There's an interesting reflection on the "power tends to corrupt" quote in this biography of Lord Acton:
There are three things wrong with the famous maxim. First, power in human affairs does not come in volts or anything measurable; it comes in many contexts, each requiring close consideration. One can no more write a history of power than Acton could write a history of liberty. Second, no human being ever had absolute power. Absolute power is a fantasy of the frustrated. Third, the quotation must be read in terms of what immediately follows: ''Great men are almost always bad men.'' This thought expresses the very judgmental Acton, who held historical figures to be bad if they performed a single unworthy act. That point was made in the letter; Acton declared Elizabeth I a bad person for having Mary Queen of Scots executed. With such judgments he assumed a divine prerogative. As prosecutors, judges and historians we must sometimes evaluate actions. We cannot judge persons.
One should note that it is typically corrupt people who seek absolute power in the first place, in which case they are already corrupted before they achieve power.
Although there are any number of object lessons of corrupt people in power, there are many, perhaps more, instances of people with a large amount of power who remain relatively unchanged by it.
Consider American presidents. George W. Bush probably wields more power than any recent President. He has his flaws and has arguable made mistakes but few would say he has been morally corrupted by his years in the White House.
Re:How do you do a character literal?
on
Vim 6.4 Released
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· Score: 1
what's the windows vim equivelent of vi's ^V?
That would be Ctrl-Q (while in insert mode or entering a search string)
And could they not spell "hitchhiker" correctly as well?
Furthermore, the expression "expect the unexpected" goes back at least to Wilde's play "An Ideal Husband" (1895): "To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect." (Act 3).
The message of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is more like "the unexpected is stranger than you might expect".
Consider: (A) chimpanzees are the most human-like of the primates vs (B) humans are the most chimpanzee-like of the primates.
(A) asks us to consider the human characteristics of the chimp while (B) asks us to consider the chimp characteristics of the human. (A) and (B) broaden our perspective on humanity in different ways.
In comparing Earth and Titan, looking for Titan-like characteristics on Earth may lead us to discover new features of Earth, which some would argue is more useful than discovering new features about Titan.
It's also true that the response has been about as good as it can possibly be under the circumstances.
The dikes and levees were designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane and Katrina was a category 4. Under those circumstances, the National Guard and the relief effort should have been mobilized as soon as the there was a chance Katrina would hit New Orleans, not after it hit.
Ever driven on a Louisiana road?
New Orlean's international airport survived the hurricane intact. Under those circumstances, you would expect aid to be pour in there, particularly considering the U.S. militaries air transport capabilities.
And posting any comment about 'selective use of evidence' in a complaint about another news site posted to/. cannot really be taken seriously.
For the record, I did not complain about the selective use of evidence. My point was that knowing the source of an article allowed the reader to know the article's bias and be able to take the selective use of evidence into account.
Why not try to refute the facts presented, rather than suggest they must be wrong because of the source they come from?
The problem is not necessarily with the facts themselves but in their selective use to support a political position.
Publications like the National Review with a political bias will typically make selective use of evidence. Therefore, knowing the source of the article makes one aware of how much credibility one should assign to its conclusions.
In this case, the article concludes "The process has been functioning remarkably smoothly under the circumstances." President Bush himself disagrees as does the Mayor of New Orleans, both of whom would be in a position to know.
That makes perfect sense for him to say more and more imports come from overseas.
First of all, the point was that Bush's defenders are so bereft of ideas that they are reduced to using fabricated statements to support their man.
In the case of this quote, Salon provides some context:
"It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas."--Beaverton, Ore., Sep. 25, 2000
It looks like he was trying to say the U.S. is becoming more and more dependent on imported oil but the ideas got tangled up in his brain.
Furthermore, the Salon page provides over 350 other absurd statements by Bush. It makes one wonder if he actually knows what he is saying even when he manages to sound reasonably coherent.
"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country." - John F. Kerry
Kerry never said it. It was actually GWB, according to Snopes:
"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country." Though it is not a word-for-word match, it is close enough to a statement made by President George W. Bush in 2000 to be recognizable: "More and more of our imports come from overseas."
The Snopes page also shows that most of the other quotes are bogus.
The article cites a survey from Evans Data Corp. that claims PHP use is declining but the rest of the article doesn't support that conclusion.
Zend claims the number of monthly downloads of its Zend integrated development environment (IDE) today number 20,000, up from 5,000 in September 2004, with an accompanying 150% growth in the privately held company's revenue. Furthermore, Zend is opening offices worldwide.
As for stats, Zend points to Netcraft who claims 22m internet domains use PHP, making it the internet's most popular scripting language.
"Microsoft is interested in PHP - the next version of IIS is going to support PHP. If there was no interest, or we were seeing a decline of interest in PHP, why would they get their product to support PHP?" asked Zend vice president of marketing Michel Gerin.
Furthermore, while EDC maintains PHP is not seeing "serious" deployment, Zend claims changes to the language like the addition of Object Orientation (OO) in PHP 5.0 mean the language is going beyond pure web site development and into the enterprise as an alternative to Java and C++.
While adoption may be slowing, PHP is not going away. With an estimated 2.5m PHP developers and web sites going up on a daily basis that have been built using PHP, the language is firmly ensconced in computing's landscape. The only question seems to be: how deep can PHP go in business computing?
The decision by IBM and Oracle to provide native support for PHP in their databases proves they have recognized PHP's ability to harm their core businesses, and their desire to avert any problems by winning over PHP developers
The language you use for development isn't so important as the database you use and project's architecture.
In general, the most flexible architecture is lots of small modules that interact with the database. These modules may initially be written in one language but over time may be rewritten in various languages, depending upon performance requirements and the evolving skillset of the staff.
Pay careful attention to what functionality you can put into the database's stored procedures. Stored procedures can provide a standardized and simplified interface to access the content of the database and solve some of the performance issues.
Concentrate the complexity of the design in the database as much as possible. Document the interface well. Then chose whatever development language the staff is comfortable with.
To begin with we should have 13 months in the year, not 12.
Why not dispense with the concept of months all together? We could just have 52 seven-day weeks with the usual adjustment for leap year. Dates would no longer be of the MM DD, YYYY format but WW DD, YYYY.
Planning is already done primarily on a weekly basis so that months only confuse the issue. Setting a meeting date 10 weeks in the future is more obvious and precise than two and a half months.
Another advantage is you can tell more accurately at glance how much of the year has passed. For example 31-7 gives a better sense that 31/52 of the year is over than August 7 (or whatever).
With 12-hour shifts, Sunday shopping, and 24/7 service even the notion of a 7-day week itself is increasingly obsolete. Thinking strictly in terms of DDD YYYY may be more practical. For instance, organizations where people work 12-hour shifts now think in terms of a four-day week.
The months are a vestige of agriculture where the seasons determined all activity. The industrial economy requires a fundamental rethinking of how the year is divided. Even the notion of months was once considered radical. During the hunter-gather phases of human history, simply dividing the years into seasons was sufficient and the solstices and equinoxes were the only points that mattered.
One can imagine a not-too-distant future where every worker sets a personal time-frame based on the requirements of his job and the expectations of his family. People with young children might work a 4-day week while people with grown children might choose a 10 day week.
In any case, months based on the phases of the moon could hardly be less relevant to the way people live.
Because something is old, it needs to be evaluated for replacement.
On the surface, the criteria for replacing something old is the same as the criteria for replacing something new: is there a better way to do it.
In practice, things like amortizing existing investment, vested interests and training are decisive. These economic and psychological issues cannot simply be dismissed as a failure of imagination since innovations have work in the real world, whatever else their merits are.
Sometimes, like the end of analog television signals, someone just has to legislate change. It is a chicken-and-egg problem. Some things only make sense if every one adopts them at once.
To some extent the reason we still have wood houses and the internal combusion engine is because no government has demanded something better.
McCarthy wasn't censured by colleagues in the U.S. senate for claiming there were Communists in the U.S. government, he was censured because he "acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity".
McCarthy's supporters seem to think the Communist threat justified that behavior.
Nazi Germany built a biological weapons research facility at Posen, in 1943. Hitler's scientists worked with aircraft spray-tank dissemination of plague and other germs, but without success.
Your point still stands, of course, but it might lead someone to conclude that just because the Nazis experimented with biological warfare doesn't mean it is wrong.
But so what if had? Hitler was a demogogue who might say anything if it would gain him power. To that end, he might just as easily have said something true as something false.
For instance, he's quoted here as saying "There could be no issue between the Church and the State. The Church, as such, has nothing to do with political affairs. On the other hand, the State has nothing to do with the faith or inner organization of the Church."
No doubt Hitler had some ulterior motive for advocating separation of Church and State but simple quoting Hitler would not in any way undermine the concept.
Similarly, America's law makers may have their flaws but they are by no stretch of the imagination like the Nazis or secretly harbour the objectives of the Nazis.
The biggest reason not to use DST is the increase in auto accidents in the morning.
The balance of evidence appears to be that DST results in a decrease in auto accidents and pedestrian fatalities and a reduction in violent crime.
This testimony from the U.S. Department of Transport before the U.S. House Science Committee says:
With respect to traffic fatalities, we were able to identify a 0.7 percent reduction due to daylight saving time in March and April 1974 compared to the comparable months in 1973 when we were under standard time. At the time, DOT analysts believed that these estimates were conservative and that their calculations understated the real reduction due to daylight saving time, which they judged to be on the order of 1.5 percent to 2 percent.
With respect to the incidence of crime, study of daylight saving time impacts on the incidence of crime revealed reductions in violent crimes of 10 to 13 percent in Washington, D.C. throughout a 3-year period.
Results show that a switch to full year daylight saving time would reduce
pedestrian fatalities by 343 over the 1998-1999 period, or by 13 percent of all pedestrian
fatalities in the 5 AM to 10 AM and in the 4 PM to 9 PM time periods examined in this research.
Motor vehicle occupant fatalities would be reduced by 390, or 3 percent during the same time
periods. In metropolitan areas, full year daylight saving time would reduce pedestrian fatalities
by 255 in the 1998-1999 period, or by 12 percent, and would reduce pedestrian fatalities in non-metropolitan
areas by 81 or 17 percent.
The reasoning is that the extra daylight in the working day increases visibility and thereby reduces accidents. Fewer people are also out after dark when they are more likely to be a victim of crime.
There are studies that show some increase in motor accidents during certain periods but this increase is more than balanced out by the decrease in other periods.
Trying to correlate accidents with daylight savings time is a complicated statistical exercise but, at best, the evidence for both sides of the question is inconclusive. The result is that, contrary to your statement, there is no strong case against DST out of concern for traffic fatalities.
Despite some evidence that pie menus are easier to use than more common schemes, they've never caught on. It might be because they are not as compact as other types and so page designers trade off some usability to make better use of screen space. Also, they don't scale well to a large number of options.
Still, you might think that with the human hand a a model of a radial selection device, pie menus would be more popular. However, even in the physical world, levers, switches, sliders and rows of buttons are more common than radial devices. The same objections for UI design on the screen seem to apply to physical devices.
Given the hostile and partisan way Gore's words have been misinterpreted, I doubt if Gore's critics are interested in his actual contribution to the creation of the Internet, however he might have phrased it.
The award mentioned in the post that started this thread speaks for itself.
Once again, I can do no better than cite a reply to your journal entry:
Go back to the original interview that caused all this fuss. Gore's interviewer asks candidate Gore to point out the highlights of his legislative career. From the context I think any fair-minded person can see Gore left out a word. He should have said, "I took legislative initiative in creating the internet." Everyone knows he is not a Scientist or Engineer. He is a legislator. From the context any fair-minded person knows he was talking about "legislative initiative". It was an interview, it wasn't scripted. He left out the word "legislative".
In addition, that reply contained a link to comments by Vinton Cerf.
The Vice President was among the first of the members of Congress to recognize the importance of the Internet and his interest as far back as 1986 (to my certain knowledge) led him to sponsor legislation and to speak favorably about optical networks, high performance computing, and led to programs such as the National Research and Education Network program, the Next Generation Internet program and so on.
I think the Vice President is very deserving of credit for his active support for the Internet and the businesses that depend upon it daily.
Gore's statement in context was factually correct and no less than Vint Cerf says he deserves credit. At the time, you're lame response was, "I'm just using VP Gore's statement to show that from his point of view at the time, he was responsible for the explosion of the Internet in the '90s." As the transcript shows, Gore never claimed to be "responsible for the explosion of the Internet".
Repeating the errors in your journal entry here is not going to make them any more valid.
It does no good to pretend he never tried to make the claim, or that he wasn't trying to get more credit than he was due.
People lampoon Gore for partisan politican purposes or because they incorrectly think he said he invented the Internet.
I can do no better than cite the refutation of your point in a reply to your journal entry:
It seems to me... you can't bring yourself to recognize that something you believed has been disproved. Gore simply never claimed to that he "created the internet".
...
Do you really want to see beyond the conventional misconceptions other people are comfortable believing?
A man in Virginia was convicted of advocating jihad against the U.S. by "inspiring his followers to attend terrorist training camps abroad" He was sentenced to 25 years.
Conceivably, a Web site that linked to one of his speeches would also be guilty of something.
Make students learn how to use slide rules, for the sake and feel of what is really happening during calculations.
Note the first words in this suggestion: "Make students learn". It reveals the underlying assumptions of all these ideas: students must be forced to learn.
Stop inflating grades and stop moving kids to the next grade if they aren't ready are prime examples. Giving students failing grades and holding them back, is in effect a form of punishment for not learning. How does stigmatizing a student as a failure make him more likely to improve?
Ask yourself, how well to do you learn under the threat of punishment? And if you do learn, what resentment does in engender? How would it affect your view of the education system in general?
I would say, in education as in medicine, first do no harm. If students are not learning, making them miserable probably isn't going to help.
Which of those ideas will engender a love of learning? Without that love, education is drudgery and grades will never reflect learning whether they are high or low.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an interesting reflection on the "power tends to corrupt" quote in this biography of Lord Acton:
One should note that it is typically corrupt people who seek absolute power in the first place, in which case they are already corrupted before they achieve power.
Although there are any number of object lessons of corrupt people in power, there are many, perhaps more, instances of people with a large amount of power who remain relatively unchanged by it.
Consider American presidents. George W. Bush probably wields more power than any recent President. He has his flaws and has arguable made mistakes but few would say he has been morally corrupted by his years in the White House.
what's the windows vim equivelent of vi's ^V?
That would be Ctrl-Q (while in insert mode or entering a search string)
And could they not spell "hitchhiker" correctly as well?
Furthermore, the expression "expect the unexpected" goes back at least to Wilde's play "An Ideal Husband" (1895): "To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect." (Act 3).
The message of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is more like "the unexpected is stranger than you might expect".
Consider: (A) chimpanzees are the most human-like of the primates vs (B) humans are the most chimpanzee-like of the primates.
(A) asks us to consider the human characteristics of the chimp while (B) asks us to consider the chimp characteristics of the human. (A) and (B) broaden our perspective on humanity in different ways.
In comparing Earth and Titan, looking for Titan-like characteristics on Earth may lead us to discover new features of Earth, which some would argue is more useful than discovering new features about Titan.
It's also true that the response has been about as good as it can possibly be under the circumstances.
The dikes and levees were designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane and Katrina was a category 4. Under those circumstances, the National Guard and the relief effort should have been mobilized as soon as the there was a chance Katrina would hit New Orleans, not after it hit.
Ever driven on a Louisiana road?
New Orlean's international airport survived the hurricane intact. Under those circumstances, you would expect aid to be pour in there, particularly considering the U.S. militaries air transport capabilities.
And posting any comment about 'selective use of evidence' in a complaint about another news site posted to /. cannot really be taken seriously.
For the record, I did not complain about the selective use of evidence. My point was that knowing the source of an article allowed the reader to know the article's bias and be able to take the selective use of evidence into account.
Why not try to refute the facts presented, rather than suggest they must be wrong because of the source they come from?
The problem is not necessarily with the facts themselves but in their selective use to support a political position.
Publications like the National Review with a political bias will typically make selective use of evidence. Therefore, knowing the source of the article makes one aware of how much credibility one should assign to its conclusions.
In this case, the article concludes "The process has been functioning remarkably smoothly under the circumstances." President Bush himself disagrees as does the Mayor of New Orleans, both of whom would be in a position to know.
That makes perfect sense for him to say more and more imports come from overseas.
First of all, the point was that Bush's defenders are so bereft of ideas that they are reduced to using fabricated statements to support their man.
In the case of this quote, Salon provides some context:
It looks like he was trying to say the U.S. is becoming more and more dependent on imported oil but the ideas got tangled up in his brain.Furthermore, the Salon page provides over 350 other absurd statements by Bush. It makes one wonder if he actually knows what he is saying even when he manages to sound reasonably coherent.
"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country." - John F. Kerry
Kerry never said it. It was actually GWB, according to Snopes:
The Snopes page also shows that most of the other quotes are bogus.
The article cites a survey from Evans Data Corp. that claims PHP use is declining but the rest of the article doesn't support that conclusion.
The language you use for development isn't so important as the database you use and project's architecture.
In general, the most flexible architecture is lots of small modules that interact with the database. These modules may initially be written in one language but over time may be rewritten in various languages, depending upon performance requirements and the evolving skillset of the staff.
Pay careful attention to what functionality you can put into the database's stored procedures. Stored procedures can provide a standardized and simplified interface to access the content of the database and solve some of the performance issues.
Concentrate the complexity of the design in the database as much as possible. Document the interface well. Then chose whatever development language the staff is comfortable with.
To begin with we should have 13 months in the year, not 12.
Why not dispense with the concept of months all together? We could just have 52 seven-day weeks with the usual adjustment for leap year. Dates would no longer be of the MM DD, YYYY format but WW DD, YYYY.
Planning is already done primarily on a weekly basis so that months only confuse the issue. Setting a meeting date 10 weeks in the future is more obvious and precise than two and a half months.
Another advantage is you can tell more accurately at glance how much of the year has passed. For example 31-7 gives a better sense that 31/52 of the year is over than August 7 (or whatever).
With 12-hour shifts, Sunday shopping, and 24/7 service even the notion of a 7-day week itself is increasingly obsolete. Thinking strictly in terms of DDD YYYY may be more practical. For instance, organizations where people work 12-hour shifts now think in terms of a four-day week.
The months are a vestige of agriculture where the seasons determined all activity. The industrial economy requires a fundamental rethinking of how the year is divided. Even the notion of months was once considered radical. During the hunter-gather phases of human history, simply dividing the years into seasons was sufficient and the solstices and equinoxes were the only points that mattered.
One can imagine a not-too-distant future where every worker sets a personal time-frame based on the requirements of his job and the expectations of his family. People with young children might work a 4-day week while people with grown children might choose a 10 day week.
In any case, months based on the phases of the moon could hardly be less relevant to the way people live.
Because something is old, it needs to be evaluated for replacement.
On the surface, the criteria for replacing something old is the same as the criteria for replacing something new: is there a better way to do it.
In practice, things like amortizing existing investment, vested interests and training are decisive. These economic and psychological issues cannot simply be dismissed as a failure of imagination since innovations have work in the real world, whatever else their merits are.
Sometimes, like the end of analog television signals, someone just has to legislate change. It is a chicken-and-egg problem. Some things only make sense if every one adopts them at once.
To some extent the reason we still have wood houses and the internal combusion engine is because no government has demanded something better.
Compare equivalent views...
The views are not equivalent. Here is the equivalent Microsoft view, which is comparable in detail and design to the Google image.
The truth is more complex
In this case, the truth is perfectly simple.
McCarthy wasn't censured by colleagues in the U.S. senate for claiming there were Communists in the U.S. government, he was censured because he "acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity".
McCarthy's supporters seem to think the Communist threat justified that behavior.
I heard the Nazi's also weren't fond of the Bubonic Plague.
In fact, they were fond of plague.
Your point still stands, of course, but it might lead someone to conclude that just because the Nazis experimented with biological warfare doesn't mean it is wrong.
Hitler never said it.
But so what if had? Hitler was a demogogue who might say anything if it would gain him power. To that end, he might just as easily have said something true as something false.
For instance, he's quoted here as saying "There could be no issue between the Church and the State. The Church, as such, has nothing to do with political affairs. On the other hand, the State has nothing to do with the faith or inner organization of the Church."
No doubt Hitler had some ulterior motive for advocating separation of Church and State but simple quoting Hitler would not in any way undermine the concept.
Similarly, America's law makers may have their flaws but they are by no stretch of the imagination like the Nazis or secretly harbour the objectives of the Nazis.
The biggest reason not to use DST is the increase in auto accidents in the morning.
The balance of evidence appears to be that DST results in a decrease in auto accidents and pedestrian fatalities and a reduction in violent crime.
This testimony from the U.S. Department of Transport before the U.S. House Science Committee says:
This study from Rutgers University argues that
The reasoning is that the extra daylight in the working day increases visibility and thereby reduces accidents. Fewer people are also out after dark when they are more likely to be a victim of crime.
There are studies that show some increase in motor accidents during certain periods but this increase is more than balanced out by the decrease in other periods.
Trying to correlate accidents with daylight savings time is a complicated statistical exercise but, at best, the evidence for both sides of the question is inconclusive. The result is that, contrary to your statement, there is no strong case against DST out of concern for traffic fatalities.
It takes one button and expands it out (like flower petals) into multiple buttons.
You seem to have independently discovered or reinvented the pie menu, also known as the circle menu or radial context menu.
There are assorted demos here
Despite some evidence that pie menus are easier to use than more common schemes, they've never caught on. It might be because they are not as compact as other types and so page designers trade off some usability to make better use of screen space. Also, they don't scale well to a large number of options.
Still, you might think that with the human hand a a model of a radial selection device, pie menus would be more popular. However, even in the physical world, levers, switches, sliders and rows of buttons are more common than radial devices. The same objections for UI design on the screen seem to apply to physical devices.
Let's just agree he should have said "releasing" instead of "creating".
David J Farber suggests "instrumental in the development of" would be more accurate.
Given the hostile and partisan way Gore's words have been misinterpreted, I doubt if Gore's critics are interested in his actual contribution to the creation of the Internet, however he might have phrased it.
The award mentioned in the post that started this thread speaks for itself.
Already dealt with.
Just read the transcript.
Once again, I can do no better than cite a reply to your journal entry:
In addition, that reply contained a link to comments by Vinton Cerf.
Gore's statement in context was factually correct and no less than Vint Cerf says he deserves credit. At the time, you're lame response was, "I'm just using VP Gore's statement to show that from his point of view at the time, he was responsible for the explosion of the Internet in the '90s." As the transcript shows, Gore never claimed to be "responsible for the explosion of the Internet".
Repeating the errors in your journal entry here is not going to make them any more valid.
It does no good to pretend he never tried to make the claim, or that he wasn't trying to get more credit than he was due.
People lampoon Gore for partisan politican purposes or because they incorrectly think he said he invented the Internet.
I can do no better than cite the refutation of your point in a reply to your journal entry:
A man in Virginia was convicted of advocating jihad against the U.S. by "inspiring his followers to attend terrorist training camps abroad" He was sentenced to 25 years.
Conceivably, a Web site that linked to one of his speeches would also be guilty of something.
Make students learn how to use slide rules, for the sake and feel of what is really happening during calculations.
Note the first words in this suggestion: "Make students learn". It reveals the underlying assumptions of all these ideas: students must be forced to learn.
Stop inflating grades and stop moving kids to the next grade if they aren't ready are prime examples. Giving students failing grades and holding them back, is in effect a form of punishment for not learning. How does stigmatizing a student as a failure make him more likely to improve?
Ask yourself, how well to do you learn under the threat of punishment? And if you do learn, what resentment does in engender? How would it affect your view of the education system in general?
I would say, in education as in medicine, first do no harm. If students are not learning, making them miserable probably isn't going to help.
Which of those ideas will engender a love of learning? Without that love, education is drudgery and grades will never reflect learning whether they are high or low.