At the time I switched, the Win2k VM was driving me insane, making me wait for swap for minutes at a time with a gig of RAM and ~500MB resident. The explorer was just nuts. Delete a start menu entry and wait 5 minutes? And then there was the peerless combination of your POP mail client and norton antivirus, which at the time had a small fit and opened a window for each message it processed, as well as popping a dialog you had to click through every time it found a virus (so, about 100 times a day).
There were things like ogle, that let you skip to the DVD menu without waiting 5 minutes for the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, and 8 other movies to have their say first. And things like mplayer, which at that point was already better than WMP/Quicktime/Whatever-Else, especially as a browser plugin (hello... "save file as!").
But of course the thing that really sealed the deal was switching into 2.6 just as the new VM stuff was coming online, and seeing how incredibly responsive a computer can be under load...
"06 - 26" "This is 06." "Uh, we've got activity out here but I don't think we really need to report it" "What do you see?" "Ah, appears to be fornication in a converitble" (laughter) "Do a target score, and I'll be there in a second" (laughter) "Ah, we're taping it."...
"White Hawk 26 - Alpha 1 1 Uniform" "Ah, this is 26" "Roger, I'm gonna need that tape from you, and an additional..." "Roger, we'll make copies for everyone."
I know your question is partly rhetorical. But it's such a good one, I'll answer.
Social control.
The people in power today are anxious to return to the J Edgar Hoover days of federal "law" "enforcement," when federal agents could be employed as a goon squad for servicing the needs of the dominant political and economic interests backing the government.
To make this good, they need eliminate oversight (such as judicial review), and expand their powers (limiting civil and human rights). As far as I can see, this has basically been the sole law enforcement agenda of both Bush and Clinton - the only difference was the intensity with which they pursued it.
I took him to be saying that the universities are doing a bad job of teaching and could do better, and if they did do better, more people might "love" their field of study and progress in it.
Or more succinctly, doing a bad job of teaching gets you fewer graduates in the field, and they are not necessarily better than the ones who switched to something else.
And if that's the case, I maintain that he's right.
Many of us go through the big fish in a suddenly much bigger pond thing. I think it's beside the point, if the system is so clearly broken.
I can see it now. Cue the chorus of people who say, "this guy must be dumb, no wonder he washed out."
You know what? Bullshit. He has a point.
During my four years of undergraduate, I did my share of engineering, CS, physics, and I threw in an extra liberal arts minor just because I was bored. My experience was exactly like his. The only difference is that I didn't want law or medicine, and was determined to suffer.
I learned mostly outside of class - primarily on the job (I paid for school by already working in the field I was studying). There are always exceptions, and exceptional teachers. Few and far between. For the most part the place was ridiculous, and I constantly pitied the kids who had to actually rely on the teachers to learn.
The sad fact is, the pedagogical technique is absolute shit at the university level. Absolute shit, even in some of the supposedly "great" American schools. The comparison to the secondary level, with its few remaining standards and shattered, vague but lingering sense of professionalism, is stark. These people often have no idea how to teach, and there is very little expectation that they should. There is no requirement for communication skills, metaphorical skills, or even language skills. The grading practices are ludicrous - almost dadaesque. There is no oversight. No standards. For fun, add critical first year classes with 250 students to a teacher. And of course, quite a few of them just plain suck altogether. As an educational environment, it is completely out to lunch.
The math curricula is particularly noxious, but the problem is by no means limited to mathematics. The best I can say of them is that the department may have seen itself as a filter rather than a teacher, selecting the few people who already know as much as they do and can prove it through arcane and torturous inquisition, and discarding the rest. But were they really such big believers in "natural talent" and "high standards?" This theory flies out the window when you see the entire class curved up 50 points. I once saw someone who failed a midterm and skipped a final curved up to a C-. It wasn't about standards. It was just completely non-functional. But this guy expresses it much better than I do.
Making excuses for these people is pointless. If you paid thousands of dollars to learn Differential Equations and got a gibbering 24 year old who barely understands them himself and can even more barely speak your language to explain it, you just got robbed.
I hate to say it, but it feels like the final stages of the great educational decline. We've been letting the public educational system burn at every level for decades, and now I think our higher educational institutions are finally starting to break...
For some reason, the more I read about patents, the more I get the distinct impression that, when you clear away the varied legal wranglings of individual cases and look at the trends, the only people who profit from them are those who are already rich and powerful (corporations, mostly, and the rare wealthy individual).
I'm not saying I like lever pull machines either, but... FYI, it's much easier to do that kind of hack with software than with gears. Think about how hard it would be to design a new mechanism that would do this, yet not be visible when the cover came off and the machine was inspected. Think about getting in there grinding in this modification on the voting machine without being seen. Now think about doing this for not just one voting machine, but hundreds or thousands...
This is why the lever pulls are still around in a few places...
I don't know what's worse: the frighteningly bizarre concept of a voting machine with no voter-verified paper trail, or the small group of people who defend this literally indefensible practice. It fills me with a sense of dread every time I hear another round of this story hitting the news, and it hasn't involved anyone going to jail yet.
Unfortunately, as geeks know better than journalists, there is no sane, moral, or legal reason for paperless touchscreen voting machines to even exist. Almost everyone who is knowledgable in this discipline gets it pretty quickly - because it's extremely obvious, and also because paper is integral to secure systems everywhere, from secure logging on printers in machine rooms to ATMs and even slot machines... You just don't store things like votes on non-user-verified, let alone rewriteable, media.
In fact, if I recall, the state of Nevada was a little while ago in the awkward position of having vastly superior standards enforced for gambling devices than they had for voting machines... although I think now they are one of many states that has put this craziness under some scrutiny...
Yet there really are a few people out there (I've met some on slashdot for instance) who argue to defend this practice anyway. These days, ignorance and stupidity is no longer funny. It's becoming terrifying.
If we lived in a sane country, the people who made these machines would be prosecuted, since their level of negligence certainly rises to the level of criminal even if they have no intent of their own to rig elections, and all of the politicians and bureaucrats who ordered, "evaluated," "tested," and approved these systems should follow not long after. We would know all this, prima-facie, even if Diebold hadn't had a pants-down security incident and exposed their internal emails to the world, showing us their gaffes in first-person detail. We would know even if direct results of their incompetence weren't widely documented
The simple, bedrock need for secure voting systems, and the absolutely impeccable engineering doctrines involving voter-verified paper, are almost universally accepted among credible experts. All explained many times before, better than I could anyway. It's inconceivable there is any debate at this point. Why would we have a voting machine that was deliberately made insecure?
The most credible argument I've ever heard (relatively speaking) is, "Who would cheat anyway? You're just being paranoid."
The Content Trust is careful, so far, to avoid the subject of libraries, because they want to abolish them and the public isn't ready to swallow that yet.
The Content Trust wants cash on the barrelhead for every "use." They want carte blanche to monitor and revoke. They want artificial price structures by region and use-case. They want to criminalize quoting and excerpts without permission. They want to end re-selling. Think. They want to criminalize lending!
What does a library do? It buys books, records, and movies, and then lends them to people for free! Heaven forfend! How do the poor booksellers, music shops, and video rental stores survive?
It shocks me that so few people have thought this through yet. The Content Trust is pushing the biggest renegotiation with society since the printing press. We have a longstanding deal when it comes to "copyright:" information is already free. At your beloved public library! Buying books, movies, and DVDs is patronage, pure and simple.
Free access to information for everyone, regardless of means is singularly, vastly, vitally important to the way our society functions.
Imagine if, when the phonograph was invented, musicians (which until then were the only way you got to hear music) were for some unusual reason able to lobby powerful people in Washington. What if they said, "Make a law! We must be paid individually for every musical performance made by these Recording Machines, just as if we were there to perform it ourselves." It's stupid, right? Almost as stupid as libraries using DRM to manage "copies."
Unfortunately, those poor little musicians had to suck it up. And now it's time for the Content Trust to suck it up too... screw them. Technology marches along. Sometimes people need to change their "business model." Ask any musician, or for that matter, any bank teller, they'll tell you...
Microsoft did a better job with.NET... better than... VBScript! You remember that, right? On Error Resume Next? Set? Don't Set?
What Microsoft means is for developers to get locked into a closed, proprietary, patented platform that Microsoft controls. "Neutral standards committee" standardized the steering wheel of the car but not the engine... It is utterly wrong and highly deceptive to call.NET an open standard. Does MS provide full specs and all cross-platform sources for their product? No, they do not. They only give some parts of it, I imagine so that they can fool people like you into not noticing the shackles being attached. Why is it that Mono is spending years reverse-engineering the core APIs and hoping they won't be sued for patent infringement all the while? There is nothing like this in the Java world. This is why Java will still be jumping to new OSs and hardware architectures long after.NET is de-supported.
Java is mature, fast, and an industry standard. It's taught in universities more than.NET is, and there are many more Java jobs than.NET jobs..NET may have a future, of course... the world's appetite for version 1.0 and 1.1 Microsoft products seems curiously inexhaustible. But today it's hardly the first language I would tell a young programmer to learn.
dotNET development tools and 3rd party libraries are immature compared to Java....NET programmers spend an hour with IntelliJ Idea and weep with envy. There is a mountain of impeccable, production-tested enterprise-class BSD-licensed libraries for Java. If you look at the enormous work the Apache foundation has done, there is nothing in the.NET world that compares to it, though there are things that aspire... and may some day...
dotNET has some sugar and some cute extra features; it also has some mistakes and pitfalls. It's a vaguely improved Java knock-off, and what it offers in no way compensates for becoming locked into the world's most notorious vendor.
What they "pioneered" was using feedback and network effects to force a marketplace to accept an inferior product at monopolist prices, costing the world trillions in lost productivity and lost opportunities.
I was disappointed to find zero hits under google for "Classical Cognitism." I am better at referencing english literature than the cognitive psych, and came up with my glib description of thinking without regard for the nomenclature, so I'm curious to get more background. Domain-specific input patterns is another one; I'd love to read more if you have a reference. My statements about it all come as much from introspection as anywhere else; it seems like we simply have a certain amount of "bandwidth" to think with. "Symbols" are just a vague way of describing the metal joints holding up the jungle-gym of objective reality as we try to climb around on it.
We don't seem think about everything we know at once - which is not to say we're talking about some AI researcher's fantasy of discreet compartments and clearly-defined boundaries. But as we move our minds eye over the landscape I do think things bloom into vivid focus as we look right at them, and leave a symbol - or just a reduction, if you like, like a trailing afterimage, as we look away.
First, as Orwell very correctly observed, the human mind is not the least bit troubled by self-contradiction. Logic is much more of a conceit or a learned skill than a human trait. Or as Swift said, human beings are just Rationis Capax. Well, it doesn't really surprise any observer of humanity that we're all so often blithely illogical even as we express pride at our reason and intelligence. It's just an all-too-familiar fact of life.
The second thing is that people who are ungifted or unfamiliar with the subtleties of a situation very often mistake nuance for a self-contradiction. We've all watched politicians make our most cherished freedoms into evils to be ground under the bootheel of a five word slogan. The truth is that we reason modularly with symbols and representations that reduce the immediate and full impact of what they represent, and we communicate using the same imperfect tools.
Slogans about information wanting to be free are symbols that make a far more specific case than they appear - because (forgive the half-hearted semiotics) of their context. Take them out of context and you are now merely playing dishonest rhetorical games. To clarify this as one example: "we" (not really, but lets say for the sake of the example) don't want "information to be free" - we want copyright to be limited (or at least its enforcement to take a backseat to civil liberties). And yes, we consider privacy to be one of those civil liberties.
Remember, too, that common law, and indeed all of our human society, is not a mathematical model descended from the heavens. It's a permutation of our instictints and our necessities - strictly arbitrary and animal in nature.
There are many "inconsistencies" around us that deserve our full attention. And I take it as a compliment that the story's attempt at producing one for the slashdot crowd's approach towards copyright and privacy amounts to a vapid, dishonest hat-trick.:D
There are a whole variety of pedagogic techniques that are interesting and worth looking at, and most are little more than arranging deckchairs on the Titanic when we routinely allow class sizes to get above 30 kids.
At those sizes it's just not functional. You are doing someting, it's not really education as we know it.
For dramatic results, student-teacher ratios need to change dramatically.
"How dramatic do you mean?"
How about setting a "man on the moon" type national project that gets us to 15 students to a teacher in 10 years?
Expensive? Sure as hell is. However, I can think of very few better investments... Being stupid is certainly costing us a lot of money. For instance, I have no idea why democrats are hammering on national healthcare in this midst of our monumental education crisis...
Now of course, you take take any single idea like this and "poke a bunch of holes" in it. No, class size is not a panacea. There are lots of problems to address. Teacher quality. Performance metrics in general. Performance grouping. Discipline. But I think class size is worth focusing on rhetorically because it is probably the most significantly out of whack in most public education scenarios.
I say public because, quality secular private schools do not generally have this problem. The keep their class sizes in the 10-20 range - and some schools tout class sizes in the 5-10 range. Of course, this runs all the way to tutors for the ultra-wealthy...
New York City (HS dropout rate: 50%+) is planning on spending hundreds of millions on a new sports stadium. So here is how I would Stop the Stupid: put up a giant tent instead. And how many teachers does half a billion dollars buy?
Now, which do you think is better for the economy?
I have read about it. My use of the word "kindergarten" was out of line, and I apologize. I attempted to use hyperbole as a debate tactice, but failed to realize that tactic is reserved for use by the left (cf. "gulag").
Oh my word. Look at what you have written. Just stop here a moment and contemplate this paragraph with me. Really, think about it.
Reserved? Nothing is reserved, BB. And if I ever need proof, I will point them to you.
Do you mind if I bookmark this post, and maybe show it to a few other people?
Frankly, I think your "kindergarten" description of the Shah and SAVAK, and your instant blanket condemnation of Amnesty International, an enormously important humanitarian group that includes many from all parties and beliefs, are far far worse than the "Guantanamo as gulag of our time" gaffe. I don't know, maybe if we cool off and look at it objectively you can even agree.
One thing, though, claiming you have some background knowledge to back up your behavior does not make you look better.
I am not denying that. I am only questioning whether he was worse than Saddam Hussein.
Someone who had read about it would have come up with at least one concrete argument by now as to why. I did - the statement of an authority on human rights abuses. Want to do more? I am willing.
When the organization does not apologize for the gaffe, chastise the gaffer, and in no way attempts to distance themselve from the gaffe, then indeed I do
Since your own apology was a powerful exercise in comedy, we must now consider you perfectly, elegantly hoisted on your own petard.
It is your very own arguments we must now rule out for all time, BB.
Are you assuming I'm a Republican and a Bush supporter?
Yes.
You're are arguing one of their talking points.
you think everything is divided neatly down the middle into lockstep groups
No.
It's possible to dislike AI's Gitmo statement without also having voted for Bush
For instance, I do. But that's not why I made that assumption.
It's possible to view the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo as humane (despite lack of due process) without being a Republican.
Hell, you can still be a Republican and be locked up in Gitmo, but as with all of these things, since the likelihood decreases, everyone acts accordingly.
It's possible to view the US invasion of Iraq as wrong without being a Democrat or Green.
Indeed, I know some Republicans and conservatives who are very angry about it.
Now, for the record, I consider your exercise in "you guessed my label wrong" to have added nothing to this debate but a distraction. However, I do apologize for assuming your label was wrong, if I have indeed guessed wrong. Now, shall we continue?
So you're saying that full scale ethnic and religious genocide is the only way to modernize and democratize the mideast, to enable a free flow of information and a free exchange of ideas, and to empower the peoples of said nations to control their own personal and collective destinies in an environment that nurtures ideals of freedom?
To which I say:
If we started with non-oil producers in greater need, people actually would believe that was what we were doing.
To which you say:
Um, we did.
But we didn't. And now you agree, and say:
I never claimed that the Iraq war was waged for humanitarian purposes.
OK, I guess you just misunderstood the thread. DS was making Iraq out to have humanitarian goals, and I've done a lot of reasoning here about what I think the problems with that viewpoint are - starting with that sentence.
"Um, we did" looks very much like a claim to the contrary.
Certainly, certainly, Bush did.
However, you were replying to a person who said our goals are "to modernize and democratize the mideast, to enable a free flow of information and a free exchange of ideas, and to empower the peoples of said nations to control their own personal and collective destinies in an environment that nurtures ideals of freedom".
That is a pretty good summary of the United States' current goals in Iraq.
And you admit it! Quote it even! I fear I am in for some Clinton-grade hair splitting.
I read that paragraph and I see it as a humanitarian justification for the war. Certainly, as opposed to "they're buying yellow cake," or "they were behind 9/11."
Whether Osama is dead, incarcerated, or merely on the lam would make little difference to the effectiveness of al Qaeda's ongoing operations, so I would not support devoting a lot of additional resources toward hunting this one individual.
Do you really, honestly believe anyone ever, at ny time, just advocated "going after only Osama" versus "going after Al Qaeda?" Well, you implied I did... I won't go so far as to imply in return that you're being deliberately dishonest or insulting. We routinely use "Osama" as a symbol for Al Qaeda the same way we use Bush as a symbol for America. I'll say it's an honest mistake. And suffice it to say, going after Al Qaeda, instead of going on a catastrophic military adventure in Iraq, creating the world's largest backlash, and playing right into the hands of Muslim Fascists who have been trying (largely unsuccessfully) to frighten people into the cause for years with wild tales about an American Invasion that are no longer so wild anymore... I can only support simply going after the people who actually want to hurt the U.S., rather than creating a greater danger with a crude attempt to build an oil producing empire.
I agree with Litvinov, I think her use of the word was wrong. I also maintain their description of SAVAK and the Shah's regime was accurate. You clearly still haven't read about it, or you would be much quieter.
The most biased of all screaming "bias!" at others seems to be the hallmark of our time.
Do you think you can discount all of AI's history and work from that one comment? Do you like to use a single gaffe to discredit an entire organization? Someone has told you that you can, maybe by example. They were playing you for a huge fool.
How about a presidential candidate, for instance, who speaks haughtily and with great fanfare about restoring dignity to the whitehouse, shortly before calling a reporter as an "asshole?"
I deliberately picked the most innocuous example I could think of. Bush has no credibility either, by your standard.
I'm just waiting for you to crack open that source material. There is no republican party cheat sheet on the Shah's Iran. Just cold hard facts... When we are done here, you'll realize "gulag of our time" is nothing to what you've done, and you'll be caught in your own trap. Or will you not be man enough to admit it?
the primary reason being a multi-pronged, multi-year (or perhaps multi-decade) strategy of initiating difficult changes in the mideast would not have flown as a justification. Sure, there would have been those that understood it, but for better or worse, that would not have worked as a justification for the action.
It seems clear this is nothing more than a manifestation of Strauss' concept of "noble lies".
I think one reason it wouldn't have flown because it was a bad idea, and most experts knew it.
Regardless, there you have the problem with noble lies: we didn't have a real debate.
Who knows, maybe there was a "right way" to invade Iraq; multilateral, sophisticated, well-planned, executed by people promoted for talent instead of loyalty. That right way had no chance of happening under Bush.
Bush's problem is that he is after the oil. And when I say that, I mean that his bigger picture isn't big enough. He is a silverware thief and a second-rate fascist, not a nation builder, and he runs his war like one.
In reality, the weapons were properly either hidden well enough long ago, and indeed, many or nearly all likely do not even remain in Iraq.
You phrase it well. They thought they would at least find something they could use. Truthfully even if they found some Sarin or Anthrax it doesn't change that others next door are known to be working on nukes.
Let alone that we have now demonstrated to the 3rd world that a plausible purpose of U.N. disarmament regimes is to pacify a nation before a U.S. invasion.
Let alone that the U.N. itself, an essential instrument not only for peace and WMD disarmament, but as a sophisticated tool for U.S. hegemony, has been irretrievably weakend by our actions.
Incidentally, I actually disagree that America wouldn't have bought a more bold-faced justification for the war. I think that more of the truth would have worked. We'll never know, of course. Just an idle speculation, but take it for what you will.
This is patently incorrect. On what basis do you make this claim?
Let's start by agreeing to disagree. Neither of us are in the intelligence business (or would admit to it if we were), so we are only swordfighting with table knives.
I am willing to be persuaded, in no small part because I want to be persuaded, that I am wrong.
I am unimpressed by ceremonies. I always said they would have great ones. Sovereignty, elections, constitutions... Occupation is all about ceremony. It's all meaningless if the end result is a backlash and a possible Iranian takeover (in fact if not in name), when we are finally beaten away.
Who has good news that is not also drinking the kool aid? The casualty graphs don't show a trend...
This is one of my favorite arguments, because it presumes that someone expected Islamic radicalism to simply be quashed quickly and easily by entering a single, somewhat secular nation-state.
Actually, nobody expected it, and not even Bush's people claimed anything that outrageous (though they came close).
I don't see how what we've done for the anti-western arab movement in Iraq is in any way a short-term problem. Casualties never come back to life. Casual humiliation from frontier-mentality security actions has been the first impression of the west for an enormous number of Iraqis. People will now be saying the words "Abu Ghraib" with respect to us instead of Saddam for a generation.
I think you've traded a major strategic gain to Muslim Fascism today in exchange for an extremely dubious chance of fostering western-friendly oil policies and political moderation in Iraq in the future.
Say we were able to build a democracy in Iraq tomorr
We've engaged in a number of humanitarian military missions over the years. Iraq is not one of them. Trying to pass it off that way is the crudest deception.
Isn't OBL believed by many or most to be in Pakistan? If this is the case, a significantly greater effort in Afghanistan would not "get him". Isn't finding him in Pakistan much more dependent on the cooperation of the Pakistani government and local military and other leaders, than it is on the size and "dedication" of the American forces?
We were always much more likely to catch OBL with intelligence than with the military. Intelligence assets are precious and rare. When you divert a majority of your Arabic and Persian speakers from Afghanistan and OBL to Iraq... the result is obvious to you, I hope.
We declared Afghanistan was a response to 9/11, which it largely was, so it is incorrect to bring it up over a discussion about whether Iraq can be justified as a war for humanitarian purposes.
For the record, "not having oil" is not the criteria for determing what was a humanitarian mission. Having a humanitarian crisis is. And although Afghanistan was significantly worse than Iraq as far as human rights are concerned, there were mass amputations in Sierra Leone, for instance... neither nation compares to half a dozen nations in Africa which had to be passed on the way. Nobody tried to sell us that story with Afghanistan, though. We were after Osama and we said so.
Anyway, daveschroeder just all but admitted oil is a major factor in Iraq. Why continue to argue?
Do you ever wonder if we had just stayed focused there, instead of splitting our resources, could we have caught him by now?
I mean, the easy way out is to say, no, we wouldn't have, but you have to admit, it's possible.
Amnesty International calls the Shah's secret police the Worst in the World.
Think about that for a minute. The Worst in the World.
And you call him a kindergartner.
A kindergartner? A kindergartner who liked removing teeth with pliers, I guess.
Unfortunately, your grasp of history is as loose as your grasp of current events, and the war is not going as well as you would like to believe. The insurgents include many Iraqis, for a variety of reasons, so your reference to what "The Iraqis" want isn't necessarily meaningful. If you're pointing out that bad actors like Iranian intelligence have a bit of a home-court advantage there too, you're not exactly helping yourself.
(That's a private account by a Wall Street Journal reporter, by the way. For those not current with U.S. media, the W.S.J is ostensibly right-wing, and pro-war.)
Slashdot Mirror
At the time I switched, the Win2k VM was driving me insane, making me wait for swap for minutes at a time with a gig of RAM and ~500MB resident. The explorer was just nuts. Delete a start menu entry and wait 5 minutes? And then there was the peerless combination of your POP mail client and norton antivirus, which at the time had a small fit and opened a window for each message it processed, as well as popping a dialog you had to click through every time it found a virus (so, about 100 times a day).
There were things like ogle, that let you skip to the DVD menu without waiting 5 minutes for the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, and 8 other movies to have their say first. And things like mplayer, which at that point was already better than WMP/Quicktime/Whatever-Else, especially as a browser plugin (hello... "save file as!").
But of course the thing that really sealed the deal was switching into 2.6 just as the new VM stuff was coming online, and seeing how incredibly responsive a computer can be under load...
I'm pretty sure you're talking about this.
...
"06 - 26"
"This is 06."
"Uh, we've got activity out here but I don't think we really need to report it"
"What do you see?"
"Ah, appears to be fornication in a converitble"
(laughter)
"Do a target score, and I'll be there in a second"
(laughter)
"Ah, we're taping it."
"White Hawk 26 - Alpha 1 1 Uniform"
"Ah, this is 26"
"Roger, I'm gonna need that tape from you, and an additional..."
"Roger, we'll make copies for everyone."
Our tax dollars hard at work.
why throw more money at a non-problem?
I know your question is partly rhetorical. But it's such a good one, I'll answer.
Social control.
The people in power today are anxious to return to the J Edgar Hoover days of federal "law" "enforcement," when federal agents could be employed as a goon squad for servicing the needs of the dominant political and economic interests backing the government.
To make this good, they need eliminate oversight (such as judicial review), and expand their powers (limiting civil and human rights). As far as I can see, this has basically been the sole law enforcement agenda of both Bush and Clinton - the only difference was the intensity with which they pursued it.
I took him to be saying that the universities are doing a bad job of teaching and could do better, and if they did do better, more people might "love" their field of study and progress in it.
Or more succinctly, doing a bad job of teaching gets you fewer graduates in the field, and they are not necessarily better than the ones who switched to something else.
And if that's the case, I maintain that he's right.
Many of us go through the big fish in a suddenly much bigger pond thing. I think it's beside the point, if the system is so clearly broken.
Let me sum up what I'm trying to say:
"Hard" != "Good"
From what I hear, rushing a _fraternity_ is "hard."
I can see it now. Cue the chorus of people who say, "this guy must be dumb, no wonder he washed out."
You know what? Bullshit. He has a point.
During my four years of undergraduate, I did my share of engineering, CS, physics, and I threw in an extra liberal arts minor just because I was bored. My experience was exactly like his. The only difference is that I didn't want law or medicine, and was determined to suffer.
I learned mostly outside of class - primarily on the job (I paid for school by already working in the field I was studying). There are always exceptions, and exceptional teachers. Few and far between. For the most part the place was ridiculous, and I constantly pitied the kids who had to actually rely on the teachers to learn.
The sad fact is, the pedagogical technique is absolute shit at the university level. Absolute shit, even in some of the supposedly "great" American schools. The comparison to the secondary level, with its few remaining standards and shattered, vague but lingering sense of professionalism, is stark. These people often have no idea how to teach, and there is very little expectation that they should. There is no requirement for communication skills, metaphorical skills, or even language skills. The grading practices are ludicrous - almost dadaesque. There is no oversight. No standards. For fun, add critical first year classes with 250 students to a teacher. And of course, quite a few of them just plain suck altogether. As an educational environment, it is completely out to lunch.
The math curricula is particularly noxious, but the problem is by no means limited to mathematics. The best I can say of them is that the department may have seen itself as a filter rather than a teacher, selecting the few people who already know as much as they do and can prove it through arcane and torturous inquisition, and discarding the rest. But were they really such big believers in "natural talent" and "high standards?" This theory flies out the window when you see the entire class curved up 50 points. I once saw someone who failed a midterm and skipped a final curved up to a C-. It wasn't about standards. It was just completely non-functional. But this guy expresses it much better than I do.
Making excuses for these people is pointless. If you paid thousands of dollars to learn Differential Equations and got a gibbering 24 year old who barely understands them himself and can even more barely speak your language to explain it, you just got robbed.
I hate to say it, but it feels like the final stages of the great educational decline. We've been letting the public educational system burn at every level for decades, and now I think our higher educational institutions are finally starting to break...
For some reason, the more I read about patents, the more I get the distinct impression that, when you clear away the varied legal wranglings of individual cases and look at the trends, the only people who profit from them are those who are already rich and powerful (corporations, mostly, and the rare wealthy individual).
I'm not saying I like lever pull machines either, but... FYI, it's much easier to do that kind of hack with software than with gears. Think about how hard it would be to design a new mechanism that would do this, yet not be visible when the cover came off and the machine was inspected. Think about getting in there grinding in this modification on the voting machine without being seen. Now think about doing this for not just one voting machine, but hundreds or thousands...
This is why the lever pulls are still around in a few places...
They also can't be systematically rigged without visiting each of them physically.
You'll give me a hint?
Really?
If we voted on paper, then... the paper fairy takes all the paper away, so you'll never be able to go back and "ensure it was counted?"
Did you figure this out on your own? Or did you have help?
I don't know what's worse: the frighteningly bizarre concept of a voting machine with no voter-verified paper trail, or the small group of people who defend this literally indefensible practice. It fills me with a sense of dread every time I hear another round of this story hitting the news, and it hasn't involved anyone going to jail yet.
Unfortunately, as geeks know better than journalists, there is no sane, moral, or legal reason for paperless touchscreen voting machines to even exist. Almost everyone who is knowledgable in this discipline gets it pretty quickly - because it's extremely obvious, and also because paper is integral to secure systems everywhere, from secure logging on printers in machine rooms to ATMs and even slot machines... You just don't store things like votes on non-user-verified, let alone rewriteable, media.
In fact, if I recall, the state of Nevada was a little while ago in the awkward position of having vastly superior standards enforced for gambling devices than they had for voting machines... although I think now they are one of many states that has put this craziness under some scrutiny...
Yet there really are a few people out there (I've met some on slashdot for instance) who argue to defend this practice anyway. These days, ignorance and stupidity is no longer funny. It's becoming terrifying.
If we lived in a sane country, the people who made these machines would be prosecuted, since their level of negligence certainly rises to the level of criminal even if they have no intent of their own to rig elections, and all of the politicians and bureaucrats who ordered, "evaluated," "tested," and approved these systems should follow not long after. We would know all this, prima-facie, even if Diebold hadn't had a pants-down security incident and exposed their internal emails to the world, showing us their gaffes in first-person detail. We would know even if direct results of their incompetence weren't widely documented
The simple, bedrock need for secure voting systems, and the absolutely impeccable engineering doctrines involving voter-verified paper, are almost universally accepted among credible experts. All explained many times before, better than I could anyway. It's inconceivable there is any debate at this point. Why would we have a voting machine that was deliberately made insecure?
The most credible argument I've ever heard (relatively speaking) is, "Who would cheat anyway? You're just being paranoid."
But you all know the answer to the question of who would cheat at election time: probably, the first person who thought they could get away with it.
The Content Trust is careful, so far, to avoid the subject of libraries, because they want to abolish them and the public isn't ready to swallow that yet.
The Content Trust wants cash on the barrelhead for every "use." They want carte blanche to monitor and revoke. They want artificial price structures by region and use-case. They want to criminalize quoting and excerpts without permission. They want to end re-selling. Think. They want to criminalize lending!
What does a library do? It buys books, records, and movies, and then lends them to people for free! Heaven forfend! How do the poor booksellers, music shops, and video rental stores survive?
It shocks me that so few people have thought this through yet. The Content Trust is pushing the biggest renegotiation with society since the printing press. We have a longstanding deal when it comes to "copyright:" information is already free. At your beloved public library! Buying books, movies, and DVDs is patronage, pure and simple.
Free access to information for everyone, regardless of means is singularly, vastly, vitally important to the way our society functions.
Imagine if, when the phonograph was invented, musicians (which until then were the only way you got to hear music) were for some unusual reason able to lobby powerful people in Washington. What if they said, "Make a law! We must be paid individually for every musical performance made by these Recording Machines, just as if we were there to perform it ourselves." It's stupid, right? Almost as stupid as libraries using DRM to manage "copies."
Unfortunately, those poor little musicians had to suck it up. And now it's time for the Content Trust to suck it up too... screw them. Technology marches along. Sometimes people need to change their "business model." Ask any musician, or for that matter, any bank teller, they'll tell you...
This could have been written by a MS PR flack.
.NET... better than... VBScript! You remember that, right? On Error Resume Next? Set? Don't Set?
.NET an open standard. Does MS provide full specs and all cross-platform sources for their product? No, they do not. They only give some parts of it, I imagine so that they can fool people like you into not noticing the shackles being attached. Why is it that Mono is spending years reverse-engineering the core APIs and hoping they won't be sued for patent infringement all the while? There is nothing like this in the Java world. This is why Java will still be jumping to new OSs and hardware architectures long after .NET is de-supported.
.NET is, and there are many more Java jobs than .NET jobs. .NET may have a future, of course... the world's appetite for version 1.0 and 1.1 Microsoft products seems curiously inexhaustible. But today it's hardly the first language I would tell a young programmer to learn.
.NET programmers spend an hour with IntelliJ Idea and weep with envy. There is a mountain of impeccable, production-tested enterprise-class BSD-licensed libraries for Java. If you look at the enormous work the Apache foundation has done, there is nothing in the .NET world that compares to it, though there are things that aspire... and may some day...
Microsoft did a better job with
What Microsoft means is for developers to get locked into a closed, proprietary, patented platform that Microsoft controls. "Neutral standards committee" standardized the steering wheel of the car but not the engine... It is utterly wrong and highly deceptive to call
Java is mature, fast, and an industry standard. It's taught in universities more than
dotNET development tools and 3rd party libraries are immature compared to Java...
dotNET has some sugar and some cute extra features; it also has some mistakes and pitfalls. It's a vaguely improved Java knock-off, and what it offers in no way compensates for becoming locked into the world's most notorious vendor.
What they "pioneered" was using feedback and network effects to force a marketplace to accept an inferior product at monopolist prices, costing the world trillions in lost productivity and lost opportunities.
And I thank you for it.
I was disappointed to find zero hits under google for "Classical Cognitism." I am better at referencing english literature than the cognitive psych, and came up with my glib description of thinking without regard for the nomenclature, so I'm curious to get more background. Domain-specific input patterns is another one; I'd love to read more if you have a reference. My statements about it all come as much from introspection as anywhere else; it seems like we simply have a certain amount of "bandwidth" to think with. "Symbols" are just a vague way of describing the metal joints holding up the jungle-gym of objective reality as we try to climb around on it.
We don't seem think about everything we know at once - which is not to say we're talking about some AI researcher's fantasy of discreet compartments and clearly-defined boundaries. But as we move our minds eye over the landscape I do think things bloom into vivid focus as we look right at them, and leave a symbol - or just a reduction, if you like, like a trailing afterimage, as we look away.
First, as Orwell very correctly observed, the human mind is not the least bit troubled by self-contradiction. Logic is much more of a conceit or a learned skill than a human trait. Or as Swift said, human beings are just Rationis Capax. Well, it doesn't really surprise any observer of humanity that we're all so often blithely illogical even as we express pride at our reason and intelligence. It's just an all-too-familiar fact of life.
:D
The second thing is that people who are ungifted or unfamiliar with the subtleties of a situation very often mistake nuance for a self-contradiction. We've all watched politicians make our most cherished freedoms into evils to be ground under the bootheel of a five word slogan. The truth is that we reason modularly with symbols and representations that reduce the immediate and full impact of what they represent, and we communicate using the same imperfect tools.
Slogans about information wanting to be free are symbols that make a far more specific case than they appear - because (forgive the half-hearted semiotics) of their context. Take them out of context and you are now merely playing dishonest rhetorical games. To clarify this as one example: "we" (not really, but lets say for the sake of the example) don't want "information to be free" - we want copyright to be limited (or at least its enforcement to take a backseat to civil liberties). And yes, we consider privacy to be one of those civil liberties.
Remember, too, that common law, and indeed all of our human society, is not a mathematical model descended from the heavens. It's a permutation of our instictints and our necessities - strictly arbitrary and animal in nature.
There are many "inconsistencies" around us that deserve our full attention. And I take it as a compliment that the story's attempt at producing one for the slashdot crowd's approach towards copyright and privacy amounts to a vapid, dishonest hat-trick.
There are a whole variety of pedagogic techniques that are interesting and worth looking at, and most are little more than arranging deckchairs on the Titanic when we routinely allow class sizes to get above 30 kids.
At those sizes it's just not functional. You are doing someting, it's not really education as we know it.
For dramatic results, student-teacher ratios need to change dramatically.
"How dramatic do you mean?"
How about setting a "man on the moon" type national project that gets us to 15 students to a teacher in 10 years?
Expensive? Sure as hell is. However, I can think of very few better investments... Being stupid is certainly costing us a lot of money. For instance, I have no idea why democrats are hammering on national healthcare in this midst of our monumental education crisis...
Now of course, you take take any single idea like this and "poke a bunch of holes" in it. No, class size is not a panacea. There are lots of problems to address. Teacher quality. Performance metrics in general. Performance grouping. Discipline. But I think class size is worth focusing on rhetorically because it is probably the most significantly out of whack in most public education scenarios.
I say public because, quality secular private schools do not generally have this problem. The keep their class sizes in the 10-20 range - and some schools tout class sizes in the 5-10 range. Of course, this runs all the way to tutors for the ultra-wealthy...
New York City (HS dropout rate: 50%+) is planning on spending hundreds of millions on a new sports stadium. So here is how I would Stop the Stupid: put up a giant tent instead. And how many teachers does half a billion dollars buy?
Now, which do you think is better for the economy?
I have read about it. My use of the word "kindergarten" was out of line, and I apologize. I attempted to use hyperbole as a debate tactice, but failed to realize that tactic is reserved for use by the left (cf. "gulag").
Oh my word. Look at what you have written. Just stop here a moment and contemplate this paragraph with me. Really, think about it.
Reserved? Nothing is reserved, BB. And if I ever need proof, I will point them to you.
Do you mind if I bookmark this post, and maybe show it to a few other people?
Frankly, I think your "kindergarten" description of the Shah and SAVAK, and your instant blanket condemnation of Amnesty International, an enormously important humanitarian group that includes many from all parties and beliefs, are far far worse than the "Guantanamo as gulag of our time" gaffe. I don't know, maybe if we cool off and look at it objectively you can even agree.
One thing, though, claiming you have some background knowledge to back up your behavior does not make you look better.
I am not denying that. I am only questioning whether he was worse than Saddam Hussein.
Someone who had read about it would have come up with at least one concrete argument by now as to why. I did - the statement of an authority on human rights abuses. Want to do more? I am willing.
When the organization does not apologize for the gaffe, chastise the gaffer, and in no way attempts to distance themselve from the gaffe, then indeed I do
Since your own apology was a powerful exercise in comedy, we must now consider you perfectly, elegantly hoisted on your own petard.
It is your very own arguments we must now rule out for all time, BB.
Are you assuming I'm a Republican and a Bush supporter?
Yes.
You're are arguing one of their talking points.
you think everything is divided neatly down the middle into lockstep groups
No.
It's possible to dislike AI's Gitmo statement without also having voted for Bush
For instance, I do. But that's not why I made that assumption.
It's possible to view the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo as humane (despite lack of due process) without being a Republican.
Hell, you can still be a Republican and be locked up in Gitmo, but as with all of these things, since the likelihood decreases, everyone acts accordingly.
It's possible to view the US invasion of Iraq as wrong without being a Democrat or Green.
Indeed, I know some Republicans and conservatives who are very angry about it.
Now, for the record, I consider your exercise in "you guessed my label wrong" to have added nothing to this debate but a distraction. However, I do apologize for assuming your label was wrong, if I have indeed guessed wrong. Now, shall we continue?
OK, here's how it looks to me. DS says:
So you're saying that full scale ethnic and religious genocide is the only way to modernize and democratize the mideast, to enable a free flow of information and a free exchange of ideas, and to empower the peoples of said nations to control their own personal and collective destinies in an environment that nurtures ideals of freedom?
To which I say:
If we started with non-oil producers in greater need, people actually would believe that was what we were doing.
To which you say:
Um, we did.
But we didn't. And now you agree, and say:
I never claimed that the Iraq war was waged for humanitarian purposes.
OK, I guess you just misunderstood the thread. DS was making Iraq out to have humanitarian goals, and I've done a lot of reasoning here about what I think the problems with that viewpoint are - starting with that sentence.
"Um, we did" looks very much like a claim to the contrary.
Certainly, certainly, Bush did.
However, you were replying to a person who said our goals are "to modernize and democratize the mideast, to enable a free flow of information and a free exchange of ideas, and to empower the peoples of said nations to control their own personal and collective destinies in an environment that nurtures ideals of freedom".
That is a pretty good summary of the United States' current goals in Iraq.
And you admit it! Quote it even! I fear I am in for some Clinton-grade hair splitting.
I read that paragraph and I see it as a humanitarian justification for the war. Certainly, as opposed to "they're buying yellow cake," or "they were behind 9/11."
Whether Osama is dead, incarcerated, or merely on the lam would make little difference to the effectiveness of al Qaeda's ongoing operations, so I would not support devoting a lot of additional resources toward hunting this one individual.
Do you really, honestly believe anyone ever, at ny time, just advocated "going after only Osama" versus "going after Al Qaeda?" Well, you implied I did... I won't go so far as to imply in return that you're being deliberately dishonest or insulting. We routinely use "Osama" as a symbol for Al Qaeda the same way we use Bush as a symbol for America. I'll say it's an honest mistake. And suffice it to say, going after Al Qaeda, instead of going on a catastrophic military adventure in Iraq, creating the world's largest backlash, and playing right into the hands of Muslim Fascists who have been trying (largely unsuccessfully) to frighten people into the cause for years with wild tales about an American Invasion that are no longer so wild anymore... I can only support simply going after the people who actually want to hurt the U.S., rather than creating a greater danger with a crude attempt to build an oil producing empire.
was his regime worse than Saddam's?
I agree with Litvinov, I think her use of the word was wrong. I also maintain their description of SAVAK and the Shah's regime was accurate. You clearly still haven't read about it, or you would be much quieter.
The most biased of all screaming "bias!" at others seems to be the hallmark of our time.
Do you think you can discount all of AI's history and work from that one comment? Do you like to use a single gaffe to discredit an entire organization? Someone has told you that you can, maybe by example. They were playing you for a huge fool.
How about a presidential candidate, for instance, who speaks haughtily and with great fanfare about restoring dignity to the whitehouse, shortly before calling a reporter as an "asshole?"
I deliberately picked the most innocuous example I could think of. Bush has no credibility either, by your standard.
I'm just waiting for you to crack open that source material. There is no republican party cheat sheet on the Shah's Iran. Just cold hard facts... When we are done here, you'll realize "gulag of our time" is nothing to what you've done, and you'll be caught in your own trap. Or will you not be man enough to admit it?
So, you think Amnesty Internation was exaggerating about SAVAK?
I'm glad we have this on record.
the primary reason being a multi-pronged, multi-year (or perhaps multi-decade) strategy of initiating difficult changes in the mideast would not have flown as a justification. Sure, there would have been those that understood it, but for better or worse, that would not have worked as a justification for the action.
It seems clear this is nothing more than a manifestation of Strauss' concept of "noble lies".
I think one reason it wouldn't have flown because it was a bad idea, and most experts knew it.
Regardless, there you have the problem with noble lies: we didn't have a real debate.
Who knows, maybe there was a "right way" to invade Iraq; multilateral, sophisticated, well-planned, executed by people promoted for talent instead of loyalty. That right way had no chance of happening under Bush.
Bush's problem is that he is after the oil. And when I say that, I mean that his bigger picture isn't big enough. He is a silverware thief and a second-rate fascist, not a nation builder, and he runs his war like one.
In reality, the weapons were properly either hidden well enough long ago, and indeed, many or nearly all likely do not even remain in Iraq.
You phrase it well. They thought they would at least find something they could use. Truthfully even if they found some Sarin or Anthrax it doesn't change that others next door are known to be working on nukes.
Let alone that we have now demonstrated to the 3rd world that a plausible purpose of U.N. disarmament regimes is to pacify a nation before a U.S. invasion.
Let alone that the U.N. itself, an essential instrument not only for peace and WMD disarmament, but as a sophisticated tool for U.S. hegemony, has been irretrievably weakend by our actions.
Incidentally, I actually disagree that America wouldn't have bought a more bold-faced justification for the war. I think that more of the truth would have worked. We'll never know, of course. Just an idle speculation, but take it for what you will.
This is patently incorrect. On what basis do you make this claim?
Let's start by agreeing to disagree. Neither of us are in the intelligence business (or would admit to it if we were), so we are only swordfighting with table knives.
That said, even Wall Street Journal reporters are waxing apocalyptic at this point. The reports from the ground are quite frightening, especially when you consider certain details.
I am willing to be persuaded, in no small part because I want to be persuaded, that I am wrong.
I am unimpressed by ceremonies. I always said they would have great ones. Sovereignty, elections, constitutions... Occupation is all about ceremony. It's all meaningless if the end result is a backlash and a possible Iranian takeover (in fact if not in name), when we are finally beaten away.
Who has good news that is not also drinking the kool aid? The casualty graphs don't show a trend...
This is one of my favorite arguments, because it presumes that someone expected Islamic radicalism to simply be quashed quickly and easily by entering a single, somewhat secular nation-state.
Actually, nobody expected it, and not even Bush's people claimed anything that outrageous (though they came close).
I don't see how what we've done for the anti-western arab movement in Iraq is in any way a short-term problem. Casualties never come back to life. Casual humiliation from frontier-mentality security actions has been the first impression of the west for an enormous number of Iraqis. People will now be saying the words "Abu Ghraib" with respect to us instead of Saddam for a generation.
I think you've traded a major strategic gain to Muslim Fascism today in exchange for an extremely dubious chance of fostering western-friendly oil policies and political moderation in Iraq in the future.
Say we were able to build a democracy in Iraq tomorr
We've engaged in a number of humanitarian military missions over the years. Iraq is not one of them. Trying to pass it off that way is the crudest deception.
Isn't OBL believed by many or most to be in Pakistan? If this is the case, a significantly greater effort in Afghanistan would not "get him". Isn't finding him in Pakistan much more dependent on the cooperation of the Pakistani government and local military and other leaders, than it is on the size and "dedication" of the American forces?
We were always much more likely to catch OBL with intelligence than with the military. Intelligence assets are precious and rare. When you divert a majority of your Arabic and Persian speakers from Afghanistan and OBL to Iraq... the result is obvious to you, I hope.
We declared Afghanistan was a response to 9/11, which it largely was, so it is incorrect to bring it up over a discussion about whether Iraq can be justified as a war for humanitarian purposes.
For the record, "not having oil" is not the criteria for determing what was a humanitarian mission. Having a humanitarian crisis is. And although Afghanistan was significantly worse than Iraq as far as human rights are concerned, there were mass amputations in Sierra Leone, for instance... neither nation compares to half a dozen nations in Africa which had to be passed on the way. Nobody tried to sell us that story with Afghanistan, though. We were after Osama and we said so.
Anyway, daveschroeder just all but admitted oil is a major factor in Iraq. Why continue to argue?
Do you ever wonder if we had just stayed focused there, instead of splitting our resources, could we have caught him by now?
I mean, the easy way out is to say, no, we wouldn't have, but you have to admit, it's possible.
Amnesty International calls the Shah's secret police the Worst in the World.
Think about that for a minute. The Worst in the World.
And you call him a kindergartner.
A kindergartner? A kindergartner who liked removing teeth with pliers, I guess.
Unfortunately, your grasp of history is as loose as your grasp of current events, and the war is not going as well as you would like to believe. The insurgents include many Iraqis, for a variety of reasons, so your reference to what "The Iraqis" want isn't necessarily meaningful. If you're pointing out that bad actors like Iranian intelligence have a bit of a home-court advantage there too, you're not exactly helping yourself.
(That's a private account by a Wall Street Journal reporter, by the way. For those not current with U.S. media, the W.S.J is ostensibly right-wing, and pro-war.)