In my philosophy of science course, on the other hand, I was taught by a world-renowned professor (Paul Feyerabend) that there is no such thing as scientific method and that physicists have no better claim to knowledge than voodoo priests.
Then either Feyerabend is an idiot, or you are misquoting him, or you misunderstood his argument. The philosophy of science is an epistemology, a theory of knowledge describing what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and how we know we have knowledge.
Any system of logic, science included, requires some small set of foundational premises, some fundamental axioms. We cannot know whether these axioms are absolutely true, but we can compare epistemologies for their explanatory and predictive power and thus compare the quality of the epistemology and its knowledge.
If you accept that there is an existence beyond your own mind, and you can accept that you can perceive even a small fraction of this existence via your senses, then the axioms of the philosophy of science are satisfied, and science can help you understand your world reliably. I think we can all agree that these axioms are simpler and more self-evident than any axioms of the voodoo religion. Further, assuming these simpler axioms, the resulting body of knowledge has more explanatory and predictive power than the axioms of voodoo can produce. Therefore, there is no logical way to conclude that it is better to believe in voodoo than science.
Really, only a world in which I were the only individual and everything I experience were a fabrication, or a world in which our senses would never convey any sort of structure or regularity reflective of this outside world, could someone claim that science has no claim to knowledge. It's so unlikely as to border on the preposterous. Of course, we cannot "know" with absolute certainty that those axioms are true, but we certainly have a pretty good idea.
There are whole economic schools of thought dedicated to laissez-faire capitalism of various types. The fact that you seem to attribute this view exclusively to Randian Objectivism, and to nihilism at that, means you should read more.
And socialism is not scalable. This argument has been hashed out many times, and the fact is, markets are self-regulating in ways that centralized authority can never be. We know this from computer science too: TCP is a self-regulating protocol. Markets are excellent, near ideal in fact, for producing and distributing private goods. They are not, however, good at producing and distributing public goods. Public goods are where regulation should come in. These are all things we know.
The question remains however, how best to manage public goods, and how to determine whether something is a public good. Some try direct management by the government, ie. telcos in the past, roads, water, etc. Some try to create a system where public goods can be managed like private goods, ie. carbon credits.
But nowhere does anyone who knows anything, question whether markets are good at what they do. They disagree only on the point at which markets fail to be optimal, which goods are not suitable for markets (ie. are public goods), and how best to provide public goods.
I think the obsession with Rand is the scope of her philosophy, and the fact that she wrote fiction which made it more accessible to younger readers. I think Rand could have been a very positive influence in getting young people to think critically and question a great deal about what their governments and religions are telling them, but her personality and the Ayn Rand institute caused a very serious stigma around Objectivism.
Not for me... I'm happy with saying "nothing can be 100% proven" [...]
Except that would be obviously false. We can and have proven many things in mathematics. They are not necessarily properties about the real world, but they are definitely proofs of something.
According to the document, these steps include figuring out which employees might be most inclined to leak classified documents, by using psychiatrists and sociologists to assess their trustworthiness.
Sure, as long as politicians submit to tests assessing their sanity, compassion. raionality and penchant to accumulate power and trample civil rights.
The memo also suggests that agencies require all their employees to report any contacts with members of the news media they may have.
Yes, because a leaker is going to report his own activities. All this does is punish who they consider the "honest" people. Which I suppose will just lead to more disgruntled workers, which is good for the people.
Go to court. This has all been thought out by some pretty smart people.
Sure, because government officials respect court orders. Oh wait, they don't.
And your statistic that we know what the government is doing 95% of the time is a complete fabrication. Analysis of these cables will produce the true number, and it's already clear that it's nowhere near 95%.
To the former, I personally have no respect for Wikileaks simplistic view of total transparency when they are shrouded in secrecy themselves.
Except the people that hate Wikileaks have guns while Wikileaks does not; secrecy is Wikileaks' only defence.
The government using secrecy against its own people for its own defence is similar in effect, except that the government is supposed to be representing us. Unfortunately, we can't verify they are honestly representing us without transparency, and we've given the government a lot of power they can easily misuse. So how do you propose we ensure they use it properly without transparency?
In contrast, we haven't given Wikileaks any power, and they're not representing anyone but themselves. I hope you can see how the two situations are entirely different, and not hypocrisy on Wikileaks' part.
We know very well what they're doing in 95% of the cases. See the Freedom of Information Act for some guidance. It's amazing what we can get.
Except Bush instructed his staff to simply ignore all FOIA requests. What do you do then? Face it, the leaks are a response to increasingly closed and secretive government policies. The answer is not to criticize the leaks and its publishers, but to criticize the actual cause: the government and its policies.
I'm saying I don't think the leaks are as important as he, and his followers/fans would have us believe. I've yet to see anything come to light that is truly a game changer.
You have to start somewhere. The content of some of the leaks will piss X% of people, these other leaks Y%, and so on. With 250,000 documents, everyone is going find something to piss them off, guaranteed. Once enough public opinion turns against you, change is inevitable. This is how every counterculture gets started, by a slow erosion of government support. This century has proven that sweeping societal change is possible with persistence.
The leaks have proven the government literally lied to our faces, and it's only going to get worse as more leaks are published.
As in, I don't foresee any sweeping changes coming from the government as a result of these releases, so what's the fucking point? Airing dirty laundry? Opening the stall door while the government has its pants down?
Frankly, these leaks have already spurred otherwise complacent people into getting more involved in politics and commenting on government policies. The game has already changed. A less complacent populace makes for a more honest government.
[Assange] is shocked when the spotlight gets put back on him
I'm not sure where you got that idea, but I doubt very much that Assange is shocked that the spotlight is on him. He's intentionally brought the spotlight on him and served as Wikileaks' lightning rod so the other journalists can continue their good work.
The excessive openness of Assange and WikiLeaks is a response to the excessive secrecy and outright lies manufactured by corrupt government. The solution to this problem is not to blame the natural response, the solution is address the cause. I would think this was obvious.
I expect a WikiLeaks download worm any day now. Some hacker somewhere is going to get so pissed off at the government's response to this, I expect a worm which downloads and seeds the WikiLeaks to every computer it can spread to. Any downloads on a computer can be claimed as having been downloaded by the virus. Perfect plausible deniability, and the WikiLeaks data will never die.
WikiLeaks is taking a strong stance completely in opposition to the current trends in government of shrouding everything in secrecy: complete transparency. And they have demonstrated to governments that their secrets will not be secret for long. If the government hadn't been so paranoid and driven that fear into the populace with propaganda, WikiLeaks would never targeted the U.S. at all.
I hope WikiLeaks starts the pendulum swinging away from secrecy by showing the people exactly how much their government is hiding from them, and I hope it shows the media exactly how poorly they've been doing their jobs.
Some might say the U.S. needs scale back its strategic relations a little. They have so many fingers in so many countries, it's not even funny. Speaking as a Canadian here, who are generally friendly with the U.S., the influence you have on our country's policies pisses me off.
The G1's numbers aren't comparable to the others: 1.5 million over 6 months = 8,300 / day if spread evenly across the whole time period. Of course the spread is not even, but this naive comparison would imply that WP7 is doing just fine.
Amazing how people will actually pay for content provided to them the way they want it, when they want it. Executives in the entertainment industry should be taking notes.
The primary purpose of laws is to either to expand the public sector or else to advantage one group in the private sector at the expense of another group so less laws is automatically better for the economy
I'm not sure that's true. I think the important influence is stability. Changing laws breeds a climate of uncertainty around investment, thus stalling it. The degree of uncertainty is a strong predictor for the amount of investment; the less uncertainty, the more investment.
The question of what to learn, or who decides it, is irrelevant. The point is simply that testing has been proven to improve retention. You can argue social policies all you like, but it won't change this basic fact.
Programming languages usually have too much syntax and too much expressiveness, not too little. We don't need them to be even more cryptic and even more laden with hidden pitfalls for someone who is new, or imperfectly vigilant, or just makes a mistake.
The point is to move software closer to math, whose syntax is fairly standard and where there are no hidden pitfalls, and perfect vigilance is less important because proof of consistency is either inferred (type inference/proof automation), or provided.
We don't need longer character sets. We don't need more programming languages or more language features. We need more productive tools
The need for tools to solve tasks that cannot be solved within the language is a deficiency of the language.
Apple isn't shipping squat. They are providing a mechanism for the Developer to Upload their solution to Apple's centrally distributed repository. It's on the Developer shoulders to take responsibility for their choices.
This would be true if Apple weren't reviewing and censoring uploads. They would then be a "common carrier" akin to ISPs. Since they are censoring, they are liable.
Slashdot Mirror
Then either Feyerabend is an idiot, or you are misquoting him, or you misunderstood his argument. The philosophy of science is an epistemology, a theory of knowledge describing what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and how we know we have knowledge.
Any system of logic, science included, requires some small set of foundational premises, some fundamental axioms. We cannot know whether these axioms are absolutely true, but we can compare epistemologies for their explanatory and predictive power and thus compare the quality of the epistemology and its knowledge.
If you accept that there is an existence beyond your own mind, and you can accept that you can perceive even a small fraction of this existence via your senses, then the axioms of the philosophy of science are satisfied, and science can help you understand your world reliably. I think we can all agree that these axioms are simpler and more self-evident than any axioms of the voodoo religion. Further, assuming these simpler axioms, the resulting body of knowledge has more explanatory and predictive power than the axioms of voodoo can produce. Therefore, there is no logical way to conclude that it is better to believe in voodoo than science.
Really, only a world in which I were the only individual and everything I experience were a fabrication, or a world in which our senses would never convey any sort of structure or regularity reflective of this outside world, could someone claim that science has no claim to knowledge. It's so unlikely as to border on the preposterous. Of course, we cannot "know" with absolute certainty that those axioms are true, but we certainly have a pretty good idea.
There are whole economic schools of thought dedicated to laissez-faire capitalism of various types. The fact that you seem to attribute this view exclusively to Randian Objectivism, and to nihilism at that, means you should read more.
And socialism is not scalable. This argument has been hashed out many times, and the fact is, markets are self-regulating in ways that centralized authority can never be. We know this from computer science too: TCP is a self-regulating protocol. Markets are excellent, near ideal in fact, for producing and distributing private goods. They are not, however, good at producing and distributing public goods. Public goods are where regulation should come in. These are all things we know.
The question remains however, how best to manage public goods, and how to determine whether something is a public good. Some try direct management by the government, ie. telcos in the past, roads, water, etc. Some try to create a system where public goods can be managed like private goods, ie. carbon credits.
But nowhere does anyone who knows anything, question whether markets are good at what they do. They disagree only on the point at which markets fail to be optimal, which goods are not suitable for markets (ie. are public goods), and how best to provide public goods.
I think the obsession with Rand is the scope of her philosophy, and the fact that she wrote fiction which made it more accessible to younger readers. I think Rand could have been a very positive influence in getting young people to think critically and question a great deal about what their governments and religions are telling them, but her personality and the Ayn Rand institute caused a very serious stigma around Objectivism.
Except that would be obviously false. We can and have proven many things in mathematics. They are not necessarily properties about the real world, but they are definitely proofs of something.
Sure, as long as politicians submit to tests assessing their sanity, compassion. raionality and penchant to accumulate power and trample civil rights.
Yes, because a leaker is going to report his own activities. All this does is punish who they consider the "honest" people. Which I suppose will just lead to more disgruntled workers, which is good for the people.
Because the cost of having someone fix your computer is comparable to the cost of a new one. And the new one will probably be faster.
Why, what's wrong with ATM? (besides the cost of the switch) It has all the predictability and latency guarantees that people *wish* IP had.
So you're assuming they weren't contacted because such an effort doesn't fit into your prejudice against Wikileaks?
Except where it causes harm, which many military secrets would. As I said, Wikileaks has a strict policy about that.
Sure, because government officials respect court orders. Oh wait, they don't.
And your statistic that we know what the government is doing 95% of the time is a complete fabrication. Analysis of these cables will produce the true number, and it's already clear that it's nowhere near 95%.
Except the people that hate Wikileaks have guns while Wikileaks does not; secrecy is Wikileaks' only defence.
The government using secrecy against its own people for its own defence is similar in effect, except that the government is supposed to be representing us. Unfortunately, we can't verify they are honestly representing us without transparency, and we've given the government a lot of power they can easily misuse. So how do you propose we ensure they use it properly without transparency?
In contrast, we haven't given Wikileaks any power, and they're not representing anyone but themselves. I hope you can see how the two situations are entirely different, and not hypocrisy on Wikileaks' part.
Except Bush instructed his staff to simply ignore all FOIA requests. What do you do then? Face it, the leaks are a response to increasingly closed and secretive government policies. The answer is not to criticize the leaks and its publishers, but to criticize the actual cause: the government and its policies.
You have to start somewhere. The content of some of the leaks will piss X% of people, these other leaks Y%, and so on. With 250,000 documents, everyone is going find something to piss them off, guaranteed. Once enough public opinion turns against you, change is inevitable. This is how every counterculture gets started, by a slow erosion of government support. This century has proven that sweeping societal change is possible with persistence.
The leaks have proven the government literally lied to our faces, and it's only going to get worse as more leaks are published.
Frankly, these leaks have already spurred otherwise complacent people into getting more involved in politics and commenting on government policies. The game has already changed. A less complacent populace makes for a more honest government.
I'm not sure where you got that idea, but I doubt very much that Assange is shocked that the spotlight is on him. He's intentionally brought the spotlight on him and served as Wikileaks' lightning rod so the other journalists can continue their good work.
The excessive openness of Assange and WikiLeaks is a response to the excessive secrecy and outright lies manufactured by corrupt government. The solution to this problem is not to blame the natural response, the solution is address the cause. I would think this was obvious.
I expect a WikiLeaks download worm any day now. Some hacker somewhere is going to get so pissed off at the government's response to this, I expect a worm which downloads and seeds the WikiLeaks to every computer it can spread to. Any downloads on a computer can be claimed as having been downloaded by the virus. Perfect plausible deniability, and the WikiLeaks data will never die.
WikiLeaks is taking a strong stance completely in opposition to the current trends in government of shrouding everything in secrecy: complete transparency. And they have demonstrated to governments that their secrets will not be secret for long. If the government hadn't been so paranoid and driven that fear into the populace with propaganda, WikiLeaks would never targeted the U.S. at all.
I hope WikiLeaks starts the pendulum swinging away from secrecy by showing the people exactly how much their government is hiding from them, and I hope it shows the media exactly how poorly they've been doing their jobs.
Generally because mass murderers aren't so smart. If they were smart, they'd get themselves elected and start a war.
http://pgp.mit.edu/
Some might say the U.S. needs scale back its strategic relations a little. They have so many fingers in so many countries, it's not even funny. Speaking as a Canadian here, who are generally friendly with the U.S., the influence you have on our country's policies pisses me off.
You could not possibly be awarded enough mod points. I only wish I had some to give. This should be on the front page.
The G1's numbers aren't comparable to the others: 1.5 million over 6 months = 8,300 / day if spread evenly across the whole time period. Of course the spread is not even, but this naive comparison would imply that WP7 is doing just fine.
Amazing how people will actually pay for content provided to them the way they want it, when they want it. Executives in the entertainment industry should be taking notes.
I'm not sure that's true. I think the important influence is stability. Changing laws breeds a climate of uncertainty around investment, thus stalling it. The degree of uncertainty is a strong predictor for the amount of investment; the less uncertainty, the more investment.
The question of what to learn, or who decides it, is irrelevant. The point is simply that testing has been proven to improve retention. You can argue social policies all you like, but it won't change this basic fact.
The point is to move software closer to math, whose syntax is fairly standard and where there are no hidden pitfalls, and perfect vigilance is less important because proof of consistency is either inferred (type inference/proof automation), or provided.
The need for tools to solve tasks that cannot be solved within the language is a deficiency of the language.
This would be true if Apple weren't reviewing and censoring uploads. They would then be a "common carrier" akin to ISPs. Since they are censoring, they are liable.