Bluntly, what you're offended by isn't the definition, but by the unpleasant truth that an objective reading of what terrorism is
sometimes condemns the good guys, too.
You're getting a lot of flak for this, but it's essentially true. By the given definition of terrorism, many of the acts of the U.S. have been and continue to be terrorism. By that same definition, many of the acts of the police in every country in the world are terrorism. It is true that people are uncomfortable with that.
We're saying that two wrongs don't make a right.
Here is where you start to lose it. Once you start talking about "wrong" and "right," you immediately lose any credibility that you care at all about objective definitions. Objective definitions say nothing about these concepts. Ideas of right and wrong are connotations of these words. They may be in some definitions, but not in any remotely objective ones.
Consider the pair of words "aggressive" and "assertive." Objectively, they mean exactly the same thing. However, people use "aggressive" when they disapprove and "assertive" when they approve.
The question of whether something is right or wrong is inherently and necessarily a result of evaluating it in context. If I shoot someone who is trying to kill me, is that homicide? By any objective definition of "homicide," of course it is. Is it something I would feel bad about? Not at all. Is it something I would get in trouble with the law over? Well, I'm sure there would be an investigation, but in most states of the U.S. I would not be charged with a crime.
I don't think that "War on Terrorism" is a particularly good or accurate term. However, at least it's close. Your practice of jumping back and forth between supposedly objective definitions and moralism in an ad hoc fashion, on the other hand, is not even approximately appropriate for rational discourse.
And we're saying that
if we're going to set a moral example for the rest of the world--and it's not American arrogance to say that given our
position as the only superpower, we damn well better be willing to set that example--we've got to be moral.
This leads to the question of whether "we" want to set a moral standard. Right now, I don't think "we" do. I think "we've" just had it up to here.
Specifically, I think the prevailing attitude is that we have tried to set a moral standard since the end of World War II. We rebuilt Germany and Japan to economically powerful states. When Israel got its birth certificate from the U.N., Truman kept Israel at arms' length. The French were the biggest ally. After the French encouraged Israel to invade Egypt, Eisenhower got them out. Still, the French were their biggest allies until 1967, when Israel had some more imperial fun. We took over that role and have been trying to keep them on a leash ever since. When there was a revolution in Iran, we dropped support for the Shah. When Iran kept many Americans hostage, we did little but crash a couple of our own helicopters. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, we repulsed Iraq at Kuwait's request with Saudi Arabia's help. When that was done, we got out, even though it would have been to our advantage to overwhelm Iraq when we could. We statined troops in Saudi Arabia because they asked us to. We put up with one bomb in the World Trade Center, the killing of 18 soldiers in Somalia, and attacks on a number of embassies and ships, for all of which bin Laden explicitly claimed credit. We've gone to Herculean efforts to establish a Palestinian state in the Middle East, only to see Arafat and the various people who have been in charge of Israel stomp off in a fit of pique.
Any reasonable "objective" view of U.S. actions is that we have, usually reluctantly, tried to straighten out intractable messes caused by others (in my view, usually the French).
However, for all that time, leftists have gone through U.S. actions with a magnifying glass to find nuggets that they can throw out and say, "Ha-ha! The U.S. does Bad Things!" They always find them, of course. Some of these were really bad, like the bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant. Most of them, however, are due to the fact that you can't go into a place where people have been hating and killing each other for thousands of years and make it into a land of happy bunny rabbits.
All these "criticisms" missed the point that if the U.S. had not been a factor, things would unquestionably been worse than they are today. If the French had been left a dominant force, most of the ancestors of those people who danced when they heard of the WTC bombings would probably have been radioactive cinders by about 1980.
I think the prevailing view is that the meliorist, moderate, moral approach that the U.S. had taken (with some deviations from perfection in an impossible situation) did not work. September 11 sent us a message about peacemaking, just like World War I sent us a message about isolationism. Some sickos drove some planes into the WTC, and we've just simply had enough. September 11 was the moment in the Warner Brothers' cartoons where Bugs says, "Of course, you know, this means war."
One question is whether this view or response is justifiable (whether or not it is moral). For a few weeks after September 11, I didn't think it was. The leftist gadflies have gone a long way toward persuading me that it is, with their empty, revisionist, and opportunistic rhetoric. Before September 11, I could listen to Noam Chomsky with a straight face and some sympathy. Immediately after, I was only concerned with rebuilding, which is why I went to New York City and helped with the efforts. I agreed with the posters that said "Our grief is not a cry for war."
However, what has been coming out of the left in the weeks since then has been so obviously vapid that it is prima facie evidence that they do not know what they are talking about, at all. As much as I have traditionally disliked the right, it is only the right that acknowledges any of the basic history of the current situation in the Middle East, some of which I know personally because I grew up during it and did my own research. The left may come across as more appealing and idealistic and compassionate (when it isn't just winning debate points for being nasty), but any evidence of actual thought on the left is asymptotically approaching zero.
Nor is there any evidence that they care, at all. There are even Derrida and the postmodernists to tell them that facts don't exist, and opinions are all. This homo fecit used to be merely irritating and amusing; now it is deadly.
You can talk all you want about bad things America has done. I believe in free speech. When people aren't scared witless any more of going to New York, you might get a sympathetic audience that doesn't entirely consist of doped-up morons who are pissed off that their daddies don't give them enough money. Until then, sorry.
Anarchism, as a mode of thought, simply expects people to be grown-ups. Most people who have anything to
say about the subject--which is to say, most people who are not in any shape or form an anarchist--fail to notice this
component of it in their mad rush to disavow any possibility that human beings can live this way.
Human beings are bald, domineering, violent apes with an ego problem. If they're grown-up, they're just grown-up bald, domineering, violent apes with an ego problem.
They do what they do. Because they're bald, they wear clothing and have stupid sex taboos. Because they're domineering, they establish hierarchies. Because they're violent, they do it by hurting and killing. Because they have an ego problem, they think of themselves as refined and think up justifying philosophies for everything they feel like doing, all of which are nonsense.
The problem with anarchy, which is otherwise quite appealing, is that it is an inherently unstable situation in a species of bald, domineering, violent apes with an ego problem.
It doesn't matter if you get rid of a hierarchy. If you do, someone will want a hierarchy, with him on top, of course. He'll get it, even if it kills you.
Look at the web. It used to be anarchy. That was great but short-lived. Now various governments want to control it, and they're getting their way. You can't stop them; if you try they'll either ignore you, put you in jail, or kill you.
As Jean Shepherd said, some chickens are going to be better at being chickens than others. It doesn't matter what the parameters of chickenhood are.
Go ahead. Prove that I'm right. Take a moral stand. Tell me that I advocate domineering and violence or that I'm insulting anarchism or something. Get down with your bad monkey self!
The best thing you can do with apes is have a hierarchy that is full of incompetence and always changing, deliberately enfeebled. That's what the Constitution was supposed to be about. Too bad it didn't work.
Software is math, so it follows that it is like math. It is also quite a lot like quantum physics, especially when dealing with multiprocessing.
What it isn't like, though, is building a bridge or a car, except perhaps for the architecture and design aspects, but those aren't called "engineering." There is no place you can look up a bunch of rules that, when applied relatively mindlessly, result in good code. Sure, you can find algorithms in books, but the killer is always the overall system, and every one of those is different.
What is not clear is whether and why society should prefer this arrangement.
If society should give you this right, what does society gain in return?
That's obvious. What they gain is that I write good software that benefits them, even though it's harder than making money by abusively exploiting people.
Such as, for instance, that time when I led a team to write a 250,000 line visualization package, wrote my own terms of use, and gave it away including source for free.
If society wants developers to be cogs in machines, then society shouldn't be outraged when they operate like cogs in machines and keep turning out the same old crap.
Look at copyright law. It's obviously a restriction on free speech. It's legally recognized as a restriction on free speech. It's there on the grounds that society benefits from having lots of writers writing lots of original stuff, and that wouldn't happen as much if they couldn't control their work. The same is true of software development.
You are right. Power is power. Power over others is power over others. You can tell the difference by looking at the phrase "over others."
Consider this from the article referred to:
Freedom is being able to make decisions that affect mainly you. Power is being able to make decisions that affect others more than
you.
This statement reflects one of the following:
A ressentiment view of power
Gross illiteracy, perhaps of a deliberate and political kind
If 1 be the case, then it would mean that open source and free software are effectively dead, or that Stallman and Kuhn no longer have any relevance. I suspect, rather, that 2 is the case. I think that they may have painted themselves into a corner by treating "freedom" as a mythological entity rather than a word, and now they have to resort to Humpty Dumpty tricks to keep a semblance of consistency. Honestly, though, they're starting to sound like a postmodernist Ayn Rand.
Power and freedom are inextricably linked. Freedom without power is sterile (there is no rule to stop a paraplegic from signing up for the three-legged race). Power without freedom is futile (a slave can make productivity records in the cotton fields).
The real problem is not power but powerlessness. People with power can and usually will attempt to use it to control others, but those others must first be powerless for it to work. Nobody would care about Microsoft's EULA if more people had the power to reject it.
Even Martin Luther King read Nietzsche and understood him. Maybe the days of talking and posturing are over. Open Source got a shot in the arm not because of philosophical screeds, but because a bunch of people, under the direction of Linus Torvalds, actually finished their implementation of UN*X.
I wasn't aware that we had returned to the days of Chardonnay, herbal tea, and hot tubs.
Putting computers in schools in poor neighborhoods does not work. It has been tried, by well-meaning people who didn't know any better. Now it can only be tried by well-meaning people who are deliberately obtuse to the lessons of history.
The primary effect of putting computers in schools in poor neighborhoods is to increase the desirability of the school as a target for thieves. This is not good because they have too much crime already.
They don't need computers. They need better security, solid buildings, more and better teachers. Putting computers there is worse than not putting computers there.
Are people here really so totally unaware of what poverty is?
Most of this is right on, but it neglects another factor. Even if we knew how to do number 1, why would anyone go for it?
It has been discovered that solid software does not generate as much money as mediocre software. Much to my lament, the philosophy that making money should override the creation of solid software has become dominant, almost uniform in the industry. Trying to fix this problem by creating standards is like trying to end world hunger by eating all the peas on your plate. It entirely fails to address the reason there is a problem.
It isn't prohibitively difficult to generate solid software. We've known some of the practices for decades:
Design, then build
Prove your algorithms
Use craftsmanship
Test like hell
Take responsibility
Way back when, in the early 1980's, I was working on my first official full-time programming job. We built a bisynchronous communications package that had full on-screen help, access to printers and disks, a built-in text editor, and could communicate error-free at 56 KB on 2 MHz machines. In assembly language. There were no known bugs on release. We offered anyone who found a bug a free dinner at any restaurant. We only had to pay off once--at the Alexandria Hotel in San Francisco. We went out of our way to make the stuff work; my first task was to disassemble the Xerox 820-II bios to find a workaround for one of their bugs, and later I worked with hardware vendors to make sure their machines were up to snuff.
Nothing like this could ever happen nowadays. No business would allow it. If one did, they would be smashed by the competition. There are exceptions, but only in special cases, such as in-house projects, games, and medical software. The cycle of selling support, undermining the competition by shipping a crappy prototype first, and actually getting gratitude from the users when you fix any of the thousands of bugs while charging them for support has so come to dominate the software industry that it's hard to see how it could be reversed.
When business was booming, people didn't care about bugs. Now that business is busting, people aren't going to hire experienced craftsmen when they can get flunkies for cheap. Managers even say that they won't hire anybody with more than the bare minimum of knowledge, because they know their business. It is simply not going to happen.
Since we can't even reverse that and do the practices we already know how to do, it is totally nonsensical to talk about engineering and knowledge bases as magic fixes.
This depresses me no end, but I don't see that there is anything I can do about it. I can pine all I want for companies that cared about product, but it won't happen. Oh well, at least I have a job. Even though it's hardly cutting edge, at least I am allowed to write software well, because it's all in house.
You're not too far off the mark when you write the photons would have to bounce around. That's pretty close to the truth. The photons interact with the material.
However, it's not like a billiard ball bouncing around a table or trying to walk through syrup or any other common-place analogy. Even the idea of a photon moving is a bit illusory. There's no way to watch a photon move. If you've seen a photon, it's already not there any more.
This only starts to make sense when you think in terms of quantum electrodynamics (QED). There is no basic law of physics that says that a photon has to travel a straight line (or a geodesic, as in General Relativity). What QED uses is a thing called an amplitude, which underlies every particle in the universe. You can think of an amplitude as a little watch with a sweep second hand going around with the frequency of the photon and moving at the speed of light. However, all you can observe is where the photon leaves and where it winds up.
Where the photon actually winds up is determined by figuring out the amplitudes for all possible paths and summing them up using vector arithmetic. This gives a single vector. The probability of the photon winding up there is proportional to the length of this vector squared. Light travels normally in a straight line because this is where all the local amplitudes reinforce each other by summing up, while elsewhere they tend to cancel out.
This is obviously a lot of paths, and it's hard to do. It wasn't until the late 1940's that the math was solved. It's still hard to do in complex situations, even with computers.
This seems weird, but it explains the workings basically of everything in the universe outside the nucleus. How light bounces off a mirror, how parital reflection works, diffusion, why light goes the way it does in GR, the color of white paper, everything. (The same quantum rules work for solid matter, but it's just easier to understand with light.) The wave theory of light does not explain its behavior fully (it works pretty well until you get to multiple sources and detectors), nor does a more classical particle theory. I don't know if someone will come up with a different theory, but if they do, I'm pretty sure it would be just as weird.
For inside the nucleus, people are working on quantum chromadynamics. I did some visualization work on that a few years ago, but I don't know the status today.
In transparent materials, light looks as if it had moved in a straight line at a slower speed, but it really doesn't. The amplitudes suggest a path of highest probability that is not in a straight line.
Why does it come out in a straight line? Well, it doesn't always! If you sandblast glass, much more is reflected, and it's all scattered about. Note that this does not make sense with classical theory: you might guess that the irregular surfaces did scattering, but you wouldn't be able to guess that more would be reflected back. However, well polished glass is uniform enough, at least with respect to the wavelength of the photon (which is, for visible light, much bigger than the atoms), any net effect at deflection cancels out.
Change the wavelength of the photon and the situation changes, which is why prisms and X-rays work the way they do. Change the way the material is packed, and it also changes, which is why graphite is opaque and black while diamond is transparent.
Incidentally, this also happens in a vacuum, because there are virtual particles in the vacuum. Not many, but enough to have a tiny effect. You can get rid of most of these virtual particles by putting two plates so close together that there isn't enough room for them to form. Then light appears to go a teensy bit faster, though not enough to worry about. It's that maximum speed that is the thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Bluntly, what you're offended by isn't the definition, but by the unpleasant truth that an objective reading of what terrorism is sometimes condemns the good guys, too.
You're getting a lot of flak for this, but it's essentially true. By the given definition of terrorism, many of the acts of the U.S. have been and continue to be terrorism. By that same definition, many of the acts of the police in every country in the world are terrorism. It is true that people are uncomfortable with that.
We're saying that two wrongs don't make a right.
Here is where you start to lose it. Once you start talking about "wrong" and "right," you immediately lose any credibility that you care at all about objective definitions. Objective definitions say nothing about these concepts. Ideas of right and wrong are connotations of these words. They may be in some definitions, but not in any remotely objective ones.
Consider the pair of words "aggressive" and "assertive." Objectively, they mean exactly the same thing. However, people use "aggressive" when they disapprove and "assertive" when they approve.
The question of whether something is right or wrong is inherently and necessarily a result of evaluating it in context. If I shoot someone who is trying to kill me, is that homicide? By any objective definition of "homicide," of course it is. Is it something I would feel bad about? Not at all. Is it something I would get in trouble with the law over? Well, I'm sure there would be an investigation, but in most states of the U.S. I would not be charged with a crime.
I don't think that "War on Terrorism" is a particularly good or accurate term. However, at least it's close. Your practice of jumping back and forth between supposedly objective definitions and moralism in an ad hoc fashion, on the other hand, is not even approximately appropriate for rational discourse.
And we're saying that if we're going to set a moral example for the rest of the world--and it's not American arrogance to say that given our position as the only superpower, we damn well better be willing to set that example--we've got to be moral.
This leads to the question of whether "we" want to set a moral standard. Right now, I don't think "we" do. I think "we've" just had it up to here.
Specifically, I think the prevailing attitude is that we have tried to set a moral standard since the end of World War II. We rebuilt Germany and Japan to economically powerful states. When Israel got its birth certificate from the U.N., Truman kept Israel at arms' length. The French were the biggest ally. After the French encouraged Israel to invade Egypt, Eisenhower got them out. Still, the French were their biggest allies until 1967, when Israel had some more imperial fun. We took over that role and have been trying to keep them on a leash ever since. When there was a revolution in Iran, we dropped support for the Shah. When Iran kept many Americans hostage, we did little but crash a couple of our own helicopters. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, we repulsed Iraq at Kuwait's request with Saudi Arabia's help. When that was done, we got out, even though it would have been to our advantage to overwhelm Iraq when we could. We statined troops in Saudi Arabia because they asked us to. We put up with one bomb in the World Trade Center, the killing of 18 soldiers in Somalia, and attacks on a number of embassies and ships, for all of which bin Laden explicitly claimed credit. We've gone to Herculean efforts to establish a Palestinian state in the Middle East, only to see Arafat and the various people who have been in charge of Israel stomp off in a fit of pique.
Any reasonable "objective" view of U.S. actions is that we have, usually reluctantly, tried to straighten out intractable messes caused by others (in my view, usually the French).
However, for all that time, leftists have gone through U.S. actions with a magnifying glass to find nuggets that they can throw out and say, "Ha-ha! The U.S. does Bad Things!" They always find them, of course. Some of these were really bad, like the bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant. Most of them, however, are due to the fact that you can't go into a place where people have been hating and killing each other for thousands of years and make it into a land of happy bunny rabbits.
All these "criticisms" missed the point that if the U.S. had not been a factor, things would unquestionably been worse than they are today. If the French had been left a dominant force, most of the ancestors of those people who danced when they heard of the WTC bombings would probably have been radioactive cinders by about 1980.
I think the prevailing view is that the meliorist, moderate, moral approach that the U.S. had taken (with some deviations from perfection in an impossible situation) did not work. September 11 sent us a message about peacemaking, just like World War I sent us a message about isolationism. Some sickos drove some planes into the WTC, and we've just simply had enough. September 11 was the moment in the Warner Brothers' cartoons where Bugs says, "Of course, you know, this means war."
One question is whether this view or response is justifiable (whether or not it is moral). For a few weeks after September 11, I didn't think it was. The leftist gadflies have gone a long way toward persuading me that it is, with their empty, revisionist, and opportunistic rhetoric. Before September 11, I could listen to Noam Chomsky with a straight face and some sympathy. Immediately after, I was only concerned with rebuilding, which is why I went to New York City and helped with the efforts. I agreed with the posters that said "Our grief is not a cry for war."
However, what has been coming out of the left in the weeks since then has been so obviously vapid that it is prima facie evidence that they do not know what they are talking about, at all. As much as I have traditionally disliked the right, it is only the right that acknowledges any of the basic history of the current situation in the Middle East, some of which I know personally because I grew up during it and did my own research. The left may come across as more appealing and idealistic and compassionate (when it isn't just winning debate points for being nasty), but any evidence of actual thought on the left is asymptotically approaching zero.
Nor is there any evidence that they care, at all. There are even Derrida and the postmodernists to tell them that facts don't exist, and opinions are all. This homo fecit used to be merely irritating and amusing; now it is deadly.
You can talk all you want about bad things America has done. I believe in free speech. When people aren't scared witless any more of going to New York, you might get a sympathetic audience that doesn't entirely consist of doped-up morons who are pissed off that their daddies don't give them enough money. Until then, sorry.
Anarchism, as a mode of thought, simply expects people to be grown-ups. Most people who have anything to say about the subject--which is to say, most people who are not in any shape or form an anarchist--fail to notice this component of it in their mad rush to disavow any possibility that human beings can live this way.
Human beings are bald, domineering, violent apes with an ego problem. If they're grown-up, they're just grown-up bald, domineering, violent apes with an ego problem.
They do what they do. Because they're bald, they wear clothing and have stupid sex taboos. Because they're domineering, they establish hierarchies. Because they're violent, they do it by hurting and killing. Because they have an ego problem, they think of themselves as refined and think up justifying philosophies for everything they feel like doing, all of which are nonsense.
The problem with anarchy, which is otherwise quite appealing, is that it is an inherently unstable situation in a species of bald, domineering, violent apes with an ego problem.
It doesn't matter if you get rid of a hierarchy. If you do, someone will want a hierarchy, with him on top, of course. He'll get it, even if it kills you.
Look at the web. It used to be anarchy. That was great but short-lived. Now various governments want to control it, and they're getting their way. You can't stop them; if you try they'll either ignore you, put you in jail, or kill you.
As Jean Shepherd said, some chickens are going to be better at being chickens than others. It doesn't matter what the parameters of chickenhood are.
Go ahead. Prove that I'm right. Take a moral stand. Tell me that I advocate domineering and violence or that I'm insulting anarchism or something. Get down with your bad monkey self!
The best thing you can do with apes is have a hierarchy that is full of incompetence and always changing, deliberately enfeebled. That's what the Constitution was supposed to be about. Too bad it didn't work.
Software is math, so it follows that it is like math. It is also quite a lot like quantum physics, especially when dealing with multiprocessing.
What it isn't like, though, is building a bridge or a car, except perhaps for the architecture and design aspects, but those aren't called "engineering." There is no place you can look up a bunch of rules that, when applied relatively mindlessly, result in good code. Sure, you can find algorithms in books, but the killer is always the overall system, and every one of those is different.
What is not clear is whether and why society should prefer this arrangement.
If society should give you this right, what does society gain in return?
That's obvious. What they gain is that I write good software that benefits them, even though it's harder than making money by abusively exploiting people.
Such as, for instance, that time when I led a team to write a 250,000 line visualization package, wrote my own terms of use, and gave it away including source for free.
If society wants developers to be cogs in machines, then society shouldn't be outraged when they operate like cogs in machines and keep turning out the same old crap.
Look at copyright law. It's obviously a restriction on free speech. It's legally recognized as a restriction on free speech. It's there on the grounds that society benefits from having lots of writers writing lots of original stuff, and that wouldn't happen as much if they couldn't control their work. The same is true of software development.
You are right. Power is power. Power over others is power over others. You can tell the difference by looking at the phrase "over others."
Consider this from the article referred to:
Freedom is being able to make decisions that affect mainly you. Power is being able to make decisions that affect others more than you.
This statement reflects one of the following:
If 1 be the case, then it would mean that open source and free software are effectively dead, or that Stallman and Kuhn no longer have any relevance. I suspect, rather, that 2 is the case. I think that they may have painted themselves into a corner by treating "freedom" as a mythological entity rather than a word, and now they have to resort to Humpty Dumpty tricks to keep a semblance of consistency. Honestly, though, they're starting to sound like a postmodernist Ayn Rand.
Power and freedom are inextricably linked. Freedom without power is sterile (there is no rule to stop a paraplegic from signing up for the three-legged race). Power without freedom is futile (a slave can make productivity records in the cotton fields).
The real problem is not power but powerlessness. People with power can and usually will attempt to use it to control others, but those others must first be powerless for it to work. Nobody would care about Microsoft's EULA if more people had the power to reject it.
Even Martin Luther King read Nietzsche and understood him. Maybe the days of talking and posturing are over. Open Source got a shot in the arm not because of philosophical screeds, but because a bunch of people, under the direction of Linus Torvalds, actually finished their implementation of UN*X.
I wasn't aware that we had returned to the days of Chardonnay, herbal tea, and hot tubs.
Putting computers in schools in poor neighborhoods does not work. It has been tried, by well-meaning people who didn't know any better. Now it can only be tried by well-meaning people who are deliberately obtuse to the lessons of history.
The primary effect of putting computers in schools in poor neighborhoods is to increase the desirability of the school as a target for thieves. This is not good because they have too much crime already.
They don't need computers. They need better security, solid buildings, more and better teachers. Putting computers there is worse than not putting computers there.
Are people here really so totally unaware of what poverty is?
Most of this is right on, but it neglects another factor. Even if we knew how to do number 1, why would anyone go for it?
It has been discovered that solid software does not generate as much money as mediocre software. Much to my lament, the philosophy that making money should override the creation of solid software has become dominant, almost uniform in the industry. Trying to fix this problem by creating standards is like trying to end world hunger by eating all the peas on your plate. It entirely fails to address the reason there is a problem.
It isn't prohibitively difficult to generate solid software. We've known some of the practices for decades:
Way back when, in the early 1980's, I was working on my first official full-time programming job. We built a bisynchronous communications package that had full on-screen help, access to printers and disks, a built-in text editor, and could communicate error-free at 56 KB on 2 MHz machines. In assembly language. There were no known bugs on release. We offered anyone who found a bug a free dinner at any restaurant. We only had to pay off once--at the Alexandria Hotel in San Francisco. We went out of our way to make the stuff work; my first task was to disassemble the Xerox 820-II bios to find a workaround for one of their bugs, and later I worked with hardware vendors to make sure their machines were up to snuff.
Nothing like this could ever happen nowadays. No business would allow it. If one did, they would be smashed by the competition. There are exceptions, but only in special cases, such as in-house projects, games, and medical software. The cycle of selling support, undermining the competition by shipping a crappy prototype first, and actually getting gratitude from the users when you fix any of the thousands of bugs while charging them for support has so come to dominate the software industry that it's hard to see how it could be reversed.
When business was booming, people didn't care about bugs. Now that business is busting, people aren't going to hire experienced craftsmen when they can get flunkies for cheap. Managers even say that they won't hire anybody with more than the bare minimum of knowledge, because they know their business. It is simply not going to happen.
Since we can't even reverse that and do the practices we already know how to do, it is totally nonsensical to talk about engineering and knowledge bases as magic fixes.
This depresses me no end, but I don't see that there is anything I can do about it. I can pine all I want for companies that cared about product, but it won't happen. Oh well, at least I have a job. Even though it's hardly cutting edge, at least I am allowed to write software well, because it's all in house.
You're not too far off the mark when you write the photons would have to bounce around. That's pretty close to the truth. The photons interact with the material.
However, it's not like a billiard ball bouncing around a table or trying to walk through syrup or any other common-place analogy. Even the idea of a photon moving is a bit illusory. There's no way to watch a photon move. If you've seen a photon, it's already not there any more.
This only starts to make sense when you think in terms of quantum electrodynamics (QED). There is no basic law of physics that says that a photon has to travel a straight line (or a geodesic, as in General Relativity). What QED uses is a thing called an amplitude, which underlies every particle in the universe. You can think of an amplitude as a little watch with a sweep second hand going around with the frequency of the photon and moving at the speed of light. However, all you can observe is where the photon leaves and where it winds up.
Where the photon actually winds up is determined by figuring out the amplitudes for all possible paths and summing them up using vector arithmetic. This gives a single vector. The probability of the photon winding up there is proportional to the length of this vector squared. Light travels normally in a straight line because this is where all the local amplitudes reinforce each other by summing up, while elsewhere they tend to cancel out.
This is obviously a lot of paths, and it's hard to do. It wasn't until the late 1940's that the math was solved. It's still hard to do in complex situations, even with computers.
This seems weird, but it explains the workings basically of everything in the universe outside the nucleus. How light bounces off a mirror, how parital reflection works, diffusion, why light goes the way it does in GR, the color of white paper, everything. (The same quantum rules work for solid matter, but it's just easier to understand with light.) The wave theory of light does not explain its behavior fully (it works pretty well until you get to multiple sources and detectors), nor does a more classical particle theory. I don't know if someone will come up with a different theory, but if they do, I'm pretty sure it would be just as weird.
For inside the nucleus, people are working on quantum chromadynamics. I did some visualization work on that a few years ago, but I don't know the status today.
In transparent materials, light looks as if it had moved in a straight line at a slower speed, but it really doesn't. The amplitudes suggest a path of highest probability that is not in a straight line.
Why does it come out in a straight line? Well, it doesn't always! If you sandblast glass, much more is reflected, and it's all scattered about. Note that this does not make sense with classical theory: you might guess that the irregular surfaces did scattering, but you wouldn't be able to guess that more would be reflected back. However, well polished glass is uniform enough, at least with respect to the wavelength of the photon (which is, for visible light, much bigger than the atoms), any net effect at deflection cancels out.
Change the wavelength of the photon and the situation changes, which is why prisms and X-rays work the way they do. Change the way the material is packed, and it also changes, which is why graphite is opaque and black while diamond is transparent.
Incidentally, this also happens in a vacuum, because there are virtual particles in the vacuum. Not many, but enough to have a tiny effect. You can get rid of most of these virtual particles by putting two plates so close together that there isn't enough room for them to form. Then light appears to go a teensy bit faster, though not enough to worry about. It's that maximum speed that is the thing.
I hope this handwaving is an improvement.