if you have to keep someone ignorant to keep them part of your culture then your culture is sick.
Conversely, when people willing choose to be part of a subculture, then that subculture tends to be a lot stronger that it would have been with coerced membership.
Unfortunately, a great deal of literature on politics fails to realize either point.
I don't think the Saudis or Chinese are blocking the Net just because they're afraid of "Friends" or "Entertainment Weekly."
I don't think they are censoring because they necessarily dislike the ideas they see. I think they censor because they want the power to define their society.
BTW, it is amazing the large amount of literature in the west about the need for the rulers to produce propaganda and to define public opinion. This is a basic tenet of the Straussians on the right and many liberal groups on the left. Much of Machiavelli's writings were about propaganda. The US is often held up as being one of the most successful propagandists in history. For example, the US defined Native Americans as savage, then created publicly popular attrocities against the disparged group.
Accepting the hacker mantality really destroys the ability of the propagandists to control...unless, of course, you create a mechanism to control the opinions of the hackers.
There's also a large number of groups that try to define the world on a global level. The Catholic Church can often be held up as an example of a universal authority.
There are many people who are trained to see the world in the form of power relations. I suspect that in the mind's eye of the clerics in Iran, acknowledging human rights is simply a transfer of power from the clerics to the Catholic Church and US. The acknowledgement of the individual doesn't even come into view as they would see individuals as the illusion.
New applications of an age old idea are still news. How many times has there been/. discussions about a program designed for UNIX or (gasp) MS, being ported to Linux or other open software? New implementations of existing ideas are still news.
People have known for a long time that animals and plants tend to concentrate minerals. Some good. Some bad.
Fish apparently are very good at concentrating mercury from the ocean. Fish that eat fish that eat fish become interesting little mobil chemical factories. This a good reason why estuaries and oceans aren't good places to dispose waste. The fish will concentrate the waste and give it back to us in tasty McFish sandwiches. For that matter, the food chain is pretty good at concentrating heavy metals in the belly of beasts. This has been known for quite a while.
The reason we need to clean up tailings piles is because humans are really good at concentrating chemicals.
One of the most interesting chemical/animal relations that I've heard of lately is that salmon bring up a great deal of nitrogen from the ocean. They fertilize the forests that provide the nutrients for baby salmon. Blocking the salmon run with damns decreases the value of the wood in the forest.
I am not sure why people are modding your post down. The post did a nice job of being an entry point into discussing the article without being flaimbait.
What gives us the right to do this? That we are stronger.
I think the article is touching on something slightly larger than American culture v. the world. They are touching on the fact that if you have a system where people have access to a global media, then you will end up losing a great deal of what you consider to be your own local culture. To prevent this from happening (i.e., to preserve your culture...) you have to curtail human rights. This is not quite an "our army is bigger than your army" issue. It is a little bit more of whether or not the "world culture" should dominate your local culture.
Accepting human rights pretty much takes the ability to completely define culture out of the hands of any given authority. If your belief system demands a general authority then the global culture will always be a horrible shock.
"It is impossible to prove anything" which cannot be proven true, because for it to be true, you must have proved something.
It is pretty much established that the reflexive paradox will come up in any complex system. The paradox has created a great deal angst for top thinkers like Goedel [sp], Cantor, Russell, etc..
Unfortunately, we keep building this paradox into the base of our systems of thought. I personally think the one thing Aristotle and Socrates did right was to acknowledge that their definitions were never really complete, and to procede from there. The systems built with the paradox as a central feature seem a bit mushy to me.
As I recall, Goedel's contribution was to show that the paradox will show up in any system sufficiently complex to include the whole numbers.
Different schools of law have different mascots. While the rat is common, there are other law schools sporting the vulture and many more sporting the shark...There is nothing a shark loves more than the tasty bite sized meaty morsels that come with sinking ships.
I imagine that there might also be politic battles over the generative power of the water that flows through the river near your property. Waterways are generally considered public throughways; so you probably have to go through a nasty political process to access to the river.
Come to think of it, if you wrapped copper wires around the lawyers that will get involved with the project, and hooked up a turbine...
Does a car have to be 21 before being allowed to burn alcohol ?
Why do you think it is taking so long for hybrid cars to hit to the market? They made a whole bunch in the late eighties. We are just waiting for them to be mature enough to burn the fuel we feed them.
From Article:
Lawyers who drum up business with direct mail argue that it gives people facing such charges as driving-while-intoxicated a much better way to get legal help than rifling through the yellow pages.
For the lawyers hawking services, you have the best chance of clinching the deal if you can get to the client before they sober up.
Those who are innocent will want lawyers who relentlessly pursue the truth. The rest need lawyers who know what people can get away with. In our oppositional based legal system, the demand for scummy lawyers will be equal or greater than honest lawyers.
I just hope the merger and acquisition department at SCO is keeping tabs on these valuable garbage intellectual property firms. Imagine if SCO (the owners of linux), IdeaFlood (who owns subdomains), that group that owns the patent to hyperlinks, and all the rest of the garbage IP claims got together...why, they could sue the world. Think of the value of the stock of that company!!!!
My attempts at gardening just shows I produce a lot of strange things I can't control. I side with life. If we get life up on Mars, it will do what my garden does...take on a life of its own.
Basically, the book provides fuel for your cause if one of your political enemies is in an extreme programming group.
You have to envision the management team as a group of pointy haired men who are being pushed forward and backward by their desires and fears. The hype of XP triggers the desire instinct. Cynicism triggers fear. You need to trigger desire or fear depending on your objective. If you do it right, money falls out of the company's pocket.
As for success of IT projects goes, I realized that the most difficult obstacles to overcome are political. Every project has supporters and detractors. Surrounding every project is a hum of buzz words as the political players line up to claim the success or declare defeat.
Back to the book. In order to acheive a political objective, a pointy haired boss must look at the world from a higher meta level. XP, UML and other design philosophies are all paradigms. The pointy haired boss shifts the paradigm according to need. They do this by dropping the right buzz word or casting a disparagement. Paradigm shifting is largely a political task, and politics is divorced from reality. In reality, a large number of IT programs will fail. They will fail for a variety of reasons. Often it is market timing. Some projects were over designed, some were a bad idea. Sometimes the programmer weren't up to the challenge.
Success and failure are not predictible. The politicos in the company need a language that can help them navigate the fallout of disasters while taking claim for successes. That means there is big need for books that provide different examples of arguments to help in the blame laying and success claiming climb up that long shiny silver corporate ladder.
First, I agree that I am stupid. All the post said that different systems have different views as to whether our not the sequence 9/10 + 9/100 + 9/1000 + 9/10000... equals 1. Each item in the sequence is 1 - 1/10^n. Summing the sequence is just a way of restating the question of whether 1/10^n where n approaches and or equals infinite is 0.
There is also differing opinions as to whether or not ellipses means a completed infinity or just an unbound sequence. For that matter you are the first person I have heard claiming that it only means completed infinities. If I were to make the list "Washington, Adams, Jefferson..." most would take that to mean reference to the presidents to the US. They would neither enfer that there is an infinite number of presidents or that the list of presidents is actually complete.
An infinite decimal is simply a sequence. As for the 1/infinity thing, if you take it to mean that 1/x where x approaches infinity, then it is traditional calculus, the stuff tossed asside by Cantorians.
Conclusion, you are intelligent, I am stupid. I accepted my fate long ago.
The answer to the question in this thread is unknown. It is the same question as proving 1/infinity = 0.
In EAM, DFW subtly conceded this point. He mentioned that if you accepted infinitesmal (currently, there are many mathematicians who hold that infinitesmal calculus is consistent) then the answer is a no. 0.99999... != 1. They differ by an infinitesmal. If you hold to the traditional pre-Cantorian view, you are likely to say that 0.99999... approaches 1 but stop before assigning equality.
My personal view is that 0.999... and 1 have essentially the same value, but that 0.999... contains different information than 1. For example 0.9999.... does not belong in the set of numbers that begin with a 1.
In other words, there are equally valid mathematical models which have different answers to this question. There is no way to prove either the view that they are or are not equal.
The thing I most like about the trilogy was the source of the magic. If you knew the true name of something, you could control it. In ancient times, magicians knew the true names of everything, but through their own arrogance the ancients destroyed themselves and the knowledge was lost.
Written before computers, the premise is akin to "some one lost the friggin' owners manual!"
Those that could figure out the API for the MUD would become magicians.
I got the same message. Of course, as the city I live in can be accurately described as a "temporary error", it took me awhile to figure out that the message meant there was a problem at Google.
I pretty much hold with the crowd that predicts massive volcanic eruptions, shifting of plates, the erosion of entire mountain ranges, massive glaciation, massive floods...big canyons being carved in deserts, cities sinking under the ocean, deserts turning to forests, forests turning to desert and every single thing you can imagine.
The sad thing is that I only get to live a human life span and will miss most of it.
BTW, there is a hot spot under Yellowstone and big cinder cones and a lot of lave flows in Idaho. I think there is a better than average changes of some major event in a short geological time frame.
Wikipedia is a great place to find out the current popular interpretations of history and other subjects. They've done a great job at SEO and are likely to become the most influential single source of information on the net on most topics. I notice Wikipedia shows up on the first page for most of my internet searches these days. It is a bit scary having one source that is that influential.
Of course, one of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can read the editing history of the items, and see the political battles raging as different groups try to promote their versions of history.
As for the rest of the net. The majority of pages are opinion pieces. Since the search engines judge sites by link popularity, provocative opinion pieces often get a better billing than factual pieces--more people link to provocative sites than to facts.
The good thing about the old encyclopedias is that it is easy to guess the publishers point of view, making it easier to filter the facts from intepretation.
Hmmm, I seem to have purchased several computers in my days that turned out to be disposable. I don't think this is a new idea. Of course, each time I bought a new machine (8088, 286, 386...) I thought it was the bees knees that would never be replaced. The only new thing would be pricing them at a level that didn't make buying a new machine extremely painful. Also admitting a limited lifecycle upfront is a new idea.
Of course, on the battle front, there is a large number of computers that only get to live for a few moments before going out in a blaze of glory.
I think the DVD industry realizes that too many obstacles between the viewer and the movie will cause widescale hacking of the firmware. As mentioned in another thread, altough DVD companies have the ability to force people to watch a commercial at the beginning of each movie, many are opting out of this temptation. The last DVDs I've watched did not have forced previews or other commercials. My bet isn't on the movie industry playing fair with the public, but miracles happen. My guess is that the advertisers who pay for product placement in the movies are upset at those that pay for product placement on the DVDs. I can't see Hollywood ever doing anything that isn't set against the consumer.
IANAL. Anyway, the article is about a bill, not a court case. Legislation can change rulings by changing the law. So your question depends on which court and which laws this ruling came from. If it is just an interpretation of the Federal Copyright law, then a bill past by Congress should override the previous ruling. If it was actually an interpretation of the Constitution, then after passing the bill, there will probably be a Constitutional challenge. The Constitution says:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
This does not preclude lists of facts. Was the ruling you cited from the Supreme Court, and what law did it reference?
You are forgetting the one law that stands above all other laws: Lawyers can damn well do what they please. Copyright laws pretty much don't apply for court evidence. I could not use the copyright law to dismiss the outline I wrote out for my diabolical scheme, even though I paid the $30 to file it with the copyright office.
I doubt this legislation would affect the information in the court (it might affect the ability of people to publish information about the hearing, but not in the court itself), the copyright law would mean that you would have to pay copyright holders of the data you need to prove you are innocent, providing another income opportunities for LAWYERS!!!!!
Corporations will squeeze every last damn cent they can out of anyone.
With the current 7 trillion dollar deficit, I suspect that the US administration will side on any legislation that cause taxable economic exchanges without considering what is right or best.
I think folks in the US government are finally waking up to the realization that the productivity gains from technology reduction in price (deflation) rather than as more economic activity. So they are looking at ways to try and create more transactions.
The problem with this type of meddling is that these billions of transactions for phone numbers, basic facts, etc.., will have the result of transferring even more wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich. Deflation distributes the gains a bit more evenly, but erodes the tax base--bad news for a government with monstrous debts.
Slashdot Mirror
Conversely, when people willing choose to be part of a subculture, then that subculture tends to be a lot stronger that it would have been with coerced membership.
Unfortunately, a great deal of literature on politics fails to realize either point.
I don't think they are censoring because they necessarily dislike the ideas they see. I think they censor because they want the power to define their society.
BTW, it is amazing the large amount of literature in the west about the need for the rulers to produce propaganda and to define public opinion. This is a basic tenet of the Straussians on the right and many liberal groups on the left. Much of Machiavelli's writings were about propaganda. The US is often held up as being one of the most successful propagandists in history. For example, the US defined Native Americans as savage, then created publicly popular attrocities against the disparged group.
Accepting the hacker mantality really destroys the ability of the propagandists to control...unless, of course, you create a mechanism to control the opinions of the hackers.
There's also a large number of groups that try to define the world on a global level. The Catholic Church can often be held up as an example of a universal authority.
There are many people who are trained to see the world in the form of power relations. I suspect that in the mind's eye of the clerics in Iran, acknowledging human rights is simply a transfer of power from the clerics to the Catholic Church and US. The acknowledgement of the individual doesn't even come into view as they would see individuals as the illusion.
New applications of an age old idea are still news. How many times has there been /. discussions about a program designed for UNIX or (gasp) MS, being ported to Linux or other open software? New implementations of existing ideas are still news.
People have known for a long time that animals and plants tend to concentrate minerals. Some good. Some bad.
Fish apparently are very good at concentrating mercury from the ocean. Fish that eat fish that eat fish become interesting little mobil chemical factories. This a good reason why estuaries and oceans aren't good places to dispose waste. The fish will concentrate the waste and give it back to us in tasty McFish sandwiches. For that matter, the food chain is pretty good at concentrating heavy metals in the belly of beasts. This has been known for quite a while.
The reason we need to clean up tailings piles is because humans are really good at concentrating chemicals.
One of the most interesting chemical/animal relations that I've heard of lately is that salmon bring up a great deal of nitrogen from the ocean. They fertilize the forests that provide the nutrients for baby salmon. Blocking the salmon run with damns decreases the value of the wood in the forest.
I am not sure why people are modding your post down. The post did a nice job of being an entry point into discussing the article without being flaimbait.
I think the article is touching on something slightly larger than American culture v. the world. They are touching on the fact that if you have a system where people have access to a global media, then you will end up losing a great deal of what you consider to be your own local culture. To prevent this from happening (i.e., to preserve your culture...) you have to curtail human rights. This is not quite an "our army is bigger than your army" issue. It is a little bit more of whether or not the "world culture" should dominate your local culture.
Accepting human rights pretty much takes the ability to completely define culture out of the hands of any given authority. If your belief system demands a general authority then the global culture will always be a horrible shock.
It is pretty much established that the reflexive paradox will come up in any complex system. The paradox has created a great deal angst for top thinkers like Goedel [sp], Cantor, Russell, etc..
Unfortunately, we keep building this paradox into the base of our systems of thought. I personally think the one thing Aristotle and Socrates did right was to acknowledge that their definitions were never really complete, and to procede from there. The systems built with the paradox as a central feature seem a bit mushy to me.
As I recall, Goedel's contribution was to show that the paradox will show up in any system sufficiently complex to include the whole numbers.
I imagine that there might also be politic battles over the generative power of the water that flows through the river near your property. Waterways are generally considered public throughways; so you probably have to go through a nasty political process to access to the river.
Come to think of it, if you wrapped copper wires around the lawyers that will get involved with the project, and hooked up a turbine...
Why do you think it is taking so long for hybrid cars to hit to the market? They made a whole bunch in the late eighties. We are just waiting for them to be mature enough to burn the fuel we feed them.
is a car that drives by burning alcohol driving under the influence?
For the lawyers hawking services, you have the best chance of clinching the deal if you can get to the client before they sober up.
Those who are innocent will want lawyers who relentlessly pursue the truth. The rest need lawyers who know what people can get away with. In our oppositional based legal system, the demand for scummy lawyers will be equal or greater than honest lawyers.
I just hope the merger and acquisition department at SCO is keeping tabs on these valuable garbage intellectual property firms. Imagine if SCO (the owners of linux), IdeaFlood (who owns subdomains), that group that owns the patent to hyperlinks, and all the rest of the garbage IP claims got together...why, they could sue the world. Think of the value of the stock of that company!!!!
My attempts at gardening just shows I produce a lot of strange things I can't control. I side with life. If we get life up on Mars, it will do what my garden does...take on a life of its own.
Basically, the book provides fuel for your cause if one of your political enemies is in an extreme programming group.
You have to envision the management team as a group of pointy haired men who are being pushed forward and backward by their desires and fears. The hype of XP triggers the desire instinct. Cynicism triggers fear. You need to trigger desire or fear depending on your objective. If you do it right, money falls out of the company's pocket.
As for success of IT projects goes, I realized that the most difficult obstacles to overcome are political. Every project has supporters and detractors. Surrounding every project is a hum of buzz words as the political players line up to claim the success or declare defeat.
Back to the book. In order to acheive a political objective, a pointy haired boss must look at the world from a higher meta level. XP, UML and other design philosophies are all paradigms. The pointy haired boss shifts the paradigm according to need. They do this by dropping the right buzz word or casting a disparagement. Paradigm shifting is largely a political task, and politics is divorced from reality. In reality, a large number of IT programs will fail. They will fail for a variety of reasons. Often it is market timing. Some projects were over designed, some were a bad idea. Sometimes the programmer weren't up to the challenge.
Success and failure are not predictible. The politicos in the company need a language that can help them navigate the fallout of disasters while taking claim for successes. That means there is big need for books that provide different examples of arguments to help in the blame laying and success claiming climb up that long shiny silver corporate ladder.
First, I agree that I am stupid. All the post said that different systems have different views as to whether our not the sequence 9/10 + 9/100 + 9/1000 + 9/10000 ... equals 1. Each item in the sequence is 1 - 1/10^n. Summing the sequence is just a way of restating the question of whether 1/10^n where n approaches and or equals infinite is 0.
..." most would take that to mean reference to the presidents to the US. They would neither enfer that there is an infinite number of presidents or that the list of presidents is actually complete.
There is also differing opinions as to whether or not ellipses means a completed infinity or just an unbound sequence. For that matter you are the first person I have heard claiming that it only means completed infinities. If I were to make the list "Washington, Adams, Jefferson
An infinite decimal is simply a sequence. As for the 1/infinity thing, if you take it to mean that 1/x where x approaches infinity, then it is traditional calculus, the stuff tossed asside by Cantorians.
Conclusion, you are intelligent, I am stupid. I accepted my fate long ago.
The answer to the question in this thread is unknown. It is the same question as proving 1/infinity = 0.
In EAM, DFW subtly conceded this point. He mentioned that if you accepted infinitesmal (currently, there are many mathematicians who hold that infinitesmal calculus is consistent) then the answer is a no. 0.99999... != 1. They differ by an infinitesmal. If you hold to the traditional pre-Cantorian view, you are likely to say that 0.99999... approaches 1 but stop before assigning equality.
My personal view is that 0.999... and 1 have essentially the same value, but that 0.999... contains different information than 1. For example 0.9999.... does not belong in the set of numbers that begin with a 1.
In other words, there are equally valid mathematical models which have different answers to this question. There is no way to prove either the view that they are or are not equal.
The thing I most like about the trilogy was the source of the magic. If you knew the true name of something, you could control it. In ancient times, magicians knew the true names of everything, but through their own arrogance the ancients destroyed themselves and the knowledge was lost.
Written before computers, the premise is akin to "some one lost the friggin' owners manual!"
Those that could figure out the API for the MUD would become magicians.
I got the same message. Of course, as the city I live in can be accurately described as a "temporary error", it took me awhile to figure out that the message meant there was a problem at Google.
I pretty much hold with the crowd that predicts massive volcanic eruptions, shifting of plates, the erosion of entire mountain ranges, massive glaciation, massive floods...big canyons being carved in deserts, cities sinking under the ocean, deserts turning to forests, forests turning to desert and every single thing you can imagine.
The sad thing is that I only get to live a human life span and will miss most of it.
BTW, there is a hot spot under Yellowstone and big cinder cones and a lot of lave flows in Idaho. I think there is a better than average changes of some major event in a short geological time frame.
Wikipedia is a great place to find out the current popular interpretations of history and other subjects. They've done a great job at SEO and are likely to become the most influential single source of information on the net on most topics. I notice Wikipedia shows up on the first page for most of my internet searches these days. It is a bit scary having one source that is that influential.
Of course, one of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can read the editing history of the items, and see the political battles raging as different groups try to promote their versions of history.
As for the rest of the net. The majority of pages are opinion pieces. Since the search engines judge sites by link popularity, provocative opinion pieces often get a better billing than factual pieces--more people link to provocative sites than to facts.
The good thing about the old encyclopedias is that it is easy to guess the publishers point of view, making it easier to filter the facts from intepretation.
Hmmm, I seem to have purchased several computers in my days that turned out to be disposable. I don't think this is a new idea. Of course, each time I bought a new machine (8088, 286, 386 ...) I thought it was the bees knees that would never be replaced. The only new thing would be pricing them at a level that didn't make buying a new machine extremely painful. Also admitting a limited lifecycle upfront is a new idea.
Of course, on the battle front, there is a large number of computers that only get to live for a few moments before going out in a blaze of glory.
I think the DVD industry realizes that too many obstacles between the viewer and the movie will cause widescale hacking of the firmware. As mentioned in another thread, altough DVD companies have the ability to force people to watch a commercial at the beginning of each movie, many are opting out of this temptation. The last DVDs I've watched did not have forced previews or other commercials. My bet isn't on the movie industry playing fair with the public, but miracles happen. My guess is that the advertisers who pay for product placement in the movies are upset at those that pay for product placement on the DVDs. I can't see Hollywood ever doing anything that isn't set against the consumer.
IANAL. Anyway, the article is about a bill, not a court case. Legislation can change rulings by changing the law. So your question depends on which court and which laws this ruling came from. If it is just an interpretation of the Federal Copyright law, then a bill past by Congress should override the previous ruling. If it was actually an interpretation of the Constitution, then after passing the bill, there will probably be a Constitutional challenge. The Constitution says:
This does not preclude lists of facts. Was the ruling you cited from the Supreme Court, and what law did it reference?
Required: IANAL
You are forgetting the one law that stands above all other laws: Lawyers can damn well do what they please. Copyright laws pretty much don't apply for court evidence. I could not use the copyright law to dismiss the outline I wrote out for my diabolical scheme, even though I paid the $30 to file it with the copyright office.
I doubt this legislation would affect the information in the court (it might affect the ability of people to publish information about the hearing, but not in the court itself), the copyright law would mean that you would have to pay copyright holders of the data you need to prove you are innocent, providing another income opportunities for LAWYERS!!!!!
With the current 7 trillion dollar deficit, I suspect that the US administration will side on any legislation that cause taxable economic exchanges without considering what is right or best.
I think folks in the US government are finally waking up to the realization that the productivity gains from technology reduction in price (deflation) rather than as more economic activity. So they are looking at ways to try and create more transactions.
The problem with this type of meddling is that these billions of transactions for phone numbers, basic facts, etc.., will have the result of transferring even more wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich. Deflation distributes the gains a bit more evenly, but erodes the tax base--bad news for a government with monstrous debts.