This isn't about forcing anyone to do anything, it's about the government choosing to fund research.
That's EXACTLY what this argument is about. It's about the federal government of the United States forcing people to pay for embryonic stem cell research even if they are morally opposed to the practice.
You talk about the government choosing to spend the money as if the government was the one who earned it. The people earned it, their representatives outlawed the use of federal funds for that purpose, and the president signed it.
although I must admit I find the notion of allowing discrimination in the first place abhorrent
The problem is that it's hard to fairly legislate against discrimination. Let's follow a sequence of events:
(1) John happens to be a member of a minority group, and he's applying. You think you can get someone better, so you don't offer him a job. Instead, you wait for the right person to come along. (2) Bill applies two weeks later, and he's about the same quality. You are tired of waiting so you offer him a job, and he accepts.
Now, to John that looks like discrimination, but the thought never crossed the employer's mind. It's unfair to punish the employer (in my opinion), but any anti-discrimination law would probably group him with the criminals because he can't prove that he wasn't discriminating.
In general, I think that anyone should have the freedom to choose not to give their money to someone else for any reason. They shouldn't have to give any reason at all; it's their money. If they choose to express their reason, that's their freedom of speech. And if it's a bad reason, everyone else can choose to dislike the employer.
The fact is, there's an art as much as a science to hiring people. If someone hints toward some kind of lazy practice during the interview ("So, does a hangover count as sick leave, by the way?"), you don't hire them. Or even if they show a hint of a communication problem and you don't think they will work effectively with the rest of your workforce (who you already know). It's impossible for the courts to sort all of this out in a fair, consistent way.
If someone really is discriminating, they will be punished by their competitors who can outperform them by not discriminating. If, for example, women made only 75% of what men do for the same productivity, why aren't there companies of only women, with only 75% of the labor costs, undercutting all the competition?
Let's say that I have some bacteria in a dish. It has survived for a million years under those conditions. Now, you introduce the bacteria to an altered environment, and you leave them that way for a million years. Assuming some survives, evolution says that the gene pool will have shifted to support the new conditions. OK, that's sort of a theory, but there are problems.
What if the gene pool really doesn't change much, and it's just that fewer bacteria will be alive in there at any one time? I suppose an evolutionist would say that it's a less hospitable environment or something, but that really doesn't explain why the theory failed. How long is this supposed to take? What environmental factors can the gene pool be expected to accomodate, and which ones are just less hospitable and cause a population decline?
So we have this "prediction". But the fact is, no matter what happens at all in any timeframe, an evolutionist could say "that's how the theory is supposed to work". A theory has to be disprovable also, if given a certain set of data. Let's go through the cases:
(1) The bacteria all die. Well, evolution can only work so fast.
(2) The bacteria become genetically different and flourish. That's some good evolving going on.
(3) The bacteria become genetically different and experience a population decline. Oh well, it's less hospitable.
(4) The bacteria don't become genetically different. You need to wait longer.
If you drop a book, and it flies upward, you just disproved gravity. How do you disprove evolution? What data would disprove it? A theory must be disprovable, or what are you supposed to be testing for?
Inteligent Design cannot make similar predictions
I don't think any reasonable scientist would contend that ID is a coherent, testable theory.
Forensics is a science: it uses scientific tests and principles to determine whether historical events happened, and to help piece together a story
Interesting that you used that example, I also associate evolution with forensics.
Forensics are based on science. They aren't testing a theory, they are applying already accepted theories and laws of science to determine what plausibly happened. Same with evolution: they carbon date some stuff, they examine bone structure, apply genetic theories, and presto, tell you what they think happened (e.g. "A fast predator was introduced, and the gene pool gradually promoted bigger legs in the prey so they could run away"). So forensics are science-based, but not science. Same with archeology.
I just don't think it's productive to mix science with the effort to explain events. Science is used to explain events, but explaining events in and of itself isn't science. Explaining events is a perfectly valid persuit, and it works hand in hand with science (i.e. the advent of DNA as evidence of criminal activity).
...you've managed to exclude several branches of physics, including astro-physics...
Yup.
Maybe you don't mind people lying and spinning BS to kids...
You obviously missed the point of my post. I don't think that "Intelligent Design" should be passed off in schools, that's just stupid.
I was merely pointing out the flaws in evolutionary theory, which seems pretty weak to me, if it's any kind of theory at all.
It may be worthwhile to talk about evolution, and many concepts of evolution are based on scientific principles, but it's just not a theory in my opinion.
Science doesn't explain things. It doesn't even seek some kind of truth. It just makes predictions, and tests them.
Everyone immediately associates intelligent design with faith and evolution with science. But look at the scientific method:
1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.
3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.
4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.
I don't really think evolution fits the scientific method either. Evolution is probably correct, but it's mostly circular logic anyway. When I hear evolution I think to myself "Organisms which are better fit to live until reproductive age will be more likely to reproduce". That's not science, that's at best an observation.
If some species changes genetically over time, and it appears to be more fit, people point and say "evolution". But nobody can say ahead of time what will actually happen quantitatively. And if two scientists try to conduct and experiment, they will get different results.
Evolution explains the past. Science is about predicting the future.
I'm not religious, but it seems to me like the secular people are really reaching for a way to "disprove" religion. I think the whole thing is stupid because I don't think evolution should be taught as a theory either. It's reduced to circular logic and it doesn't have reproducible results; how is that a theory?
I don't think he's abusing his power. He's just getting rid of someone who he thinks won't operate in the public interest. Do you think it would be wrong if he didn't invite someone to the commission because they were an advocate of the Communist Party? I don't think that would be wrong at all.
Half of the country did not publicly donate to John Kerry's campaign. Most of the time, the president would have no way of knowing who someone voted for, but these people made it public.
So you saying, that if a party is elected (by what ever means) to power, it is OK for them to systemmaticlly remove any non-party members for all boards (FCC, FAA, DOE, DOD, etc.) and positions they feel like.
Yes, that is OK with me. Maybe if we had fewer government agencies it wouldn't even be an issue. Most of the time the president doesn't even know who you voted for, unless you start making campaign contributions. And you get what's coming to you if you make high-profile contributions to the opponent of your current boss.
What does 1984 have to do with this? I read it a while back, and I can't understand what reference you're making. It's not like he's firing people in the private sector. If it were up to me I would fire a hell of a lot more public sector people than just the Democrats.
Well, the President has the power to appoint who he wants to whatever commissions or conferences. If he disagrees with someone, it makes sense that he thinks the best thing for America is to get rid of them and appoint people he agrees with. After all, an appointment is pretty much a delegation of power, so it's supposed to be someone you agree with. What if they donated money to the Communist Party? I'd get rid of them in a second.
I'm at UCSD and I'm doing Electrical Engineering with software depth (very similar to CE, can be as close as one class away if the right electives are taken).
I really don't find the CS classes that time consuming. Challenging, yes, but the really don't take much at-home time for me, at least compared to classes with required reading and papers due. That was my point, but I suppose some people here find it much harder to get the work for CS done than papers. It all depends on the person.
As far as girls go, yeah, CS is really bad, and so is EE. But there are general ed classes and I don't think I'd want any more of those classes than I already have to take. And the ones I take do have mostly girls.
On the other hand, here in the state of Ohio they are actually projecting a shortfall of IT folks in the next eight years.
Any time you hear someone say "shortage" or "surplus" in a market economy, they are not talking sense. They are trying to manipulate the market for their own gain. In this case, the person that said there is a "shortfall" wants more IT folks at a lower price. Meanwhile, those of us who are in the field are saying that there are too many, because we want to be able to demand a higher price for our work.
Genuine interest? Heck, why major in the humanities or arts? Your prospects there are much worse, and I doubt those people really have more fun (heck, give me a proramming assignment over a 20-page paper any day).
Most of the problems pointed out should never hit the database engine and if they do, you get what you deserve.
What if you're programming application A, and application B has a bug and issues a strange query, producing inconsistent results? Application A will mysteriously fail and it will be very difficult to track down the bug because it's not in your application. Is that what you deserve?
The "application's fault" paradigm of MySQL only makes sense when a single application is accessing the database. And even then, having the application do consistency checking is very expensive in terms of performance and developer time. Plus, it's already been solved at the database level by every other RDBMS.
The GPL doesn't need to destroy for-pay software to be useful.
It should, and will, however, destroy the market for software that isn't very innovative. MS has been selling the same code for a long time, with just incremental improvements. It's not like each new release represents a triumph of research.
Innovation will happen in both the free and proprietary worlds for ever. If something has already been done though, it should eventually find a place in the free software world.
Just like in the rest of the economy: the old practices and products get standardized and commoditized, the new products are proprietary. Unfortunately in the software industry, the old products don't become commoditized fast enough.
state taking on the role of kingmaker in the industry
It already does. If you want to eliminate this, you need to reduce the scope of government so that government contracts don't make or break the leaders of every industry.
A better approach, IMO, is to say that the state will *not* do business with companies convicted of antitrust violations.
You would hope that that would be obvious. But it's not what's happening, and I think that's hypocrisy.
But it IS an option for the state. That was my point. The state isn't some helpless consumer. If the state stopped buying MS products, the monopoly would fall.
I'm sorry, but the "but it's slow" argument does not hold for most software designed today. Let's please get over it.
That's only if it's an interactive application with a reasonable response time. If a human is sitting in from of your app and your app is faster than the human, great.
However, that doesn't work for any underlying software. As processors get faster, software engineers are using increasing degrees of abstraction as a tool. If you're working on one of the lower layers, it better be fast, or else everything on top is going to compound the performance problems.
Operating systems have to be fast, file systems have to be fast, databases have to be fast, http servers have to be fast, web services servers (e.g. SOAP servers) have to be fast, code libraries have to be fast, interpreters have to be fast. Once all those things are fast, you can make the final, end-user app pretty slow and it will still be so fast the user won't know the difference.
However, even that can be a little deceptive. You have to avoid major algorithmic problems. You have to understand all the layers you're building on, otherwise you will misuse some abstracted library and it could perform much more poorly than you expect (even if you follow the documented spec). The more abstractions you rely upon, the easier it is to do that.
Oh yeah, and processors are not improving so much in serial processing as parallel processing. So if your algorithm can't be easily parallelized, you might have a problem even if you spend infinite money on processors.
So, performance will always matter to programmers unless they are really just designing an interface by clicking and dragging in VS.Net. Or maybe if projects stop becoming more complex, which is unlikely to happen.
I agree that the US shouldn't run trade deficits. I also agree that the Euro is a strong currency.
However, the US needs to address other major budget problems: primarily that the feds are spending way too much money. Without doing that, the US will economically fail. If they do address those problems, the US will continue to succeed exonomically. The trade deficit can help, but that issue will not solve the budget problems by itself.
Sound fiscal policy is impossible without massive overhaul of mandatory spending. In 2004, just Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid added up to 42% of total federal spending. SS alone is more than the entire DoD (and that's in 2004... a war year).
Bush cut taxes, but he failed to reduce spending. It's just out of control. Let's hope, for the country's sake, that he does a better job this time 'round.
The only real hope we have is that states stand up and say "no" to federal spending. I don't think citizens alone can do it any more through merely electing reps. The states need to take a stand and say "reduce spending, or we won't collect taxes for you in our state".
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The workplace does NOT regulate itself.
Huh? If the boss doesn't give him his check, he sues and wins very quickly. How would a union get it to him any faster?
This isn't about forcing anyone to do anything, it's about the government choosing to fund research.
That's EXACTLY what this argument is about. It's about the federal government of the United States forcing people to pay for embryonic stem cell research even if they are morally opposed to the practice.
You talk about the government choosing to spend the money as if the government was the one who earned it. The people earned it, their representatives outlawed the use of federal funds for that purpose, and the president signed it.
although I must admit I find the notion of allowing discrimination in the first place abhorrent
The problem is that it's hard to fairly legislate against discrimination. Let's follow a sequence of events:
(1) John happens to be a member of a minority group, and he's applying. You think you can get someone better, so you don't offer him a job. Instead, you wait for the right person to come along.
(2) Bill applies two weeks later, and he's about the same quality. You are tired of waiting so you offer him a job, and he accepts.
Now, to John that looks like discrimination, but the thought never crossed the employer's mind. It's unfair to punish the employer (in my opinion), but any anti-discrimination law would probably group him with the criminals because he can't prove that he wasn't discriminating.
In general, I think that anyone should have the freedom to choose not to give their money to someone else for any reason. They shouldn't have to give any reason at all; it's their money. If they choose to express their reason, that's their freedom of speech. And if it's a bad reason, everyone else can choose to dislike the employer.
The fact is, there's an art as much as a science to hiring people. If someone hints toward some kind of lazy practice during the interview ("So, does a hangover count as sick leave, by the way?"), you don't hire them. Or even if they show a hint of a communication problem and you don't think they will work effectively with the rest of your workforce (who you already know). It's impossible for the courts to sort all of this out in a fair, consistent way.
If someone really is discriminating, they will be punished by their competitors who can outperform them by not discriminating. If, for example, women made only 75% of what men do for the same productivity, why aren't there companies of only women, with only 75% of the labor costs, undercutting all the competition?
Let's say that I have some bacteria in a dish. It has survived for a million years under those conditions. Now, you introduce the bacteria to an altered environment, and you leave them that way for a million years. Assuming some survives, evolution says that the gene pool will have shifted to support the new conditions. OK, that's sort of a theory, but there are problems.
What if the gene pool really doesn't change much, and it's just that fewer bacteria will be alive in there at any one time? I suppose an evolutionist would say that it's a less hospitable environment or something, but that really doesn't explain why the theory failed. How long is this supposed to take? What environmental factors can the gene pool be expected to accomodate, and which ones are just less hospitable and cause a population decline?
So we have this "prediction". But the fact is, no matter what happens at all in any timeframe, an evolutionist could say "that's how the theory is supposed to work". A theory has to be disprovable also, if given a certain set of data. Let's go through the cases:
(1) The bacteria all die. Well, evolution can only work so fast.
(2) The bacteria become genetically different and flourish. That's some good evolving going on.
(3) The bacteria become genetically different and experience a population decline. Oh well, it's less hospitable.
(4) The bacteria don't become genetically different. You need to wait longer.
If you drop a book, and it flies upward, you just disproved gravity. How do you disprove evolution? What data would disprove it? A theory must be disprovable, or what are you supposed to be testing for?
Inteligent Design cannot make similar predictions
I don't think any reasonable scientist would contend that ID is a coherent, testable theory.
Forensics is a science: it uses scientific tests and principles to determine whether historical events happened, and to help piece together a story
Interesting that you used that example, I also associate evolution with forensics.
Forensics are based on science. They aren't testing a theory, they are applying already accepted theories and laws of science to determine what plausibly happened. Same with evolution: they carbon date some stuff, they examine bone structure, apply genetic theories, and presto, tell you what they think happened (e.g. "A fast predator was introduced, and the gene pool gradually promoted bigger legs in the prey so they could run away"). So forensics are science-based, but not science. Same with archeology.
I just don't think it's productive to mix science with the effort to explain events. Science is used to explain events, but explaining events in and of itself isn't science. Explaining events is a perfectly valid persuit, and it works hand in hand with science (i.e. the advent of DNA as evidence of criminal activity).
...you've managed to exclude several branches of physics, including astro-physics...
Yup.
Maybe you don't mind people lying and spinning BS to kids...
You obviously missed the point of my post. I don't think that "Intelligent Design" should be passed off in schools, that's just stupid.
I was merely pointing out the flaws in evolutionary theory, which seems pretty weak to me, if it's any kind of theory at all.
It may be worthwhile to talk about evolution, and many concepts of evolution are based on scientific principles, but it's just not a theory in my opinion.
Science doesn't explain things. It doesn't even seek some kind of truth. It just makes predictions, and tests them.
I don't really think evolution fits the scientific method either. Evolution is probably correct, but it's mostly circular logic anyway. When I hear evolution I think to myself "Organisms which are better fit to live until reproductive age will be more likely to reproduce". That's not science, that's at best an observation.
If some species changes genetically over time, and it appears to be more fit, people point and say "evolution". But nobody can say ahead of time what will actually happen quantitatively. And if two scientists try to conduct and experiment, they will get different results.
Evolution explains the past. Science is about predicting the future.
I'm not religious, but it seems to me like the secular people are really reaching for a way to "disprove" religion. I think the whole thing is stupid because I don't think evolution should be taught as a theory either. It's reduced to circular logic and it doesn't have reproducible results; how is that a theory?
And they still work for Nokia and Qualcomm... they just don't get to have special input in government proceedings.
I don't think he's abusing his power. He's just getting rid of someone who he thinks won't operate in the public interest. Do you think it would be wrong if he didn't invite someone to the commission because they were an advocate of the Communist Party? I don't think that would be wrong at all.
Half of the country did not publicly donate to John Kerry's campaign. Most of the time, the president would have no way of knowing who someone voted for, but these people made it public.
So you saying, that if a party is elected (by what ever means) to power, it is OK for them to systemmaticlly remove any non-party members for all boards (FCC, FAA, DOE, DOD, etc.) and positions they feel like.
Yes, that is OK with me. Maybe if we had fewer government agencies it wouldn't even be an issue. Most of the time the president doesn't even know who you voted for, unless you start making campaign contributions. And you get what's coming to you if you make high-profile contributions to the opponent of your current boss.
What does 1984 have to do with this? I read it a while back, and I can't understand what reference you're making. It's not like he's firing people in the private sector. If it were up to me I would fire a hell of a lot more public sector people than just the Democrats.
Well, the President has the power to appoint who he wants to whatever commissions or conferences. If he disagrees with someone, it makes sense that he thinks the best thing for America is to get rid of them and appoint people he agrees with. After all, an appointment is pretty much a delegation of power, so it's supposed to be someone you agree with. What if they donated money to the Communist Party? I'd get rid of them in a second.
The IATC is something that's basically a job of the Presidential administration; some kind of foreign negotiations.
What justification do you have that anti-Bush people should be represented in the Bush Administration?
Some argue that the world did not improve because of the existence of BK, that's the whole point.
Studying on a saturday night? Wow.
I'm at UCSD and I'm doing Electrical Engineering with software depth (very similar to CE, can be as close as one class away if the right electives are taken).
I really don't find the CS classes that time consuming. Challenging, yes, but the really don't take much at-home time for me, at least compared to classes with required reading and papers due. That was my point, but I suppose some people here find it much harder to get the work for CS done than papers. It all depends on the person.
As far as girls go, yeah, CS is really bad, and so is EE. But there are general ed classes and I don't think I'd want any more of those classes than I already have to take. And the ones I take do have mostly girls.
On the other hand, here in the state of Ohio they are actually projecting a shortfall of IT folks in the next eight years.
Any time you hear someone say "shortage" or "surplus" in a market economy, they are not talking sense. They are trying to manipulate the market for their own gain. In this case, the person that said there is a "shortfall" wants more IT folks at a lower price. Meanwhile, those of us who are in the field are saying that there are too many, because we want to be able to demand a higher price for our work.
Genuine interest? Heck, why major in the humanities or arts? Your prospects there are much worse, and I doubt those people really have more fun (heck, give me a proramming assignment over a 20-page paper any day).
Most of the problems pointed out should never hit the database engine and if they do, you get what you deserve.
What if you're programming application A, and application B has a bug and issues a strange query, producing inconsistent results? Application A will mysteriously fail and it will be very difficult to track down the bug because it's not in your application. Is that what you deserve?
The "application's fault" paradigm of MySQL only makes sense when a single application is accessing the database. And even then, having the application do consistency checking is very expensive in terms of performance and developer time. Plus, it's already been solved at the database level by every other RDBMS.
The GPL doesn't need to destroy for-pay software to be useful.
It should, and will, however, destroy the market for software that isn't very innovative. MS has been selling the same code for a long time, with just incremental improvements. It's not like each new release represents a triumph of research.
Innovation will happen in both the free and proprietary worlds for ever. If something has already been done though, it should eventually find a place in the free software world.
Just like in the rest of the economy: the old practices and products get standardized and commoditized, the new products are proprietary. Unfortunately in the software industry, the old products don't become commoditized fast enough.
state taking on the role of kingmaker in the industry
It already does. If you want to eliminate this, you need to reduce the scope of government so that government contracts don't make or break the leaders of every industry.
A better approach, IMO, is to say that the state will *not* do business with companies convicted of antitrust violations.
You would hope that that would be obvious. But it's not what's happening, and I think that's hypocrisy.
simply *not an option* for many of my customers
But it IS an option for the state. That was my point. The state isn't some helpless consumer. If the state stopped buying MS products, the monopoly would fall.
I'm sorry, but the "but it's slow" argument does not hold for most software designed today. Let's please get over it.
That's only if it's an interactive application with a reasonable response time. If a human is sitting in from of your app and your app is faster than the human, great.
However, that doesn't work for any underlying software. As processors get faster, software engineers are using increasing degrees of abstraction as a tool. If you're working on one of the lower layers, it better be fast, or else everything on top is going to compound the performance problems.
Operating systems have to be fast, file systems have to be fast, databases have to be fast, http servers have to be fast, web services servers (e.g. SOAP servers) have to be fast, code libraries have to be fast, interpreters have to be fast. Once all those things are fast, you can make the final, end-user app pretty slow and it will still be so fast the user won't know the difference.
However, even that can be a little deceptive. You have to avoid major algorithmic problems. You have to understand all the layers you're building on, otherwise you will misuse some abstracted library and it could perform much more poorly than you expect (even if you follow the documented spec). The more abstractions you rely upon, the easier it is to do that.
Oh yeah, and processors are not improving so much in serial processing as parallel processing. So if your algorithm can't be easily parallelized, you might have a problem even if you spend infinite money on processors.
So, performance will always matter to programmers unless they are really just designing an interface by clicking and dragging in VS.Net. Or maybe if projects stop becoming more complex, which is unlikely to happen.
I always thought you got more shallow as you got older. How do you know what to be shallow about when you're young?
I agree that the US shouldn't run trade deficits. I also agree that the Euro is a strong currency.
However, the US needs to address other major budget problems: primarily that the feds are spending way too much money. Without doing that, the US will economically fail. If they do address those problems, the US will continue to succeed exonomically. The trade deficit can help, but that issue will not solve the budget problems by itself.
Sound fiscal policy is impossible without massive overhaul of mandatory spending. In 2004, just Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid added up to 42% of total federal spending. SS alone is more than the entire DoD (and that's in 2004 ... a war year).
Bush cut taxes, but he failed to reduce spending. It's just out of control. Let's hope, for the country's sake, that he does a better job this time 'round.
The only real hope we have is that states stand up and say "no" to federal spending. I don't think citizens alone can do it any more through merely electing reps. The states need to take a stand and say "reduce spending, or we won't collect taxes for you in our state".