Bad example, did you expect your $10 would get the homeless guy off the street?
Nope. But the fact that it didn't doesn't prove giving him money won't get him off the street. I was making an analogy to show why your evidence was a logical fallacy.
If someone tells you they know how to end recessions but constantly fails would you still believe them the third, forth, or fifth time?
Someone? I don't trust any individual t tell me. I look at the evidence and inform myself, look at the theories and the data to support each one, then go with the most practical theories supported by the evidence. In short, I go with the scientific method.
You seem to think that everyone needs to be pretty much equal which guarantees that a precious few will be spectacular.
Were people not "spectacular" enough twenty years ago when we had reasonable tax policies? Our current policies don't reward people for being spectacular. They reward them for having been born wealthy, regardless of how unspectacular they are after having been born.
Hyperbole, any Austrian or Chicago School economist would bristle at your claims.
Show me a recovery plan proposed by any credible economist in the last three years and which has not been repudiated by that economist since. Trickle down economics was tried and failed. The world has moved on.
Government grew by 50% during the past eight years. Tell me again where this gigantic retreat of government was?
The size of the government is not indicative of the amount of regulation we have. We deregulated many industries at the same time we increased the federal payroll, especially the military.
The Internet was funded by DARPA. I think few people will say that defense is not a legitimate function of government.
So what? Defense is still socialism and it invalidates your claim to some sort of absolute.
If this were true Germany and socialist command and control economies would be the largest economic powerhouse in the world. Relatively free Switzerland runs rings around Germany. How do you explain this contradiction?
Cherry pick much? Look at overall trends, not two cherrypicked countries where one is an extreme special case due to banking laws.
That's the problem. The playing field is not fair.
I think what the GP meant by "fair" was that government should prevent injustice (i.e. violence), promote liberty, and precious little else.
One person is born penniless. Another inherits millions. This is simply circumstance of birth. If you're going to claim that is just, we might as well go back to having monarchies. It takes money to make money. The more you are born with, the faster you will acquire even more in a flat capitalist system. That's one of the reasons no country has a flat capitalist system, wealth consolidates then it collapses. Our economy moved more towards extreme capitalism and has destabilized. How is that just for those born in the lower classes?
I assume you're quoting Krugman.
Nope, my Econ 101 text from a decade ago. I didn't follow your link. I refuse to do anything that gives money to Fox or the WSJ since they acquired it. They aren't news, just propaganda. Once you go to court and argue that your free speech rights mean you can intentionally lie to your viewers you lose all credibility and I won't even validate their claims to be news with a page view.
Slashdot is all about learning new stuff. You should have considered going into a lot more detail.:-)
Slashdot doesn't seem to be about learning too much. A lot of it is people arguing whatever position they picked long ago without evaluating any new evidence.
I think the size of an economy is a less talked about factor here. A very small country would do great with socialism, which may not be easily acceptable by bigger economies
Actually, the larger the economy the less danger socialism presents to democratic processes, which is one of the social drawbacks of such methods. Socialized programs work fine, economically, in larger economies where scale makes communism less relevant. Keep in mind we're talking about socialism and communism the economic terms, not the political movements (which is something else and confuses the issue significantly). Talking about socialism the economic policy is as difficult as talking about republic the government method, since socialist countries enacted fascism while the republican party actually promotes a less republic form of democracy than the democrats.
Also, the temperament of the people of a country goes a long way in deciding what system of economics is adopted.
The temperament of a country goes a long way toward what laws are passed. In the US, policies that promote the common good at the expense of individual rights are less likely to be passed, even when they make sense. In much of Europe, policies that promote individual responsibility over societal benefits are less likely to be passed, even when they make sense. It is a cultural bias that fights anything perceived as socialism in the US. To the average American "socialism" means either "what those commies do" or "public funded projects that aren't the ones we already have and have had for centuries".
I would not suggest anything other than free market capitalism for the US. This is because Americans love spending. We are a greedy people by nature.
Everyone is greedy by nature. Our economy is a balance of capitalism, communism, and socialism. Doing away with everything but free market capitalism would entail disbanding the police and military, families paying for housing and food separately from one another instead of collectively, and closing down the public school system. No one who actually understands how capitalism and socialism fit into our economy proposes we move to either extreme as both are completely unstable. Balance is sustainable. A move towards more (or at least different) socialism in the US is absolutely necessary for repairing current wealth disparity and our broken economy. There has not been even one reasonable recovery plan proposed and endorsed by respectable economists that does not include more socialism, at least in the short term.
It is obvious people actually trying to solve the problem are fighting a huge uphill battle here and I'm quite discouraged by what I've seen written here. If more intelligent than average people, here on Slashdot, don't even understand what our economic crisis is or what the plans proposed for dealing with it are, how can we expect politicians to be kept on task of actually fixing the problem instead of just taking actions they claim will fix the problem but which are just for their benefit? It is going to take real pressure from the people and if the people are uninformed and don't grasp the issue do we have any hope? One would think the economy would be important enough to people now that they would do some research and get informed. How can you know if you should be supporting Obama's proposed tax reforms or Congress's proposed tax reforms if you don't understand what the problem they are trying to solve is, what current trends are, and what affect each tax proposal is likely to have?
Wealth disparity is the root of the market volatility and there isn't any other practical way to repair it.
Woah, you're going to have to explain how that works, because I have no clue how you came to that conclusion.
I take it you don't read anything on economics? Wealth disparity has been going up for a long time, but a lot more so after the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Economists in academia have been saying for a decade now that it was going to crash. 50% of the populace has no net wealth anymore and they've been taking loans for housing. That was never going to work and the loans were simply delaying the crash and making it worse at the same time.
If you bought stock at the worst time during the great depression, over the next decade of the depression your return still beat inflation by 4%. A lot of people find this surprising. What then, was the problem? The problem was the same then as now, volatility. Stocks went up and down rapidly and no one could plan well. The cause was the same, wealth disparity had gotten out of control. People didn't know if they were going to eat tomorrow so they could not invest in any sensible way. Each swing in either direction did two things, it destroyed real wealth that was lost in the chaos (a person loses their house and it sits empty and rots and the value is partly destroyed) it funneled more of the wealth to the few people at the top who could still make strategic, long term investments. The very wealthy did very well during the great depression. This lasted until the new deal, where government tax reform and public works redistributed it back down the chain. This was exceptional, as the traditional route is for the poor to kill the wealthy and redistribute the money that way, and that has happened many times in the past when extreme capitalism ran away.
This isn't some random idea I just came up with, it's fairly basic economics and economists have been saying it for years. The only real opposition were the people who thought "trickle down" economics would work, but everyone with any respectability (even Greenspan) has given up on that. Tax cuts don't work. Spending cuts don't actually happen and most that are possible are putting people out of work, when the economy can least absorb them back into the private sector. It's not like there are a lot of alternative ways to solve our economic crisis.
No, check the budget again. Even with all the extra taxes Obama is putting into place, he will still outspend the Bush administration in about three years.
Outspending isn't the problem if we have more tax income. It's a matter of how fast the national debt grows. The idea is to tax the high end more, pay for economic recovery, which in turn drives growth and gets more taxes coming in until we can get back to a sustainable spending level.
Yeah, there was one scary thing Obama said when reporters accused the stimulus bill of being a spending bill, he said, "Of course it's a spending bill. Spending is how you stimulate the economy."
This isn't scary at all when you understand the economic problem in its entirety. Spending is half of how we need to fix the problem. The other half is progressive taxation to balance out and partly reverse wealth condensation.
While in part spending can help, the majority of the bill was actually NOT targeted towards growth...
True, but that's under the assumption that those parts of the bill were attempting to fix the economy. They weren't. They were trying to treat symptoms of the problem and prevent the whole thing from spiraling out of control before a cure could be implemented. The bill was mostly a bandage, not the needed surgery.
...in that the democrats won, so now they want their turn to spend on what they want;..
Absolutely. Democrats in Congress are trying to play the same old game and give pork to their special interests and benefactors. They are also trying to pass laws to make money for their benefactors or push through other changes that don't reflect the wishes of their actual constituents but rather lobbyists.
...for example, extending health-care benefits to the unemployed. Sure it helps them out, but it's not really stimulus.
You picked a poor example. Socialist programs that transfer wealth to everyone or particularly to those on the bottom of the economic heap are absolutely necessary to any effective recovery plan. Wealth disparity is the root of the market volatility and there isn't any other practical way to repair it. Healthcare is, in particular, a sweet spot for economic repair because consolidating it in other places has not only helped wealth disparity but also been more efficient than the private industry, partially because capitalism and healthcare are a poor fit due to the inherent knowledge and motivational inequity between buyers and sellers.
Indiscriminate spending doesn't make the economy grow...
I agree, but I think healthcare is absolutely one of the best places to target. It matches all the criteria and has been proven to work in other places numerous times.
Spending the way we are it won't be long before China and Japan decide they don't want to finance our debts anymore.
Well, I wouldn't say that, exactly, but increasing foreign debt is an increasingly risky method of manufacturing wealth and creating cash flow. Interestingly, that was one of the main differences between Obama and McCain. McCain's economic plan would have had to rely upon more foreign debt where as Obama is fighting to pay a larger share with high end tax increases instead. He's currently fighting most of his own party to do it though.
Congress has become like one of those credit card addicts that thinks he can always get a higher credit limit as long as he can pay the minimum.
Absolutely. Probably the most important thing citizens can do right now is make sure their representatives know we are watching and won't tolerate it. We need tax reform to fix this, both removing tax spending that is not useful and increasing the amount of money we pull in from those that can afford it. Trickle down economics doesn't work because it doesn't actually trickle down and just leverage it to gain ever greater shares overall; in effect becoming a shovel up economy. What we need it to take a slice off the top, restoring tax levels to closer to what they were a decade or two ago, when wealth was moving around but not constantly consolidating into the hands of just a few and leaving the majority increasingly more poverty stricken.
I am in favor of change, but the direction Obama is going is kind
Ok, mod me down but this guy that you people put in charge is a socialist nut case...
Socialism. It's probably one of the most confusing and misunderstood terms in the US. Partly this is because it is a political movement separate from it being an economic method. Party this is because there was a huge propaganda campaign in the US to spread fear about it as part of a campaign against Asia in the cold war.
Listen to me carefully. Every president ever has been a socialist. Every economist is a socialist to a fair degree or they are insane. Socialism has always been part of our economic system and trying to eliminate it entirely would destroy the economy. Every stable economy in the world is a balance of socialism and capitalism (and communism, but there's no need to get into that right now).
The highway department, post office, military, police, fire department, public schools, NASA, and the FDA are all socialist programs. Socialist programs were established as part of our government from day one. Obama is working to increase the level of socialism in the US. That makes him moderately informed about economics and is pretty much what every reputable economist says is required to reduce the volatility of our stock market and return wealth disparity to sane levels. He's advocating policies that have worked in numerous other countries. Sure it is socialism, but you have to understand socialism is nothing new and not some bogey monster. If we're going to get our economy back on track, socialism coupled with more progressive taxation on the high end is pretty close to the only viable route. You can't lower taxes for people who aren't paying any now. They can't gain wealth starting from their current state. (Try playing monopoly where you start out with $5 and the other guy starts with $50000, but is willing to loan you enough to get started, provided he gets 2/3 of any profit you make. Sure, you could win, but it isn't likely and if you play every day, you will lose overall.)
So, do you have a sane counter proposal or are you just a extreme capitalist nut case with no real understanding of the problem?
Public works projects as a way of recovering from a recession has never worked.
Public works by themselves can't fix a broken economy, but they can be a useful part of a solution if done right.
It didn't work for the Japanese in the 90's, they spent 10 years building roads and bridges and wondering why nothing was happening. It didn't work for us in the 30's. And it will never work.
I gave ten bucks to a homeless guy and he was begging again later that day. Obviously giving money to the poor doesn't help them significantly. See the logical fallacy? An example does not make something a truism.
We need to stop listening to Keynesian and socialist economists who don't have the first clue what they're talking about and are trying to give solutions based on theory instead of what's been shown to work.
Yeah, if only there were countries with higher standards of living an more stable economies and higher median wealth than the US. We could do what they do. Oh, wait there are such countries and they almost all implement socialist programs you are claiming don't work.
You want to turn this economy around? Cut taxes to 20%, max.
Tax cuts haven't worked in practice and credible economist will tell you there isn't even a viable theory as to how that would work. Trickle down economics has failed. The biggest proponents among economist, even die hards like Greenspan, have abandoned it. The wealth has consolidated at the top and it isn't trickling back down. The only people still advocating that nonsense are paid publications trying to provide PR materials for policies no reputable economist will touch.
educe regulations on small businesses \ cut the red tape.
Yeah, reducing regulations has helped a lot too. It results in businesses that pass on a lot of the costs of their doing business to the rest of society.
The government cannot create jobs except government jobs, and government jobs do not build an economy.
Our tax dollars funded the research and equipment that was the internet. Our tax dollars funded the universities who expanded it and built the software to make it useful. It has created millions of jobs that are not government jobs and makes up a huge part of the world economy. Government spending can and does create more jobs and bring more growth to the economy than the same money spent by the private sector. It doesn't always. The spending has to be carefully picked for that purpose, but it certainly can and has done so in the past.
All government can do is get out of the way, and keep the playing field fair for the players.
That's the problem. The playing field is not fair. We'd like to think our economy is a meritocracy, but it isn't. Wealth is mostly transferred by inheritance and with our current tax policies pretty much every economic model predicts wealth will continue to consolidate into fewer hands, the middle class will shrink, and the lower class will grow. Reducing taxes across the board accelerates this process. The only thing that will change it is a complete wealth redistribution ala revolution, or increasing the progressiveness of taxes to take some of that money back from the high end, enough to at least balance out wealth condensation. Then, that money needs to be put back into the economy on the low end, raising the overall wealth of the poor. One way that has worked in many other countries is socialized medicine, where the consolidated nature usually leads to greater efficiency overall.
I can go on and go into detail, but I think a lot of people here don't have much of a grasp on economics. Our economic crisis s not that we don't have enough money. The problem is the money is too inequitably distributed (just like during the great depression) and this leads to a volatile stock market and overall loss of wealth as it is lost dur
Even ignoring that there may not be any physical chip save for something small that spits out a few signals for play/pause, next, stop. I wouldn't be at all suprised to learn that there is a patent on this use of the technology and that Apple owns it.
Maybe they do, but they have patents on lots of physical interfaces and they license them to other manufacturers. Thid parties have already announced headphones with controls that will work with this interface.
On top of that, I'm sure they would abuse the DMCA or other laws, to prevent people from reverse engineering the design and making their own copies.
They can't use the DMCA as this is not a copyright protection mechanism. Other parties already are making their own implementations. I don't know if they had to license a patent and neither do you. Does it matter?
...no one in the US will be able to make their own version of the headphone without fearing lawsuit from Apple.
IANAL, but the way I understand it, monopolies in a specific market within the United States are OK as long as they don't try to leverage another market. How is this different from Microsoft's monopoly?
It's different in that MS has a monopoly as determined by the courts and is a repeat offender. Apple may have a monopoly, but it is right on the edge of the market share guidelines and the courts have not made any determination of the markets.
The way I see it, Apple is trying to use Shuffle, which has a virtual monopoly in the tiny screen-less talking music player department to leverage, to Apple's favor, the headphone market.
That market definition will never fly. Markets are defined by what the typical purchaser will consider as alternatives. Having a screen or not having a talking feature does not automatically rule out the competition when the average person considers what to buy. In the EU, they never made a formal ruling but they seem to have sided with including cell phones that play media as valid competitors and with the laws they have restricting vendor lock-in that probably makes sense. That being the major reason Apple did not have enough influence, Apple probably does have enough influence in the US to qualify as a monopoly if it ever goes to court. The difficulties being that the cell phone market and music player market are converging and several of the markets where Apple has leveraged their monopoly are the same markets MS has leveraged their monopoly and nothing has been done about it. It's a mess thanks to the actions of the DoJ in the past.
Re:Why web developers should be dragged out and sh
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People, the web is fine for multimedia and information presentation, but why is there this constant push to integrate everything into the web?
That's easy. The desktop OS market is monopolized and innovation has slowed to a crawl. The market is attempting to route around the damage. It's not working well, but that's what is happening.
Apple is *forcing* you to buy their headphones if you want to control it and from what I understand is that 3rd parties cannot make these special headphones without a special chip only apple has.
The problem being, this part is just speculation at this point and seems unlikely. No one has seen said chip or tried to reverse engineer the new interface from Apple.
So yes - its drm.
Assuming said speculation was true it wouldn't be DRM, but it would be intentionally enforced hardware component lock-in. If you want to call it DRM, go ahead, but it is inaccurate. Either way it is annoying and likely actionable if someone had the legal muscle.
And while some 3rd party could reverse engineer the lockout chip apple could in turn shut them down with the dmca.
...if any such chip exists as opposed to the more likely scenario that Apple built a nonstandard interface and did not include a special locking chip. So far, all anyone has seen is the interface, not this supposed chip.
He's a good protest vote. Some of his ideas are, frankly, very poorly informed, but he's at least earnest if not super informed or educated on many subjects.
BUT, we could not afford to have another W get in.
This is why we need electoral reform.
I had some issues with McCain, but somewhat considered him. That was gone once he picked the ultimate neo-con as running mate.
Yeah, that was some really lousy strategy. He had a shot, but he needed to appeal to moderates in the center. It's not like the far right wasn't going to vote for him anyway simply to stop Obama who they perceive as a threat. Palin did exactly the opposite. It did not get him any real new votes and drove away all the moderates.
I am STILL hopeful that Obama is an honest pol.
I have hope to. He honestly seems to be trying. He's come through fairly well for things in his power as executive and he's fighting hard for healthcare and tax reforms we really, really need and he promised to try to deliver.
BUT as I look at all the ppl that he has put around himself, they appear to be as corrupt as any neo-con.
Hs appointments to date have been a mixed bag. Some I strongly disapprove of, but some I strongly approve of. If you look at his cabinet there are a few that really stand out like: Kathleen Sebelius, Steven Chu, Eric Shinseki, Lisa Jackson, and Peter Orszag. They all seem leaps and bounds more competent and significantly less corrupt than many of their predecessors. Appointments like Chu are what keep my hope alive. Even Kundra seems to be at least more competent. We'll have to see how this potential corruption turns out.
In this case it is a false statement of fact, as magenta is in fact, not my favorite color.
That's just your opinion of what your favorite color is. You might be wrong. I hypothesize magenta is your favorite color and we should subject you to a battery of tests where you rate how positively you feel about pictures of various objects in different colors and see if your answers correlate with magenta. Then we can publish the numbers and let some other people review it and see if the experiments are repeatable.
He's only been in office for a 2 month! How much could he do/not do in 8 weeks? Not very much.
He's responsible for every decision that has been made in the past 8 weeks. I'm a fair man, and I'm willing to say that processes that were in place as he took office aren't his fault... but that doesn't sound like it was the case here at all.
Was Carmen Suro-Bredie appointed by Obama? Was she appointed by someone he appointed? Was she appointed by the previous administration? I don't know. She seems to be a very minor player making a bad decision. Perhaps she should be rebuked or replaced?
One of Obama's first acts was to sign a series of executive orders so people serving under him would not do crap like this. He signed an order requiring people to fill FOIA requests unless they could provide a real justification for security reasons. Is there a real reason here? Does the treaty contain sensitive provisions regarding nuclear materials or something? We don't know, but it sure shouldn't. So the question then becomes, will this ever come to the attention of the president or his direct appointees? If it does will they fix it and if this becomes common will they clean house?
I'm not exactly an Obama fan, but I haven't lost all hope. He's pushing for some very important changes that would be of great benefit and fighting his own party to do it. I'm not happy with some of his appointees. I'm not happy with many of his policies. He is still the lesser evil by a large margin IMHO.
No, it's the truth. He broke his promises before he took office...
Agreed, although he's still doing better on them than almost any president in recent history with numerous campaign promises already fulfilled in a very timely fashion (those within his power in the executive). It does not make the broken ones any less his fault.
Furthermore, attempting to polarize this matter...
Amen. Politics is not sports. When people stop rooting for their favorite team and actually start paying attention to individuals and what they vote for, we will have some hope for reform.
That's quite a violent approach to the problem. Invalidate all software patents? I don't think Apple would approve, as that would be the end of their business.
How do you figure? Half of Apple's revenue is from their PC business where their largest differentiator is OS X, protected more by copyright than patents. Then there is their iPod business, where hardware patents are the major protection. Between hardware patents, copyright, and trademark protections, I don't see Apple being in much trouble if software patents are invalidated... even if it went to extremes and included UI's that include a mix of hardware and software, ala multi-touch.
But you really meant invalidate all of MSFT's right?
Why would you make such an assumption? That's not at all what he said, nor does it even make sense.
Well, if such a person was willing and able to defend their viewpoints, Id[sic] call that rational.
How can ignoring the evidence as determined by the scientific method be rational?
Being rational doesn't mean blindly believing whatever someone tells you to believe without using your brain, whether its science or religion in question.
The scientific method is not to read what other people have come up with and believe them. It is to look at all the evidence and peer reviewed experiments to date and, if you think it useful, to create a new hypothesis and perform your own experiments.
Being rational means having a reason behind your beliefs, and being able to defend them logically.
I disagree. Being rational means forming your beliefs based upon the evidence and using reason. Anyone can use logic and evidence to try to defend any arbitrary belief. Brilliant people have irrational beliefs and can be quite good at defending those beliefs both to themselves and others. That's why decisions made via a formal process, such as the scientific method is a reasoned method of making decisions. Reason has to be part of the formation of the belief, not just defending it.
It's easier to teach kids to memorize than to understand.
This is the only thing you wrote that I disagree with. Kids naturally want to learn
I don't mean it is easier for the kids. It's easier for the teacher because they don't have to put in significant effort or actually engage the students. It's easier to just read from the text. Handling the discipline issues that arise from the regiment are old hat.
I agree with your point, but the status quo is almost always easier.
You can't learn how to critically deduce something if you don't know things... [you go on to present an example of a jigsaw puzzle]
True, but you don't have to know any specific things. For example, you can apply the scientific method to solving jigsaw puzzles without knowing what percentage of the earth's surface is covered with water. For any given problem you need to acquire facts and create a hypothesis and an experiment in order to apply the scientific method. Having more facts can make your hypothesis more likely to be a good one. You don't, however, actually need particular facts going into the process, which is why in "Science" classes the method should be the priority and the facts less so.
I don't actually think we're too far apart on this, conceptually.
Mind you, I think "critical thought", "Principals of Western Philosophy", "Mathematical proofs", "Basic Algorithms" should all be classes since the 5th grade (10 years old here in Brazil).
I think those are a good start, although they might be a bit biased towards one end of the spectrum. I'd like to see something a little more rounded including foundations of logic and the rhetorical method. A lot of people understand reason, but fail in conveying it and understanding discussions because they don't understand how to converse well and reasonably.
But you need to show them some fact too, so they can apply what they are learning in terms of thinking, and their curiosity on a bunch of "silly" trivia and from that onwards learn how to think.
Oh I'm all in favor of teaching facts. I wrote, "I think science classes should run through teaching a wide base of scientifically determined fats[sic] and likely theories," in my previous post.
I agree with you that people who pass this test may still have no understading of the scientific method, but I don't think that someone who can't get those facts can know it. Mainly because they are easy to infer from other things.
Ahh, but that's not what I wrote. I wrote that it is possible they may not know those particular facts when surveyed. That's not at all the same thing as not being able to get those facts. While you can infer some of those facts from other facts, you need to know those other facts first. Just because someone has never seen a map of the earth does not mean they can't know the scientific method.
The fact that so many people have no idea about it, shows not just a lack of trivia knowledge but a lack of deducing capabilities.
In all likelihood it is a combination of things. Most people who don't know these facts, likely don't know the scientific method either, but it is not actually a good test for if people are scientifically literate. It really is too bad education is not a bigger priority. It can be so much more than it is.
My biggest problem with the summary is that many scientists might fail this "basic science literacy" test simply because it's too specific.
I don't think that's the problem. It's just that it only asks about facts/likely truths determined by science, not about science itself.
As pointed out elsewhere, how much of the planet is covered in water is more of a trivia question.
Agreed.
And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science.
Well, it is asking a question where the scientific method has determined one answer to be the most likely truth. Science never really proves anything, just has theories that are more or less supported. A person who understands and trusts the scientific method is a person who accepts the most supported theory until the preponderance of evidence shifts.
It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
It's also entirely possible for someone to understand the science but believe for religious reasons that the earth does not go around the sun. It's just not rational or scientific because it is rejecting the answers presented by the scientific method and arbitrarily believing something else.
Science literacy shouldn't be about what they know, it should be about what they can recognize.
I agree it should not be about trivia, but it should include understanding and applying the scientific method. If people apply the scientific method very narrowly and then apply irrational and nonscientific methods to determine the facts about other parts of the world, then I'd argue scientific literacy has failed to a significant extent.
Just because I'm literate with books doesn't mean that I can tell you specific details about Edgar Allen Poe, nor does it mean that I necessarily agree with Orwell.
No, but to be literate means you can read and often that you do read, not that you can read certain things but in other instances you can just look at the pictures or you make up what you think the little squiggly things on the paper mean. You don't have to agree with Orwell to be literate, you just have to be able to read his books. Not understanding that the scientific method has determined the most likely truth to be that humans and dinosaurs never inhabited the earth at the same time is analogous to being unable to read Orwell.
To fail at basic info like that, shows a disregard for scientific knowledge. And that is foundation of critical thought (together with some philosophy in it).
I disagree. I think understanding and applying the scientific method is the foundation of science, which is just one method of critical thought. Any particular facts a person knows or does not know may be reflective of their opinions about science, or it may be reflective of their particular interests and cultural influences. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that people who fail such a test are able to apply the scientific method. It is probable that people who pass this test, still have no real understanding of the scientific method, how to apply it, or why it works.
I surmise that thinking such as is demonstrated in this survey is a symptom of our broken educational system. It is highly focused upon rote memorization instead of applicable skills and understanding concepts. It's easier to memorize the definition of science than to understand the method. It's easier to teach kids to memorize than to understand. It's significantly easier to test memorization than understanding. It is vastly easier to standardize a test for memorizing a blurb than for understanding a concept.
Don't get me wrong. I think science classes should run through teaching a wide base of scientifically determined fats and likely theories. I just think that should come second to a thorough understanding of the scientific method and how to apply it to determine the truth as well as a firm grounding in hands on experimentation so students can learn that it does work and have confidence in it.
They aren't run by idiots. They're run by selfish bastards. There's a big difference.
Agreed, but often the end result is the same. An idiot will run a small company into the ground and move on. A selfish bastard will gut a company of a all valuable assets to temporarily boost the stock, collect huge bonuses, and then sell off the remains of the company to a larger one or just walk away. The end result is the same except the latter is more sustainable. After running the company into the ground intentionally, an executive can almost certainly get a job working for one of his buddies who he was giving huge bonuses to. After accidentally running a company into the ground an executive is less likely to get another high paying executive position (although not as unlikely as any rational human would think).
i'll actually disagree... science just isn't for everyone.
I'll disagree with your disagreement, sort of. I disagree that science is not for everyone. There is no excuse why all students should not be taught science, i.e. the scientific method and how to apply it to accurately determine the truth. That said, I agree not everyone should necessarily be learning "science" as it is presented in this article. All they are asking is trivia that falls into the category of things science has determined to be almost certainly true. While knowing these things is nice and useful, it isn't really the core of science and not what I would think of as "the basics" of science.
Actually, it is a counter example. The article talks about how science education is lacking and how this is a problem. The summary was a case of poor language skills failing to accurately and clearly convey information the submitter almost certainly understood. The article talks about the problem with science education, but does at address that education is failing in many, many other areas as well.
Will this switch on a large level impact the EU's suit against MS?
No.
If there are large numbers of computers, especially at the government level, that do not use MS at all, does this not take the force out of the meme, "It's a monopoly, kill it now," or is there more to this than is clear at present?
If every single company buying site licenses of Windows were to switch to Linux, it still would not make enough of a dent for MS to not have enough market share to have monopoly influence. The vast majority of the market is OEM licenses for pre-installs. In fact, almost all the computers in question probably already were bundled with a Windows license and then a second, site license was bought, before finally being migrated to Linux. Until major OEMs start shipping Linux in significant volumes. This was 90,000 machines. In an average quarter there are 71,900,000 computers shipped to the EU with Windows pre-installed, site licenses. Windows has 99% of the applicable market. By my calculations, that means this news accounts for.001% of the market. Since MS would have to drop to about 70% before the EU would consider them no longer having monopoly influence it will take 29,000 more switches of the same size every quarter. So when you start seeing 10,000 stories like this on Slashdot every month, MS might be in the clear.
Honestly, not supporting a business that resides in your nation during the current state of the economy is a pretty bad thing for the government to do.
Why is MS at risk of going under? I'd much rather government stimulus come in the form of hiring unemployed IT people to help them transition and unemployed coders to add features they need/want and hiring smaller companies to provide support. Giving large amounts of money to MS is (amusingly) approaching the broken window fallacy.
The point is that the government should be helping to foster the development of it's own economy by investing into it.
Yes it should, but I'd much rather they hand all that cash to truly innovative companies that will provide longterm benefits to the economy and the government. Fostering innovation has been a key to several economic recoveries. Monopolies and especially monopoly abusers are death to innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad example, did you expect your $10 would get the homeless guy off the street?
Nope. But the fact that it didn't doesn't prove giving him money won't get him off the street. I was making an analogy to show why your evidence was a logical fallacy.
If someone tells you they know how to end recessions but constantly fails would you still believe them the third, forth, or fifth time?
Someone? I don't trust any individual t tell me. I look at the evidence and inform myself, look at the theories and the data to support each one, then go with the most practical theories supported by the evidence. In short, I go with the scientific method.
You seem to think that everyone needs to be pretty much equal which guarantees that a precious few will be spectacular.
Were people not "spectacular" enough twenty years ago when we had reasonable tax policies? Our current policies don't reward people for being spectacular. They reward them for having been born wealthy, regardless of how unspectacular they are after having been born.
Hyperbole, any Austrian or Chicago School economist would bristle at your claims.
Show me a recovery plan proposed by any credible economist in the last three years and which has not been repudiated by that economist since. Trickle down economics was tried and failed. The world has moved on.
Government grew by 50% during the past eight years. Tell me again where this gigantic retreat of government was?
The size of the government is not indicative of the amount of regulation we have. We deregulated many industries at the same time we increased the federal payroll, especially the military.
The Internet was funded by DARPA. I think few people will say that defense is not a legitimate function of government.
So what? Defense is still socialism and it invalidates your claim to some sort of absolute.
If this were true Germany and socialist command and control economies would be the largest economic powerhouse in the world. Relatively free Switzerland runs rings around Germany. How do you explain this contradiction?
Cherry pick much? Look at overall trends, not two cherrypicked countries where one is an extreme special case due to banking laws.
That's the problem. The playing field is not fair.
I think what the GP meant by "fair" was that government should prevent injustice (i.e. violence), promote liberty, and precious little else.
One person is born penniless. Another inherits millions. This is simply circumstance of birth. If you're going to claim that is just, we might as well go back to having monarchies. It takes money to make money. The more you are born with, the faster you will acquire even more in a flat capitalist system. That's one of the reasons no country has a flat capitalist system, wealth consolidates then it collapses. Our economy moved more towards extreme capitalism and has destabilized. How is that just for those born in the lower classes?
I assume you're quoting Krugman.
Nope, my Econ 101 text from a decade ago. I didn't follow your link. I refuse to do anything that gives money to Fox or the WSJ since they acquired it. They aren't news, just propaganda. Once you go to court and argue that your free speech rights mean you can intentionally lie to your viewers you lose all credibility and I won't even validate their claims to be news with a page view.
Slashdot is all about learning new stuff. You should have considered going into a lot more detail. :-)
Slashdot doesn't seem to be about learning too much. A lot of it is people arguing whatever position they picked long ago without evaluating any new evidence.
Please tell me you're
I think the size of an economy is a less talked about factor here. A very small country would do great with socialism, which may not be easily acceptable by bigger economies
Actually, the larger the economy the less danger socialism presents to democratic processes, which is one of the social drawbacks of such methods. Socialized programs work fine, economically, in larger economies where scale makes communism less relevant. Keep in mind we're talking about socialism and communism the economic terms, not the political movements (which is something else and confuses the issue significantly). Talking about socialism the economic policy is as difficult as talking about republic the government method, since socialist countries enacted fascism while the republican party actually promotes a less republic form of democracy than the democrats.
Also, the temperament of the people of a country goes a long way in deciding what system of economics is adopted.
The temperament of a country goes a long way toward what laws are passed. In the US, policies that promote the common good at the expense of individual rights are less likely to be passed, even when they make sense. In much of Europe, policies that promote individual responsibility over societal benefits are less likely to be passed, even when they make sense. It is a cultural bias that fights anything perceived as socialism in the US. To the average American "socialism" means either "what those commies do" or "public funded projects that aren't the ones we already have and have had for centuries".
I would not suggest anything other than free market capitalism for the US. This is because Americans love spending. We are a greedy people by nature.
Everyone is greedy by nature. Our economy is a balance of capitalism, communism, and socialism. Doing away with everything but free market capitalism would entail disbanding the police and military, families paying for housing and food separately from one another instead of collectively, and closing down the public school system. No one who actually understands how capitalism and socialism fit into our economy proposes we move to either extreme as both are completely unstable. Balance is sustainable. A move towards more (or at least different) socialism in the US is absolutely necessary for repairing current wealth disparity and our broken economy. There has not been even one reasonable recovery plan proposed and endorsed by respectable economists that does not include more socialism, at least in the short term.
It is obvious people actually trying to solve the problem are fighting a huge uphill battle here and I'm quite discouraged by what I've seen written here. If more intelligent than average people, here on Slashdot, don't even understand what our economic crisis is or what the plans proposed for dealing with it are, how can we expect politicians to be kept on task of actually fixing the problem instead of just taking actions they claim will fix the problem but which are just for their benefit? It is going to take real pressure from the people and if the people are uninformed and don't grasp the issue do we have any hope? One would think the economy would be important enough to people now that they would do some research and get informed. How can you know if you should be supporting Obama's proposed tax reforms or Congress's proposed tax reforms if you don't understand what the problem they are trying to solve is, what current trends are, and what affect each tax proposal is likely to have?
Wealth disparity is the root of the market volatility and there isn't any other practical way to repair it.
Woah, you're going to have to explain how that works, because I have no clue how you came to that conclusion.
I take it you don't read anything on economics? Wealth disparity has been going up for a long time, but a lot more so after the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Economists in academia have been saying for a decade now that it was going to crash. 50% of the populace has no net wealth anymore and they've been taking loans for housing. That was never going to work and the loans were simply delaying the crash and making it worse at the same time.
If you bought stock at the worst time during the great depression, over the next decade of the depression your return still beat inflation by 4%. A lot of people find this surprising. What then, was the problem? The problem was the same then as now, volatility. Stocks went up and down rapidly and no one could plan well. The cause was the same, wealth disparity had gotten out of control. People didn't know if they were going to eat tomorrow so they could not invest in any sensible way. Each swing in either direction did two things, it destroyed real wealth that was lost in the chaos (a person loses their house and it sits empty and rots and the value is partly destroyed) it funneled more of the wealth to the few people at the top who could still make strategic, long term investments. The very wealthy did very well during the great depression. This lasted until the new deal, where government tax reform and public works redistributed it back down the chain. This was exceptional, as the traditional route is for the poor to kill the wealthy and redistribute the money that way, and that has happened many times in the past when extreme capitalism ran away.
This isn't some random idea I just came up with, it's fairly basic economics and economists have been saying it for years. The only real opposition were the people who thought "trickle down" economics would work, but everyone with any respectability (even Greenspan) has given up on that. Tax cuts don't work. Spending cuts don't actually happen and most that are possible are putting people out of work, when the economy can least absorb them back into the private sector. It's not like there are a lot of alternative ways to solve our economic crisis.
No, check the budget again. Even with all the extra taxes Obama is putting into place, he will still outspend the Bush administration in about three years.
Outspending isn't the problem if we have more tax income. It's a matter of how fast the national debt grows. The idea is to tax the high end more, pay for economic recovery, which in turn drives growth and gets more taxes coming in until we can get back to a sustainable spending level.
Yeah, there was one scary thing Obama said when reporters accused the stimulus bill of being a spending bill, he said, "Of course it's a spending bill. Spending is how you stimulate the economy."
This isn't scary at all when you understand the economic problem in its entirety. Spending is half of how we need to fix the problem. The other half is progressive taxation to balance out and partly reverse wealth condensation.
While in part spending can help, the majority of the bill was actually NOT targeted towards growth...
True, but that's under the assumption that those parts of the bill were attempting to fix the economy. They weren't. They were trying to treat symptoms of the problem and prevent the whole thing from spiraling out of control before a cure could be implemented. The bill was mostly a bandage, not the needed surgery.
...in that the democrats won, so now they want their turn to spend on what they want;..
Absolutely. Democrats in Congress are trying to play the same old game and give pork to their special interests and benefactors. They are also trying to pass laws to make money for their benefactors or push through other changes that don't reflect the wishes of their actual constituents but rather lobbyists.
...for example, extending health-care benefits to the unemployed. Sure it helps them out, but it's not really stimulus.
You picked a poor example. Socialist programs that transfer wealth to everyone or particularly to those on the bottom of the economic heap are absolutely necessary to any effective recovery plan. Wealth disparity is the root of the market volatility and there isn't any other practical way to repair it. Healthcare is, in particular, a sweet spot for economic repair because consolidating it in other places has not only helped wealth disparity but also been more efficient than the private industry, partially because capitalism and healthcare are a poor fit due to the inherent knowledge and motivational inequity between buyers and sellers.
Indiscriminate spending doesn't make the economy grow...
I agree, but I think healthcare is absolutely one of the best places to target. It matches all the criteria and has been proven to work in other places numerous times.
Spending the way we are it won't be long before China and Japan decide they don't want to finance our debts anymore.
Well, I wouldn't say that, exactly, but increasing foreign debt is an increasingly risky method of manufacturing wealth and creating cash flow. Interestingly, that was one of the main differences between Obama and McCain. McCain's economic plan would have had to rely upon more foreign debt where as Obama is fighting to pay a larger share with high end tax increases instead. He's currently fighting most of his own party to do it though.
Congress has become like one of those credit card addicts that thinks he can always get a higher credit limit as long as he can pay the minimum.
Absolutely. Probably the most important thing citizens can do right now is make sure their representatives know we are watching and won't tolerate it. We need tax reform to fix this, both removing tax spending that is not useful and increasing the amount of money we pull in from those that can afford it. Trickle down economics doesn't work because it doesn't actually trickle down and just leverage it to gain ever greater shares overall; in effect becoming a shovel up economy. What we need it to take a slice off the top, restoring tax levels to closer to what they were a decade or two ago, when wealth was moving around but not constantly consolidating into the hands of just a few and leaving the majority increasingly more poverty stricken.
I am in favor of change, but the direction Obama is going is kind
Ok, mod me down but this guy that you people put in charge is a socialist nut case...
Socialism. It's probably one of the most confusing and misunderstood terms in the US. Partly this is because it is a political movement separate from it being an economic method. Party this is because there was a huge propaganda campaign in the US to spread fear about it as part of a campaign against Asia in the cold war.
Listen to me carefully. Every president ever has been a socialist. Every economist is a socialist to a fair degree or they are insane. Socialism has always been part of our economic system and trying to eliminate it entirely would destroy the economy. Every stable economy in the world is a balance of socialism and capitalism (and communism, but there's no need to get into that right now).
The highway department, post office, military, police, fire department, public schools, NASA, and the FDA are all socialist programs. Socialist programs were established as part of our government from day one. Obama is working to increase the level of socialism in the US. That makes him moderately informed about economics and is pretty much what every reputable economist says is required to reduce the volatility of our stock market and return wealth disparity to sane levels. He's advocating policies that have worked in numerous other countries. Sure it is socialism, but you have to understand socialism is nothing new and not some bogey monster. If we're going to get our economy back on track, socialism coupled with more progressive taxation on the high end is pretty close to the only viable route. You can't lower taxes for people who aren't paying any now. They can't gain wealth starting from their current state. (Try playing monopoly where you start out with $5 and the other guy starts with $50000, but is willing to loan you enough to get started, provided he gets 2/3 of any profit you make. Sure, you could win, but it isn't likely and if you play every day, you will lose overall.)
So, do you have a sane counter proposal or are you just a extreme capitalist nut case with no real understanding of the problem?
Public works projects as a way of recovering from a recession has never worked.
Public works by themselves can't fix a broken economy, but they can be a useful part of a solution if done right.
It didn't work for the Japanese in the 90's, they spent 10 years building roads and bridges and wondering why nothing was happening. It didn't work for us in the 30's. And it will never work.
I gave ten bucks to a homeless guy and he was begging again later that day. Obviously giving money to the poor doesn't help them significantly. See the logical fallacy? An example does not make something a truism.
We need to stop listening to Keynesian and socialist economists who don't have the first clue what they're talking about and are trying to give solutions based on theory instead of what's been shown to work.
Yeah, if only there were countries with higher standards of living an more stable economies and higher median wealth than the US. We could do what they do. Oh, wait there are such countries and they almost all implement socialist programs you are claiming don't work.
You want to turn this economy around? Cut taxes to 20%, max.
Tax cuts haven't worked in practice and credible economist will tell you there isn't even a viable theory as to how that would work. Trickle down economics has failed. The biggest proponents among economist, even die hards like Greenspan, have abandoned it. The wealth has consolidated at the top and it isn't trickling back down. The only people still advocating that nonsense are paid publications trying to provide PR materials for policies no reputable economist will touch.
educe regulations on small businesses \ cut the red tape.
Yeah, reducing regulations has helped a lot too. It results in businesses that pass on a lot of the costs of their doing business to the rest of society.
The government cannot create jobs except government jobs, and government jobs do not build an economy.
Our tax dollars funded the research and equipment that was the internet. Our tax dollars funded the universities who expanded it and built the software to make it useful. It has created millions of jobs that are not government jobs and makes up a huge part of the world economy. Government spending can and does create more jobs and bring more growth to the economy than the same money spent by the private sector. It doesn't always. The spending has to be carefully picked for that purpose, but it certainly can and has done so in the past.
All government can do is get out of the way, and keep the playing field fair for the players.
That's the problem. The playing field is not fair. We'd like to think our economy is a meritocracy, but it isn't. Wealth is mostly transferred by inheritance and with our current tax policies pretty much every economic model predicts wealth will continue to consolidate into fewer hands, the middle class will shrink, and the lower class will grow. Reducing taxes across the board accelerates this process. The only thing that will change it is a complete wealth redistribution ala revolution, or increasing the progressiveness of taxes to take some of that money back from the high end, enough to at least balance out wealth condensation. Then, that money needs to be put back into the economy on the low end, raising the overall wealth of the poor. One way that has worked in many other countries is socialized medicine, where the consolidated nature usually leads to greater efficiency overall.
I can go on and go into detail, but I think a lot of people here don't have much of a grasp on economics. Our economic crisis s not that we don't have enough money. The problem is the money is too inequitably distributed (just like during the great depression) and this leads to a volatile stock market and overall loss of wealth as it is lost dur
You'd do well to look at the French system for inspiration.
Yes. Condorcet seems like the most fair and useful, even more so than instant runoff.
Even ignoring that there may not be any physical chip save for something small that spits out a few signals for play/pause, next, stop. I wouldn't be at all suprised to learn that there is a patent on this use of the technology and that Apple owns it.
Maybe they do, but they have patents on lots of physical interfaces and they license them to other manufacturers. Thid parties have already announced headphones with controls that will work with this interface.
On top of that, I'm sure they would abuse the DMCA or other laws, to prevent people from reverse engineering the design and making their own copies.
They can't use the DMCA as this is not a copyright protection mechanism. Other parties already are making their own implementations. I don't know if they had to license a patent and neither do you. Does it matter?
...no one in the US will be able to make their own version of the headphone without fearing lawsuit from Apple.
You are misinformed.
IANAL, but the way I understand it, monopolies in a specific market within the United States are OK as long as they don't try to leverage another market. How is this different from Microsoft's monopoly?
It's different in that MS has a monopoly as determined by the courts and is a repeat offender. Apple may have a monopoly, but it is right on the edge of the market share guidelines and the courts have not made any determination of the markets.
The way I see it, Apple is trying to use Shuffle, which has a virtual monopoly in the tiny screen-less talking music player department to leverage, to Apple's favor, the headphone market.
That market definition will never fly. Markets are defined by what the typical purchaser will consider as alternatives. Having a screen or not having a talking feature does not automatically rule out the competition when the average person considers what to buy. In the EU, they never made a formal ruling but they seem to have sided with including cell phones that play media as valid competitors and with the laws they have restricting vendor lock-in that probably makes sense. That being the major reason Apple did not have enough influence, Apple probably does have enough influence in the US to qualify as a monopoly if it ever goes to court. The difficulties being that the cell phone market and music player market are converging and several of the markets where Apple has leveraged their monopoly are the same markets MS has leveraged their monopoly and nothing has been done about it. It's a mess thanks to the actions of the DoJ in the past.
People, the web is fine for multimedia and information presentation, but why is there this constant push to integrate everything into the web?
That's easy. The desktop OS market is monopolized and innovation has slowed to a crawl. The market is attempting to route around the damage. It's not working well, but that's what is happening.
Apple is *forcing* you to buy their headphones if you want to control it and from what I understand is that 3rd parties cannot make these special headphones without a special chip only apple has.
The problem being, this part is just speculation at this point and seems unlikely. No one has seen said chip or tried to reverse engineer the new interface from Apple.
So yes - its drm.
Assuming said speculation was true it wouldn't be DRM, but it would be intentionally enforced hardware component lock-in. If you want to call it DRM, go ahead, but it is inaccurate. Either way it is annoying and likely actionable if someone had the legal muscle.
And while some 3rd party could reverse engineer the lockout chip apple could in turn shut them down with the dmca.
...if any such chip exists as opposed to the more likely scenario that Apple built a nonstandard interface and did not include a special locking chip. So far, all anyone has seen is the interface, not this supposed chip.
Well, I voted for Ron the first time around.
He's a good protest vote. Some of his ideas are, frankly, very poorly informed, but he's at least earnest if not super informed or educated on many subjects.
BUT, we could not afford to have another W get in.
This is why we need electoral reform.
I had some issues with McCain, but somewhat considered him. That was gone once he picked the ultimate neo-con as running mate.
Yeah, that was some really lousy strategy. He had a shot, but he needed to appeal to moderates in the center. It's not like the far right wasn't going to vote for him anyway simply to stop Obama who they perceive as a threat. Palin did exactly the opposite. It did not get him any real new votes and drove away all the moderates.
I am STILL hopeful that Obama is an honest pol.
I have hope to. He honestly seems to be trying. He's come through fairly well for things in his power as executive and he's fighting hard for healthcare and tax reforms we really, really need and he promised to try to deliver.
BUT as I look at all the ppl that he has put around himself, they appear to be as corrupt as any neo-con.
Hs appointments to date have been a mixed bag. Some I strongly disapprove of, but some I strongly approve of. If you look at his cabinet there are a few that really stand out like: Kathleen Sebelius, Steven Chu, Eric Shinseki, Lisa Jackson, and Peter Orszag. They all seem leaps and bounds more competent and significantly less corrupt than many of their predecessors. Appointments like Chu are what keep my hope alive. Even Kundra seems to be at least more competent. We'll have to see how this potential corruption turns out.
In this case it is a false statement of fact, as magenta is in fact, not my favorite color.
That's just your opinion of what your favorite color is. You might be wrong. I hypothesize magenta is your favorite color and we should subject you to a battery of tests where you rate how positively you feel about pictures of various objects in different colors and see if your answers correlate with magenta. Then we can publish the numbers and let some other people review it and see if the experiments are repeatable.
...
It's funny because it hurts.
He's only been in office for a 2 month! How much could he do/not do in 8 weeks? Not very much.
He's responsible for every decision that has been made in the past 8 weeks. I'm a fair man, and I'm willing to say that processes that were in place as he took office aren't his fault... but that doesn't sound like it was the case here at all.
Was Carmen Suro-Bredie appointed by Obama? Was she appointed by someone he appointed? Was she appointed by the previous administration? I don't know. She seems to be a very minor player making a bad decision. Perhaps she should be rebuked or replaced?
One of Obama's first acts was to sign a series of executive orders so people serving under him would not do crap like this. He signed an order requiring people to fill FOIA requests unless they could provide a real justification for security reasons. Is there a real reason here? Does the treaty contain sensitive provisions regarding nuclear materials or something? We don't know, but it sure shouldn't. So the question then becomes, will this ever come to the attention of the president or his direct appointees? If it does will they fix it and if this becomes common will they clean house?
I'm not exactly an Obama fan, but I haven't lost all hope. He's pushing for some very important changes that would be of great benefit and fighting his own party to do it. I'm not happy with some of his appointees. I'm not happy with many of his policies. He is still the lesser evil by a large margin IMHO.
No, it's the truth. He broke his promises before he took office...
Agreed, although he's still doing better on them than almost any president in recent history with numerous campaign promises already fulfilled in a very timely fashion (those within his power in the executive). It does not make the broken ones any less his fault.
Furthermore, attempting to polarize this matter...
Amen. Politics is not sports. When people stop rooting for their favorite team and actually start paying attention to individuals and what they vote for, we will have some hope for reform.
That's quite a violent approach to the problem. Invalidate all software patents? I don't think Apple would approve, as that would be the end of their business.
How do you figure? Half of Apple's revenue is from their PC business where their largest differentiator is OS X, protected more by copyright than patents. Then there is their iPod business, where hardware patents are the major protection. Between hardware patents, copyright, and trademark protections, I don't see Apple being in much trouble if software patents are invalidated... even if it went to extremes and included UI's that include a mix of hardware and software, ala multi-touch.
But you really meant invalidate all of MSFT's right?
Why would you make such an assumption? That's not at all what he said, nor does it even make sense.
Well, if such a person was willing and able to defend their viewpoints, Id[sic] call that rational.
How can ignoring the evidence as determined by the scientific method be rational?
Being rational doesn't mean blindly believing whatever someone tells you to believe without using your brain, whether its science or religion in question.
The scientific method is not to read what other people have come up with and believe them. It is to look at all the evidence and peer reviewed experiments to date and, if you think it useful, to create a new hypothesis and perform your own experiments.
Being rational means having a reason behind your beliefs, and being able to defend them logically.
I disagree. Being rational means forming your beliefs based upon the evidence and using reason. Anyone can use logic and evidence to try to defend any arbitrary belief. Brilliant people have irrational beliefs and can be quite good at defending those beliefs both to themselves and others. That's why decisions made via a formal process, such as the scientific method is a reasoned method of making decisions. Reason has to be part of the formation of the belief, not just defending it.
It's easier to teach kids to memorize than to understand.
This is the only thing you wrote that I disagree with. Kids naturally want to learn
I don't mean it is easier for the kids. It's easier for the teacher because they don't have to put in significant effort or actually engage the students. It's easier to just read from the text. Handling the discipline issues that arise from the regiment are old hat.
I agree with your point, but the status quo is almost always easier.
You can't learn how to critically deduce something if you don't know things... [you go on to present an example of a jigsaw puzzle]
True, but you don't have to know any specific things. For example, you can apply the scientific method to solving jigsaw puzzles without knowing what percentage of the earth's surface is covered with water. For any given problem you need to acquire facts and create a hypothesis and an experiment in order to apply the scientific method. Having more facts can make your hypothesis more likely to be a good one. You don't, however, actually need particular facts going into the process, which is why in "Science" classes the method should be the priority and the facts less so.
I don't actually think we're too far apart on this, conceptually.
Mind you, I think "critical thought", "Principals of Western Philosophy", "Mathematical proofs", "Basic Algorithms" should all be classes since the 5th grade (10 years old here in Brazil).
I think those are a good start, although they might be a bit biased towards one end of the spectrum. I'd like to see something a little more rounded including foundations of logic and the rhetorical method. A lot of people understand reason, but fail in conveying it and understanding discussions because they don't understand how to converse well and reasonably.
But you need to show them some fact too, so they can apply what they are learning in terms of thinking, and their curiosity on a bunch of "silly" trivia and from that onwards learn how to think.
Oh I'm all in favor of teaching facts. I wrote, "I think science classes should run through teaching a wide base of scientifically determined fats[sic] and likely theories," in my previous post.
I agree with you that people who pass this test may still have no understading of the scientific method, but I don't think that someone who can't get those facts can know it. Mainly because they are easy to infer from other things.
Ahh, but that's not what I wrote. I wrote that it is possible they may not know those particular facts when surveyed. That's not at all the same thing as not being able to get those facts. While you can infer some of those facts from other facts, you need to know those other facts first. Just because someone has never seen a map of the earth does not mean they can't know the scientific method.
The fact that so many people have no idea about it, shows not just a lack of trivia knowledge but a lack of deducing capabilities.
In all likelihood it is a combination of things. Most people who don't know these facts, likely don't know the scientific method either, but it is not actually a good test for if people are scientifically literate. It really is too bad education is not a bigger priority. It can be so much more than it is.
My biggest problem with the summary is that many scientists might fail this "basic science literacy" test simply because it's too specific.
I don't think that's the problem. It's just that it only asks about facts/likely truths determined by science, not about science itself.
As pointed out elsewhere, how much of the planet is covered in water is more of a trivia question.
Agreed.
And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science.
Well, it is asking a question where the scientific method has determined one answer to be the most likely truth. Science never really proves anything, just has theories that are more or less supported. A person who understands and trusts the scientific method is a person who accepts the most supported theory until the preponderance of evidence shifts.
It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
It's also entirely possible for someone to understand the science but believe for religious reasons that the earth does not go around the sun. It's just not rational or scientific because it is rejecting the answers presented by the scientific method and arbitrarily believing something else.
Science literacy shouldn't be about what they know, it should be about what they can recognize.
I agree it should not be about trivia, but it should include understanding and applying the scientific method. If people apply the scientific method very narrowly and then apply irrational and nonscientific methods to determine the facts about other parts of the world, then I'd argue scientific literacy has failed to a significant extent.
Just because I'm literate with books doesn't mean that I can tell you specific details about Edgar Allen Poe, nor does it mean that I necessarily agree with Orwell.
No, but to be literate means you can read and often that you do read, not that you can read certain things but in other instances you can just look at the pictures or you make up what you think the little squiggly things on the paper mean. You don't have to agree with Orwell to be literate, you just have to be able to read his books. Not understanding that the scientific method has determined the most likely truth to be that humans and dinosaurs never inhabited the earth at the same time is analogous to being unable to read Orwell.
To fail at basic info like that, shows a disregard for scientific knowledge. And that is foundation of critical thought (together with some philosophy in it).
I disagree. I think understanding and applying the scientific method is the foundation of science, which is just one method of critical thought. Any particular facts a person knows or does not know may be reflective of their opinions about science, or it may be reflective of their particular interests and cultural influences. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that people who fail such a test are able to apply the scientific method. It is probable that people who pass this test, still have no real understanding of the scientific method, how to apply it, or why it works.
I surmise that thinking such as is demonstrated in this survey is a symptom of our broken educational system. It is highly focused upon rote memorization instead of applicable skills and understanding concepts. It's easier to memorize the definition of science than to understand the method. It's easier to teach kids to memorize than to understand. It's significantly easier to test memorization than understanding. It is vastly easier to standardize a test for memorizing a blurb than for understanding a concept.
Don't get me wrong. I think science classes should run through teaching a wide base of scientifically determined fats and likely theories. I just think that should come second to a thorough understanding of the scientific method and how to apply it to determine the truth as well as a firm grounding in hands on experimentation so students can learn that it does work and have confidence in it.
They aren't run by idiots. They're run by selfish bastards. There's a big difference.
Agreed, but often the end result is the same. An idiot will run a small company into the ground and move on. A selfish bastard will gut a company of a all valuable assets to temporarily boost the stock, collect huge bonuses, and then sell off the remains of the company to a larger one or just walk away. The end result is the same except the latter is more sustainable. After running the company into the ground intentionally, an executive can almost certainly get a job working for one of his buddies who he was giving huge bonuses to. After accidentally running a company into the ground an executive is less likely to get another high paying executive position (although not as unlikely as any rational human would think).
i'll actually disagree... science just isn't for everyone.
I'll disagree with your disagreement, sort of. I disagree that science is not for everyone. There is no excuse why all students should not be taught science, i.e. the scientific method and how to apply it to accurately determine the truth. That said, I agree not everyone should necessarily be learning "science" as it is presented in this article. All they are asking is trivia that falls into the category of things science has determined to be almost certainly true. While knowing these things is nice and useful, it isn't really the core of science and not what I would think of as "the basics" of science.
This mistake proves the premise of the article.
Actually, it is a counter example. The article talks about how science education is lacking and how this is a problem. The summary was a case of poor language skills failing to accurately and clearly convey information the submitter almost certainly understood. The article talks about the problem with science education, but does at address that education is failing in many, many other areas as well.
Will this switch on a large level impact the EU's suit against MS?
No.
If there are large numbers of computers, especially at the government level, that do not use MS at all, does this not take the force out of the meme, "It's a monopoly, kill it now," or is there more to this than is clear at present?
If every single company buying site licenses of Windows were to switch to Linux, it still would not make enough of a dent for MS to not have enough market share to have monopoly influence. The vast majority of the market is OEM licenses for pre-installs. In fact, almost all the computers in question probably already were bundled with a Windows license and then a second, site license was bought, before finally being migrated to Linux. Until major OEMs start shipping Linux in significant volumes. This was 90,000 machines. In an average quarter there are 71,900,000 computers shipped to the EU with Windows pre-installed, site licenses. Windows has 99% of the applicable market. By my calculations, that means this news accounts for .001% of the market. Since MS would have to drop to about 70% before the EU would consider them no longer having monopoly influence it will take 29,000 more switches of the same size every quarter. So when you start seeing 10,000 stories like this on Slashdot every month, MS might be in the clear.
Honestly, not supporting a business that resides in your nation during the current state of the economy is a pretty bad thing for the government to do.
Why is MS at risk of going under? I'd much rather government stimulus come in the form of hiring unemployed IT people to help them transition and unemployed coders to add features they need/want and hiring smaller companies to provide support. Giving large amounts of money to MS is (amusingly) approaching the broken window fallacy.
The point is that the government should be helping to foster the development of it's own economy by investing into it.
Yes it should, but I'd much rather they hand all that cash to truly innovative companies that will provide longterm benefits to the economy and the government. Fostering innovation has been a key to several economic recoveries. Monopolies and especially monopoly abusers are death to innovation.