Ooops. You've just questioned military spending AND been modded insightful.
I predict a flood of "If we don't do it first, then our enemies will," comments.
Be careful what you laugh at something someone says. You may be laughing at the next Galileo.
I certainly wasn't laughing at you, mate. I like the idea of sci-fi being a deliberate attempt to get people used to What-Will-Come! My comments were intended as a qualification of that point though.
Using Sci-Fi as a way of getting people used to new technology may reduce 'future shock,' but I don't think it improves people's level of science, because the important aspect of science is not 'facts' but methodology. If anything, I think it would reduce people's understanding of science because so much of sci-fi is hollywood science with no hint of the underlying principles.
Anyway, I don't think there is anyone out there doing this as deliberate policy.
On a related note, the thing that truly holds back science and drives me personally nuts is when the media and people constantly refer to 'Scientists.' Scientists say this... say that... I would sooner it didn't treat scientist as some unquestionable homogenous authority.
...if a lot of Sci-Fi on TV wasn't a big "public education" project.
That doesn't work for me. Science is about the application of logic and critical thinking. You might get people used to the idea of a spaceship with TV sci-fi shows, but this will do nothing to raise the level of 'real' scientific thinking. If anything, it might make it worse because people pick up dodgy concepts and expect technology to work that way.
On a similar theme, I've only ever seen Star Trek once, but that was enough. If you want fantasy then fine, but I'd at least like it to be internally consistant. In the episode I saw their spaceship was trapped by a ring of energy. Okay, I will accept a floating wave of green energy in space... but a ring? Are you telling me they're exploring the galaxy with a spaceship that can't go up or down?
Oh how I wish I had some insightful points for you, mate.
Of course the assumption implicit in your statement is that mathematics has some existence outside of human understanding; that it is more than a model created by the human brain to deal with the patterns it percieves. And it is difficult to justify this as an axiom philosophically.
And if it cannot be justified, then that leaves us with something that can be understood by the human brain because it was designed by the human brain.
How is it immoral for companies to benefit from new products that they have created? They are only patenting new creations, not existing crops, which will of course remain patent-free. If the company starts charging too much for its new crops, farmers can always switch back to the 'natural' variety.
Food is a necessity of life, like water. I find it dubious in the extreme that a small group (in this case, certain companies) would be able to control the supply of a necessity of life. Farmers will not neccesarily be able to 'switch back.' if they later decide they don't like the version they licence from (e.g.) Monsanto. One reason for this is the creep of GM traits into existing crops rendering them (in the eyes of the law) no longer the existing crops. There is already a legal precedent for this in exactly this situation (the link is elsewhere in this story).
Furthermore, the aim here is a monopoly. With a large enough market share, Monsanto can make it economically impossible to continue growing non-GM crops even if you have an untainted strain. ONE means by which they can accomplish this in the US is by the banning of labelling on food that would allow customers to choose between organic non-GM food and the rest. Economies of scale, such as leveraging better deals with the supermarkets is another. Because there is money to be made on patented food stuffs, and less on the non-licenced strains, they have enough investment to pull all sorts of nasty buisness tricks on their rivals.
As I said, having a monopoly on a necessity of life is repugnant. It should be accessible to all equally.
The potato famine was as much a political problem as an agricultural one. And if monoculture was the problem, why hasn't any similar famine occurred recently, when modern agriculture is far more dependent on single-species crops?
I'd say it was an agricultural one, although of course the economic situation of the Irish and the attitude of the UK parliament did little to help solve it. Clearly monoculture was the problem since if they'd had a broader food base the blight would not have been as devastating as it was.
As to why a similar famine hasn't occured recently? Well, knock on wood.
and (2) people starve in the world due to lack of money to buy food and/or that delivery of said food is fouled up by political hindrances.
Here's an economic one - many people in poorer parts of the world now suffer malnutrition of various forms because where once they grew a variety of staple foods to provide them with a balanced diet, they now grow only the current cash crop for export. So for a common example, this means rice for breakfast, rice for lunch, rice for everything really.
Why don't they mix in growing something else too? Because they can't afford to - that's global economics.
And do you want to know what's really ironic? Monsanto (again) has patented something they call Golden Rice - rice with that produces additional Vitamin D. The idea is to [partially] solve the malnutrition issues that companies such as themselves have been creating.
Of course they don't go into quite as much detail in their marketing on that side of things.
I know the case you refer to. Worse than Monsanto demanding payment for growing their crops, was that he was an organic farmer growing for the non-GM market and export (here in Europe we still refuse to import unapproved GM crops and there's F. all market for them with the public anyway).
So in one strike he's losing his livelihood and being sued by a giant corporation.
Although I have concerns about splicing 'alien' genes into food crops, this isn't my main issue with GM crops.
It is morally repugnant to me to allow the patenting of food. It is blindingly stupid in my opinion to allow patented foodstuff to become the main body of supply for us.
Furthermore, the main advantage with many of the GM crops is not that they are in some way better for us, but that they are resistant to more powerful pesticides and herbicides than non-GM plants, enabling the fields to be blitzed with much stronger chemicals. What do you think that does to local wildlife? To the rivers and streams it runs off to? To the people who live next to the fields?
And what do you think it does to biodiversity? Did you ever hear about the Irish Potato famine? Most of the population depended on a single food crop derived from a small number of imported ancestors. The potato blight came and they were all but wiped out in a stroke.
Why should they? Unless the boss is watching their performance, what stake do they have in stopping you? None, unless they enjoy confrontation (which most don't.
Another triumph for the social model of remote ownership of local business!
The increase in book loans from drawing in the extra people is probably minimal.
However, so long as it doesn't adversely effect the availability of books then it's not a bad thing. Providing free internet access to people that don't have it is a good thing, as well as the assitance that library staff can provide to people who aren't quite/.'ers yet;)
Many communities in the modern western Europe and the USA lack any real community or cultural centre. If a library can fulfill this role in a greater way then more power to it. I personally would love to see libraries take on greater roles as centres of information, learning and debate. They were once greatly respected by the public.
The introduction of a network of public libraries in the UK in the 1850s was a landmark of progressive thinking and it nearly didn't happen. One Consrevative MP argued (and had a lot of support in his party for this)that:
"people have too much knowledge already: it was much easier to manage them twenty years ago; the more education people get the more difficult they are to manage."
Society would be much the poorer if the libraries hadn't been approved by parliament, and by the same measure, society will become much richer if they recieve more support in the future.
I have an entirely legitamate hatred for geometric proofs, which seem useless
There are loads of uses... if you work in advanced mathematics.;)
Just to make this utterly off-topic, today I was asked by a student why he needed to learn Sin(A+B), COS(A+B), etc. I replied that in the old days, when calculators that could work out trig functions weren't invented, these were incredibly useful formulae for saving yourself work.
And that no-one who writes exam papers has noticed the discovery of the microchip yet.
One way to work around it is that if you file a lawsuit and lose, you have to pay the winning side the cost of your legal actions. That way neither side is able to drive up the stakes by hiring high-priced lawyers, ala SCO.
Yep, familiar with that, but I'm not sure it helps. Consider...
EvilCorp does something bad to you. You file a suit against them. They hire a high-priced legal firm - they might even have some $300/hr lawyer on staff. Now you know that if you pursue the suit and lose you're going to be paying a fortune you cannot afford.
From the article:... advocacy groups and lawyers have received enough consumer complaints to prompt the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society to launch an informational website apprising crackdown targets of their legal rights. EFF says innocent people are settling with DirecTV for no other purpose than to avoid costly litigation.
It seems the coercian involves people preferring to settle than rather than pay the costs for defending themselves. From an article linked to from the above:
At that point, the settlement price tag jumps to $10,000 -- still less than the typical cost of paying a lawyer to go to trial against a corporate powerhouse in federal court.
Is it now actually the case that in the US the law is too expensive for people to use? This is how it appears from the stories I read on/. and elsewhere.
Math and science *ARE* kid-friendly, and kids ARE science and math friendly. Inherently.
Science more so than maths alas. I agree that Maths has a lot to recommend it as something fun to learn, but there is a problem inherant in maths that doesn't exist in other subjects such as History, Art or English.
The problem is that [almost] everything you learn in Maths builds on the last thing you learnt and it's very easy to fall behind in a bad way. This is why many people think they're bad at the subject. They miss a step or two and suddenly nothing they're supposed to be learning makes sense. This is less so for Science and hardly a problem at all in other GCSE-level subjects (GCSEs are the exams you do in the UK at 16).
I'm helping out a school next week by teaching some supplemental maths. Personally, I like maths but I'm good at it. It's hard to say which came first. They go together.
But I walk in carrying a Sainsbury's bag loaded with munchies, and no-one bats an eye.
You sound as bad as me.:)
As far as I'm concerned the 'no outside food' rule just doesn't apply. Surely it's the exact same principle as Micro$oft bundling it's own browser into Windows and excluding others. A violation of rights. A company cannot use it's influence in one area to force the buyers hand in another area.
Hah! Time to take Warner Village to the EU! (Teach them for putting our Odean out of business).
Is this purely a US problem? I go to the cinema quite a bit here in the UK and I almost always take my own food in. That's mainly because I like fruit or nuts not ice-cream and popcorn, but I take my own drinks as well. No-one's dared try and stop me yet.
Anyone in the UK ever been forbidden to take their own food in?
I really wanted to mod you up, but I just had to reply instead.
However, the concious mind can only deal with one possibilty at a time.
I would say that one of the concious mind's essential functions is to narrow things down to one possibility at a time. It is the decision maker that collapses the possibilities thrown up by the rest of the brain into one fixed state. There's no reason to believe it, but the parallel to the original posters mention of quantum conciousness is a nice one.
Our entire lives are lived making choice, that we think are logical, but once you get past the excuses and a rationalization, they turn out to be arbitrary. Or worse, someone else's arbitrary choice.
There are two levels (at least) that this can be addressed on - the neurological and the cultural.
For the first apporach, It's been shown that the human brain makes many decisions before concious awareness of that choice but that afterwards a person will rationalise that decision. The correct use of the concious mind is to train the brain as a whole to make the decisions that benefit it. To draw a metaphor from elsewhere in this thread, the brain as a whole is like that solution finding algorithm that finds a local best-case solution and is trapped because all near points are worse, even though a better solution exists in a remoter area of the solution space. The concious mind exists to observe and provide strategy where the unconcious system uses tactics.
For the cultural approach, many of our decisions are made for us because we use behaviour learned from our predecessors or trainers. Unfortunately this behaviour was what worked for them to achieve aims that they chose. Unless we have identical aims then we are not acting for ourselves, but for others.
When we say something, it is generally to the exclusion of something else.
This is what is so frustrating to me. It's hard to say something without collapsing the possibilities. An abstract solution is to use language to describe the problem space rather than the solution. This puts things at one remove on the either/or scale. Of course, you're then collapsing the possible problem states to just one, but then you can repeat this process until you reach the required level of multiplicity.
Am I making sense? My biggest problem is that I've developed a hybrid visual-language in my own head space (I think we all do to different degrees) and translating things into pure words takes time and is less intuitive.
Anyone out there want to help me develop a new language with some built in multi-threading?
And generally the most literate people are the ones least likely to engage in parallel thinking. (Grumbles the frustrated science fiction writer wannabee who has a story stuck in his head, but he can't tell it all at once.)
So jumble it all together and tell them all at once. Worked for Catch-22.;)
So would I actually. I've thought about this a bit more since I posted and of course making tasks easier should cut down on mistakes being made. Just because I use a front end for my CRON jobs nowadays, it doesn't mean I'll destroy my system.
The problem is that until recently, administering a *NIX system looked hard. You paid attention and you didn't feel comfortable doing anything until you'd acquired a decent level of education on the subject. If Linux takes the Windows approach to things though, then more people will be rushing in and bluffing their way through and that's when the problems occur.
Essentially, I'm agreeing with your point about needing more education, but I think we'll actually see a drop in this as people feel they need it less because they don't need to understand what goes on under the [bonnet|hood].
Hmmm. I seem to have ended up agreeing with myself again, but I'll post this anyway because I liked you seatbelt analogy.
Natural language are also exactly that - natural. Our brains evolved to support them and our languages evolved over millenia to suit our brains.
I agree, but not with your inference. You suppose that a computer language does not have this property, but as it is produced by the human brain without constraints upon it, surely it is an even purer reflection of the human brain's inherent language ability (however much it is inherent). There might have been constraints in the old days, but have you tried Python yet?;)
More on-topic however, I agree with the original poster but for not for his reasons. The picture / point-and-click approach is more of a use-base method rather than one based on underlying theory.*
The danger with this is you get people who do things by the step-by-step book instead of through a true understanding. Like how a mechanic used to have a good grasp of how an engine worked and nowadays tends to just follow the official process.
[As | If] Linux becomes more 'userfriendly,' security will suffer. This is not because it becomes inherently more vulnerable, but because it becomes accessible to ever less competent people.
A *NIX system does have inherent security advantages over Windows, but it still requires a very competent Admin to do a thorough job. Right now, I'd lay money (based on experience) that the average Linux Admin has a far better understanding than the average Windows admin simply because he needs to.
This is going to change.
Consider that in my day, a programmer was still a computer scientist. Nowadays, I have to work with people who took a few months at a college course using a Visual design package and couldn't even program a Bubble Sort routine. It'll be similar with Linux security.
Desalination would be vital if you live in a floating city. If the world's population continues to grow then not only does this provide more living space, but more 'farm land' too.
But then again, I've been writing PHP code solidly for the last two days and I'm feeling kind of trippy. So perhaps the best course of action would be to make the US approve Kyoto after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooops. You've just questioned military spending AND been modded insightful. I predict a flood of "If we don't do it first, then our enemies will," comments.
If I was able to just wave my hand and get a drink I'd be bankrupt in no time.
;)
You see a design flaw, they see a feature.
Be careful what you laugh at something someone says. You may be laughing at the next Galileo.
I certainly wasn't laughing at you, mate. I like the idea of sci-fi being a deliberate attempt to get people used to What-Will-Come! My comments were intended as a qualification of that point though.
Using Sci-Fi as a way of getting people used to new technology may reduce 'future shock,' but I don't think it improves people's level of science, because the important aspect of science is not 'facts' but methodology. If anything, I think it would reduce people's understanding of science because so much of sci-fi is hollywood science with no hint of the underlying principles.
Anyway, I don't think there is anyone out there doing this as deliberate policy.
On a related note, the thing that truly holds back science and drives me personally nuts is when the media and people constantly refer to 'Scientists.' Scientists say this... say that... I would sooner it didn't treat scientist as some unquestionable homogenous authority.
...if a lot of Sci-Fi on TV wasn't a big "public education" project.
That doesn't work for me. Science is about the application of logic and critical thinking. You might get people used to the idea of a spaceship with TV sci-fi shows, but this will do nothing to raise the level of 'real' scientific thinking. If anything, it might make it worse because people pick up dodgy concepts and expect technology to work that way.
On a similar theme, I've only ever seen Star Trek once, but that was enough. If you want fantasy then fine, but I'd at least like it to be internally consistant. In the episode I saw their spaceship was trapped by a ring of energy. Okay, I will accept a floating wave of green energy in space... but a ring? Are you telling me they're exploring the galaxy with a spaceship that can't go up or down?
That's bad science at the deepest level.
A fellow programmer once called C++ a "write-only" language. I guees this could be extended to PERL.
;)
/. just gives me a "please use fewer 'junk' characters" error.
Nah, C++ is lovely. When you've been using it as long as I have you start to think in it.
A true "write only" language is brainfuck
I was going to paste a sample program here, but
Ho hum.
Oh how I wish I had some insightful points for you, mate.
Of course the assumption implicit in your statement is that mathematics has some existence outside of human understanding; that it is more than a model created by the human brain to deal with the patterns it percieves. And it is difficult to justify this as an axiom philosophically.
And if it cannot be justified, then that leaves us with something that can be understood by the human brain because it was designed by the human brain.
So, which is it?
How is it immoral for companies to benefit from new products that they have created? They are only patenting new creations, not existing crops, which will of course remain patent-free. If the company starts charging too much for its new crops, farmers can always switch back to the 'natural' variety.
Food is a necessity of life, like water. I find it dubious in the extreme that a small group (in this case, certain companies) would be able to control the supply of a necessity of life. Farmers will not neccesarily be able to 'switch back.' if they later decide they don't like the version they licence from (e.g.) Monsanto. One reason for this is the creep of GM traits into existing crops rendering them (in the eyes of the law) no longer the existing crops. There is already a legal precedent for this in exactly this situation (the link is elsewhere in this story).
Furthermore, the aim here is a monopoly. With a large enough market share, Monsanto can make it economically impossible to continue growing non-GM crops even if you have an untainted strain. ONE means by which they can accomplish this in the US is by the banning of labelling on food that would allow customers to choose between organic non-GM food and the rest. Economies of scale, such as leveraging better deals with the supermarkets is another. Because there is money to be made on patented food stuffs, and less on the non-licenced strains, they have enough investment to pull all sorts of nasty buisness tricks on their rivals.
As I said, having a monopoly on a necessity of life is repugnant. It should be accessible to all equally.
The potato famine was as much a political problem as an agricultural one. And if monoculture was the problem, why hasn't any similar famine occurred recently, when modern agriculture is far more dependent on single-species crops?
I'd say it was an agricultural one, although of course the economic situation of the Irish and the attitude of the UK parliament did little to help solve it. Clearly monoculture was the problem since if they'd had a broader food base the blight would not have been as devastating as it was.
As to why a similar famine hasn't occured recently? Well, knock on wood.
and (2) people starve in the world due to lack of money to buy food and/or that delivery of said food is fouled up by political hindrances.
Here's an economic one - many people in poorer parts of the world now suffer malnutrition of various forms because where once they grew a variety of staple foods to provide them with a balanced diet, they now grow only the current cash crop for export. So for a common example, this means rice for breakfast, rice for lunch, rice for everything really.
Why don't they mix in growing something else too? Because they can't afford to - that's global economics.
And do you want to know what's really ironic? Monsanto (again) has patented something they call Golden Rice - rice with that produces additional Vitamin D. The idea is to [partially] solve the malnutrition issues that companies such as themselves have been creating.
Of course they don't go into quite as much detail in their marketing on that side of things.
I know the case you refer to. Worse than Monsanto demanding payment for growing their crops, was that he was an organic farmer growing for the non-GM market and export (here in Europe we still refuse to import unapproved GM crops and there's F. all market for them with the public anyway).
So in one strike he's losing his livelihood and being sued by a giant corporation.
Monsanto is bad news.
Although I have concerns about splicing 'alien' genes into food crops, this isn't my main issue with GM crops.
It is morally repugnant to me to allow the patenting of food. It is blindingly stupid in my opinion to allow patented foodstuff to become the main body of supply for us.
Furthermore, the main advantage with many of the GM crops is not that they are in some way better for us, but that they are resistant to more powerful pesticides and herbicides than non-GM plants, enabling the fields to be blitzed with much stronger chemicals. What do you think that does to local wildlife? To the rivers and streams it runs off to? To the people who live next to the fields?
And what do you think it does to biodiversity? Did you ever hear about the Irish Potato famine? Most of the population depended on a single food crop derived from a small number of imported ancestors. The potato blight came and they were all but wiped out in a stroke.
Most of the time they don't seem to mind at all
Why should they? Unless the boss is watching their performance, what stake do they have in stopping you? None, unless they enjoy confrontation (which most don't.
Another triumph for the social model of remote ownership of local business!
The increase in book loans from drawing in the extra people is probably minimal.
However, so long as it doesn't adversely effect the availability of books then it's not a bad thing. Providing free internet access to people that don't have it is a good thing, as well as the assitance that library staff can provide to people who aren't quite
Many communities in the modern western Europe and the USA lack any real community or cultural centre. If a library can fulfill this role in a greater way then more power to it. I personally would love to see libraries take on greater roles as centres of information, learning and debate. They were once greatly respected by the public.
The introduction of a network of public libraries in the UK in the 1850s was a landmark of progressive thinking and it nearly didn't happen.
One Consrevative MP argued (and had a lot of support in his party for this)that:
"people have too much knowledge already: it was much easier to manage them twenty years ago; the more education people get the more difficult they are to manage."
Society would be much the poorer if the libraries hadn't been approved by parliament, and by the same measure, society will become much richer if they recieve more support in the future.
I have an entirely legitamate hatred for geometric proofs, which seem useless
;)
There are loads of uses... if you work in advanced mathematics.
Just to make this utterly off-topic, today I was asked by a student why he needed to learn Sin(A+B), COS(A+B), etc. I replied that in the old days, when calculators that could work out trig functions weren't invented, these were incredibly useful formulae for saving yourself work.
And that no-one who writes exam papers has noticed the discovery of the microchip yet.
One way to work around it is that if you file a lawsuit and lose, you have to pay the winning side the cost of your legal actions. That way neither side is able to drive up the stakes by hiring high-priced lawyers, ala SCO.
Yep, familiar with that, but I'm not sure it helps. Consider...
EvilCorp does something bad to you. You file a suit against them. They hire a high-priced legal firm - they might even have some $300/hr lawyer on staff. Now you know that if you pursue the suit and lose you're going to be paying a fortune you cannot afford.
What we need in this country is a higher penality for filing a lawsuit that is eventually lost.
Assumiming you're in the US, I agree that it sounds like something needs to be done, but is this it?
Doesn't this make it an even greater risk for someone without deep pockets to take someone to court?
From the article: ... advocacy groups and lawyers have received enough consumer complaints to prompt the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society to launch an informational website apprising crackdown targets of their legal rights. EFF says innocent people are settling with DirecTV for no other purpose than to avoid costly litigation.
/. and elsewhere.
It seems the coercian involves people preferring to settle than rather than pay the costs for defending themselves. From an article linked to from the above:
At that point, the settlement price tag jumps to $10,000 -- still less than the typical cost of paying a lawyer to go to trial against a corporate powerhouse in federal court.
Is it now actually the case that in the US the law is too expensive for people to use? This is how it appears from the stories I read on
Math and science *ARE* kid-friendly, and kids ARE science and math friendly. Inherently.
Science more so than maths alas. I agree that Maths has a lot to recommend it as something fun to learn, but there is a problem inherant in maths that doesn't exist in other subjects such as History, Art or English.
The problem is that [almost] everything you learn in Maths builds on the last thing you learnt and it's very easy to fall behind in a bad way. This is why many people think they're bad at the subject. They miss a step or two and suddenly nothing they're supposed to be learning makes sense. This is less so for Science and hardly a problem at all in other GCSE-level subjects (GCSEs are the exams you do in the UK at 16).
I'm helping out a school next week by teaching some supplemental maths. Personally, I like maths but I'm good at it. It's hard to say which came first. They go together.
A quote from my father:
This internet thing is killing the art of watching television.
(I don't have one either).
But I walk in carrying a Sainsbury's bag loaded with munchies, and no-one bats an eye.
:)
You sound as bad as me.
As far as I'm concerned the 'no outside food' rule just doesn't apply. Surely it's the exact same principle as Micro$oft bundling it's own browser into Windows and excluding others. A violation of rights. A company cannot use it's influence in one area to force the buyers hand in another area.
Hah! Time to take Warner Village to the EU! (Teach them for putting our Odean out of business).
Is this purely a US problem? I go to the cinema quite a bit here in the UK and I almost always take my own food in. That's mainly because I like fruit or nuts not ice-cream and popcorn, but I take my own drinks as well. No-one's dared try and stop me yet.
Anyone in the UK ever been forbidden to take their own food in?
I really wanted to mod you up, but I just had to reply instead.
;)
However, the concious mind can only deal with one possibilty at a time.
I would say that one of the concious mind's essential functions is to narrow things down to one possibility at a time. It is the decision maker that collapses the possibilities thrown up by the rest of the brain into one fixed state. There's no reason to believe it, but the parallel to the original posters mention of quantum conciousness is a nice one.
Our entire lives are lived making choice, that we think are logical, but once you get past the excuses and a rationalization, they turn out to be arbitrary. Or worse, someone else's arbitrary choice.
There are two levels (at least) that this can be addressed on - the neurological and the cultural.
For the first apporach, It's been shown that the human brain makes many decisions before concious awareness of that choice but that afterwards a person will rationalise that decision. The correct use of the concious mind is to train the brain as a whole to make the decisions that benefit it. To draw a metaphor from elsewhere in this thread, the brain as a whole is like that solution finding algorithm that finds a local best-case solution and is trapped because all near points are worse, even though a better solution exists in a remoter area of the solution space. The concious mind exists to observe and provide strategy where the unconcious system uses tactics.
For the cultural approach, many of our decisions are made for us because we use behaviour learned from our predecessors or trainers. Unfortunately this behaviour was what worked for them to achieve aims that they chose. Unless we have identical aims then we are not acting for ourselves, but for others.
When we say something, it is generally to the exclusion of something else.
This is what is so frustrating to me. It's hard to say something without collapsing the possibilities. An abstract solution is to use language to describe the problem space rather than the solution. This puts things at one remove on the either/or scale. Of course, you're then collapsing the possible problem states to just one, but then you can repeat this process until you reach the required level of multiplicity.
Am I making sense? My biggest problem is that I've developed a hybrid visual-language in my own head space (I think we all do to different degrees) and translating things into pure words takes time and is less intuitive.
Anyone out there want to help me develop a new language with some built in multi-threading?
And generally the most literate people are the ones least likely to engage in parallel thinking. (Grumbles the frustrated science fiction writer wannabee who has a story stuck in his head, but he can't tell it all at once.)
So jumble it all together and tell them all at once. Worked for Catch-22.
Hmm. I would disagree.
So would I actually. I've thought about this a bit more since I posted and of course making tasks easier should cut down on mistakes being made. Just because I use a front end for my CRON jobs nowadays, it doesn't mean I'll destroy my system.
The problem is that until recently, administering a *NIX system looked hard. You paid attention and you didn't feel comfortable doing anything until you'd acquired a decent level of education on the subject. If Linux takes the Windows approach to things though, then more people will be rushing in and bluffing their way through and that's when the problems occur.
Essentially, I'm agreeing with your point about needing more education, but I think we'll actually see a drop in this as people feel they need it less because they don't need to understand what goes on under the [bonnet|hood].
Hmmm. I seem to have ended up agreeing with myself again, but I'll post this anyway because I liked you seatbelt analogy.
Natural language are also exactly that - natural. Our brains evolved to support them and our languages evolved over millenia to suit our brains.
;)
/. post now.
I agree, but not with your inference. You suppose that a computer language does not have this property, but as it is produced by the human brain without constraints upon it, surely it is an even purer reflection of the human brain's inherent language ability (however much it is inherent). There might have been constraints in the old days, but have you tried Python yet?
More on-topic however, I agree with the original poster but for not for his reasons. The picture / point-and-click approach is more of a use-base method rather than one based on underlying theory.*
The danger with this is you get people who do things by the step-by-step book instead of through a true understanding. Like how a mechanic used to have a good grasp of how an engine worked and nowadays tends to just follow the official process.
*Doesn't have to be, but it is.**
**My gods, I'm using footnotes in a
[As | If] Linux becomes more 'userfriendly,' security will suffer. This is not because it becomes inherently more vulnerable, but because it becomes accessible to ever less competent people.
A *NIX system does have inherent security advantages over Windows, but it still requires a very competent Admin to do a thorough job. Right now, I'd lay money (based on experience) that the average Linux Admin has a far better understanding than the average Windows admin simply because he needs to. This is going to change.
Consider that in my day, a programmer was still a computer scientist. Nowadays, I have to work with people who took a few months at a college course using a Visual design package and couldn't even program a Bubble Sort routine. It'll be similar with Linux security.
They say that sea levels will rise due to the greenhouse effect...perhaps keeping it up would be a good thing.
Or perhaps we could all just set sai like this.
Desalination would be vital if you live in a floating city. If the world's population continues to grow then not only does this provide more living space, but more 'farm land' too.
But then again, I've been writing PHP code solidly for the last two days and I'm feeling kind of trippy. So perhaps the best course of action would be to make the US approve Kyoto after all.