...that instant voting on any/all issues, would be A Bad Thing
Instant voting would be a bad thing. That's why the system would never be set up to offer up policies in the morning for vote in the afternoon. There would be process, just like currently there is. There would be mandatory time periods for discussion and review. There would be research committees that would research issues and submit their results... etc. None would be totally unbiased - the facts of humanity aren't going to change! But, everyone would have opportunities for rebuttal and mind changing. Time for emotions to settle.
Someone stomped on this by pointing out crooked politicians. Sure, they exist. However, one must recognize that these crooked politicians were infact elected by the people some want to give the instant vote too. They didn't just step out of the void, and they weren't handed their position at birth. Someone decided to vote for them, the majority of someone's actually
Sounds like you're arguing that the source of corruption comes from the people anyway, so direct democracy wouldn't help. I would suggest that this alone is not an argument against direct democracy. If the source of corruption truly is the people, than nothing will change. If it's not, then things would be improved.
You might also be arguing that this proves that people make poor decisions as a voting whole, and you feel better that power is left to the few who get elected who most likely know more about what is going on than you or me. But then I say, how often do we see arguments here at Slashdot about how clueless gov't officials are on matters we know about (cryptography, for example). How often is it really, that those in congress are the most knowledgeable? Virtually never, IMO, by the very nature of their job. On average, they know a hell of lot more than me. But they know less than the public as a whole.
Ok, but that knowledge is hopelessy dilulted, right? It's never going to show through. But then, witness this Jane's Intelligence Review thing about security. How many of the thousands at Slashdot really know that much about computer security? Yet mostly good stuff showed through anyway (notice, I'm not arguing "the best" showed through).
I think the theory deserves to be put to the test. I'd like my assertions to be tested out somehow.
Additionally, I think that voting for a person vs. voting on a bill are very different animals. In one, you have to vote for someone. In the other, you can always simply vote "no".
Think Lobbiests are bad now? What happens when coporations don't need them, and take clever intuitive multi-million dollar marketing campaigns aimed at making policy directly to the people
You are right here, I think. Special interests would start lobbying the people directly, through television ads. Of course, they do already, though maybe the impact of that is minimalized because of the buffering system we have in place. But I'll argue that it's still better. Right now, someone is lobbying your congressman. There's money behind that lobbyist. Funding your congressman's campaign. How well informed are we of this lobbying and funding? If it were all out in the open, we could all see it, and at least have a chance to fight it - either through rational discussion, or ads on TV of our own. The number of "lobbyists" would increase dramatically, which is to say, more people would get a voice, which I think is good.
Also, ads could be barred from the internet site(s) that ran the discussion and voting. Personally, I would be in favor of banning images at these sites. TV political ads could be banned just as smoking ads are, though this would be hard to truly enforce.
It won't abolish political parties either
No, it wouldn't. We'd probably end up with more of them. Again, all good, IMO. 3 choices is better than 2.
They'll look to these charasmatic leaders for a quick summary or break down
Yes, absolutely. They'll probably also assign their votes on many issues to others. No different than now really, except we get a LOT more choices. Again, good IMO.
These will be virtual legislatues with NO CHECKS OR BALANCES
Checks and balances such as...? It would only be the legislative branch, just as congress currently is, subject to the same checks and balances as we have now. Each member gets only one vote. I'm not sure what checks and balances it would be lacking?
Something else that is seemingly ignored, is network intrusion
Entirely valid. No such system can be put into place until the technical issues are resolved. For the sake of argument, let's just say they can be resolved.
Yes, I did. But I wanted a response to my reasoning. Someone said electronic democracy wouldn't work because immediate votes after an emotional event would bad. I agree. I went on point out that that doesn't invalidate electronic democracy, it only means we need processes in place to protect against that, just as we do now.
I call it a straw man because it sets up electronic democracy in a less than ideal fashion in order to make knocking it down easier. I'm trying to put up a stronger target for you to argue against.
As for the original post, here is the section I believe you're referring to:
All elections are tabulated digitally. The fractious, fragmented, eternally unresolvable two-party political-media system on display on Washington-based talk shows daily is gradually replaced by online discussions, research and information-sharing and instant voting that actually resolves issues by majority rule. Washington, like Bonn, is re-engineered from a national capitol to a hi-tech enclave.
That says on-line discussions, research and information sharing - which suggests time spent on issues prior to voting - and then says "instant voting", which is either a poorly chosen phrase to mean electronic voting, or simply that Jon hasn't thought it all through yet.
I'm interested in real reasons why you think electronic democracy would be bad. I've pointed out that the immediacy argument is a straw man. If you disagree with that, please cite your reasons in 250 words or less;-) (just kidding!)
And I also believe mob behavior is in large part a physical phenomenon, and wouldn't have much parallel in the digital world. Are we reading the same slashdot?
We are not. But from your experiences, what about Slashdot has constituted mob behavior? And what has made this a scary experience for you? Perhaps you've been moderated down unfairly? I know I feel I have on once occasion. But that wasn't mob behavior - that was the action of a single moderator.
Perhaps you've felt attacked by me? I'm sorry. I didn't mean too. I don't think I've launched any ad hominem attacks, but I could be wrong. But you've also had your defender's, or at least those who agreed with you, and not me. Vice-versa as well, which seems to contradict the mob theory. What makes a mob scary is when it goes in the same direction.
And the/. effect? Bringing down web-sites as viewers "stampede" through posted links? To quote a Stephenson character - It's a metaphor. And a poor one at that. No one is being trampled. Sites go down, they come back up. We come back here and talk about it, and have surprisingly rational discussions.
Maybe you need to define mob behaior for me, cause I'm not really seeing it.
Singer says a lot of things. More than just that parents should be allowed to kill their children. I was trying to see the whole of his arguments and put them in a context that made sense to me. If the man only said what you mention, we wouldn't find him interesting enough to talk about here.
By the way, what I think is relevant - to you and me at least.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes, to all you say here (except that majority = mob).
This is all true in representative and direct. I am arguing that I seem incremental improvement on most these issues in direct democracy. I do not think direct = mob. You are saying that any sufficiently large group of people behaves like a mob at all times. I would argue that mob behavior never happens unless there is a single point of focus for that mob - an instigator.
And I also believe mob behavior is in large part a physical phenomenon, and wouldn't have much parallel in the digital world.
The harder the question, the fewer people who actually know the answer, thus the more diluted the effect. I'm sure there comes a point where the effect is so diluted as to be insignificant.
As far as there not being a right answer - sometimes and sometimes not. There are many here who seem to fear very much that there IS a right answer, and that the masses will get it wrong, but whereas their elected official will get it right. I don't pretend to understand their logic, but it's all over these postings.
And when the issue is too muddled to know if there is a right answer, I guess it comes down to which group you have more confidence in, on an emotional level.
This is the immediacy argument. It's a straw man. Who said electronic democracy meant immediate and final votes? That's a question of how the system is set up, with time periods, processes, etc. I would imagine any issue up for vote would have a minimum time period required spent on public discussion and research, etc.
Any criteria you put on citizenship will become a dominant focusing mechanism on the voters.
What do I mean by focusing mechanism? Well, if you are going to predict a outcome of a vote from a large number of individuals, you might try to determine what similarities all those voters have in the context of what they're voting about. The similarites you pick out are what I call focusing mechanisms.
To take another step back - if every voter is completely dissimilar from every other voter, you might say you'd get a perfectly random distribution of votes on any subject. If you define a similarity in two voters, than you might expect all votes to be random except those two, who will vote effectively as a block, and thus perturb the otherwise randomness of the votes. Get a block of 100, and they effectively rule.
I hope that explains what I mean by a focusing mechanism. If every citizen is required to have served in the military, that's a profound focus. It's not just a block of would-be voters - it's all of them. Other voices don't even get heard, regardless of their validity.
I think any criteria you choose would create an undesirably powerful focusing mechanism. Currently, money is the primary such mechanism, I think.
you're example of "you must submit N righteous patches to be granted cvs access" suggests that those without citizenship were allowed to submit patches, in the first place. If you want to use the Open Source movement as an example, are their people that aren't allowed to write Open Source Code? Do you need a degree? No, you need the desire and that's it. Anyone who wants to can start writing the next Linux. Notice how nobody particulary fears that all the unwashed masses will stupidly start installing this new, untested Linux blindly.
So only those who had been brainwa...er, I mean trained by the military would be allowed to vote. Super!
Reminds me of someone's idea that we only allow an ex-military person who had served in a war to be president (after all, the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces). Naturally, this leads to a situation where we are in need of war at least once every 50 years, and the person at the top of the decision tree is best able to solve problems with military solutions.....
-- Never heard a Heinlein "solution" that made sense beyond it's instant soundbite value --
It seems reasonable to think that a direct democracy would require absurd levels of education about the issues in order to get good results, but I don't think it's true.
Have you ever watched "Who Wants to be a Millionaire"? (or something like that). Here's the basic premise: You have to answer multiple choice questions. Answer enough, and you get a million dollars. On your way to answering enough, you have 3 "help" options. One of them is that you can have the audience answer the question. The audience is NEVER wrong (at least, that's what Regis said - he was the moderator for the show, and I never witnessed the audience being wrong). I use the following reasoning to explain this:
There will be people who know the answer, and those that don't. Those that don't will spread their answers fairly evenly about. Those that know, will all agree, so when the votes are tabulated, the correct one gets the highest percentage.
The application of this reasoning to direct democracy suggests that not everyone needs to understand every issue fully. Not everyone needs to be a genius for it to work. The votes will ultimately get weighed in favor of those solutions that research and intelligence most often point to, simply because that is the only focusing mechanism of votes.
With a republic, we have many focusing mechanisms, such as money, lobbying interests, corruption, partisanship, and the above mentioned "well-researched, intelligence" mechanism.
I would argue that eliminating the other non-ideal focusing mechanisms would be a good thing.
Notice that this does not mean we don't need full time Legislation. Yes, someone needs to be knowledgable enough to write the laws, to submit proposals for voting, etc. But, with direct democracy, those that want to spend this time, can. Those that don't, won't, and that's Ok - it's not necessary.
It seems very unlikely that Singer wants this institutionalized. I think he's just trying to make some points, and make us think.
What I think his goals are: 1. To get us to stop thinking of ourselves (ie humans) as special, in some holy, spiritual way. 2. To get people to see the suffering we cause animals because we don't view their pain as valid. 3. To see that some humans are in states that are no more, and sometimes less "humanlike" than the state some animals are in. 4. To get people to think about the unseen poor with the same empathy that we apply to our children, even to our non-existent children.
He doesn't want to legalize infanticide. He doesn't even think it's necessary. He wants to change how we think about these issues, so that we can start making more rational ethical decisions in other areas.
Which just goes to show - passing the turing test is probably mostly a question of cues other than the conversational logic. If a beautiful woman came on to you and kept saying "we were talking about you, not me" over and over, you probably wouldn't say, "gee, that's a poorly written computer program".
A lot of people complain about Java because it's Run Everywhere theory isn't overly useful to them. They get pretty good portability from C, and why would they want to give up the processing speed for a questionable advantage?
But I see a lot of people here saying that AMD's "compromise" will succeed cause it won't force developers to port everything all at once. It'll save a lot of work, so it'll succeed over Merced. Some also bemoan that this means a lesser quality chip will win. A drastic change in architecture is too risky, they say.
But, Java is also portable to anything new that comes along, so an advantage of the VM architecture is there isn't as much reason to fear drastic innovation in the underlying hardware. This is major, IMO. My code will work anywhere, once someone ports the VM to it. A single port, and everyone's code is brought to the new hardware. This is why many people argue that the greater flexibility of the VM architecture is worth the relatively minor performance hit and even the larger memory hit.
It seems to me they've demonstrated the ability to do something current "good" systems can't do - recognize words within a white noise environment. That's what they're excited about.
I don't think he makes nuclear power sound inherently evil, I think he makes it sound inherenty scary. And who would argue that it isn't scary? Only someone with an agenda.
Oil, contrary to what many like to think, is not likely to run out in 200 years. I'm all for alternatives, but running out is not a concern. Coal will simply never run out. It's disgusting, so we don't use it as much as we used to. Someday we'll probably think the same about oil.
Hydro - I'm pretty much in agreement.
Solar/wind - Solar could be extremely effective. It's not economical at this time, though. But I'm confident that will change.
Nuclear -/Possible/ accidents -> we all die very quickly! Compared to the other forms of dying you mention, in any case. And it's not clean either. why do you think they're building a massive radioactive waste dump in the desert in the southwest US? Cause nobody wants the stuff and it's causing problems. Typically, these wastes are disposed of in the poorest areas, cause they can't fight effectively against it. Rochester has a nuclear facility, but you can bet our waste is ending up in poor counties like Allegheny or Cortland (NYS I'm talking about).
It seems a bit hypocritical to espouse the virtues of something, but insist the bad parts get shovelled off into someone else's land.
Is it not feasable to utilize neuro-reactive chemicals to force faster synaptic responses, keep the "gates" between synapses open, and boost electric signal in the brain?
I cannot see any advantages in using Java (beside of attracting programmers that cannot handle pointers and dynamic allocation:)) )
Or programmers who simply don't want the hassle of doing so. Java is easier to program in, in many ways (in some ways it's harder, I agree). Easier to some people, particularly geeks, means not worth doing. Personally, I want to code mathematical algorithms. I don't want to deal with hardware issues - ever! I don't like getting down and dirty with file formats, video display programming, etc... So, Java is perfect for me.
....that humans are thinking creatures. You refer to the human brain as a machine - you are dead right.
Humans don't "think" the way we usually mean it. Our brains associate endlessly. "A" gets associated with "B" (goth-violence,gun-death,christian-zealot, etc). The associations your brain makes are completely governed by it's own experiences. How many of us argue based on personal experience? Extrapolate single incidents/stories to everything? The answer is every single one of us.
We're doing it with Columbine. We WILL extrapolate it, and it will be completely illogical. People who are defenders of gun rights do so not because of logical argument, but only because that's where they've come from, that's how their brain has associated things, and that's how the world looks to them now. Ditto for those against gun laws.
How else do you explain that devout Christians are usually Replublicans, and support gun rights, are pro death penalty? Makes no sense, it's just an association of random things that happened to go together frequently. Jarts are bad, guns are good. Liberal democrats aren't any better. NO ONE is any better, because we are all machines. If you happen to make more sense than most, feel lucky your machine developed in a more reasonable environment.
And before you go and say people don't all fit into these categories - I know that. But everyone has they're own set of bizarre associations. I just picked some examples that most can see. Pick any person you want and you'll find contradications and illogic in their beliefs and values. They'll philosophize really bizarrely to explain it too. The smart ones realize that they're beliefs are contradictory and irrational, like Paul here.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you're arguing that the source of corruption comes from the people anyway, so direct democracy wouldn't help. I would suggest that this alone is not an argument against direct democracy. If the source of corruption truly is the people, than nothing will change. If it's not, then things would be improved.
You might also be arguing that this proves that people make poor decisions as a voting whole, and you feel better that power is left to the few who get elected who most likely know more about what is going on than you or me. But then I say, how often do we see arguments here at Slashdot about how clueless gov't officials are on matters we know about (cryptography, for example). How often is it really, that those in congress are the most knowledgeable? Virtually never, IMO, by the very nature of their job. On average, they know a hell of lot more than me. But they know less than the public as a whole.
Ok, but that knowledge is hopelessy dilulted, right? It's never going to show through. But then, witness this Jane's Intelligence Review thing about security. How many of the thousands at Slashdot really know that much about computer security? Yet mostly good stuff showed through anyway (notice, I'm not arguing "the best" showed through).
I think the theory deserves to be put to the test. I'd like my assertions to be tested out somehow.
Additionally, I think that voting for a person vs. voting on a bill are very different animals. In one, you have to vote for someone. In the other, you can always simply vote "no".
You are right here, I think. Special interests would start lobbying the people directly, through television ads. Of course, they do already, though maybe the impact of that is minimalized because of the buffering system we have in place. But I'll argue that it's still better. Right now, someone is lobbying your congressman. There's money behind that lobbyist. Funding your congressman's campaign. How well informed are we of this lobbying and funding? If it were all out in the open, we could all see it, and at least have a chance to fight it - either through rational discussion, or ads on TV of our own. The number of "lobbyists" would increase dramatically, which is to say, more people would get a voice, which I think is good.
Also, ads could be barred from the internet site(s) that ran the discussion and voting. Personally, I would be in favor of banning images at these sites. TV political ads could be banned just as smoking ads are, though this would be hard to truly enforce.
No, it wouldn't. We'd probably end up with more of them. Again, all good, IMO. 3 choices is better than 2.
Yes, absolutely. They'll probably also assign their votes on many issues to others. No different than now really, except we get a LOT more choices. Again, good IMO.
Checks and balances such as...? It would only be the legislative branch, just as congress currently is, subject to the same checks and balances as we have now. Each member gets only one vote. I'm not sure what checks and balances it would be lacking?
Entirely valid. No such system can be put into place until the technical issues are resolved. For the sake of argument, let's just say they can be resolved.
I call it a straw man because it sets up electronic democracy in a less than ideal fashion in order to make knocking it down easier. I'm trying to put up a stronger target for you to argue against.
As for the original post, here is the section I believe you're referring to:
That says on-line discussions, research and information sharing - which suggests time spent on issues prior to voting - and then says "instant voting", which is either a poorly chosen phrase to mean electronic voting, or simply that Jon hasn't thought it all through yet.
I'm interested in real reasons why you think electronic democracy would be bad. I've pointed out that the immediacy argument is a straw man. If you disagree with that, please cite your reasons in 250 words or less
We are not. But from your experiences, what about Slashdot has constituted mob behavior? And what has made this a scary experience for you? Perhaps you've been moderated down unfairly? I know I feel I have on once occasion. But that wasn't mob behavior - that was the action of a single moderator.
Perhaps you've felt attacked by me? I'm sorry. I didn't mean too. I don't think I've launched any ad hominem attacks, but I could be wrong. But you've also had your defender's, or at least those who agreed with you, and not me. Vice-versa as well, which seems to contradict the mob theory. What makes a mob scary is when it goes in the same direction.
And the
Maybe you need to define mob behaior for me, cause I'm not really seeing it.
Maybe you could make an argument here instead of just saying "no it's not". Why isn't it? Where do you disagree with my reasoning?
Singer says a lot of things. More than just that parents should be allowed to kill their children. I was trying to see the whole of his arguments and put them in a context that made sense to me. If the man only said what you mention, we wouldn't find him interesting enough to talk about here.
By the way, what I think is relevant - to you and me at least.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes, to all you say here (except that majority = mob).
This is all true in representative and direct. I am arguing that I seem incremental improvement on most these issues in direct democracy. I do not think direct = mob. You are saying that any sufficiently large group of people behaves like a mob at all times. I would argue that mob behavior never happens unless there is a single point of focus for that mob - an instigator.
And I also believe mob behavior is in large part a physical phenomenon, and wouldn't have much parallel in the digital world.
The harder the question, the fewer people who actually know the answer, thus the more diluted the effect. I'm sure there comes a point where the effect is so diluted as to be insignificant.
As far as there not being a right answer - sometimes and sometimes not. There are many here who seem to fear very much that there IS a right answer, and that the masses will get it wrong, but whereas their elected official will get it right. I don't pretend to understand their logic, but it's all over these postings.
And when the issue is too muddled to know if there is a right answer, I guess it comes down to which group you have more confidence in, on an emotional level.
This is the immediacy argument. It's a straw man. Who said electronic democracy meant immediate and final votes? That's a question of how the system is set up, with time periods, processes, etc. I would imagine any issue up for vote would have a minimum time period required spent on public discussion and research, etc.
Any criteria you put on citizenship will become a dominant focusing mechanism on the voters.
What do I mean by focusing mechanism? Well, if you are going to predict a outcome of a vote from a large number of individuals, you might try to determine what similarities all those voters have in the context of what they're voting about. The similarites you pick out are what I call focusing mechanisms.
To take another step back - if every voter is completely dissimilar from every other voter, you might say you'd get a perfectly random distribution of votes on any subject. If you define a similarity in two voters, than you might expect all votes to be random except those two, who will vote effectively as a block, and thus perturb the otherwise randomness of the votes. Get a block of 100, and they effectively rule.
I hope that explains what I mean by a focusing mechanism. If every citizen is required to have served in the military, that's a profound focus. It's not just a block of would-be voters - it's all of them. Other voices don't even get heard, regardless of their validity.
I think any criteria you choose would create an undesirably powerful focusing mechanism. Currently, money is the primary such mechanism, I think.
you're example of "you must submit N righteous patches to be granted cvs access" suggests that those without citizenship were allowed to submit patches, in the first place. If you want to use the Open Source movement as an example, are their people that aren't allowed to write Open Source Code? Do you need a degree? No, you need the desire and that's it. Anyone who wants to can start writing the next Linux. Notice how nobody particulary fears that all the unwashed masses will stupidly start installing this new, untested Linux blindly.
This is undoubtedly why you choose to be here at slashdot - so you can stomp us all down, when necessary.
So only those who had been brainwa...er, I mean trained by the military would be allowed to vote. Super!
Reminds me of someone's idea that we only allow an ex-military person who had served in a war to be president (after all, the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces). Naturally, this leads to a situation where we are in need of war at least once every 50 years, and the person at the top of the decision tree is best able to solve problems with military solutions.....
-- Never heard a Heinlein "solution" that made sense beyond it's instant soundbite value --
It seems reasonable to think that a direct democracy would require absurd levels of education about the issues in order to get good results, but I don't think it's true.
Have you ever watched "Who Wants to be a Millionaire"? (or something like that). Here's the basic premise: You have to answer multiple choice questions. Answer enough, and you get a million dollars. On your way to answering enough, you have 3 "help" options. One of them is that you can have the audience answer the question. The audience is NEVER wrong (at least, that's what Regis said - he was the moderator for the show, and I never witnessed the audience being wrong). I use the following reasoning to explain this:
There will be people who know the answer, and those that don't. Those that don't will spread their answers fairly evenly about. Those that know, will all agree, so when the votes are tabulated, the correct one gets the highest percentage.
The application of this reasoning to direct democracy suggests that not everyone needs to understand every issue fully. Not everyone needs to be a genius for it to work. The votes will ultimately get weighed in favor of those solutions that research and intelligence most often point to, simply because that is the only focusing mechanism of votes.
With a republic, we have many focusing mechanisms, such as money, lobbying interests, corruption, partisanship, and the above mentioned "well-researched, intelligence" mechanism.
I would argue that eliminating the other non-ideal focusing mechanisms would be a good thing.
Notice that this does not mean we don't need full time Legislation. Yes, someone needs to be knowledgable enough to write the laws, to submit proposals for voting, etc. But, with direct democracy, those that want to spend this time, can. Those that don't, won't, and that's Ok - it's not necessary.
It seems very unlikely that Singer wants this institutionalized. I think he's just trying to make some points, and make us think.
What I think his goals are:
1. To get us to stop thinking of ourselves (ie humans) as special, in some holy, spiritual way.
2. To get people to see the suffering we cause animals because we don't view their pain as valid.
3. To see that some humans are in states that are no more, and sometimes less "humanlike" than the state some animals are in.
4. To get people to think about the unseen poor with the same empathy that we apply to our children, even to our non-existent children.
He doesn't want to legalize infanticide. He doesn't even think it's necessary. He wants to change how we think about these issues, so that we can start making more rational ethical decisions in other areas.
Which just goes to show - passing the turing test is probably mostly a question of cues other than the conversational logic. If a beautiful woman came on to you and kept saying "we were talking about you, not me" over and over, you probably wouldn't say, "gee, that's a poorly written computer program".
You'd probably fall for it.
;-)
A lot of people complain about Java because it's Run Everywhere theory isn't overly useful to them. They get pretty good portability from C, and why would they want to give up the processing speed for a questionable advantage?
But I see a lot of people here saying that AMD's "compromise" will succeed cause it won't force developers to port everything all at once. It'll save a lot of work, so it'll succeed over Merced. Some also bemoan that this means a lesser quality chip will win. A drastic change in architecture is too risky, they say.
But, Java is also portable to anything new that comes along, so an advantage of the VM architecture is there isn't as much reason to fear drastic innovation in the underlying hardware. This is major, IMO. My code will work anywhere, once someone ports the VM to it. A single port, and everyone's code is brought to the new hardware. This is why many people argue that the greater flexibility of the VM architecture is worth the relatively minor performance hit and even the larger memory hit.
It seems to me they've demonstrated the ability to do something current "good" systems can't do - recognize words within a white noise environment. That's what they're excited about.
You just displayed circular reasoning at it's best. Why is it impossible?
'Cause xyzzy said so? Care to offer up a real explanation?
...in Andromeda!
/Possible/ accidents -> we all die very quickly! Compared to the other forms of dying you mention, in any case. And it's not clean either. why do you think they're building a massive radioactive waste dump in the desert in the southwest US? Cause nobody wants the stuff and it's causing problems. Typically, these wastes are disposed of in the poorest areas, cause they can't fight effectively against it. Rochester has a nuclear facility, but you can bet our waste is ending up in poor counties like Allegheny or Cortland (NYS I'm talking about).
I don't think he makes nuclear power sound inherently evil, I think he makes it sound inherenty scary. And who would argue that it isn't scary? Only someone with an agenda.
Oil, contrary to what many like to think, is not likely to run out in 200 years. I'm all for alternatives, but running out is not a concern.
Coal will simply never run out. It's disgusting, so we don't use it as much as we used to. Someday we'll probably think the same about oil.
Hydro - I'm pretty much in agreement.
Solar/wind - Solar could be extremely effective. It's not economical at this time, though. But I'm confident that will change.
Nuclear -
It seems a bit hypocritical to espouse the virtues of something, but insist the bad parts get shovelled off into someone else's land.
Is it not feasable to utilize neuro-reactive chemicals to force faster synaptic responses, keep the "gates" between synapses open, and boost electric signal in the brain?
:-)
Sure - it's called epilepsy.
....Katz would surely be filtered out.
I cannot see any advantages in using Java (beside of attracting programmers that cannot handle pointers and dynamic allocation :)) )
Or programmers who simply don't want the hassle of doing so. Java is easier to program in, in many ways (in some ways it's harder, I agree). Easier to some people, particularly geeks, means not worth doing. Personally, I want to code mathematical algorithms. I don't want to deal with hardware issues - ever! I don't like getting down and dirty with file formats, video display programming, etc... So, Java is perfect for me.
Stop coding in Perl and you won't need so many comments.
;-)
:-)
I know what you mean (I think!). It doesn't sound pretty. It sounds self-defeating to think this way....makes life seem pointless....
But, I don't think modernism has been such a great deal either. So, which hell do you choose?
....that humans are thinking creatures. You refer to the human brain as a machine - you are dead right.
Humans don't "think" the way we usually mean it. Our brains associate endlessly. "A" gets associated with "B" (goth-violence,gun-death,christian-zealot, etc). The associations your brain makes are completely governed by it's own experiences. How many of us argue based on personal experience? Extrapolate single incidents/stories to everything? The answer is every single one of us.
We're doing it with Columbine. We WILL extrapolate it, and it will be completely illogical. People who are defenders of gun rights do so not because of logical argument, but only because that's where they've come from, that's how their brain has associated things, and that's how the world looks to them now. Ditto for those against gun laws.
How else do you explain that devout Christians are usually Replublicans, and support gun rights, are pro death penalty? Makes no sense, it's just an association of random things that happened to go together frequently. Jarts are bad, guns are good. Liberal democrats aren't any better. NO ONE is any better, because we are all machines. If you happen to make more sense than most, feel lucky your machine developed in a more reasonable environment.
And before you go and say people don't all fit into these categories - I know that. But everyone has they're own set of bizarre associations. I just picked some examples that most can see. Pick any person you want and you'll find contradications and illogic in their beliefs and values. They'll philosophize really bizarrely to explain it too. The smart ones realize that they're beliefs are contradictory and irrational, like Paul here.
So much for CS at Finnish Universities.