Unless you're more keen on the details than I am, I would be willing to give the benifit of the doubt that publishing one's work was, and to whatever degree, still remains, an opportunity of circumstance. Maybe there was a reason he didn't publishing unrelated to his desire to do so.
Lots of things are opportunities of circumstance, and that is often how heroes are made. You don't hear about the fireman who arrived two minutes too late to leap into the flames and pull the baby out unharmed, you hear about his buddy in Company C whose station was closer and got there first. Both men had the same capabilities and the same desire, but one had the opportunity of circumstance while the other was a victim of it. The act itself is what matters, and I fully agree with Compholio that while the findings are interesting, he should not be considered a hero.
There are those who are overly concerned with dates and figures who will make sure to label Thomas Harriot with the distinguished title of "First to use Optickal Aide to Chart the Moon," and there is no harm in it (though it is likely untrue; it would not surprise me if much older civilizations had moon maps whose detail matches his or Galileo's), but history books will only make a slight change to their sections about Galileo as Harriot is not otherwise noteworthy.
There are certainly some of those types out there, but their shrill voices make them appear a larger group than they truly are.
The root of capitalism is really nothing more than the belief that I know best how to spend my own money. If I am right then I should reap the benefits, and if I am wrong then I will suffer the consequences. Freedom and personal responsibility. That doesn't make me a greedy asshole, but neither does it prevent assholes from talking the same talk.
This whole "people are sheep" has become a meme repeated by people with delusions of grandeur. Ironically enough, mindlessly repeating a meme makes these people themselves the very sheep they so despise.
That was an excellent statement. I have been occasionally fighting against the same meme (though in relation to political action) and I had never put together how such baseless grandstanding affects the speaker.
FWIW, though I disagree with GP's assessment of Katrina and his characterization of people, I do agree that the interest in helping our fellow citizens has waned. Perhaps the depression that's coming if we continue on our current course will reawaken a spirit of community and responsibility.
Fricking newage babble. Emotional states can be quantized as well as any other mental state.
I am not sure what other mental states you are referencing, but I'm going to forge ahead anyway and claim that any quantization of an emotional state is simplistic, though it may prove useful to science and in communication.
I'd normally say, "They just look that way" but they don't even appear continuous internally!
Emotional states change all day long, and it is perfectly cromulent to say "I was sad this morning, but I feel better now"
Such a statement, although accurate to an extent, is overly broad. First of all, "continuous" is not the same as "static," so your remark that emotional states change all day long does not contradict the GP's point. Second, your use of the word "feel" is illustrative because it reflects the individual's current feelings (constantly referred to as his "emotional state" as if changing the name makes it more objective). It is important to note that if you ask someone how he is feeling, he is always able to provide an answer. This underscores the fact that feeling goes on all the time, every day, every conscious moment.
Every single thought that our focus rests on is accompanied by a fringe of perceptions, from the ambient noise of the room or surrounding area to how at ease one feels at this current location, along with a vast number of other emotional and environmental colorations that can be examined individually (by focusing on them) but never separated from the whole of perception. This is not some new-agey idea; it has been known almost since psychology's inception and certainly before 1900.
I believe strongly that the point in the article (as summarized by the original poster; you didn't expect me to READ it, did you?) stands:
Finite state machines will be unrealistically simple when simulating emotional responses.
It has also been known since before 1900 that our emotional response to things begins with physical symptoms, not with contemplation. We see the rampaging bear, our hearts skip a beat then go into overdrive, and we are afraid; not: we see the bear, decide to be afraid, then our hearts go into overdrive. Of course this can work in reverse at times, dwelling on a sad experience will lead to slumped posture and a downcast face, but every emotion stems from and results in physical changes. This fact leads me to believe that without a massive sensation-processing apparatus on the order of complexity of, say, a small mammal, a digital device will never be able to simulate feelings at a level that we would consider to be realistic. I further believe that we will never be able to artificially create consciousness in any way similar to our own without such an apparatus.
In closing, anyone interested in the creation of a consciousness owes it to himself to read up on the history of psychology in addition to all the standard AI information. A failure to understand the magnitude of the human being's conscious experience will lead only to continual frustration in the quest to create one artificially.
I recall reading about that here a few years ago, but I couldn't find any more information on it when I searched a few months back.
This topic reminds me of Bruce Sterling's Bitter Resistance, an entertaining and informative article about bacteria. That sounds like marketing-speak, so here's a topical excerpt:
Bacteria live on and inside human beings. They always have; bacteria were already living on us long, long before our species became human. They creep onto us in the first instants in which we are held to our mother's breast. They live on us, and especially inside us, for as long as we live. And when we die, then other bacteria do their living best to recycle us.
An adult human being carries about a solid pound of commensal bacteria in his or her body; about a hundred trillion of them. Humans have a whole garden of specialized human-dwelling bacteria -- tank-car E. coli, balloon-shaped staphylococcus, streptococcus, corynebacteria, micrococcus, and so on. Normally, these lurkers do us little harm. On the contrary, our normal human-dwelling bacteria run a kind of protection racket, monopolizing the available nutrients and muscling out other rival bacteria that might want to flourish at our expense in a ruder way.
But bacteria, even the bacteria that flourish inside us all our lives, are not our friends. Bacteria are creatures of an order vastly different from our own, a world far, far older than the world of multicellular mammals. Bacteria are vast in numbers, and small, and fetid, and profoundly unsympathetic.
There is an easy way to test for impairment, and that is to test for impairment rather than for drugs. There are a few companies out there pushing this stuff, conveniently called impairment testing.
From linked site:
100% of employers who used impairment testing considered their experience successful
82% of employers found that impairment testing improved safety.
90% of employees accepted impairment testing.
87% of employers found impairment testing superior to urine testing.
Impairment can come from any number of sources, even from being tired or distracted. Employees who fail impairment testing can certainly still be fired, but more likely they will be sent home with no pay for the day and fired only if they repeatedly fail the test.
Thanks for providing links. It surprises me how many people remain unaware of marijuana prohibition's sordid history, from the Hearst conspiracy all the way up to Gonzales v. Raich. Granted, I know a disproportionate amount of stoners, but this stuff has been reported on and unquestioned for decades! I suppose that there just aren't very many people interested in it because government has succeeded in indoctrinating us to denounce the gentle weed without thinking. I myself was a hater in my youth, but I pulled a 180 during college and never looked back.
Maybe that's the answer. If you meet/know someone who thinks cannabis is bad, slip 'em a weed brownie or a slice of space cake. They'll change their tune within minutes!
The "stay strong and positive" theory of oncology does hold. In most cases it won't save your life in the absence of other treatment, but it's been repeatedly shown that patients with positive attitudes often have more positive prospects than those who succumb to gloom and doom.
This is the same idea as having faith in your ability to jump over a large gap. If you question your ability, you become less steady on your feet, less able to time your leap, and increase the chance of your failure.
I don't have the link handy, but the outraged older folks you're talking about don't exist, or are at least younger than you think they are. A recent study showed that people over 60 were remarkably amenable to legalizing medical marijuana. It's not the same thing as full legalization (a question which IIRC unfortunately wasn't asked), but it's a start.
I think you're spot-on with your comment about mainstream churches. They tend to be echo chambers where new ideas have to come from the top (pastoral staff) in order to be accepted, and even then they are often accepted reluctantly. I would bet that many pastors worth their salt, after looking at MJ studies, would not be opposed to legalization, though few of them would dare to raise the issue to their congregations.
I emailed the team at DownsizeDC to ask if the problem you raised is really a problem. Here is their response:
Legislation that passed gets codified in the U.S. Code. When OSTA gets passed, it, too, would be placed in the code. A subsequent bill could repeal OSTA or amend it. But if that bill violates OSTA without specifically repealing or amending it, it is void. OSTA can't be superceded unless it's specifically repealed or amended.
If the momentum builds to get OSTA passed, it is unlikely Congress would quickly turn around and repeal it or try to ignore it. There's be too much pressure on them to obey it.
I think the second paragraph is the most poignant. If enough people push for this thing to get it passed, even if your loophole exists, taking advantage of it would piss off hundreds of thousands of people. I doubt anyone's reading these comments anymore, but I couldn't let your argument stand unanswered since it may discourage some people from pushing for this legislation.
If he's using a US QWERTY keyboard, the word was likely meant to be "living," as in "get [make] a living out of [from] their music," though "licensing" is a plausible alternative.
...which is all a criticism of the judicial system, not capitalism. I read your post further down on courts in the Nordic model, and I too would like to see something like that here in the US. The socialist part of the Nordic model would not work in the US--the country is too big for that--but the judicial system is thankfully decoupled from the socialist state.
If you want to argue for socialism, go right ahead--it's a good argument to have as socialism certainly has benefits. Don't try to sneak it through the back door by blaming capitalism for the failure of our judicial system.
I think the mood of the white house staff has a lot more to do with the amount of vandalism than "a cooperative president." Clinton's office staff was pissed off that Bush got elected because they felt that Clinton was doing good things and did not get a fair shake from Republicans, and because of the whole election fiasco in Florida leaving them questioning Bush's legitimacy.
Bush's office staff was in all likelihood less attached to the man, at least towards the end. Even the Republican presidential candidate emphasized the areas where he differed from Bush. I can't help but feel that a fair number of staffers thought, "Thank God that's over" as they were getting ready to leave, and simply didn't think to vandalize the place.
Far too many of us "in the know" fail to realize that we are the vanguard. We hear about this stuff because we're on the Internet looking for it. The average American isn't concerned about it because TV news media has not done its job of keeping the people well informed. That duty falls upon us, but when we meet the slightest bit of resistance (and fail to keep in mind that denial and ridicule are the first stages of acceptance) we throw up our hands and complain that "the public no longer cares." Oftentimes this judgment is made before even talking to anyone; just listening to the accounts of a few who have.
I strongly believe that if we in the vanguard take responsibility for telling others what's going on, we can avoid a revolution by adhering to the democratic process. Remember to keep your boxes in order: the soapbox comes first and may curtail the need to use the last.
Have you ever read William James? I ask not only because of your incorrect statement about science and faith but because James is the man who came up with Pragmatism, and Obama is continually referred to as a pragmatist (in the historical rather than the pejorative sense). It is in our interest, then, to re-examine Pragmatism if we are to fully understand the decisions that President Obama will make, provided that he does in fact use the pragmatic test of truth. This isn't the place for such an undertaking and I don't have any books handy, so instead I will only tackle your statement, "that science doesn't require any blind faith," using a smattering of quotes from William James.
Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
The statement in the second quote is especially important when considering science. When a scientist posits a hypothesis, he believes it to be true, or that there is a good chance that it is true. This faith, based on his previous experience, is what compels him to run experiments to test his hypothesis, which may turn out to be true or false. More fundamentally, he has faith that by experimenting he will be able to prove or disprove his hypothesis, or at least discover whether or not it is provable at this time, even though the only thing he has to go on is his personal experience.
Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
Here we see that faith plays a role in science at a greater than individual level. Repeatability is well and good as a test, but one must have faith that testing was actually performed as reported, and accurate results obtained. A better example, perhaps, is when we accept the word of geologists that the rock in a certain area is X million years old. This statement is based on the faith that the geologist knows what he is about, and on his part, faith that the methods used by his testing equipment are sound, and so on. You also have faith that the scientific process will continue to yield practical results; otherwise what would be the point? "In its most extreme form, scientism is the faith that science has no boundaries, that in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavor will be dealt and solved by science alone." (source: wiki::scientism)
You may complain that I have been discussing "faith" while what you wrote is "blind faith." The truth is that there are individuals who take the existence of God on blind faith, that is, solely on the faith of others, and there are other individuals who take the truths found by science on blind faith. Yet just as there are also individuals who take science on informed faith, that is, their own experimentation, so too are there individuals who believe in God based on informed faith. What informs them is their own spiritual* experience, and though that may never satisfy you it certainly satisfies them. It is the divergence of experience that explains why believing in God is an option for some and not for others; it is the same thing that allows you and I to see the same film at the same time in the same theater and come out with opposite opinions as to its worth.
Science tells us a lot about the universe in which we live; I do not intend to dispute that by pointing out the role that faith plays in science. I do not intend to defend any religion in particular, either, only to defend the option of choosing to follow a religion without being viewed as somehow inferior to or less intelligent than those who choose no religion.
One final message from James quite nicely sums up the difference between science and reality:
"Government sucks" is in actuality a great reason to work for the government. It's the same reasoning that gave us the old adage, "If you want something done right, do it yourself." I don't think that's what the poster was referring to, though. He was lamenting that neither of the choices presented are very palatable. Knowing next-to-nothing about either individual's actions, I can't comment on the accuracy of that statement.
My own belief is that it may not make much of a difference who Obama picks because the job description (or lack thereof) is too nebulous for anything profitable to come out of it. What exactly is the purpose of a government CTO? What sort of power is the CTO going to have to force government agencies to do whatever it is that the CTO is going to request them to do?
I can envision the CTO's duty being to streamline data gathering and reporting and to make the data more accessible to the public, a job for which I show support even as a believer in small government. Indeed, Warrior's statement seems to point to something like my description,
"Cisco is committed to working closely with the Obama Administration on their plans to deploy digital infrastructure to grow our economy and create jobs. Smart networking technologies and IT play a critical role in transforming government, energy, education, and health care."
but before we even finish the first sentence she's talking about growing the economy and creating jobs! I would have thought that "making the government less sucky" would include taking advantage of tech to cut back on government spending, and nowhere in our Constitution is government given responsibility for growing the economy. (In practice, as history has shown, government is much better at stifling the economy than growing it, but I digress.)
She then goes on to talk about energy, education, and health care which are themselves overly broad concepts, unrelated to the job for which she is a candidate, and (dare I say) equivalent to Bush's cries of national security and terrorism. Out with the stick and in with the carrot, and the creep of government continues at a steady pace*.
Kundra's blurb gives me a similarly mixed reaction:
Before he moved to D.C., he was assistant secretary of commerce and technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, where he set up a Web site designed to maximize citizen involvement in the state's procurement decisions. In D.C., he runs his 600-person staff like a startup, experimenting in cloud computing, open source software, social networking, and other cutting-edge technologies.
That website he set up in VA sounds very good to me and is something I would like to see more of. It also sounds like he hasn't done anything useful since he got to DC, but I have only this article to work from. I don't like the word "experimenting" when it involves taxpayers' money without their consent, and I especially dislike it when it's near "cloud computing" and "social networking," neither of which sounds very useful for government to play with.
I predict that this position will end up being slightly more beneficial than the proposed "car czar," another proposed position with a similar amount of detail in its job description.
*Do not misunderstand me: I am confident that each of those men believes he is doing what is best for his country. Both men are also part of the political class and therefore absolutely certain that a body of ~600 nearly-homogeneous individuals wielding legislation can cure all the ills of ~300,000,000 diverse others.
Re:SOA also stands for
on
The Zen of SOA
·
· Score: 4, Funny
"The present addiction to using initials instead of names and to giving institutions long titles that yield a pseudoword acronym is the childish-absurd."
- Jacques Barzun
We have created a Society of Acronyms, and are much the poorer for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you're more keen on the details than I am, I would be willing to give the benifit of the doubt that publishing one's work was, and to whatever degree, still remains, an opportunity of circumstance. Maybe there was a reason he didn't publishing unrelated to his desire to do so.
Lots of things are opportunities of circumstance, and that is often how heroes are made. You don't hear about the fireman who arrived two minutes too late to leap into the flames and pull the baby out unharmed, you hear about his buddy in Company C whose station was closer and got there first. Both men had the same capabilities and the same desire, but one had the opportunity of circumstance while the other was a victim of it. The act itself is what matters, and I fully agree with Compholio that while the findings are interesting, he should not be considered a hero.
There are those who are overly concerned with dates and figures who will make sure to label Thomas Harriot with the distinguished title of "First to use Optickal Aide to Chart the Moon," and there is no harm in it (though it is likely untrue; it would not surprise me if much older civilizations had moon maps whose detail matches his or Galileo's), but history books will only make a slight change to their sections about Galileo as Harriot is not otherwise noteworthy.
There are certainly some of those types out there, but their shrill voices make them appear a larger group than they truly are.
The root of capitalism is really nothing more than the belief that I know best how to spend my own money. If I am right then I should reap the benefits, and if I am wrong then I will suffer the consequences. Freedom and personal responsibility. That doesn't make me a greedy asshole, but neither does it prevent assholes from talking the same talk.
Not only is it a simulated universe, but it's running on a virtual machine! I saw some garbage collection take place just this morning!
This whole "people are sheep" has become a meme repeated by people with delusions of grandeur. Ironically enough, mindlessly repeating a meme makes these people themselves the very sheep they so despise.
That was an excellent statement. I have been occasionally fighting against the same meme (though in relation to political action) and I had never put together how such baseless grandstanding affects the speaker.
FWIW, though I disagree with GP's assessment of Katrina and his characterization of people, I do agree that the interest in helping our fellow citizens has waned. Perhaps the depression that's coming if we continue on our current course will reawaken a spirit of community and responsibility.
Fricking newage babble. Emotional states can be quantized as well as any other mental state.
I am not sure what other mental states you are referencing, but I'm going to forge ahead anyway and claim that any quantization of an emotional state is simplistic, though it may prove useful to science and in communication.
I'd normally say, "They just look that way" but they don't even appear continuous internally!
Emotional states change all day long, and it is perfectly cromulent to say "I was sad this morning, but I feel better now"
Such a statement, although accurate to an extent, is overly broad. First of all, "continuous" is not the same as "static," so your remark that emotional states change all day long does not contradict the GP's point. Second, your use of the word "feel" is illustrative because it reflects the individual's current feelings (constantly referred to as his "emotional state" as if changing the name makes it more objective). It is important to note that if you ask someone how he is feeling, he is always able to provide an answer. This underscores the fact that feeling goes on all the time, every day, every conscious moment.
Every single thought that our focus rests on is accompanied by a fringe of perceptions, from the ambient noise of the room or surrounding area to how at ease one feels at this current location, along with a vast number of other emotional and environmental colorations that can be examined individually (by focusing on them) but never separated from the whole of perception. This is not some new-agey idea; it has been known almost since psychology's inception and certainly before 1900.
I believe strongly that the point in the article (as summarized by the original poster; you didn't expect me to READ it, did you?) stands:
Finite state machines will be unrealistically simple when simulating emotional responses.
It has also been known since before 1900 that our emotional response to things begins with physical symptoms, not with contemplation. We see the rampaging bear, our hearts skip a beat then go into overdrive, and we are afraid; not: we see the bear, decide to be afraid, then our hearts go into overdrive. Of course this can work in reverse at times, dwelling on a sad experience will lead to slumped posture and a downcast face, but every emotion stems from and results in physical changes. This fact leads me to believe that without a massive sensation-processing apparatus on the order of complexity of, say, a small mammal, a digital device will never be able to simulate feelings at a level that we would consider to be realistic. I further believe that we will never be able to artificially create consciousness in any way similar to our own without such an apparatus.
In closing, anyone interested in the creation of a consciousness owes it to himself to read up on the history of psychology in addition to all the standard AI information. A failure to understand the magnitude of the human being's conscious experience will lead only to continual frustration in the quest to create one artificially.
I recall reading about that here a few years ago, but I couldn't find any more information on it when I searched a few months back.
This topic reminds me of Bruce Sterling's Bitter Resistance, an entertaining and informative article about bacteria. That sounds like marketing-speak, so here's a topical excerpt:
Bacteria live on and inside human beings. They always have;
bacteria were already living on us long, long before our species became
human. They creep onto us in the first instants in which we are held to
our mother's breast. They live on us, and especially inside us, for as long
as we live. And when we die, then other bacteria do their living best to
recycle us.
An adult human being carries about a solid pound of commensal
bacteria in his or her body; about a hundred trillion of them. Humans have
a whole garden of specialized human-dwelling bacteria -- tank-car E. coli,
balloon-shaped staphylococcus, streptococcus, corynebacteria,
micrococcus, and so on. Normally, these lurkers do us little harm. On the
contrary, our normal human-dwelling bacteria run a kind of protection
racket, monopolizing the available nutrients and muscling out other rival
bacteria that might want to flourish at our expense in a ruder way.
But bacteria, even the bacteria that flourish inside us all our lives,
are not our friends. Bacteria are creatures of an order vastly different
from our own, a world far, far older than the world of multicellular
mammals. Bacteria are vast in numbers, and small, and fetid, and
profoundly unsympathetic.
Okay, okay! I admit I was wrong. Will you call off your friends from posting even more damning replies!?
There is an easy way to test for impairment, and that is to test for impairment rather than for drugs. There are a few companies out there pushing this stuff, conveniently called impairment testing.
From linked site:
Impairment can come from any number of sources, even from being tired or distracted. Employees who fail impairment testing can certainly still be fired, but more likely they will be sent home with no pay for the day and fired only if they repeatedly fail the test.
Thanks for providing links. It surprises me how many people remain unaware of marijuana prohibition's sordid history, from the Hearst conspiracy all the way up to Gonzales v. Raich. Granted, I know a disproportionate amount of stoners, but this stuff has been reported on and unquestioned for decades! I suppose that there just aren't very many people interested in it because government has succeeded in indoctrinating us to denounce the gentle weed without thinking. I myself was a hater in my youth, but I pulled a 180 during college and never looked back.
Maybe that's the answer. If you meet/know someone who thinks cannabis is bad, slip 'em a weed brownie or a slice of space cake. They'll change their tune within minutes!
The "stay strong and positive" theory of oncology does hold. In most cases it won't save your life in the absence of other treatment, but it's been repeatedly shown that patients with positive attitudes often have more positive prospects than those who succumb to gloom and doom.
This is the same idea as having faith in your ability to jump over a large gap. If you question your ability, you become less steady on your feet, less able to time your leap, and increase the chance of your failure.
I don't have the link handy, but the outraged older folks you're talking about don't exist, or are at least younger than you think they are. A recent study showed that people over 60 were remarkably amenable to legalizing medical marijuana. It's not the same thing as full legalization (a question which IIRC unfortunately wasn't asked), but it's a start.
I think you're spot-on with your comment about mainstream churches. They tend to be echo chambers where new ideas have to come from the top (pastoral staff) in order to be accepted, and even then they are often accepted reluctantly. I would bet that many pastors worth their salt, after looking at MJ studies, would not be opposed to legalization, though few of them would dare to raise the issue to their congregations.
It's a bit like running FSCK on your brain
I know that this is a good thing, but it still reminds me of those old DARE ads...
Seriously. We've been doing this HTML thing for what, 20 years now</a>? And still we can't accomplish the proper use of the closing tag. ;)
I emailed the team at DownsizeDC to ask if the problem you raised is really a problem. Here is their response:
Legislation that passed gets codified in the U.S. Code. When OSTA gets passed, it, too, would be placed in the code. A subsequent bill could repeal OSTA or amend it. But if that bill violates OSTA without specifically repealing or amending it, it is void. OSTA can't be superceded unless it's specifically repealed or amended.
If the momentum builds to get OSTA passed, it is unlikely Congress would quickly turn around and repeal it or try to ignore it. There's be too much pressure on them to obey it.
I think the second paragraph is the most poignant. If enough people push for this thing to get it passed, even if your loophole exists, taking advantage of it would piss off hundreds of thousands of people. I doubt anyone's reading these comments anymore, but I couldn't let your argument stand unanswered since it may discourage some people from pushing for this legislation.
Cheers!
If he's using a US QWERTY keyboard, the word was likely meant to be "living," as in "get [make] a living out of [from] their music," though "licensing" is a plausible alternative.
...which is all a criticism of the judicial system, not capitalism. I read your post further down on courts in the Nordic model, and I too would like to see something like that here in the US. The socialist part of the Nordic model would not work in the US--the country is too big for that--but the judicial system is thankfully decoupled from the socialist state.
If you want to argue for socialism, go right ahead--it's a good argument to have as socialism certainly has benefits. Don't try to sneak it through the back door by blaming capitalism for the failure of our judicial system.
I think the mood of the white house staff has a lot more to do with the amount of vandalism than "a cooperative president." Clinton's office staff was pissed off that Bush got elected because they felt that Clinton was doing good things and did not get a fair shake from Republicans, and because of the whole election fiasco in Florida leaving them questioning Bush's legitimacy.
Bush's office staff was in all likelihood less attached to the man, at least towards the end. Even the Republican presidential candidate emphasized the areas where he differed from Bush. I can't help but feel that a fair number of staffers thought, "Thank God that's over" as they were getting ready to leave, and simply didn't think to vandalize the place.
Smoking is bad for you. Here, we bake it into cookies. You want one?
Well now that ITunes is going DRM free the Zune is even less interesting.
Too bad really. Competition is usually a good thing.
Do you think Apple would have pushed so hard for unlocking iTunes if their player was the only one on the market?
Excellent post.
Far too many of us "in the know" fail to realize that we are the vanguard. We hear about this stuff because we're on the Internet looking for it. The average American isn't concerned about it because TV news media has not done its job of keeping the people well informed. That duty falls upon us, but when we meet the slightest bit of resistance (and fail to keep in mind that denial and ridicule are the first stages of acceptance) we throw up our hands and complain that "the public no longer cares." Oftentimes this judgment is made before even talking to anyone; just listening to the accounts of a few who have.
I strongly believe that if we in the vanguard take responsibility for telling others what's going on, we can avoid a revolution by adhering to the democratic process. Remember to keep your boxes in order: the soapbox comes first and may curtail the need to use the last.
Have you ever read William James? I ask not only because of your incorrect statement about science and faith but because James is the man who came up with Pragmatism, and Obama is continually referred to as a pragmatist (in the historical rather than the pejorative sense). It is in our interest, then, to re-examine Pragmatism if we are to fully understand the decisions that President Obama will make, provided that he does in fact use the pragmatic test of truth. This isn't the place for such an undertaking and I don't have any books handy, so instead I will only tackle your statement, "that science doesn't require any blind faith," using a smattering of quotes from William James.
Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
The statement in the second quote is especially important when considering science. When a scientist posits a hypothesis, he believes it to be true, or that there is a good chance that it is true. This faith, based on his previous experience, is what compels him to run experiments to test his hypothesis, which may turn out to be true or false. More fundamentally, he has faith that by experimenting he will be able to prove or disprove his hypothesis, or at least discover whether or not it is provable at this time, even though the only thing he has to go on is his personal experience.
Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
Here we see that faith plays a role in science at a greater than individual level. Repeatability is well and good as a test, but one must have faith that testing was actually performed as reported, and accurate results obtained. A better example, perhaps, is when we accept the word of geologists that the rock in a certain area is X million years old. This statement is based on the faith that the geologist knows what he is about, and on his part, faith that the methods used by his testing equipment are sound, and so on. You also have faith that the scientific process will continue to yield practical results; otherwise what would be the point? "In its most extreme form, scientism is the faith that science has no boundaries, that in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavor will be dealt and solved by science alone." (source: wiki::scientism)
You may complain that I have been discussing "faith" while what you wrote is "blind faith." The truth is that there are individuals who take the existence of God on blind faith, that is, solely on the faith of others, and there are other individuals who take the truths found by science on blind faith. Yet just as there are also individuals who take science on informed faith, that is, their own experimentation, so too are there individuals who believe in God based on informed faith. What informs them is their own spiritual* experience, and though that may never satisfy you it certainly satisfies them. It is the divergence of experience that explains why believing in God is an option for some and not for others; it is the same thing that allows you and I to see the same film at the same time in the same theater and come out with opposite opinions as to its worth.
Science tells us a lot about the universe in which we live; I do not intend to dispute that by pointing out the role that faith plays in science. I do not intend to defend any religion in particular, either, only to defend the option of choosing to follow a religion without being viewed as somehow inferior to or less intelligent than those who choose no religion.
One final message from James quite nicely sums up the difference between science and reality:
Knowledge about life is one t
Care to elaborate? Are you referring to the financial system or something else?
"Government sucks" is in actuality a great reason to work for the government. It's the same reasoning that gave us the old adage, "If you want something done right, do it yourself." I don't think that's what the poster was referring to, though. He was lamenting that neither of the choices presented are very palatable. Knowing next-to-nothing about either individual's actions, I can't comment on the accuracy of that statement.
My own belief is that it may not make much of a difference who Obama picks because the job description (or lack thereof) is too nebulous for anything profitable to come out of it. What exactly is the purpose of a government CTO? What sort of power is the CTO going to have to force government agencies to do whatever it is that the CTO is going to request them to do?
I can envision the CTO's duty being to streamline data gathering and reporting and to make the data more accessible to the public, a job for which I show support even as a believer in small government. Indeed, Warrior's statement seems to point to something like my description,
"Cisco is committed to working closely with the Obama Administration on their plans to deploy digital infrastructure to grow our economy and create jobs. Smart networking technologies and IT play a critical role in transforming government, energy, education, and health care."
but before we even finish the first sentence she's talking about growing the economy and creating jobs! I would have thought that "making the government less sucky" would include taking advantage of tech to cut back on government spending, and nowhere in our Constitution is government given responsibility for growing the economy. (In practice, as history has shown, government is much better at stifling the economy than growing it, but I digress.)
She then goes on to talk about energy, education, and health care which are themselves overly broad concepts, unrelated to the job for which she is a candidate, and (dare I say) equivalent to Bush's cries of national security and terrorism. Out with the stick and in with the carrot, and the creep of government continues at a steady pace*.
Kundra's blurb gives me a similarly mixed reaction:
Before he moved to D.C., he was assistant secretary of commerce and technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, where he set up a Web site designed to maximize citizen involvement in the state's procurement decisions. In D.C., he runs his 600-person staff like a startup, experimenting in cloud computing, open source software, social networking, and other cutting-edge technologies.
That website he set up in VA sounds very good to me and is something I would like to see more of. It also sounds like he hasn't done anything useful since he got to DC, but I have only this article to work from. I don't like the word "experimenting" when it involves taxpayers' money without their consent, and I especially dislike it when it's near "cloud computing" and "social networking," neither of which sounds very useful for government to play with.
I predict that this position will end up being slightly more beneficial than the proposed "car czar," another proposed position with a similar amount of detail in its job description.
*Do not misunderstand me: I am confident that each of those men believes he is doing what is best for his country. Both men are also part of the political class and therefore absolutely certain that a body of ~600 nearly-homogeneous individuals wielding legislation can cure all the ills of ~300,000,000 diverse others.
BB will be the next to go if they don't compete.
One can only hope...
"The present addiction to using initials instead of names and to giving institutions long titles that yield a pseudoword acronym is the childish-absurd."
- Jacques Barzun
We have created a Society of Acronyms, and are much the poorer for it.