From what patents I've seen, there's the claims section, which is what the patent actually covers, and the description section. I believe the law says that a person ordinarily skilled in the art should be able to create the patented thing from the description, but that doesn't seem to be the case in all patents. I'd love to see patents denied or challenged in court for not including an adequate description.
Got any actual evidence for this claim, or are you simply demonstrating the blind ideology often displayed by people using "social justice warriors" in a sentence?
Venture capitalists, in a very real sense, don't know what they're doing. They want to be in on the next Big Thing, and this requires a startup that fills a previously unnoticed or unsatisfiable need, something not already satisfied by current companies, which pretty much by definition means something that looks like a bad idea, probably one the VCs can't recognize as brilliant early on.
The rule of certain laws is important in libertarianism. Last I read a Libertarian platform, I couldn't even begin to estimate how much money we'd need to extend the court system to make it work.
Libertarians tend to want the government to decisively enforce contract law without paying any attention to any imbalance in negotiating power, meaning that the court system would become a tool of oppression of the poor and unlucky.
For most people, iPhones are excellent (if expensive) solutions to their smartphone needs, and a Windows computer with the same office software that the vast majority of the rest of the world uses is an excellent (and relatively inexpensive) solution to their computer needs. Diaspora is a really bad solution to their social networking needs and desires. As long as you maintain that your priorities are the correct ones, and only ignorant and dumb people would disagree, you're not going to understand the world.
In a free market, those people who have been most useful to their fellow human beings get the most votes [money], because they have shown that they are the best qualified in allocating resources productively.
Except that many people don't have a shot at being useful (and people are not paid in proportion to how useful they are). People tend to be poor because they didn't get a decent education or a chance to make something of themselves, and the working poor are relatively worse off than they were fifty years ago.
We evolved caring about the people in our tribe or band, and treating everyone else as at least a potential enemy. We're not wired to empathize with tens of thousands of people, let alone billions.
Also, I can affect my own life considerably, along with the lives of my family members, but my potential influence decreases really fast. I could donate money to African relief programs, and I can support politicians I think will tend to do the right thing, and that's about it.
I can't end war in the Middle East or solve world hunger. I can make certain services that foster technical innovation a little cheaper and faster. I can donate some money to organizations that I believe are improving the world, but not enough to make a major difference in anything.
Far too many people having too many babies in parts of the world that can't support those populations and thus the resulting strife and misery? Cultural problem.
That particular problem is best addressed with technology and economics. Make the society wealthier and healthier, provide basic contraception, and you'll find the cultural barriers to zero population growth falling away. Lots of ecological messes and resource shortages are solved through technical means. Culture is very dependent on technology.
Profit is the result of doing what OTHER PEOPLE WITH MONEY want you to do, not what other people want you to do. There's no money in helping out the poor; indeed, helping the poor enough means not having desperate if largely unskilled people who will do whatever crap job needs doing for a small amount of money. I'd consider giving poor people a better chance to develop their abilities to be improving the world a lot.
You seem to be claiming that what happens to poor people doesn't matter, since they don't have the money to pay for things and hence have no effective demand. Not everyone benefits from economic growth.
I'm not starving partly because I make much more money than the median US worker, so that's not a good argument.
Capitalism is excellent at generating wealth, and increasing wealth helps the world out a lot. Capitalism brings its own major problems, but it does solve problems.
WWII left two empire-like entities, the US and the Soviet Union. The US of this period is rather reminiscent of the early Roman Empire, in that both avoided taking over for direct rule but made it very clear what the people in the empire not under direct rule should do.
The most obvious issue is how you characterize WWI. That war decisively altered the fundamental structure of Europe. It destroyed Austria-Hungary, created several smaller and more diverse states in its place, and toppled a lot of major monarchies, including Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. It effectively destroyed the idea of strong kings or emperors as foundations of governments. All available weapons were used, bringing in chemical warfare, large-scale sinking of merchant ships by submarines, and aerial bombardment. Really, it's what you classify as a Fourth Turning War.
IIRC, the Glorious Revolution was not particularly brutal. The American Revolution was not all that brutal, as wars of the period went, and wasn't pursued to the end, but only to the point where the Brits thought it not worth continuing. It was much closer to the Vietnam War.
Your Second Turning Wars don't make much sense either. The Spanish-American War and English Civil War were decisive and to the finish in the affected areas, had fairly clear war aims, and changed things a lot. They weren't guerilla wars (the Philippine war after the Spanish-American was).
You appear to be projecting periods on a timeline and classifying wars by periods, ignoring what the wars actually were and how they were fought.
I remember the facts of the case being something like this:
Woman gets coffee and additions (sweet stuff, white stuff) in a McDonald's drive-through. Woman parks. Woman holds cup in her lap and opens it to add sweet stuff and white stuff. Cup collapses when the lid is removed, and spills scalding hot coffee over a lot of her skin. Woman has something like $20K in medical bills, asks McDonald's to reimburse her, they refuse, case winds up in court.
What struck me was not so much the temperature of the coffee as the way the cup failed. If I were to get some sort of liquid in a cup, I'd expect the cup to be able to hold the liquid, and that was not true for McDonald's coffee cups. The coffee temperature may have weakened the cup, and it certainly caused a lot of damage, but if McDonald's had provided a halfway decent cup there would have been no injury and no lawsuit.
What you're talking about is a higher-level programming language, and you're repeating "programming is dying" arguments that have been around at least as lon as I've been alive.
The neural net can't pick out the right code to solve the problem without knowing what the problem is, and somebody's going to have to express the problem in some sort of detailed and unambiguous language, and now you've got a programming language that can't be used well except by a programmer. The only way to avoid this is to develop strong AI, and if we develop that the effects on programming as a profession are minor compared to everything else.
Over time, lots of people have come up with ways to get programming done without programmers, such as the development of COBOL. None have worked, although over time there are more and more specialized tools to allow non-programmers to do the simpler stuff programmers do, freeing up the programmers to do more complicated and interesting things.
The problem with that Excel VBA horror is that it's unlikely to be reliable. It will give answers to everything (unless it errors out), but not necessarily the correct answers, and the only way to verify answers will be to recalculate them.
If you could write some simple code that did all the documentation for you, that wasn't good documentation, even if it was better than what was being produced earlier.
Most people can't reliably automate anything, since automating a job is far harder than doing it. For one thing, it requires that all the possible problems be accounted for up front rather than handling them as they come up.
There's a nice simple algorithm for making change. Take the money, then provide change from highest denomination to lowest until the amount handed over is accounted for. To be efficient, it requires being able to do simple arithmetic fast, but not algebra. If I pay $20 for something costing $13.83, the cashier needs to realize that a $5 bill is less than the change owed, but $10 is too much, that $18.83 requires a $1 but not a $5, and so forth.
Or it can be automated. Many cash registers automatically dispense coins, allowing the cashier to pass out the paper money, which people seem to find easier to figure.
Programming isn't magic. If the school is based on regurgitation indoctrination, that's how programming will be taught. If it isn't, there will be a lot of subjects that force the kids to think.
The most important skills for K-12 education are communication skills, like reading and writing. After that, there's a host of things it would be good for students to be exposed to, including simple math, history, art, health, how everyday things work, how to cope in the modern world, keeping physically active, and so forth. There isn't time to include everything, and programming is just one of the many things it would help a student to know.
It's great to have an engineering program in a high school. My son loved it. However, there's limited time in K-12 and a tremendous amount of stuff that it would be good to cover.
Cursive is still moderately useful, but I'm not sure valuable K-12 time should be spent on it. I think it's about as useful as typing was back when I was in high school. There's nothing wrong with split infinitives in English; that's a holdover from prescriptivist teachers trying to apply Latin grammar to English. Learning how to communicate in one's native language, however, is an extremely important skill, and one which will be useful in a large number of ways in most careers. That should be a priority.
Having been involved in CS teaching, our elementary classes were how to program (in case someone needed it, and as service classes for other departments), and a firm grounding in the theory, I had a student object to the theory, saying it had no practical use. Personally, I felt that, if you came for a CS degree, you were darn well going to learn some of the science (using "science" a bit loosely here), and that there was a business programming program across the river in the business school.
I think the reason why you had a bad experience with a CS program is that you got into a crappy CS program. I can't imagine a course like you describe being part of a decent CS curriculum.
One of the cool things about special relativity is that it can be understood fully with some basic mathematics, provided one is willing to relearn a whole lot of fundamentals. This is not true of general relativity, or of anything more than the very basics of quantum mechanics (although Feynman did some very good work on those).
While an algorithm is a mathematical object, it's a bit foreign to the small amounts of mostly pure math taught in high schools, and is much more relevant to computer science. I'd rather see it taught where it's more relevant, in CS classes.
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From what patents I've seen, there's the claims section, which is what the patent actually covers, and the description section. I believe the law says that a person ordinarily skilled in the art should be able to create the patented thing from the description, but that doesn't seem to be the case in all patents. I'd love to see patents denied or challenged in court for not including an adequate description.
Got any actual evidence for this claim, or are you simply demonstrating the blind ideology often displayed by people using "social justice warriors" in a sentence?
Venture capitalists, in a very real sense, don't know what they're doing. They want to be in on the next Big Thing, and this requires a startup that fills a previously unnoticed or unsatisfiable need, something not already satisfied by current companies, which pretty much by definition means something that looks like a bad idea, probably one the VCs can't recognize as brilliant early on.
The rule of certain laws is important in libertarianism. Last I read a Libertarian platform, I couldn't even begin to estimate how much money we'd need to extend the court system to make it work.
Libertarians tend to want the government to decisively enforce contract law without paying any attention to any imbalance in negotiating power, meaning that the court system would become a tool of oppression of the poor and unlucky.
For most people, iPhones are excellent (if expensive) solutions to their smartphone needs, and a Windows computer with the same office software that the vast majority of the rest of the world uses is an excellent (and relatively inexpensive) solution to their computer needs. Diaspora is a really bad solution to their social networking needs and desires. As long as you maintain that your priorities are the correct ones, and only ignorant and dumb people would disagree, you're not going to understand the world.
Except that many people don't have a shot at being useful (and people are not paid in proportion to how useful they are). People tend to be poor because they didn't get a decent education or a chance to make something of themselves, and the working poor are relatively worse off than they were fifty years ago.
We evolved caring about the people in our tribe or band, and treating everyone else as at least a potential enemy. We're not wired to empathize with tens of thousands of people, let alone billions.
Also, I can affect my own life considerably, along with the lives of my family members, but my potential influence decreases really fast. I could donate money to African relief programs, and I can support politicians I think will tend to do the right thing, and that's about it.
I can't end war in the Middle East or solve world hunger. I can make certain services that foster technical innovation a little cheaper and faster. I can donate some money to organizations that I believe are improving the world, but not enough to make a major difference in anything.
That particular problem is best addressed with technology and economics. Make the society wealthier and healthier, provide basic contraception, and you'll find the cultural barriers to zero population growth falling away. Lots of ecological messes and resource shortages are solved through technical means. Culture is very dependent on technology.
Profit is the result of doing what OTHER PEOPLE WITH MONEY want you to do, not what other people want you to do. There's no money in helping out the poor; indeed, helping the poor enough means not having desperate if largely unskilled people who will do whatever crap job needs doing for a small amount of money. I'd consider giving poor people a better chance to develop their abilities to be improving the world a lot.
You seem to be claiming that what happens to poor people doesn't matter, since they don't have the money to pay for things and hence have no effective demand. Not everyone benefits from economic growth.
I'm not starving partly because I make much more money than the median US worker, so that's not a good argument.
Capitalism is excellent at generating wealth, and increasing wealth helps the world out a lot. Capitalism brings its own major problems, but it does solve problems.
WWII left two empire-like entities, the US and the Soviet Union. The US of this period is rather reminiscent of the early Roman Empire, in that both avoided taking over for direct rule but made it very clear what the people in the empire not under direct rule should do.
Your classification of wars is dubious at best.
The most obvious issue is how you characterize WWI. That war decisively altered the fundamental structure of Europe. It destroyed Austria-Hungary, created several smaller and more diverse states in its place, and toppled a lot of major monarchies, including Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. It effectively destroyed the idea of strong kings or emperors as foundations of governments. All available weapons were used, bringing in chemical warfare, large-scale sinking of merchant ships by submarines, and aerial bombardment. Really, it's what you classify as a Fourth Turning War.
IIRC, the Glorious Revolution was not particularly brutal. The American Revolution was not all that brutal, as wars of the period went, and wasn't pursued to the end, but only to the point where the Brits thought it not worth continuing. It was much closer to the Vietnam War.
Your Second Turning Wars don't make much sense either. The Spanish-American War and English Civil War were decisive and to the finish in the affected areas, had fairly clear war aims, and changed things a lot. They weren't guerilla wars (the Philippine war after the Spanish-American was).
You appear to be projecting periods on a timeline and classifying wars by periods, ignoring what the wars actually were and how they were fought.
What the US is becoming has nothing to do with Marxism. Ask yourself: who owns the means of production? In most cases, it isn't the workers.
I remember the facts of the case being something like this:
Woman gets coffee and additions (sweet stuff, white stuff) in a McDonald's drive-through. Woman parks. Woman holds cup in her lap and opens it to add sweet stuff and white stuff. Cup collapses when the lid is removed, and spills scalding hot coffee over a lot of her skin. Woman has something like $20K in medical bills, asks McDonald's to reimburse her, they refuse, case winds up in court.
What struck me was not so much the temperature of the coffee as the way the cup failed. If I were to get some sort of liquid in a cup, I'd expect the cup to be able to hold the liquid, and that was not true for McDonald's coffee cups. The coffee temperature may have weakened the cup, and it certainly caused a lot of damage, but if McDonald's had provided a halfway decent cup there would have been no injury and no lawsuit.
What you're talking about is a higher-level programming language, and you're repeating "programming is dying" arguments that have been around at least as lon as I've been alive.
The neural net can't pick out the right code to solve the problem without knowing what the problem is, and somebody's going to have to express the problem in some sort of detailed and unambiguous language, and now you've got a programming language that can't be used well except by a programmer. The only way to avoid this is to develop strong AI, and if we develop that the effects on programming as a profession are minor compared to everything else.
Over time, lots of people have come up with ways to get programming done without programmers, such as the development of COBOL. None have worked, although over time there are more and more specialized tools to allow non-programmers to do the simpler stuff programmers do, freeing up the programmers to do more complicated and interesting things.
The problem with that Excel VBA horror is that it's unlikely to be reliable. It will give answers to everything (unless it errors out), but not necessarily the correct answers, and the only way to verify answers will be to recalculate them.
If you could write some simple code that did all the documentation for you, that wasn't good documentation, even if it was better than what was being produced earlier.
Most people can't reliably automate anything, since automating a job is far harder than doing it. For one thing, it requires that all the possible problems be accounted for up front rather than handling them as they come up.
There's a nice simple algorithm for making change. Take the money, then provide change from highest denomination to lowest until the amount handed over is accounted for. To be efficient, it requires being able to do simple arithmetic fast, but not algebra. If I pay $20 for something costing $13.83, the cashier needs to realize that a $5 bill is less than the change owed, but $10 is too much, that $18.83 requires a $1 but not a $5, and so forth.
Or it can be automated. Many cash registers automatically dispense coins, allowing the cashier to pass out the paper money, which people seem to find easier to figure.
No algebra is required. None.
Programming isn't magic. If the school is based on regurgitation indoctrination, that's how programming will be taught. If it isn't, there will be a lot of subjects that force the kids to think.
The most important skills for K-12 education are communication skills, like reading and writing. After that, there's a host of things it would be good for students to be exposed to, including simple math, history, art, health, how everyday things work, how to cope in the modern world, keeping physically active, and so forth. There isn't time to include everything, and programming is just one of the many things it would help a student to know.
It's great to have an engineering program in a high school. My son loved it. However, there's limited time in K-12 and a tremendous amount of stuff that it would be good to cover.
Cursive is still moderately useful, but I'm not sure valuable K-12 time should be spent on it. I think it's about as useful as typing was back when I was in high school. There's nothing wrong with split infinitives in English; that's a holdover from prescriptivist teachers trying to apply Latin grammar to English. Learning how to communicate in one's native language, however, is an extremely important skill, and one which will be useful in a large number of ways in most careers. That should be a priority.
Having been involved in CS teaching, our elementary classes were how to program (in case someone needed it, and as service classes for other departments), and a firm grounding in the theory, I had a student object to the theory, saying it had no practical use. Personally, I felt that, if you came for a CS degree, you were darn well going to learn some of the science (using "science" a bit loosely here), and that there was a business programming program across the river in the business school.
I think the reason why you had a bad experience with a CS program is that you got into a crappy CS program. I can't imagine a course like you describe being part of a decent CS curriculum.
One of the cool things about special relativity is that it can be understood fully with some basic mathematics, provided one is willing to relearn a whole lot of fundamentals. This is not true of general relativity, or of anything more than the very basics of quantum mechanics (although Feynman did some very good work on those).
While an algorithm is a mathematical object, it's a bit foreign to the small amounts of mostly pure math taught in high schools, and is much more relevant to computer science. I'd rather see it taught where it's more relevant, in CS classes.