This is an interesting assertion (and may in fact be a troll). I would counter with the assertion that the constitution as written is far more robust than you (or many modern jurists) give it credit for.
For example, the constitution as written addresses "intellictual property rights", and says congress has the power to guarantee them to authors and inventors "for limited times" (where "limited" has a legally significant meaning). The separation between that limit upon the power of Congress and current statutory law is an issue well worth addressing; if you believe the status quo to be preferable, then perhaps you have a consistent argument, but if not, it suggests that current statute and juris prudence are errant, not that the Constitution per se has a weakness.
One significant point on which I think the framers got it wrong was their mistrust of standing armies (see the 2-year appropriation limit), but even in that I see why they did it, and recognize that it was in many ways tied with the logistics of war in the day which are no longer applicable.
I'm curious which of the "first principles" enshrined in the constituion and its amendments you think are out of date and need replacement?
I think a distinction needs to be made between scientific truth and objective truth; scientific truth is that which is discerned and confirmed by way fo the scientific method, while objective truth is that which has veracity independent of what methodology may detect or expose it.
What we must be wary of is the assumption that scientific and objective truth are the same thing, that is, the assumption that scientific truth is exhaustive of objective truth; I always find it curious that there are "scientists" who pride themselves on making "as few assumptions as possible", and yet they base the entirety of their knowledge system upon this rather glaring leap of faith.
Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with this assumption - it's a paradigm, and it produces a moderately coherent body of knowledge. But make no mistake, it is an unverifiable, unfalsifiable assumption.
Here's a fascinating lesson in scientific history: examine the arguments of the early apologists and popularizers of evolutionary theory. Now apply this same argument.
A Kuhnian scientific revolution this was not; ethical conclusions and implications were the main issue, not the breakdown of prior paradigms.
For that matter, Kuhn would probably be a good read for you - if you think science actually accepts the best theory to fit the facts in all but the most extraordinary situations, you could use a good shot of historic realism:-)
The first RFC describing HTTP/1.1 was RFC2068. After an arduous revision process, the next version was offered number 2608. It was decided that the revision process was complicated enough without having to worry about stupid typos having semantic significance, so they held out for 2616.
there's not much point in a language without its standard library
Tell that to all the people out there who implement the C library mostly in C.
Or kernels in C.
Heck, what do stdin/stdout mean to an MFC application?
You need some sort of support library. For a language to be useful, I would expect to be able to chuck the standard one out the window and replace it with one that suits the context I want to use the language in.
And ensure that the language is never used for any system-level project ever again, including the C++ standard library.
Garbage collection ain't too popular with systems types either - if you don't want something any more, free it so someone else can use its resources. Either that or throw away the context (apache fork-n-die model) so you don't waste your time scrap-hunting.
Maybe I'm just an old fart about disciplined programming. But then again, so is Linus, so I'm in good company.:-)
OK...so now you're saying that if I do not believe that ethics are an absolute then I am a Communist and also endorse mass murder.
My rhetoric is a little rusty - what's the latin for straw man?
A moral/ethical system with no absolute reference point is unable to evaluate any other moral/ethical system, simply because "better" and "worse" are only meaningful (you must see this coming by now) within the context of a moral/ethical system. Your only basis for evaluation is outcomes and results, and the value of an outcome will depend upon (here it comes again) the ethics within which it is evaluated.
The argument is not that "you do not believe in absolute ethics, therefore you are a Communist and a mass murderer", but "you do not believe in absolutes, and as such, your system of ethics can not logically be said to be any better than that of Communists and mass murderers; neither can it be said to be any worse; neither can your system of ethics be used as a rational basis for any sort of meaningful judgement of theirs."
Ask your friendly neighborhood existentialist - the important thing is not the merits of an ethical system itself, but that you choose one. (That the choice is recognized and even heralded as being totally arbitrarily is a non-issue.)
Morals and ethics are not an absolute. Anyone who believes that they are absolute is seriously deluded.
I think a much fairer statement would be: "Anyone who does not believe in an absolutely transcendent god-figure and believes that ethics are absolute is seriously deluded", which agrees with Zachary's point: without an absolute reference point, moral and ethical absolutism is groundless. It is, however, perfectly rational for someone who believes in the reality of such a being to believe morals and ethics could be absolute, in that their genesis is itself an untranscendable absolute.
If you wish to argue that belief in such a being is itself delusional, then your conclusion is consistent. I would quite squarely disagree with you on that point, however:-)
You have an old copy of the page and a checksum of that copy. You send a request to the server saying "If the checksum is no longer X, please send me the new copy, otherwise send me a 304 Not Modified message". The server has a checksum Y of whatever version of the page is current. If X==Y, send "304 Not Modified" (a few hundred bytes). If X!=Y, send the new version. This is standardized behavior (see ETag and If-Match/If-None-Match in RFC2616).
You and Taco must be smoking the same crack today.
Hmm... you could use the MD5 of a document as the entity tag (Etag) and use the If-None-Match conditional header. By spec, Etags are totally opaque, but there's no reason they couldn't be checksums.
IOW, the mechanism is there, but I'm not aware of that particular policy (tag==MD5sum) ever being used.
There's a pretty significant body of research into web usage, actually - file sizes and transfer length in particular have been pretty squarely beaten to death.
For example, file/transfer sizes seem to follow what's called a "Heavy-Tailed" distribution (usually modelled as Paretto). This means, roughly, "most of the files are small; most of the bytes are in big files."
The parameters of the distribution depend on where in the network you take the measurements (inside the client, mid-net proxy, server).
There are some old studies of which low-level protocols appear most on the backbone (UDP vs TCP for picking out "streaming" candidates etc); they're harder to get now that the backbones are commercial instead of research-centric.
As for how much is porn and how much is business, well... I've been involved with some studies that have casually looked at that, too; In one trace I checked out, about 13% of requests included some word that would indicate a site with strong sexual content (The 13% number is without trying very hard; it's also worth noting that the percentage of bytes in responses to those requests was a larger percentage, on the order of 20-something IIRC). Unfortunately, it's a little harder to differentiate "business" from "casual/home" with heuristics, so no numbers there.
StarWars portrays space as a site of warfare between different species and even between rival human factions.
Which sounds a lot more realistic to me than the crackpot utopianism of ST's vision for "The Federation".
Hate to have to say it, but we are still talking about humans here... and whatever you believe about alien species, it seems unlikely to me that most of them would be thoroughly benevolent.
Of course, in the modern web you can assume that every client will include a "Host" header in its requests... Netscape has done it since 1.1, and you're required to do it if you claim to be HTTP/1.1 compliant (which is just about everyone these days except for squid, and they still conform to a good chunk of RFC2616 except for the caching nitty-gritty).
It leaves thing anti-democratic and unfair to all voters
So if someone wins the popular vote, but their margin of victory nationwide is smaller than their margin of victory in New York City (i.e. New York City can override the will of the rest of the nation), that's democratic and fair?
Of course the college isn't perfect. But I assert that direct voting would be worse.
You have virtually no experience with the Navy's air programs, no experience with international politics and therefore NO right to suggest you have any idea whatsoever who is at fault.
One of the beautiful things about the US is that Katz has the right suggest whatever he wants, and we have the right to point it out when he's being a pompous, presumptuous, uninformed gasbag.
Contrast with, oh, I don't know... pick an arbitrary example... China.
Thank you for publicly demonstrating abject ignorance of what the Chinese are actually demanding. As Katz himself says in the second paragraph, what the Chinese want is not a traditional American "sorry about that, pal"; they want "dao qian". They want us to concede that it happened just like they say (without the opportunity to review physical evidence or interview people involved) and that we accept full responsibility (read: liability, culpability).
Personally, I'm still waiting for the Chinese to apologize for stealing nuclear weapons technologies or interfering illegally with our electoral process by way of massive financial contributions to a particular political party who shall go unnamed.
Just because people from China are nice does not mean that their government does not bear ill will towards the USA. Just because people from China happen to like the USA does not mean that their governemnt does not wish for the USA to be destabilized or deposed as a major world power.
If by "they're nice" you mean "they appreciate and value the US and wish it no ill will", they have two choices: take steps to remove their current government which patently disagrees with them (good luck!), or defect.
Consenting to an illegitimate or malicious government is a far worse crime than establishing one.
Of course, Americans would interpret Chinese planes flying off its own coast (in "international waters") as a sign of aggression.
As has been pointed out by at least a hundred other posts, we certainly didn't do that to the soviets who flew off our own coast.
Why was the US plane there? It was spying on China,
We could debate semantics, but it wasn't spying - it was conducting reconnaissance. The existence, location, and purpose of the plane was in no way clandestine or disguised. It was picking up broadcast signals - I'll say that again, broadcast signals - reaching 12+ miles off the coast. This doesn't even remotely rise to the level of spying ("to watch secretly as a spy" -> "Spy[n]: one who keeps secret watch on a person or thing to obtain information; a person employed by one nation to secretly convey classified information of strategic importance to another nation")
In fact, in 1976, a Soviet fighter plane was returned to the Soviet Union in crates after it carried a defector into Japan.
Again, your choice of words is misleading at best - the plane did in fact carry a defector into Japan, but that defector was not carried against his will - he delivered the plane himself, of his own free volition; very different from the questionable circumstances of an in-air collision (in which, according to common navigational law, the benefit of the doubt goes to the larger, less-maneuverable vessel) leading to an emergency landing.
Actually, a fair amount of this IS available via DNS, at least in theory; it's just that noone actually uses it or provides a usable interface to it in practice.
From RFC1034, one of the design goals for DNS is:
- The costs of implementing such a facility dictate that it be
generally useful, and not restricted to a single application.
We should be able to use names to retrieve host addresses,
mailbox data, and other as yet undetermined information. All
data associated with a name is tagged with a type, and queries
can be limited to a single type.
Currently defined types of DNS records include:
A - host addresses (which you refer to)
HINFO - host description (CPU, OS, etc)
MX,MB,MD,MF,MG,MINFO,MR - mail handling instructions for a host
NULL - can carry arbitrary data
TXT - can carry arbitrary text; "The semantics of the text depends on the domain where it is found." (RFC1035, 3.3.14)
WKS - specify available well-known-services (i.e., SMTP, HTTP, Gopher, telnet...)
As for the second paragraph of your rant, if you want to be able to immediately edit your domain files, then get a dedicated line or lease a dedicated server and host them yourself. Noone's stopping you. As long as the world can get to your domain through the TLD system, you can do whatever you like within it.
It's worse than that... they started using pieces of paper to represent the metals, and then they dropped the whole idea of "backing" currency and started using those pieces of paper to represent a share of the value/wealth of an economy (unless anyone out there is using silver-backs?). Then throw the abstraction of credit on top of that, and the abstraction of "e-wealth" on top of that.
Postmodern indeed. Is it any wonder every few years a politician shows up and talks about going back onto the gold standard? With the current system, one could get to thinking (rightly or wrongly) that their money is nothing but a consentual mass delusion...
You make some excellent points - movements of liberty are usually corrupted by those who prefer control. I'm reminded of "The Grand Inquisitor", a dream-story in Fyodor Doestoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov", where Christ himself visits Seville in the midst of the spanish inquisition and is questioned by the grand inquisitor, who says something to the effect of "there is no place for you and your liberty anymore - the people cannot handle it."
P.S.,
I'm always fascinated how people hold a distaste for organized Christianity and a love for the Lord of the Rings and Siilmarillion simultaneously, given the unashamedly Catholic imagery woven throughout those two books.
Clarence Thomas should have been dragged through the mud. He is the stupidest Supreme Court justice to serve in our lifetimes. His behavior around women is very germane to whether he is fit to judge on such "women's" issues as sexual harassment, abortion, etc. Whether Clinton slept around has nothing to do with his fitness for duty as President.
What a fascinating argument. "Thomas's behavior toward women makes him unfit as an adjudicator of women's issues, but Clinton's behavior toward women has nothing to do with his moral integrity in advancing legislation dealing with women's issues, overseeing the executive branch of the government which enforces that legislation, overseeing the DOJ which exercises prosecutorial discretion in which abuses and violations of those laws are addressed in the courts..."
Maybe Thomas should have been dragged through the mud. But fair is fair - you can't pretend that a Supreme Court Justice's private character is a fundamental issue while a president's isn't, or visa-versa.
By the way, I am an American and I believe that someone is innocent until proven guilty. If you want to accuse a person of something, either (1)make it something that he was found guilty of in court of law or (2) make it an allegation based on personal knowledge, not the hearsay, unproven claims by third parties.
I don't even know where to begin punching holes in this, especially in the context of the rant that preceeded it. Noone is found guilty in a court of law until after they have been accused, publicly. (Right to face your accusers when you are tried and all that Constitutional mumbo-jumbo.) Our legal system is by its nature accusatory, as are the more drastic political remedies (like impeachment), and most of modern campaigning is in kind ("They'll take away your kid's lunches! They'll leave our borders undefended! They'll take away your granparents' medical care! They'll steal more of your money and pour it into failed social programs!" etc)
And BTW, what was Thomas convicted of in court that makes him deserve to be "dragged through the mud"? Barring an answer to that, what personal (non-hearsay, etc) experience do you have with The Honorable Justice that validates your stated opinion that "[h]e is the stupidest Supreme Court justice to serve in our lifetimes"? My (extremely limited) personal experience with him has been that he's a very considered, thoughtful, and well-informed man.
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For example, the constitution as written addresses "intellictual property rights", and says congress has the power to guarantee them to authors and inventors "for limited times" (where "limited" has a legally significant meaning). The separation between that limit upon the power of Congress and current statutory law is an issue well worth addressing; if you believe the status quo to be preferable, then perhaps you have a consistent argument, but if not, it suggests that current statute and juris prudence are errant, not that the Constitution per se has a weakness.
One significant point on which I think the framers got it wrong was their mistrust of standing armies (see the 2-year appropriation limit), but even in that I see why they did it, and recognize that it was in many ways tied with the logistics of war in the day which are no longer applicable.
I'm curious which of the "first principles" enshrined in the constituion and its amendments you think are out of date and need replacement?
It does do away with the notion that Linux is only a "poor man's" solution, however... ;-)
What we must be wary of is the assumption that scientific and objective truth are the same thing, that is, the assumption that scientific truth is exhaustive of objective truth; I always find it curious that there are "scientists" who pride themselves on making "as few assumptions as possible", and yet they base the entirety of their knowledge system upon this rather glaring leap of faith.
Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with this assumption - it's a paradigm, and it produces a moderately coherent body of knowledge. But make no mistake, it is an unverifiable, unfalsifiable assumption.
A Kuhnian scientific revolution this was not; ethical conclusions and implications were the main issue, not the breakdown of prior paradigms.
For that matter, Kuhn would probably be a good read for you - if you think science actually accepts the best theory to fit the facts in all but the most extraordinary situations, you could use a good shot of historic realism :-)
The first RFC describing HTTP/1.1 was RFC2068. After an arduous revision process, the next version was offered number 2608. It was decided that the revision process was complicated enough without having to worry about stupid typos having semantic significance, so they held out for 2616.
Or kernels in C.
Heck, what do stdin/stdout mean to an MFC application?
You need some sort of support library. For a language to be useful, I would expect to be able to chuck the standard one out the window and replace it with one that suits the context I want to use the language in.
Garbage collection ain't too popular with systems types either - if you don't want something any more, free it so someone else can use its resources. Either that or throw away the context (apache fork-n-die model) so you don't waste your time scrap-hunting.
Maybe I'm just an old fart about disciplined programming. But then again, so is Linus, so I'm in good company.
A moral/ethical system with no absolute reference point is unable to evaluate any other moral/ethical system, simply because "better" and "worse" are only meaningful (you must see this coming by now) within the context of a moral/ethical system. Your only basis for evaluation is outcomes and results, and the value of an outcome will depend upon (here it comes again) the ethics within which it is evaluated.
The argument is not that "you do not believe in absolute ethics, therefore you are a Communist and a mass murderer", but "you do not believe in absolutes, and as such, your system of ethics can not logically be said to be any better than that of Communists and mass murderers; neither can it be said to be any worse; neither can your system of ethics be used as a rational basis for any sort of meaningful judgement of theirs."
Ask your friendly neighborhood existentialist - the important thing is not the merits of an ethical system itself, but that you choose one. (That the choice is recognized and even heralded as being totally arbitrarily is a non-issue.)
I think a much fairer statement would be: "Anyone who does not believe in an absolutely transcendent god-figure and believes that ethics are absolute is seriously deluded", which agrees with Zachary's point: without an absolute reference point, moral and ethical absolutism is groundless. It is, however, perfectly rational for someone who believes in the reality of such a being to believe morals and ethics could be absolute, in that their genesis is itself an untranscendable absolute.If you wish to argue that belief in such a being is itself delusional, then your conclusion is consistent. I would quite squarely disagree with you on that point, however :-)
You have an old copy of the page and a checksum of that copy. You send a request to the server saying "If the checksum is no longer X, please send me the new copy, otherwise send me a 304 Not Modified message". The server has a checksum Y of whatever version of the page is current. If X==Y, send "304 Not Modified" (a few hundred bytes). If X!=Y, send the new version. This is standardized behavior (see ETag and If-Match/If-None-Match in RFC2616).
You and Taco must be smoking the same crack today.
IOW, the mechanism is there, but I'm not aware of that particular policy (tag==MD5sum) ever being used.
For example, file/transfer sizes seem to follow what's called a "Heavy-Tailed" distribution (usually modelled as Paretto). This means, roughly, "most of the files are small; most of the bytes are in big files."
The parameters of the distribution depend on where in the network you take the measurements (inside the client, mid-net proxy, server).
There are some old studies of which low-level protocols appear most on the backbone (UDP vs TCP for picking out "streaming" candidates etc); they're harder to get now that the backbones are commercial instead of research-centric.
As for how much is porn and how much is business, well... I've been involved with some studies that have casually looked at that, too; In one trace I checked out, about 13% of requests included some word that would indicate a site with strong sexual content (The 13% number is without trying very hard; it's also worth noting that the percentage of bytes in responses to those requests was a larger percentage, on the order of 20-something IIRC). Unfortunately, it's a little harder to differentiate "business" from "casual/home" with heuristics, so no numbers there.
Hate to have to say it, but we are still talking about humans here... and whatever you believe about alien species, it seems unlikely to me that most of them would be thoroughly benevolent.
Of course, in the modern web you can assume that every client will include a "Host" header in its requests... Netscape has done it since 1.1, and you're required to do it if you claim to be HTTP/1.1 compliant (which is just about everyone these days except for squid, and they still conform to a good chunk of RFC2616 except for the caching nitty-gritty).
So if someone wins the popular vote, but their margin of victory nationwide is smaller than their margin of victory in New York City (i.e. New York City can override the will of the rest of the nation), that's democratic and fair?
Of course the college isn't perfect. But I assert that direct voting would be worse.
The GOP demanded accuracy, and the DNC cried "people are being cheated out of having their votes counted on a technicality! (unfair!)"
The DNC demanded fairness, and the GOP cried "you're applying arbitrary standards to evaluate what is and is not a vote! (inaccurate!)"
So it looks like you've summed up the situation pretty nicely.
Contrast with, oh, I don't know... pick an arbitrary example... China.
Personally, I'm still waiting for the Chinese to apologize for stealing nuclear weapons technologies or interfering illegally with our electoral process by way of massive financial contributions to a particular political party who shall go unnamed.
If by "they're nice" you mean "they appreciate and value the US and wish it no ill will", they have two choices: take steps to remove their current government which patently disagrees with them (good luck!), or defect.
Consenting to an illegitimate or malicious government is a far worse crime than establishing one.
As for the second paragraph of your rant, if you want to be able to immediately edit your domain files, then get a dedicated line or lease a dedicated server and host them yourself. Noone's stopping you. As long as the world can get to your domain through the TLD system, you can do whatever you like within it.
Great ideas! When should I expect to see patches from you, and where will you post them?
Postmodern indeed. Is it any wonder every few years a politician shows up and talks about going back onto the gold standard? With the current system, one could get to thinking (rightly or wrongly) that their money is nothing but a consentual mass delusion...
P.S., I'm always fascinated how people hold a distaste for organized Christianity and a love for the Lord of the Rings and Siilmarillion simultaneously, given the unashamedly Catholic imagery woven throughout those two books.
Maybe Thomas should have been dragged through the mud. But fair is fair - you can't pretend that a Supreme Court Justice's private character is a fundamental issue while a president's isn't, or visa-versa.
I don't even know where to begin punching holes in this, especially in the context of the rant that preceeded it. Noone is found guilty in a court of law until after they have been accused, publicly. (Right to face your accusers when you are tried and all that Constitutional mumbo-jumbo.) Our legal system is by its nature accusatory, as are the more drastic political remedies (like impeachment), and most of modern campaigning is in kind ("They'll take away your kid's lunches! They'll leave our borders undefended! They'll take away your granparents' medical care! They'll steal more of your money and pour it into failed social programs!" etc)And BTW, what was Thomas convicted of in court that makes him deserve to be "dragged through the mud"? Barring an answer to that, what personal (non-hearsay, etc) experience do you have with The Honorable Justice that validates your stated opinion that "[h]e is the stupidest Supreme Court justice to serve in our lifetimes"? My (extremely limited) personal experience with him has been that he's a very considered, thoughtful, and well-informed man.