLEGE GEEK = NOT INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS therefore ALL(INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS) = SUBSET(INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS)
Error: attempt to equate subset with totality of superset. Assertion failed.
"A pebble-bed reactor thus can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew hazardous wastes. It simply goes up to a designed "idle" temperature, and stays there. In that state, the reactor vessel radiates heat, but the vessel and fuel spheres remain intact and undamaged.
I dunno about that - this report suggests that although the fuel might not melt, the fuel spheres can still be damaged by heat spikes during normal operation and should water leak in (like, from the primary steam circuit that you'd use to generate power), you might get a big oldschool Chernobyl-style graphite-steam reaction.
Which would be kinda bad, wouldn't it? Especially since PBRs seem to be designed without gastight containment.
ooo, snide Perl 6 remark would go here if I were immature
Perl, wasn't that an early pre-release beta of Python...?
"Three signs shall there be before the end: the duke of atoms shall walk forever, the sixth pearl be released, and the freeman lift his crowbar thrice..."
Indeed, the references to "Victory Coffee" are very similar to the actual British experience of WW2 food rationing, and the cynically minded might say that the "We have always been at war with Eastasia/Eurasia" about-turn is eerily similar to what happened with British-American attitudes to the Germans and Russians in 1939 and 1947, and earlier:
1914: The war to end war! Down with the Kaiser! Hurray for the Czar! 1918: What's this about revolution in Russia? Now that the Kaiser's done for, let's invade Russia to sort it out! 1920s: Oops, we lost the Russian Civil War to the Reds. Hey, what happened to our stock market? 1930s: World Communism is a menace! The Russkies will invade us! But at least those manly Germans are standing up against it! 1939: Wait, the Nazis are bad now. Stalin is our friend again! Crush Jerry! Huzzah for Moscow! 1947: Cool, we squished Hitler. Hey, now Stalin's not our friend any more! An Iron Curtain falls across Europe! Berlin Airlift rar rar rar!... 1980s: Hooray for the Islamic freedom fighters in Afghanistan! Rambo III loves the Taliban! Down with the Russian atheist Commies! Tear down this wall! 1989: What's this about the Berlin wall coming down? Maggie Thatcher is not amused! Stop tearing that wall down, Mr Gorbachev! 2001: Osama bin Ladin is our enemy now? What the? Down with the Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan!
We have always been at war with Berlin / Moscow / Baghdad / Kabul / Tehran.
the sad part is that the entire world is actually a very good reference when looking up non-political stuff (and even most political stuff). But then incidents like this make it look like you can't trust it at all.
Fixed that for you (and the political party of your choice, who are much better, smarter and handsomer than the other party, that bunch of Nazi freaks).
to get him put away for whistleblowing on the NSA's spying program—which he claims he didn't even actually do.
Well of course he didn't compromise the NSA spying program, since that agency doesn't exist in the first place! And even if it did, which it didn't, he certainly didn't work there, doing something we can't talk about, for people we don't know and have never met, and definitely couldn't identify us in a court of law, especially not after what we did with the plutonium and the mangos... ahem. Just forget we said that.
All those new Farmville and Mafia Wars players? I think the Internet is unprepared for an attack of that magnitude.
Re:Crisis on Infinite Earths not effective enough?
on
DC Reboots Universe
·
· Score: 1
I thought the Crisis on Infinite Earths series in the 1980s was supposed to solve all this crap. I guess we need a "Crisis on Crisis on Infinite Earths" now?
We just had an Infinite Crisis and then a Final Crisis. I guess this one is the Final Infinite Final Crisis of Infinite Destiny.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no need to have a government, if its sole function is to uphold the rules of the majority. If the Fed didn't exist, people would still agree that, say, stealing is bad; we don't need a government to affirm this conviction.
Of course you need a government to uphold the rules of the majority. Even the most deeply held social rules won't enforce themselves just because most people agree that, in principle, and as long as they don't personally need to do anything, they're sort of a good idea, for other people but not them.
Do you want a society where the majority agrees that stealing is wrong, nod their heads gravely, and then stand by and do nothing while all their possessions are stolen by three guys in a Combi van who have a radically innovative ethical stance on the issue of property?
Or are you thinking that if the majority of homeowners believe stealing is wrong, but a minority think it's perfectly okay, then each individual citizen can solve the issue themselves by resorting to vigilante violence in the streets? Because that might "work", for values of work approaching civil war.
It's possible that governments are unnecessary, but "upholding the rules" is exactly the reason why they exist. Usually political questions turn on which rules a government ought to uphold and why - not on whether rules might be able to magically uphold themselves when less than 100% of people agree with them.
What you don't see is more research of private businesses into the nuclear energy, and this stopped just after they came up with the atomic bomb
I wonder why that was? Just a coincidence, most probably.
I'm sure we're all eagerly awaiting a future where you can buy a 15 megaton thermonuclear device at your local Wal*Mart and use it before you get home.
But ultimately, truth is, in fact, democratically determined, both in the sciences and in democracies.
No, it isn't. Truth simply is, and it's our job to find out what it is and adjust our beliefs accordingly. Our beliefs about truth may or may not be democratically determined, and beliefs may change from day to day and place to place as the whims of politics and fashion blow, but none of our beliefs can ever change the truth one bit.
Where did this weird idea that 'truth' is something that people create come from? It's just bizarre and nonsensical.
That may fail sometimes, but the alternative is that truth is determined by popularity contests and official credentials, and that is far worse.
Er, but "democratically determined" is a popularity contest. That's what democracy means!
which end of the soldering iron gets hot
Whichever end your thumb is nearest to.
what is the eighth layer of OSI and the 5th layer of TCP/IP
The PEBKAC/LART protocol buffer
what layer Does MIDI fit into in the OSI stack
MIDI? Real hackers use CB2 sound!
Consider this test: imagine somebody created a programming language, not for actual use, but to prove a point. Would you consider learning that language?
Possibly, depending on what the point was. Joy for example, isn't entirely a 'real' language but has very interesting ideas behind it and is worth studying for that reason. If the ideas are interesting enough, eventually someone will translate them into a real language for doing actual work.
Both idea and implementation are important, and both need rigor and testability. The ideas have to come first, and necessarily won't be fully formed initially, but if the ideas can't ever actually be implemented, then they're probably incorrect - implementation is to philosophy as experiment is to science.
I think the 'bad' side of intellectualism, which people rightly dislike, is a tendency to merely promote ideas without ever considering if they are implementable in practice, or even to look down on implementation as a distraction from 'pure' ideology. Which would be like theorists in science looking down on experimentalists as misguided fools - 'we don't need to check against reality, we already know our ideas are correct. Just do it already, dammit!'
This stereotype of the ' ivory tower academic' promoting socially destructive ideas without checking if they are in fact correct (such as the right-wing bete noire, Marxism-Leninism - or the left-wing equivalent, 'Washington Consensus laissez-faire') is what think of when they say 'intellectual' with a sneer. A person who thinks, and teaches, but doesn't check their thinking and teaching against reality by consulting the lower, implementing, classes.
I'd like to think this stereotype is completely false - but, well, have you ever read a Lisp forum? In some cases, this attitude is alive and well even in computer science. Why are there so few working Lisp implementations? There's lots of discussion over the pure ideas, very little over the hard nuts-and-bolts of implementation, and often a sense that producing a working implementation fo a possibly-good-idea is somehow 'beneath' a 'real' computer scientist, because it's mere details which someone else lower down the pecking order should do.
Heck, I've seen that attitude right here in the phrase 'computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has with telescopes'.
If it is legitimate to spend one's own time considering the best recons to Batmans' timeline, why can't some one spend their time trying to find out predictive experiments out of string theory?
Because most fanfic writers don't consider what they are doing to be "work" and ask for grant money for it, while most string theorists and cultural theorists do? That's the big difference. Once you start asking for money from the public purse, people get justified wondering why what you're doing is worth their money.
You could make an interesting comparison between, say, the Star Wars/Batman/X-Men fanfic community and hackers on the one hand, and George Lucas, DC, Marvel and university faculty on the other hand.
The first team is unorganised, unpaid, amateurl, and produces a mixture of brilliant original work and crud.
The second team is organised, paid, professional - and seem from a distance, also seems to produce a mixture of both brilliant work and crud.
In some cases, the professionals seem to do a lot worse work than the amateurs. George Lucas, for instance.
Are the Star Wars amateurs 'anti-science-fictionalist' by pointing out that the professionals aren't always better just by being professional?
Are the science amateurs 'antiintellectualist' by pointing out that their professionals aren't always better either?
I caulk it up to Ayn Rand.
But her arguments are already watertight!
-- the best musicians will make the most money, because they produce the most widely-loved music; ...
Someone who lacks logic, intellectual rigor, and the ability to synthesize disparate facts into a rational whole would largely be unable to function in a "libertarian" model.
Meanwhile, in our universe, the rigorous free-market process has currently selected Lady Gaga as the "best" musician of our era. Are we to derive from this that Lady Gaga's music is, in fact, the product of strict intellectual rigor and rationalism, and encourages intellectualism in every citizen?
I mean, I'm sure she's a smart lady and all, having worked out the perfect pop formula, and it's obviously working for her. But does it say the same for her fans?
Or you can follow the American Constitutional model. Keep decisions like this as local as problem and limit the scope of the failure if something really stupid is done.
That would actually be a good idea if applied to multinational corporations. They seem to be an end-run around the whole concept of states' rights and local decisionmaking.
A real geek should be, if anything, a circus performer performing sensationally morbid or disgusting acts.
So coding HTML/Javascript/PHP counts?
Academia is the formal practice of generating and passing on knowledge, to be against formal education is to be against the scientific method that develop it and informs it.
I think your definition begs the question somewhat: you are claiming that formal instutitions are both necessary and sufficient for the generation of knowledge.
Granted I don't have a formal university education, so by the very terms of your question any analysis I could make that rebuts this statement would be disallowed - but my impression from an informal study of history is that institutional formality is not at all the same thing as the generation and transmission of knowledge: for one thing, institutions don't actually embody formal processes 100% correctly, nor do formal processes 100% correctly embody knowledge - and that assuming that knowledge and institutions which claim to embody that knowledge are identical is pretty close to the foundational error of all civilisations which have fallen in the history of the world.
I mean, a moment's reflection should advise you that if your claim is correct, no knowledge-generating social institution should ever have made errors - their formal processes for accumulating knowledge should have prevented them from doing so. But they have and they do, time and time again. Rejecting an institution is not the same thing as rejecting the ideals of an institution, nor is rejecting any particular institutional knowledge claim the same as rejecting knowledge itself.
If you define "college" to be a subset of "intellectual pursuits" then geekdom is anti-intellectual (for at least some of the subset of intellectual pursuits).
Er? That doesn't seem to be a valid logical proposition at all. Are you sure you went to college?
LET COLLEGE = SUBSET (INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS)
LET GEEK = NOT COLLEGE
GEEK = NOT INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS
therefore ALL(INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS) = SUBSET(INTELLECTUAL_PURSUITS)
Error: attempt to equate subset with totality of superset. Assertion failed.
So, even if you make a computer that could graduate in the middle of a class of doctors, it won't be good enough until it can do better than them all.
I for one eagerly await the pilot episode of "Doogie HX9000 Model 101, M.D.".
Just sayin'.
And do tsunami waves keep accumulating in crops and fish with a half-life of 30 years?
Just sayin' too.
"A pebble-bed reactor thus can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew hazardous wastes. It simply goes up to a designed "idle" temperature, and stays there. In that state, the reactor vessel radiates heat, but the vessel and fuel spheres remain intact and undamaged.
I dunno about that - this report suggests that although the fuel might not melt, the fuel spheres can still be damaged by heat spikes during normal operation and should water leak in (like, from the primary steam circuit that you'd use to generate power), you might get a big oldschool Chernobyl-style graphite-steam reaction.
Which would be kinda bad, wouldn't it? Especially since PBRs seem to be designed without gastight containment.
I hope the EM waves don't disrupt any US networks, because then DoD would consider that a cyber attack and retaliate with thermonuclear weapons.
Against a fire boss? Everyone knows you should use ice magic for that.
Noone can survive such explosion
He certainly can - he survived the sixties, after all.
ooo, snide Perl 6 remark would go here if I were immature
Perl, wasn't that an early pre-release beta of Python...?
"Three signs shall there be before the end: the duke of atoms shall walk forever, the sixth pearl be released, and the freeman lift his crowbar thrice..."
timesharing + dynamic resources + virtualization + isolation = cloud
Oh, so you mean IBM System/370 VM/CMS from 1972?
Truly the Cloud (tm) is a pioneering 21st century innovation!
Indeed, the references to "Victory Coffee" are very similar to the actual British experience of WW2 food rationing, and the cynically minded might say that the "We have always been at war with Eastasia/Eurasia" about-turn is eerily similar to what happened with British-American attitudes to the Germans and Russians in 1939 and 1947, and earlier:
1914: The war to end war! Down with the Kaiser! Hurray for the Czar! ...
1918: What's this about revolution in Russia? Now that the Kaiser's done for, let's invade Russia to sort it out!
1920s: Oops, we lost the Russian Civil War to the Reds. Hey, what happened to our stock market?
1930s: World Communism is a menace! The Russkies will invade us! But at least those manly Germans are standing up against it!
1939: Wait, the Nazis are bad now. Stalin is our friend again! Crush Jerry! Huzzah for Moscow!
1947: Cool, we squished Hitler. Hey, now Stalin's not our friend any more! An Iron Curtain falls across Europe! Berlin Airlift rar rar rar!
1980s: Hooray for the Islamic freedom fighters in Afghanistan! Rambo III loves the Taliban! Down with the Russian atheist Commies! Tear down this wall!
1989: What's this about the Berlin wall coming down? Maggie Thatcher is not amused! Stop tearing that wall down, Mr Gorbachev!
2001: Osama bin Ladin is our enemy now? What the? Down with the Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan!
We have always been at war with Berlin / Moscow / Baghdad / Kabul / Tehran.
Howard Dean did it... to himself.
He did. And that's what really hurts.
He did it to himself. Just him and no one else.
the sad part is that the entire world is actually a very good reference when looking up non-political stuff (and even most political stuff). But then incidents like this make it look like you can't trust it at all.
Fixed that for you (and the political party of your choice, who are much better, smarter and handsomer than the other party, that bunch of Nazi freaks).
to get him put away for whistleblowing on the NSA's spying program—which he claims he didn't even actually do.
Well of course he didn't compromise the NSA spying program, since that agency doesn't exist in the first place! And even if it did, which it didn't, he certainly didn't work there, doing something we can't talk about, for people we don't know and have never met, and definitely couldn't identify us in a court of law, especially not after what we did with the plutonium and the mangos... ahem. Just forget we said that.
A fiendish plan. How could it possibly go wrong?
All those new Farmville and Mafia Wars players? I think the Internet is unprepared for an attack of that magnitude.
I thought the Crisis on Infinite Earths series in the 1980s was supposed to solve all this crap. I guess we need a "Crisis on Crisis on Infinite Earths" now?
We just had an Infinite Crisis and then a Final Crisis. I guess this one is the Final Infinite Final Crisis of Infinite Destiny.