Blame McCreevy, the leading commissioner for the DG that's doing all this.
What is Ireland's stake in this? It used to be one of the poorest EU members, but the IT industry is booming over there. A particular type of IT, that is:
"U.S. investment in Ireland stands at $55.4 billion--more than four times the amount invested in China, according to James Kenny, a Chicago builder who became U.S. ambassador to Ireland last year.
American businesses have created more than 90,000 jobs in Ireland, but more telling, said Kenny, is the increasing value of those jobs. When Microsoft began manufacturing software in Ireland 20 years ago, the average salary at the plant was about $20,000; today that facility has grown into Microsoft's European Operations Center, with 1,100 employees and an average salary of about $65,000." (Chicago Tribune, numbers are stale)
The position of Poland is even more remarkable when you realize that Poland itself is also a potential cheap "European Operations Center" for non-European companies like Micro$oft. I think Poland either doesn't understand yet how modern democracy works, or they are pissed with the US because they feel they didn't get paid well for the services rendered to the US in the 'coalition' that attacked Iraq.
Funding from general taxation doesn't necessarilly require the government to have direct power over _how much_ money they get.
Indeed. When I read that I immediately thought of the commitment of the Netherlands government to spend at least 0.7% of GDP on international development assistance. It's hard to reduce the budget below that level without attracting attention by the media.
The wages and job security of certain classes of civil servants like judges are also protected by similar rules.
We have a similar public broadcasting authority that likes to position itself as a kind of 'central bank' entrusted with the duty to guard freedom of expression. Any attempt by the government to do anything at all related to public broadcasting is all over the media immediately. They don't seem to have a problem protecting themselves from interference. They are the media, after all.
I think you put that in double-quotes because you invalidated it with the previous statement. Is education for its own sake, or is it for the sake of passing on civilization? Make up your mind!
What I mean to say is that the university's most immediate goal should be continuity of teaching and learning, and therefore people who learn because they like learning for some reason are generally speaking useful to society even if they fail to apply what they have learned in an economically productive way.
But the slogan "education for education's sake" is simplistic, of course. You need a better story than that if you want to pretend you speak with authority on pedagogy.
It is interesting (and worrying) to see how little people know about how modern schools came into existence, and what their purpose is. Being from a country where the introduction of schools caused bloodshed and a secession it is hard to forget why they exist. To control education is to decide the national language, the measurement system, the past, etc. Mandatory education is what keeps the nation together.
Answer the question: what is the use of learning merely for learning's sake?
The role of the university is to pass on civilization to the next generation. It is the keeper of knowledge first, and creator of knowledge second. A part of the population - preferably the most intelligent part - must learn, review, rephrase, reinvent, translate, and teach for "it's own sake". To keep knowledge alive, it must be used.
Monasteries kept "useless" knowledge alive in the dark ages. Today it is the universities that have to remember the things that are have no value to today's society, but may have value tomorrow.
Inventing stuff is highly overrated; Rediscovering today's computer from scientific knowledge is much easier than reconstructing today's scientific knowledge from a functional computer. The university's role is only to spread the scientific knowledge that led to the invention, and afterwards to remember the invention.
Vocational training is not the business of universities. The market will take care of that. Of course some influential people WANT universities to give vocational training, and they want the taxpayer to keep their underpaid employees from starving, and they want a government-enforced monopoly in the market of their choice, etc.
Distrust managers who complain about the vocational skills of newly hired employees: they will ignore the knowledge management cycle inside their own organization. They will not invest in you, and consider you as replacable.
High school is a different story.
Q: So then learning is a means to an end -- a means to get into a higher class in society? Being able to "talk with more authority" merely means that I'll be able to hold my own in "higher" conversations with "more important" people, right?
There are two roads to persuasion: people either accept your argument because it follows from their knowledge, or they accept it because they accept your authority in the matter. The first scenario is the less likely one in specialized fields.
I am often hired by people who have already read my publications and already agree with me, just because they want me to explain it to their management. You can make a living on speaking with authority.
[..] none of those 13+ organizations you rattled off has been able to stop genocide in [..]
You never hear the small, positive stories. The media want to see blood. It sells.
Nothing happens unless there is a UN member or a coalition of UN members that has the means and the willingness to interfere. Other countries than the US do take on missions if they feel they have the means to pull it off.
"Without France, we would find ourselves in a second Rwanda," claimed Ibrahim Coulibaly, one of the rebels who took control of the north in September 2002, in an interview with Courrier International (Nov 17).
Or the UNMEE force in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where the Netherlands and Canada initially volunteered, but only after explicit assurances by the US through the media that they could call in US air support from bases in Saudi Arabia if needed. The force now mostly consists of troops from India, Jordania, and Kenya.
Srebrenica is a good example of what happens if you are willing but do not really have the means to pull it off yourself (and your 'ally' the US is secretly arming the side you are supposed to disarm according to your UN mandate). The Netherlands' force mistakenly assumed it could rely on air support by allies if needed, and the small force didn't have the means to take out Serbian tanks. The Serbs blocked munitions and arms supplies over the road for months before they attacked the enclave.
The US is the only country with a network of air force bases all over the world, and even the US would probably have had problems providing sufficient air lift and air support quickly in Rwanda. For smaller countries involvement in Rwanda could only have ended in embarassment.
All of this has hardly any bearing on the functioning of the UN bureaucracy. It is about cynical international diplomacy.
I am not the only one who can spend minutes finding out:
a) which 'removable disk' corresponds to the device I want to unplug, b) which application it is that still has a lock on a file on that disk, c) into which port in which hub the black cable attached to the device I want to unplug goes, d) where on my desk the black cable with the special connector for my digital camera is, and where the other end of that black cable is?
Surely there are other disorganized people with 6 usb memory sticks, a usb CD burner, a usb HD as well as some other devices like the usb bluetooth dongle, PDA, and 3 usb cameras like me.
In the Netherlands the only dialup (being ISDN 64/128kbps) still available is 'free' dialup. There are 11 providers that I know of.
Of course you have to pay per minute (0.01/0.028 euro) for using the phone connection. It's actually more expensive than a cheap 20 euro a month ADSL subscription if you use Internet regularly.
Free WiFi is really free. There are lots of free WiFi access points here (with the university spread all over own), but no provider with a free national network. It is an interesting concept, but I do not see how they are going to force me to watch advertising.
Well, people should not just "accept it as fact," because they should be interested in the causes and solutions. This means they need to look at available evidence and make some decisions...
I don't agree. Let's leave estate planning to estate planners, surgery to surgeons, and predicting climate change to climate experts. You can't be an expert on everything in one lifetime. Trust expert opinion, but do be suspicious about motives, interests and funding.
Amazingly, all EU meteorological services agree on global warming. That's good enough for me. Wasn't the EU's motto "Unity in Disagreement"?
And how he used to speak eloquently about the noble plight of the lumpenproletariat?
Lumpenproletariat? That would centainly disqualify him as a communist. Marx introduced the concept 'lumpenproletariat' to refer to people of low class outside the productive wage-labor system. These people were considered a force hostile to the revolution of the proletariat. I don't think Marx considered these people 'noble'.
It is certainly not a perfect analogy: there is a speed limit for cars.
My 10 yrs old 1100 kg car has 115 bhp and accelerates to 100 km/h in 10 seconds. The same thing was of course possible 30 years ago, but comparatively more expensive, not with a 1.6l engine, more noisy, and consuming more fuel.
Today's computers are less economical and more noisy, but they don't feel much faster.
Clearly there was a point when, if unchecked, the Soviet Union could have ridden over a sizable chunk of Central and Western Europe. Certainly Allied thinkers in the immediate post-WWII days were quite concerned about this, and there was something of a movement to attack the Soviet divisions in Eastern Europe and drive them back. Of course, this WWIII scenario was never to be.
Sure. It was immediately at the end of WWII. There was a US/British presence small compared to the Red Army, Germany had capitulated, and ill armed western European 'resistance forces' counted as a few light infantry divisions at best. Europe was a walkover, but the Soviets did not act.
In less than a decade western Europe was armed to the teeth. The red menace was gone and only the rhetoric remained. And the US army and nuclear weapons of course.
An example of how seriously the generation of my grandparents really took the 'red menace': they sent a large part of the army to the Dutch East Indies to reoccupy it.
The system hadn't really worked all that well for decades. [..] but the USSR's internal cohesion, which had not been so great and all-encompassing as the Soviets had let on, was fragmenting.
An explanation that, I feel, is often overlooked is that Tsarist Russia didn't work that well either. When I picture 19th century Russia "internal cohesion" is not the right word to describe it. The empire required a certain measure of terror to stay together, before and after the revolution. The country made a great leap forward economically after the victory in WWII, and the combination of communist idealism, WWII-related patriotism, and deceiving American rhetoric of a "missile gap" kept people believing in a bright future.
The stagnation under Brezhnev, and the changing attitude of the US and Europe, was enough to kill that hope. The leadership became insecure and the people restless. Reagan plays a role in that, but the lost battle for the hearts and minds of Europe is what really mattered to communist aspirations.
On average the Soviet Union did pretty well throughout its existence, in any way that can be measured and compared to its predecessor and successor. Look up the figures. Modern Russia isn't really doing better. The bear is still there, and it is as "dangerous" as it always was. In the past it was overestimated, now maybe underestimated. History tells us nothing more than that it is capable of defeating a medium-sized European country on its own soil. Now they have nuclear weapons, of course.
I live in one of "the worst serviced areas" in the Netherlands: my employer (a university) claims to have 96% national coverage for employee DSL, but not in my area. Most providers have near or total national coverage.
Still I could get for instance the following comparable offer with no cap: 8064/640, no cap, EURO 49,95 (Tiscali).
Minimum no cap: 256/256, no cap, EURO 15.00 (Speedlinq).
What I have is 3200/768, no cap, EURO 59,95 (but tax deductible), with a provider (XS4ALL, see for instance this and this) that has a reputation for fighting the government and others in court to protect the privacy of its customers, a good ping, and the best helpdesk for UNIX users.
The problem is "simulation of human" vs "solving problems".
Do you aim for immersion or competitiveness, that's the question. Competitiveness is easier than immersion, and in some games bots are just as irritating as human opponents. Do you want behaviour that is plausible for the type of world you are playing in, or behaviour optimized for winning the game. It is impossible to realize both if the game is not balanced to reward behaviour that is logical for the world the game simulates.
If the multiplayer version of the game also feels wrong, there is no amount of AI that is going to solve the problem. Contrary to what many believe, it is not the adolescents you are playing that are the problem, but the mechanics of the game. The AI programmer has an impossible task writing an entertaining AI for a fundamentally flawed world without cheating.
Some simple examples: - In 'medieval' RTS games like AoE your enemy will never retreat or flee when outnumbered, regardless of whether he is AI or a good human player. In the real world they would. Human live is valued wrongly. - In many 3D FPS games your enemy will jump up and down like an idiot to dodge bullets. In real life that 1) doesn't work because you can't jump high enough, and 2) you get tired pretty quickly. - The economy: no game gets the economy right.
Video games are too unbalanced and temporary to invest time in game AI. There is nothing to learn in game AI programming that will generalize to the next project you work on. In chess, which is balanced and has been around for longer than AI, the AI is very competitive.
There are a number of competitive botclients for quake and UT servers, but bots are not generally allowed on servers unfortunately so most players don't know. I have written a specialized bot for a UT mod (unrealspeed, about 9 hours work) in the past, but most UT mods are released without any specialized bots. And even when you implement a dedicated bot, the map suppliers are too lazy to add good path nodes and test them. That just shows how little true interest in bot programming there is. It is less important than correct lighting and shadows.
I will never waste my time on something like this again because a few months later UT2003 changed the API and we decided to stop supporting the mod. To get decent AI, the game must remain the same for at least a few years.
That does not make sense to me. If I buy a mobile phone, and somehow lose it, I cannot go to the reseller and claim a new phone simply because I "already own it". If I lose it, then it's lost and I will have to buy a new one.
Similarly, if I've lost my software key, then I've lost my proof of ownership, and I'm just as much a pirate as anybody else if I use a friend's key when installing.
And if you loose your car keys, you no longer own the car? Right.
I can prove legal ownership because my employer keeps a record of the things they give away, but I do not keep keys very well and do not know which installation goes with which license and I don't want to search the attic for keys.
This is in no way similar to asking for a new phone: it is somewhat similar to asking the producer or the shop what the default password of my bluetooth headset (which was on the box which I threw away) is. If they know, or you can prove, that you own a legal copy, they have no good reason to not give you a valid key for a minor administrative fee. It's just a service, and only a monopolist could ever conceive of denying that service to customers.
I would disagree. You omitted the last part of the statement : "except not live in a prison state". In essence, you seem to be saying that if your cage is comfy enough, that is "free". Think of it a different way: mandelbrot set.
Mandelbrot is too abstract for me. Another answer I considered is that your prison state is an absolute monarchy, where only one has that freedom, since the total freedom of choice of one interferes with the freedom of choice of any other.
Since I do happen to live in a real world monarchy: the metaphor of the golden cage is common here, the monarch being the one person who is categorically denied his freedom of speech by the constitution. The monarch also doesn't vote, cannot choose his own career etc. The subjects cage the monarch, and the monarch is there to be a symbolic caged master because the people never could decide on another master.
One of the things I learned from Ofra Bengio's book "Saddam's Word", is that Saddam's rule was not Orwellian in character. Saddam was there because he was the strongest warlord, and the people are divided. Hitler could never have become a communist. Saddam could easily switch from being a pan-arabic nationalist to being a fake muslim fanatic. Saddam was an absolute monarch.
A Christian Fundamentalist Totalitarian State might seem more free if you happen to be of that mindset.
Indeed. Since freedom interferes with the freedom of others, there is only a limited amount of it that everyone can have at the same time. The trick is to align it with what people generally want. Most people can live with the restriction that they cannot interfere with the physical integrity, and honor and dignity of other people, for instance. Some can't.
To some freedom is a democracy, to others a theocracy, monarchy, or communist state. Others want to be a Nazi executioner. Democracy does not help those who fail to recognize what the viable options are, and fail to recognize who really is their master. Democracy, free market rhetoric, and libertarianism make very strong assumptions about people's autonomy. Liberalism (in the European sense, and including Kuyper's political calvinism) and socialism assume that people first have to be liberated by educating them before they recognize their true interests.
If Kuyper were right, no oppressive empires would have ever been made. You underestimate the power of bread and circuses backed by the threat of force.
Within his own frame of reference, Kuyper, who was a calvinist political leader and philosopher, is still right. He would note that the people cannot free themselves because of their own moral defects. Because the citizens of those oppressive empires weren't true calvinists. To oppress true calvinists indefinitely you would have to take their bible, and that would have to happen first. Human nature as it really is, is not part of his equation. People get the government they deserve. Other types of liberals and socialists would have a similar answer on how to 'safeguard the revolution'. The true marxist revolution will come when a people is ready for it.
You can't escape this problem by having no state. That's not freedom, but a Hobbesian state of nature where anyone can be your master. In Somalia you aren't free, even though there is no state.
*insert Orwellian comment here*
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- George Orwell
Even the Catholic church could never end truth. It is always there to be rediscovered, when the people are ready. At any time, some people will feel oppressed while others feel mostly free to do what they want. Orwell's state exists only as a caricature, that is as much a description of the democratic world we live in as it is descriptive of the Soviet Union, or medieval Europe. We make caricatures of our enemies.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. -- George Orwell
For people with an Orwellian outlook
this site by an intelligent lunatic is wonderful. It explains why democracy, human rights, liberalism, libertarianism, and the free market are totalitarian. To him at least.
I'd say you're a pretty lousy ruling elite if you don't make sure that control of whatever makes you elite stays in your hands, though. Maybe he only meant stupid ruling elites:P
I'd say he meant late 19th century elites. It was largely true then, but right now globalization, science and technology seem to have seriously stacked the odds against the masses. Still the "elite" also has an information problem: who can be trusted with the control points?
The "control points" are safe if they are outside your direct control. That's one of the ways foreigners can play a role. "Outsource" the key jobs to people who cannot have a reason to participate in a revolt.
Iraq's control points are the oil fields, the Shatt-al-Arab and its harbors, and the bank account where the money comes in. Saudi Arabia's control points are the oil fields, the walled city of Dhahran and its harbors, and the bank account where the money comes in. Only foreigners and Saudi Aramco employees live and go there, and the US defends it. In both cases all of them are out of control of the people because they cannot go there. That's the tragedy of these countries: there is nothing but the oil trade.
Kuyper may have meant that if the majority didn't care for their own losses, and manged to throw off all the chains of psychological and class warfare, then they can always overcome the ruling minority.
This is the point about motivating preference: do the people know that they have reason to overthrow the elite? That's exactly the point a revolutionary communist would make.
That's true to a point, but I'd take issue with the "always". Take prison riots as a counterexample, which occasionally succeed, but more often are suppressed.
Not if the prisoners have the same technology: if they produce the guns and locks the guards depend on.
It does depend to some degree on the assumption that opposition to the regime is roughly evenly spread over jobs: the army, weapon manufacturers, the people working at the control points. You are right about that.
Suppose you lived in a prison state. Every aspect of your existence was enforced, however, that enforcement was in perfect accord with your own wishes. Are you still free?
There is no difference. You are free, because you are allowed to do everything you want. All major political ideologies want to free people, but they differ in their beliefs on what most people want, and whether people know what they want (revealed preference vs. motivating preference).
As far as Iraq is concerned, in as much as the people didn't break the bonds of Saddam's rule by themselves, but had democracy foisted upon them; I would agree with you. It is just another form of slavery.
I believe most people in Iraq wanted something better than Saddam.
There is another, more fundamental, issue: In the late 19th century, Kuyper (you will not know him unless you happen to be Dutch) argued that a people, by virtue of numbers, is always able to remove its elite as long as you ignore cross-border effects. You cannot oppress a majority. So a people that is sufficiently autonomous (from outside interference) gets the government it deserves.
In reality a weak country cannot remove its elite if that elite is supported with the money and technology of a strong country. In much of the world 'government' is a battleground (or beauty contest) for western money and technology.
The Soviet Union collapsed because the people stopped supporting it. In a small country this does not happen as long as the elite has weapons the people cannot produce for themselves.
The 'invisible hand of democracy' will only work if countries respect the sovereignty of other countries.
Invaders sometimes leave a stable democracy behind, but only because they didn't impose it and left and the people happened to be ready. Germany and Japan after WWII are bad examples for imposing a democracy. There the people did it themselves. Germany and Austria after WWI ARE examples, and they went terribly wrong.
What happens if the people vote to have Saddam installed back in power?
Then Iraq would prove Kuyper's point. I wouldn't dare to speculate what happens in the US, but it probably has a happy ending because the American people are autonomous by virtue of their number and wealth.
And what do you call it when the evil rhetoric of the enemy calls to punish to infidels?
Good point. We infidels do not need to be 'protected' from this rhetoric ourselves, but a company which mostly employs infidels might want to 'protect' the potential fanatics from this rhetoric, because it is indirectly harmful to infidels.
I don't think trying to shut of fanatics from their news sources accomplishes anything useful, though. To them it just confirms that there is no freedom of expression for them. Indirectly it tells them that they must have a large support base, because the enemy takes so much trouble cutting them of from this support base. There are still tapes, speeches in the mosque, letters etc. They should have their own fora to speak their mind.
I also would prefer to know what plans the fanatics have with me. That's why I read Osama's speeches, for instance, because I do not completely trust the summaries my usual news sources give me to tell me what they want and what they are.
An analogy from the Netherlands, where I live: People with a Nazi mindset, often very dumb people, usually believe that they are part of a majority which is silenced by oppressive anti-hate laws. I have encountered people with this belief several times.
True freedom of expression might teach these people that this is really not the case, and that will make them less dangerous because their beliefs are based on this idea that they are 'the common people' and represent the true political mainstream.
In my opinion, the Fortuyn phenomenon a few years ago in the Netherlands exposed the size of the group that might vote an authoritarian leader into power: about 15% of the population. That is a dangerous group, but not a majority. The murder of Fortuyn unfortunately had the effect that these people now think that their numbers would have grown even larger if the leader had still lived. I don't think this is the case.
You are talking about two different types of restrictions.
Calling for murder, libeling, telling lies that influence the stock market are all done by speech and should by protected, by your words, by the FREEDOM OF SPEECH.
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. -- Thomas Jefferson
I fully support this type of restriction. Some kinds of expression harm me, and therefore should be restricted.
In other cases, speech is limited because we have to be protected from evil rhetoric of the enemy of democracy (be it theocracy, nazism, communism) because we are too stupid to judge ourselves. That is subversive to freedom.
I think the US government probably has no direct involvement in this case. In this case it is a company censoring its customers, and I don't agree with that either.
Freedom does need to be enforced, if it is going to be any better than the one Hobbes described as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". I don't care for that kind of freedom.
We are slaves of laws so that we can be free (Legum servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus) -- Cicero
Where there is no law, there is no freedom. -- John Locke
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. -- Thomas Jefferson
Freedom and coercion go together like light and darkness. Freedom in itself is a meaningless concept.
What the US did in Iraq was at odds with the fundamentals of democracy. The American people cannot "democratically" decide anything for the Iraqi people. The only thing it can do within the bounds of democracy is to stop obstructing Iraqi freedom and wait until the Iraqi people free themselves. Strictly speaking all international relations are an obstruction to democracy, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
So modern democracy should be governed by money?
It is. It shouldn't be. The Poles are still going by the textbook, apparently.
Blame McCreevy, the leading commissioner for the DG that's doing all this.
What is Ireland's stake in this? It used to be one of the poorest EU members, but the IT industry is booming over there. A particular type of IT, that is:
"U.S. investment in Ireland stands at $55.4 billion--more than four times the amount invested in China, according to James Kenny, a Chicago builder who became U.S. ambassador to Ireland last year.
American businesses have created more than 90,000 jobs in Ireland, but more telling, said Kenny, is the increasing value of those jobs. When Microsoft began manufacturing software in Ireland 20 years ago, the average salary at the plant was about $20,000; today that facility has grown into Microsoft's European Operations Center, with 1,100 employees and an average salary of about $65,000." (Chicago Tribune, numbers are stale)
The position of Poland is even more remarkable when you realize that Poland itself is also a potential cheap "European Operations Center" for non-European companies like Micro$oft. I think Poland either doesn't understand yet how modern democracy works, or they are pissed with the US because they feel they didn't get paid well for the services rendered to the US in the 'coalition' that attacked Iraq.
Funding from general taxation doesn't necessarilly require the government to have direct power over _how much_ money they get.
Indeed. When I read that I immediately thought of the commitment of the Netherlands government to spend at least 0.7% of GDP on international development assistance. It's hard to reduce the budget below that level without attracting attention by the media.
The wages and job security of certain classes of civil servants like judges are also protected by similar rules.
We have a similar public broadcasting authority that likes to position itself as a kind of 'central bank' entrusted with the duty to guard freedom of expression. Any attempt by the government to do anything at all related to public broadcasting is all over the media immediately. They don't seem to have a problem protecting themselves from interference. They are the media, after all.
I think you put that in double-quotes because you invalidated it with the previous statement. Is education for its own sake, or is it for the sake of passing on civilization? Make up your mind!
What I mean to say is that the university's most immediate goal should be continuity of teaching and learning, and therefore people who learn because they like learning for some reason are generally speaking useful to society even if they fail to apply what they have learned in an economically productive way.
But the slogan "education for education's sake" is simplistic, of course. You need a better story than that if you want to pretend you speak with authority on pedagogy.
It is interesting (and worrying) to see how little people know about how modern schools came into existence, and what their purpose is. Being from a country where the introduction of schools caused bloodshed and a secession it is hard to forget why they exist. To control education is to decide the national language, the measurement system, the past, etc. Mandatory education is what keeps the nation together.
Answer the question: what is the use of learning merely for learning's sake?
The role of the university is to pass on civilization to the next generation. It is the keeper of knowledge first, and creator of knowledge second. A part of the population - preferably the most intelligent part - must learn, review, rephrase, reinvent, translate, and teach for "it's own sake". To keep knowledge alive, it must be used.
Monasteries kept "useless" knowledge alive in the dark ages. Today it is the universities that have to remember the things that are have no value to today's society, but may have value tomorrow.
Inventing stuff is highly overrated; Rediscovering today's computer from scientific knowledge is much easier than reconstructing today's scientific knowledge from a functional computer. The university's role is only to spread the scientific knowledge that led to the invention, and afterwards to remember the invention.
Vocational training is not the business of universities. The market will take care of that. Of course some influential people WANT universities to give vocational training, and they want the taxpayer to keep their underpaid employees from starving, and they want a government-enforced monopoly in the market of their choice, etc.
Distrust managers who complain about the vocational skills of newly hired employees: they will ignore the knowledge management cycle inside their own organization. They will not invest in you, and consider you as replacable.
High school is a different story.
Q: So then learning is a means to an end -- a means to get into a higher class in society? Being able to "talk with more authority" merely means that I'll be able to hold my own in "higher" conversations with "more important" people, right?
There are two roads to persuasion: people either accept your argument because it follows from their knowledge, or they accept it because they accept your authority in the matter. The first scenario is the less likely one in specialized fields.
I am often hired by people who have already read my publications and already agree with me, just because they want me to explain it to their management. You can make a living on speaking with authority.
They already know of one way of checking that would be impossible to fool without rewriting large parts of wine
I know! It must be related to bounds checking: MS can try out buffer overflow vulnerabilities to test whether it is dealing with the real MS product.
[..] none of those 13+ organizations you rattled off has been able to stop genocide in [..]
You never hear the small, positive stories. The media want to see blood. It sells.
Nothing happens unless there is a UN member or a coalition of UN members that has the means and the willingness to interfere. Other countries than the US do take on missions if they feel they have the means to pull it off.
What about France on the Ivory Coast? A quote:
"Without France, we would find ourselves in a second Rwanda," claimed Ibrahim Coulibaly, one of the rebels who took control of the north in September 2002, in an interview with Courrier International (Nov 17).
Or the UNMEE force in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where the Netherlands and Canada initially volunteered, but only after explicit assurances by the US through the media that they could call in US air support from bases in Saudi Arabia if needed. The force now mostly consists of troops from India, Jordania, and Kenya.
65,000 UN soldiers (excluding forces like the French one on the Ivory Coast) are currently serving in 16 UN operations worldwide, and most of those are succesful.
Srebrenica is a good example of what happens if you are willing but do not really have the means to pull it off yourself (and your 'ally' the US is secretly arming the side you are supposed to disarm according to your UN mandate). The Netherlands' force mistakenly assumed it could rely on air support by allies if needed, and the small force didn't have the means to take out Serbian tanks. The Serbs blocked munitions and arms supplies over the road for months before they attacked the enclave.
The US is the only country with a network of air force bases all over the world, and even the US would probably have had problems providing sufficient air lift and air support quickly in Rwanda. For smaller countries involvement in Rwanda could only have ended in embarassment.
All of this has hardly any bearing on the functioning of the UN bureaucracy. It is about cynical international diplomacy.
This computer application implements the isNot operator and therefore violates microsoft's patent.
I am not the only one who can spend minutes finding out:
a) which 'removable disk' corresponds to the device I want to unplug,
b) which application it is that still has a lock on a file on that disk,
c) into which port in which hub the black cable attached to the device I want to unplug goes,
d) where on my desk the black cable with the special connector for my digital camera is, and where the other end of that black cable is?
Surely there are other disorganized people with 6 usb memory sticks, a usb CD burner, a usb HD as well as some other devices like the usb bluetooth dongle, PDA, and 3 usb cameras like me.
In the Netherlands the only dialup (being ISDN 64/128kbps) still available is 'free' dialup. There are 11 providers that I know of.
Of course you have to pay per minute (0.01/0.028 euro) for using the phone connection. It's actually more expensive than a cheap 20 euro a month ADSL subscription if you use Internet regularly.
Free WiFi is really free. There are lots of free WiFi access points here (with the university spread all over own), but no provider with a free national network. It is an interesting concept, but I do not see how they are going to force me to watch advertising.
Well, people should not just "accept it as fact," because they should be interested in the causes and solutions. This means they need to look at available evidence and make some decisions...
I don't agree. Let's leave estate planning to estate planners, surgery to surgeons, and predicting climate change to climate experts. You can't be an expert on everything in one lifetime. Trust expert opinion, but do be suspicious about motives, interests and funding.
Amazingly, all EU meteorological services agree on global warming. That's good enough for me. Wasn't the EU's motto "Unity in Disagreement"?
And how he used to speak eloquently about the noble plight of the lumpenproletariat?
Lumpenproletariat? That would centainly disqualify him as a communist. Marx introduced the concept 'lumpenproletariat' to refer to people of low class outside the productive wage-labor system. These people were considered a force hostile to the revolution of the proletariat. I don't think Marx considered these people 'noble'.
It is certainly not a perfect analogy: there is a speed limit for cars.
My 10 yrs old 1100 kg car has 115 bhp and accelerates to 100 km/h in 10 seconds. The same thing was of course possible 30 years ago, but comparatively more expensive, not with a 1.6l engine, more noisy, and consuming more fuel.
Today's computers are less economical and more noisy, but they don't feel much faster.
Clearly there was a point when, if unchecked, the Soviet Union could have ridden over a sizable chunk of Central and Western Europe. Certainly Allied thinkers in the immediate post-WWII days were quite concerned about this, and there was something of a movement to attack the Soviet divisions in Eastern Europe and drive them back. Of course, this WWIII scenario was never to be.
Sure. It was immediately at the end of WWII. There was a US/British presence small compared to the Red Army, Germany had capitulated, and ill armed western European 'resistance forces' counted as a few light infantry divisions at best. Europe was a walkover, but the Soviets did not act.
In less than a decade western Europe was armed to the teeth. The red menace was gone and only the rhetoric remained. And the US army and nuclear weapons of course.
An example of how seriously the generation of my grandparents really took the 'red menace': they sent a large part of the army to the Dutch East Indies to reoccupy it.
The system hadn't really worked all that well for decades. [..] but the USSR's internal cohesion, which had not been so great and all-encompassing as the Soviets had let on, was fragmenting.
An explanation that, I feel, is often overlooked is that Tsarist Russia didn't work that well either. When I picture 19th century Russia "internal cohesion" is not the right word to describe it. The empire required a certain measure of terror to stay together, before and after the revolution. The country made a great leap forward economically after the victory in WWII, and the combination of communist idealism, WWII-related patriotism, and deceiving American rhetoric of a "missile gap" kept people believing in a bright future.
The stagnation under Brezhnev, and the changing attitude of the US and Europe, was enough to kill that hope. The leadership became insecure and the people restless. Reagan plays a role in that, but the lost battle for the hearts and minds of Europe is what really mattered to communist aspirations.
On average the Soviet Union did pretty well throughout its existence, in any way that can be measured and compared to its predecessor and successor. Look up the figures. Modern Russia isn't really doing better. The bear is still there, and it is as "dangerous" as it always was. In the past it was overestimated, now maybe underestimated. History tells us nothing more than that it is capable of defeating a medium-sized European country on its own soil. Now they have nuclear weapons, of course.
I am also not impressed. Why is this news?
I live in one of "the worst serviced areas" in the Netherlands: my employer (a university) claims to have 96% national coverage for employee DSL, but not in my area. Most providers have near or total national coverage.
Still I could get for instance the following comparable offer with no cap: 8064/640, no cap, EURO 49,95 (Tiscali).
Minimum no cap: 256/256, no cap, EURO 15.00 (Speedlinq).
What I have is 3200/768, no cap, EURO 59,95 (but tax deductible), with a provider (XS4ALL, see for instance this and this) that has a reputation for fighting the government and others in court to protect the privacy of its customers, a good ping, and the best helpdesk for UNIX users.
The problem is "simulation of human" vs "solving problems".
Do you aim for immersion or competitiveness, that's the question. Competitiveness is easier than immersion, and in some games bots are just as irritating as human opponents. Do you want behaviour that is plausible for the type of world you are playing in, or behaviour optimized for winning the game. It is impossible to realize both if the game is not balanced to reward behaviour that is logical for the world the game simulates.
If the multiplayer version of the game also feels wrong, there is no amount of AI that is going to solve the problem. Contrary to what many believe, it is not the adolescents you are playing that are the problem, but the mechanics of the game. The AI programmer has an impossible task writing an entertaining AI for a fundamentally flawed world without cheating.
Some simple examples:
- In 'medieval' RTS games like AoE your enemy will never retreat or flee when outnumbered, regardless of whether he is AI or a good human player. In the real world they would. Human live is valued wrongly.
- In many 3D FPS games your enemy will jump up and down like an idiot to dodge bullets. In real life that 1) doesn't work because you can't jump high enough, and 2) you get tired pretty quickly.
- The economy: no game gets the economy right.
Video games are too unbalanced and temporary to invest time in game AI. There is nothing to learn in game AI programming that will generalize to the next project you work on. In chess, which is balanced and has been around for longer than AI, the AI is very competitive.
There are a number of competitive botclients for quake and UT servers, but bots are not generally allowed on servers unfortunately so most players don't know. I have written a specialized bot for a UT mod (unrealspeed, about 9 hours work) in the past, but most UT mods are released without any specialized bots. And even when you implement a dedicated bot, the map suppliers are too lazy to add good path nodes and test them. That just shows how little true interest in bot programming there is. It is less important than correct lighting and shadows.
I will never waste my time on something like this again because a few months later UT2003 changed the API and we decided to stop supporting the mod. To get decent AI, the game must remain the same for at least a few years.
That does not make sense to me. If I buy a mobile phone, and somehow lose it, I cannot go to the reseller and claim a new phone simply because I "already own it". If I lose it, then it's lost and I will have to buy a new one.
Similarly, if I've lost my software key, then I've lost my proof of ownership, and I'm just as much a pirate as anybody else if I use a friend's key when installing.
And if you loose your car keys, you no longer own the car? Right.
I can prove legal ownership because my employer keeps a record of the things they give away, but I do not keep keys very well and do not know which installation goes with which license and I don't want to search the attic for keys.
This is in no way similar to asking for a new phone: it is somewhat similar to asking the producer or the shop what the default password of my bluetooth headset (which was on the box which I threw away) is. If they know, or you can prove, that you own a legal copy, they have no good reason to not give you a valid key for a minor administrative fee. It's just a service, and only a monopolist could ever conceive of denying that service to customers.
I would disagree. You omitted the last part of the statement : "except not live in a prison state". In essence, you seem to be saying that if your cage is comfy enough, that is "free". Think of it a different way: mandelbrot set.
Mandelbrot is too abstract for me. Another answer I considered is that your prison state is an absolute monarchy, where only one has that freedom, since the total freedom of choice of one interferes with the freedom of choice of any other.
Since I do happen to live in a real world monarchy: the metaphor of the golden cage is common here, the monarch being the one person who is categorically denied his freedom of speech by the constitution. The monarch also doesn't vote, cannot choose his own career etc. The subjects cage the monarch, and the monarch is there to be a symbolic caged master because the people never could decide on another master.
One of the things I learned from Ofra Bengio's book "Saddam's Word", is that Saddam's rule was not Orwellian in character. Saddam was there because he was the strongest warlord, and the people are divided. Hitler could never have become a communist. Saddam could easily switch from being a pan-arabic nationalist to being a fake muslim fanatic. Saddam was an absolute monarch.
A Christian Fundamentalist Totalitarian State might seem more free if you happen to be of that mindset.
Indeed. Since freedom interferes with the freedom of others, there is only a limited amount of it that everyone can have at the same time. The trick is to align it with what people generally want. Most people can live with the restriction that they cannot interfere with the physical integrity, and honor and dignity of other people, for instance. Some can't.
To some freedom is a democracy, to others a theocracy, monarchy, or communist state. Others want to be a Nazi executioner. Democracy does not help those who fail to recognize what the viable options are, and fail to recognize who really is their master. Democracy, free market rhetoric, and libertarianism make very strong assumptions about people's autonomy. Liberalism (in the European sense, and including Kuyper's political calvinism) and socialism assume that people first have to be liberated by educating them before they recognize their true interests.
If Kuyper were right, no oppressive empires would have ever been made. You underestimate the power of bread and circuses backed by the threat of force.
Within his own frame of reference, Kuyper, who was a calvinist political leader and philosopher, is still right. He would note that the people cannot free themselves because of their own moral defects. Because the citizens of those oppressive empires weren't true calvinists. To oppress true calvinists indefinitely you would have to take their bible, and that would have to happen first. Human nature as it really is, is not part of his equation. People get the government they deserve. Other types of liberals and socialists would have a similar answer on how to 'safeguard the revolution'. The true marxist revolution will come when a people is ready for it.
You can't escape this problem by having no state. That's not freedom, but a Hobbesian state of nature where anyone can be your master. In Somalia you aren't free, even though there is no state.
*insert Orwellian comment here*
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- George Orwell
Even the Catholic church could never end truth. It is always there to be rediscovered, when the people are ready. At any time, some people will feel oppressed while others feel mostly free to do what they want. Orwell's state exists only as a caricature, that is as much a description of the democratic world we live in as it is descriptive of the Soviet Union, or medieval Europe. We make caricatures of our enemies.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. -- George Orwell
For people with an Orwellian outlook this site by an intelligent lunatic is wonderful. It explains why democracy, human rights, liberalism, libertarianism, and the free market are totalitarian. To him at least.
I'd say you're a pretty lousy ruling elite if you don't make sure that control of whatever makes you elite stays in your hands, though. Maybe he only meant stupid ruling elites :P
I'd say he meant late 19th century elites. It was largely true then, but right now globalization, science and technology seem to have seriously stacked the odds against the masses. Still the "elite" also has an information problem: who can be trusted with the control points?
The "control points" are safe if they are outside your direct control. That's one of the ways foreigners can play a role. "Outsource" the key jobs to people who cannot have a reason to participate in a revolt.
Iraq's control points are the oil fields, the Shatt-al-Arab and its harbors, and the bank account where the money comes in. Saudi Arabia's control points are the oil fields, the walled city of Dhahran and its harbors, and the bank account where the money comes in. Only foreigners and Saudi Aramco employees live and go there, and the US defends it. In both cases all of them are out of control of the people because they cannot go there. That's the tragedy of these countries: there is nothing but the oil trade.
Kuyper may have meant that if the majority didn't care for their own losses, and manged to throw off all the chains of psychological and class warfare, then they can always overcome the ruling minority.
This is the point about motivating preference: do the people know that they have reason to overthrow the elite? That's exactly the point a revolutionary communist would make.
That's true to a point, but I'd take issue with the "always". Take prison riots as a counterexample, which occasionally succeed, but more often are suppressed.
Not if the prisoners have the same technology: if they produce the guns and locks the guards depend on.
It does depend to some degree on the assumption that opposition to the regime is roughly evenly spread over jobs: the army, weapon manufacturers, the people working at the control points. You are right about that.
Suppose you lived in a prison state. Every aspect of your existence was enforced, however, that enforcement was in perfect accord with your own wishes. Are you still free?
There is no difference. You are free, because you are allowed to do everything you want. All major political ideologies want to free people, but they differ in their beliefs on what most people want, and whether people know what they want (revealed preference vs. motivating preference).
As far as Iraq is concerned, in as much as the people didn't break the bonds of Saddam's rule by themselves, but had democracy foisted upon them; I would agree with you. It is just another form of slavery.
I believe most people in Iraq wanted something better than Saddam.
There is another, more fundamental, issue: In the late 19th century, Kuyper (you will not know him unless you happen to be Dutch) argued that a people, by virtue of numbers, is always able to remove its elite as long as you ignore cross-border effects. You cannot oppress a majority. So a people that is sufficiently autonomous (from outside interference) gets the government it deserves.
In reality a weak country cannot remove its elite if that elite is supported with the money and technology of a strong country. In much of the world 'government' is a battleground (or beauty contest) for western money and technology.
The Soviet Union collapsed because the people stopped supporting it. In a small country this does not happen as long as the elite has weapons the people cannot produce for themselves.
The 'invisible hand of democracy' will only work if countries respect the sovereignty of other countries.
Invaders sometimes leave a stable democracy behind, but only because they didn't impose it and left and the people happened to be ready. Germany and Japan after WWII are bad examples for imposing a democracy. There the people did it themselves. Germany and Austria after WWI ARE examples, and they went terribly wrong.
What happens if the people vote to have Saddam installed back in power?
Then Iraq would prove Kuyper's point. I wouldn't dare to speculate what happens in the US, but it probably has a happy ending because the American people are autonomous by virtue of their number and wealth.
And what do you call it when the evil rhetoric of the enemy calls to punish to infidels?
Good point. We infidels do not need to be 'protected' from this rhetoric ourselves, but a company which mostly employs infidels might want to 'protect' the potential fanatics from this rhetoric, because it is indirectly harmful to infidels.
I don't think trying to shut of fanatics from their news sources accomplishes anything useful, though. To them it just confirms that there is no freedom of expression for them. Indirectly it tells them that they must have a large support base, because the enemy takes so much trouble cutting them of from this support base. There are still tapes, speeches in the mosque, letters etc. They should have their own fora to speak their mind.
I also would prefer to know what plans the fanatics have with me. That's why I read Osama's speeches, for instance, because I do not completely trust the summaries my usual news sources give me to tell me what they want and what they are.
An analogy from the Netherlands, where I live: People with a Nazi mindset, often very dumb people, usually believe that they are part of a majority which is silenced by oppressive anti-hate laws. I have encountered people with this belief several times.
True freedom of expression might teach these people that this is really not the case, and that will make them less dangerous because their beliefs are based on this idea that they are 'the common people' and represent the true political mainstream.
In my opinion, the Fortuyn phenomenon a few years ago in the Netherlands exposed the size of the group that might vote an authoritarian leader into power: about 15% of the population. That is a dangerous group, but not a majority. The murder of Fortuyn unfortunately had the effect that these people now think that their numbers would have grown even larger if the leader had still lived. I don't think this is the case.
You are talking about two different types of restrictions.
Calling for murder, libeling, telling lies that influence the stock market are all done by speech and should by protected, by your words, by the FREEDOM OF SPEECH.
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. -- Thomas Jefferson
I fully support this type of restriction. Some kinds of expression harm me, and therefore should be restricted.
In other cases, speech is limited because we have to be protected from evil rhetoric of the enemy of democracy (be it theocracy, nazism, communism) because we are too stupid to judge ourselves. That is subversive to freedom.
I think the US government probably has no direct involvement in this case. In this case it is a company censoring its customers, and I don't agree with that either.
er, "freedom" doesn't need to be enforced.
Freedom does need to be enforced, if it is going to be any better than the one Hobbes described as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". I don't care for that kind of freedom.
We are slaves of laws so that we can be free (Legum servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus) -- Cicero
Where there is no law, there is no freedom. -- John Locke
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. -- Thomas Jefferson
Freedom and coercion go together like light and darkness. Freedom in itself is a meaningless concept.
What the US did in Iraq was at odds with the fundamentals of democracy. The American people cannot "democratically" decide anything for the Iraqi people. The only thing it can do within the bounds of democracy is to stop obstructing Iraqi freedom and wait until the Iraqi people free themselves. Strictly speaking all international relations are an obstruction to democracy, of course.