The roots of Austrian economics begin with Carl Menger, not Bohm-Bawerk.
You're right, thanks.
From your other note, if Austrian economics is non-scientific then mathematics is also non-scientific. IMO (as an economist and not a philosopher) Austrian econ can make an even stronger case than than math for being scientific because I'm satisfied that the action axiom is a priori true whereas the fundamental axioms of math are not. You can probably deduce that I don't believe 'science' is defined by induction:-)
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it confuses two meaning of "science". Since you mention math, let me use it as an example.
Nowadays it's an accepted matter that you can select basically any set of axioms you wish, and from those you'll be able to fully develop an entire math from them. So, if I want, I can, let's say, determine that the division by 0 has a finite result, and as long as I follow rigorous a logical reasoning, I'll get a consistent, with-division-by-0 math. Some other things will work differently from what we're used, but that's about it.
Now, for us to go from math as a whole, which includes the set of all possible combinations of all possible arbitrarily chosen non-contradictory axioms, to that specific subset that applies to the real world and in turn can be used to describe it, we need a non-a priori component, in that we must observe the actual world and find what of those axioms apply here.
Praxeology doesn't do that for its own axioms. It defines with extreme precision what it understands by "action", and derive lots of conclusions from it, which for the sake of argument we can assume are valid. But it doesn't come and actually prove empirically that what specific thing it calls "action" is the only one at play in economic relations. So, since we're assuming the conclusions from the axiom, if 100% of economics is built upon "action", then praxeology describes all of economics. But this hasn't been proven. It could be that the actual number is 99.999%, or 50%, or 0.001%, or even that the percentage varies given changing factors.
Thus, even with praxeology being valid from one extreme to the other, we still need to actually look into the world to find how much of it actually applies. There's no way around it.
Additionally, the logic upon which deductions from the action axiom are obtained can itself be challenged. It's for the most part classic logic with Kantian additions. What does happen if we were to start deducing with, let's say, para-consistent logic instead? Would it work better or worse in the real world? This, too, is a matter that can only be solved with experimentation.
And so on and so forth. Nothing in this is as straightforward as Austrian economists make it to be.
I think you're joking, but if not, "Austrian" is the name of a school of economic thinking. It's called that because, different from Marxism (from Marx's name), Keynesianism (from Keynes') etc., it had more than a single founding economist, and most of them where from Austria. I guess it could be named "Bawerkism" from its very first economist (Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk), but that's not how it went. Besides, although Bohm-Bawerk was the first, the most famous were Ludwig von Mises and Friefrich von Hayek, so that you do find people talking about "Misesian" and "Hayekian" when focusing on particular ideas from either. So, we're stuck with calling it "Austrian Economics". What, admittedly, is a source of confusion.
God's way is what? Capitalism? I don't think so. If God subscribed to any ism's, communism would be as likely as any.
Actually, a ton of Christian philosophers, economists etc. have tried to answer that. The best result of their attempts, as far as I know at least, is that of what we'd call a "3rd way", called "Distributism".
Distributists agree with communists in the centrality of the means of production, and that it shouldn't be in the hands of a few for them to use it to exploit the masses. Contrary to communists, however, they also don't think it should be in the hands of a single one (the state), but rather spread among as many owners as possible. Thus, they also agree with capitalists in the you must have and preserve private property. But goes against it in that the state should prevent such private ownerships from aggregating into monopolies. They also place a strong focus on small communities, and think that social security must be provided locally, by the well of members of a community to the less well of, thus going against both liberals, who think it must be provided by a centralized state, and conservatives, who think it must be provided by the individual alone. And they think the concept of employment as practiced today is fundamentally flawed, preferring cooperatives of free workers who own their own means of productions to that of employees (who don't) working for someone else (who does).
The best analogy I can think to this is of a world composed of unions who are also companies and who provide social security for their members. In other words, the ideal social model of Christianity would be a world of professional guilds.
A major part of the problem is that the thing that macro-economists study, the economy of the world, changes its behavior in response to the reported observations of the economists.
It's worse than that, at least according to Austrian economics. For them, the theoretical basis of macro-economics, or at least of almost all of them, namely, the assumption what money (as a measurement unit) is what matters, is simply false. So, all the models starting from it will suffer no matter what.
The main criticism Austrian economists throw at macro-economics, econometrics etc. is that money isn't an objective unit, it's just a representation of subjective preferences that very from person to person, and within a single person from instant to instant, only resembling something minimally solid, and thus as a fake unit, as a kind of surface effect. Thus, the same way that a sociology divorced of any concept of human psychology is bogus, so is any macro-economics that doesn't base itself entirely on that small subset of human psychology that is micro-economics. True economics is at best a sub-field of psychology, and macro economics is at most a sub-field of sociology.
Austrian economists only do math after they manages to understood reasonably well the psychological mechanisms behind a set of atomic exchanges (not necessarily involving money), provided it shows itself as something that can have calculations done, which most often than not isn't the case.
Mainstream economics doesn't like this, at all. Keynesians, marxists, econometrists etc. all believe they have a unit of measurement, and that they can turn this unit and its measurement into a hard science. They cannot. It's wishful thinking, if not outright bullshit. But it's a bullshit so full of technobabble, so enchanting in its seeming seriousness, that the self-deception simply proceeds, unchecked.
Now, that doesn't means Austrian economics isn't full of bullshit too. It's own model of human psychology they call praxeology is extremely flawed, since it's based on philosophical assumptions more than on actual psychological research. Much of it is quite useful, or at least inspiring, but non-scientific anyway. But what they do very well, and the reason I keep reading them, is their debunking of mainstream economics pseudoscientific assumptions. They are at the top of their game when they take a macro-economics equation, break it down in its main components, and proceed to show analytically how what it describes is pure, glorified nonsense.
So, here's what must be done to really turn economics into the mostly scientific discipline it can ever be: take Austrian criticism of macro-economics, add the state of the art in cognitive sciences, develop an actually valid psychology-based micro-economics from both (it won't be Austrian's praxeology), and then, by way of reductionist thinking, build from then, step by step and floor-by-floor, a bottom-up macro-economics that's based on something actually relevant and universally valid (which "money" most definitely isn't).
Then, and only then, at least a semblance of actually working models.
Loved the typo in your comment subject ("competetion"). I guess I got a new catch phrases from it: "Competition leads to competention". Much better than the grammatically correct but non-rhyming "competence".:-)
Why not just find a quiet spot for an hour or two, then sit down and learn it?
That's not the problem. I already figured the commands I need to use "right know" to have things moving. That isn't the same as understanding what's going on, much less understanding the principles behind git's process and why they are as they are. When it comes to development tools, being an end user doesn't work for me. I want to fully grok them, not merely go with the motions. And so far git has eluded me. Using it in this way is like "knowing" an equation by rote memorization alone, without any real understanding of why the result is what it is or what it means. And this is just... wrong.
I've got two older female UX designers using GIT to manage their XML based wireframes. they create repos, add existing files, setup a dev branch, make changes, create feature branches in GITflow, merge features into dev, resolve conflicts, merge to dev, tag, create release branches, tag, merge to trunk.
This. What I'd love would be to see a week of this on paper (well, screen), no step excluded, even if without any explanation of the commands, as I could look them upon elsewhere.
You should really take a look at the Pro Git book. http://git-scm.com/book It assumes very little, and should be able to take any developer worth their salt from "lolwhat's source control?" to proficiency fairly quickly.
I did. It's one of the books I'm reading, and one I find very weak. It's all abstract concepts and toy examples, not git solving real problems for a real developer trying to do some real stuff.
My ideal git book would show git being added to an existing project, then used to develop it a little, then to test alternate features, then merge those that worked, going through the whole process of resolving a set of conflicts (real code conflicts, with a real solution, on the real project, step-by-step, not "foo.bar here differs from foo.bar there, solve it and mark as solved then commit" or the some other such generality), setting stable versions, doing stuff on those etc., with extensive discussion of what was going on behind the scenes, at the file system level, of all the people involved, for every high-level activity.
My boss is going to turn purple. He hates git & anything devised by Torvalds.
Truth be told, git isn't intuitive. I've been learning it in the last few days, and I still feel it works backwards (compared to what I'm used to think). Sure, in time I'll feel comfortable with it and start doing some of the amazing stuff I see mentioned around, but my, it's quite the steep learning curve!
I'd love it if someone were to write a set of detailed, hands on, step-by-baby-step, by-example tutorials, for different usage scenarios, showing the evolution of some real system being developed rather than abstracts "branch a", "tag b", "file foo.bar.1" etc., explaining command by command in long details that didn't assume you already knew what's going on. Everything I find while Googling, from the official site, to wikis, to tutorials, to blogs, even to actual books, including the most basic stuff, feels like I've jumped directly into chapter 10 of a work from which the first 9 have been ripped off. It's counter-intuitiveness taken to a whole new level...
Yep. First it's Git, then it's Microsoft GCC, then there's the Apache Solution Server and before too long they're selling Aladdin - The Microsoft LAMP Solution.
Call me crazy, but I don't think any of this is impossible. If at some point Microsoft feels fully embracing the Unix world (of which they never really divorced) would be in their best interest, they'd do all of this and more. Sure, they're really, REALLY attached to Windows, but in the end it all boils down to market and business opportunities. The moment the business world, i.e., their mains customers, starts switching en masse to Unix and Unix-like systems, so will they, if not for other reason that survival.
Not that this has any chance of happening while legacy systems are still required everywhere. For the next few years, perhaps decades, they'll stick to their own stuff. But beyond that things might change quite a bit, in quite surprising ways. Including for the worse.
Your examples are good, but don't apply to what I'm referring. Both the Big Bang, as well as the extinction of the dinosaurs, the origin of life etc. aren't single brute data points from which you work towards inferring a theory, they're single events derived from theories. Those theories (general relativity in the case of the Big Bang, fluid mechanics and ecology in the case of the extinction event, etc.), in turn, were developed from generalizing from an enormous amount of data points.
A single data point would be something like, let's take a common myth, a god being born as an human being. We have science of what human beings are and what they can and cannot do because we have, quite literally, billions of examples around. None among the ones at hand, however, is a god (as far as I know). So, we don't have any science on what "human-embodied godhood" would be. We can infer that it'd have many similarities with normal human beings, but not to which extent. We also have (supposed) "eyewitness reports" on a handful of such cases, but those only lend to some weak additional data points: "x% of witnesses of alleged human-embodied gods say that, regarding 'xyz', 'a'; y% say that 'b'; z% say that 'c', etc.". Hence, no science on human-embodied godhood, other than this simple affirmation: "we don't have data points".
This kind of thing also applies to anything subjective. You can do brain scans of people going through prayer, meditation or whatever, correlate those measurements to whatever they declare as eyewitnesses of their own subjectivity, get a lot of percentages, and infer some quite interesting stuff about the correlations and possible causal paths. But whether those subjective experiences are themselves real or not, no conclusion is possible, because the experiences aren't themselves data points.
In any case, taking a principled stance on whether lack of such data points means lack of reality isn't itself science, it's philosophy. And thus, not a matter of concern to science itself, although, evidently, possible of concern to scientists (in their philosophical capacity).
It would seem that, by definition, it is going to be unexplainable by natural law and may be, by extension, "supernaturally" unsuitable for reproduction.
It's even simpler than that. The scientific method is good for discovering everything it covers. One can always make the philosophical assumption that what it cover is everything, but that's an assertion that cannot be proved.
Case in point (pointed by Aristotle): one-off events are outside science's problem domain. Science is about comparing and generalizing. If you don't have two of something, you cannot compare them, and hence you cannot develop any theory on it. At best you cat say that it hasn't happened twice, or at least to you, but that's it.
Of course, that never happens because when the pieces come together for the first time, unanticipated problems occur.
This, IMHO, is also the central difference between science and engineering, and why the former doesn't translate directly into the later. A scientific theory describes a sequence of causes and effects that's valid for an isolated system. So, while every theory can be absolutely true within its experimental constraints, the moment you take more than one and try to make both work together, all those ignored parameters start showing their ugly heads. Or, put another way:
Refined theories, computer models and tons upon tons of practice can ease the whole endeavor a lot, so that with a team of experience engineers it becomes something more like this:
That last bit, however, will be there no matter what, and you'll only figure it out by actually building the damn thing and iterating over it, no two ways about it.
Not to mention, it's just as much a limitation of x86_64 architecture as to why it's not included. Once the CPU is put into 64bit mode, it only has enough registers for 64bit and 32bit applications.
Hmm... I can run a 32-bit VM OS within a 64-bit OS, and a 16-bit application within said 32 bit OS. Are those in-VM 16-bit registers emulated?
I think the solution is simple: it doesn't matter how many stuff you did at a level, if you get convicted, your total punishment cannot be more than the minimum punishment in the next level.
So, let's say 'c' had a minimum of 2 years in jail. Then 1 document downloaded or 1 million documents plus server crashes etc., the maximum punishment for your set of 'd' crimes should be 2 years (minus 1 second) tops. Got out of jail, committed another sequence of 'ds', and got caught? Another 2 years (minus 1s). And so on and so forth, for as long as you kept committing d-level crimes. And what if you committed a huge set of 'd' crimes, plus a single 'c', all grouped into a single prosecution? Then your punishment should be equal to two minimum 'cs' minimum up to that 'c' typical one plus one minimum 'c', both together limited to the minimum 'b'. Rinse, repeat. Any finally: after you're out of jail, any new conviction for old crimes in the same level you already were punished for could, at most, add be for the remaining time until you achieved that maximum (if you got 1.5 years jail time for a set of 'd', new charges for old 'ds' would only be able to add up to 6 months of new jail time, so that the total would still be below a c-minimum).
That'd keep things balanced. The only way to increase the punishment would be by changing the minimum next-level punishment. Absent that, no matter how much of a dick a prosecutor or a judge were, they'd be limited by the maximum punishment limit.
To the dispassionate and disinterested outside observer, a mentally disturbed man committed suicide.
No. To a dispassionate and disinterested outside observer, someone was being punished much more harshly than whatever he deserved.
It's simply really. Murder should carry the harshest punishment, whatever "harshest" means in a given culture. Anything that caused less severe damage should be punished less severly, in roughly this decreasing order: a) murder; b) physical damage to another person, c) physical damage to another's property, d) no physical damage to anyone.
Moral issues arise when one does something at 'd' level, but the law (and those enforcing it) are so sick they want to punish him at 'c+' level. Swartz case is a prime example, and clear symptom, of this very sickness.
And despite the best attempts of computer science and software engineering, much of it is guided more by craft principles than by rigorous scientific or engineering methods.
And the interesting thing about all this is that there's a sizable group of programmers who not only think of programming as a craft, but want it to become even more so, up to the point of resurrecting the old three-level system of professional advancement from apprentice to journeyman then master craftsman. The book that introduced me to the subject was the quite inspiring Apprenticeship Patterns, which I highly recommend for anyone interested. And as usual, Wikipedia offers plenty of references.
It doesn't sound any more logical or likely or sensible or less self contradictory that way...
Perhaps, but reality itself has this habit of showing time and again that, if anything, humanity's logical capabilities, sensibleness and reliance on binary categorization is all but good for describing how things actually are. The jump from common sense into good metaphysics, which deals heavily with combining seemingly contradictory statements, is as disturbing and disorienting at first glance as that of jumping from common sense into advanced physics. Both require some serious rewiring until you can start actually understanding what's going on in there.
And then you have the really weird stuff, such as Christian "negative theology", which replaces every "is" in my previous post's definitions with an "isn't", or Buddhism's concept of emptyness, which requires a double negation of the combination of every pair of contradictory statements, and as such go hand in hand with timeless quantum mechanics in the scale of incomprehensibleness.
That's one of the effects of globalization: Manufacturing jobs move towards desperation, because that's the cheapest place to hire people and bribe the government into doing the company's bidding.
Everything can be rendered in a positive or negative light, and this is a prime example. Where one sees greedy capitalists going after the desperate, another will see capitalism doing what it does best: improving everything it touches. In this case, first one place, then another, then another, until everywhere has been improved. After all, what's better? For those desperate people to not get the much better jobs, wages, working conditions etc. those companies bring with them?
Furthermore, once the last desperate people has been "capitalized up" from desperation, there's nothing else to but to continue improving them further, moving then to places previously improved, so that as the bottom rises, so does everyone else, in a kind of FILO queue economic sequence.
In order to get rid of the last three items, they also need to get rid of all the Catholic missionaries.
Yes, because surely Africa would be much better without the 964 hospitals, 5,000 medical clinics, 260 leprosariums, 650 rest homes, 800 orphanage and 2,000 kindergartens the evil, evil Catholic Church keeps there.
While I certainly prefer your viewpoint, I am not prepared to say that you have the 'correct' viewpoint and all the many Christians through history who disagreed with you are wrong.
Fair enough, specially because since I myself am not a Christian it'd be preposterous to dictate to Christians how they should properly interpret Christianity. But I'd like to point out that, while your considerations are spot on, it's also historically true that Christianity managed a switch towards individualism with relative ease compared to other similarly self-centered religions. Judaism, for instance, managed it by redefining itself out of its proselytist self of old into a closed, mostly ethnic religion, what isn't quite the same because it looks more like giving up ("well, they aren't Jews, so let them do their stuff, it's none of our business") compared to Christianity's approach of redoubling its proselytizing at every junction. For that to happen, yes, Christianity had to go through a sequence of wars with no clear winner until outright exhaustion caused them to reevaluate things and go for a different strategy. Luckily for them, when it happened the New Testament text didn't put too much of a barrier to things, which is precisely the luxury Muslims don't have.
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The roots of Austrian economics begin with Carl Menger, not Bohm-Bawerk.
You're right, thanks.
From your other note, if Austrian economics is non-scientific then mathematics is also non-scientific. IMO (as an economist and not a philosopher) Austrian econ can make an even stronger case than than math for being scientific because I'm satisfied that the action axiom is a priori true whereas the fundamental axioms of math are not. You can probably deduce that I don't believe 'science' is defined by induction :-)
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it confuses two meaning of "science". Since you mention math, let me use it as an example.
Nowadays it's an accepted matter that you can select basically any set of axioms you wish, and from those you'll be able to fully develop an entire math from them. So, if I want, I can, let's say, determine that the division by 0 has a finite result, and as long as I follow rigorous a logical reasoning, I'll get a consistent, with-division-by-0 math. Some other things will work differently from what we're used, but that's about it.
Now, for us to go from math as a whole, which includes the set of all possible combinations of all possible arbitrarily chosen non-contradictory axioms, to that specific subset that applies to the real world and in turn can be used to describe it, we need a non-a priori component, in that we must observe the actual world and find what of those axioms apply here.
Praxeology doesn't do that for its own axioms. It defines with extreme precision what it understands by "action", and derive lots of conclusions from it, which for the sake of argument we can assume are valid. But it doesn't come and actually prove empirically that what specific thing it calls "action" is the only one at play in economic relations. So, since we're assuming the conclusions from the axiom, if 100% of economics is built upon "action", then praxeology describes all of economics. But this hasn't been proven. It could be that the actual number is 99.999%, or 50%, or 0.001%, or even that the percentage varies given changing factors.
Thus, even with praxeology being valid from one extreme to the other, we still need to actually look into the world to find how much of it actually applies. There's no way around it.
Additionally, the logic upon which deductions from the action axiom are obtained can itself be challenged. It's for the most part classic logic with Kantian additions. What does happen if we were to start deducing with, let's say, para-consistent logic instead? Would it work better or worse in the real world? This, too, is a matter that can only be solved with experimentation.
And so on and so forth. Nothing in this is as straightforward as Austrian economists make it to be.
When did we go from talking about Australian to Austrian?
Just wondering?
I think you're joking, but if not, "Austrian" is the name of a school of economic thinking. It's called that because, different from Marxism (from Marx's name), Keynesianism (from Keynes') etc., it had more than a single founding economist, and most of them where from Austria. I guess it could be named "Bawerkism" from its very first economist (Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk), but that's not how it went. Besides, although Bohm-Bawerk was the first, the most famous were Ludwig von Mises and Friefrich von Hayek, so that you do find people talking about "Misesian" and "Hayekian" when focusing on particular ideas from either. So, we're stuck with calling it "Austrian Economics". What, admittedly, is a source of confusion.
God's way is what? Capitalism? I don't think so. If God subscribed to any ism's, communism would be as likely as any.
Actually, a ton of Christian philosophers, economists etc. have tried to answer that. The best result of their attempts, as far as I know at least, is that of what we'd call a "3rd way", called "Distributism".
Distributists agree with communists in the centrality of the means of production, and that it shouldn't be in the hands of a few for them to use it to exploit the masses. Contrary to communists, however, they also don't think it should be in the hands of a single one (the state), but rather spread among as many owners as possible. Thus, they also agree with capitalists in the you must have and preserve private property. But goes against it in that the state should prevent such private ownerships from aggregating into monopolies. They also place a strong focus on small communities, and think that social security must be provided locally, by the well of members of a community to the less well of, thus going against both liberals, who think it must be provided by a centralized state, and conservatives, who think it must be provided by the individual alone. And they think the concept of employment as practiced today is fundamentally flawed, preferring cooperatives of free workers who own their own means of productions to that of employees (who don't) working for someone else (who does).
The best analogy I can think to this is of a world composed of unions who are also companies and who provide social security for their members. In other words, the ideal social model of Christianity would be a world of professional guilds.
The Distributist Magazine offers lots of information. See also the Wikipedia page.
A major part of the problem is that the thing that macro-economists study, the economy of the world, changes its behavior in response to the reported observations of the economists.
It's worse than that, at least according to Austrian economics. For them, the theoretical basis of macro-economics, or at least of almost all of them, namely, the assumption what money (as a measurement unit) is what matters, is simply false. So, all the models starting from it will suffer no matter what.
The main criticism Austrian economists throw at macro-economics, econometrics etc. is that money isn't an objective unit, it's just a representation of subjective preferences that very from person to person, and within a single person from instant to instant, only resembling something minimally solid, and thus as a fake unit, as a kind of surface effect. Thus, the same way that a sociology divorced of any concept of human psychology is bogus, so is any macro-economics that doesn't base itself entirely on that small subset of human psychology that is micro-economics. True economics is at best a sub-field of psychology, and macro economics is at most a sub-field of sociology.
Austrian economists only do math after they manages to understood reasonably well the psychological mechanisms behind a set of atomic exchanges (not necessarily involving money), provided it shows itself as something that can have calculations done, which most often than not isn't the case.
Mainstream economics doesn't like this, at all. Keynesians, marxists, econometrists etc. all believe they have a unit of measurement, and that they can turn this unit and its measurement into a hard science. They cannot. It's wishful thinking, if not outright bullshit. But it's a bullshit so full of technobabble, so enchanting in its seeming seriousness, that the self-deception simply proceeds, unchecked.
Now, that doesn't means Austrian economics isn't full of bullshit too. It's own model of human psychology they call praxeology is extremely flawed, since it's based on philosophical assumptions more than on actual psychological research. Much of it is quite useful, or at least inspiring, but non-scientific anyway. But what they do very well, and the reason I keep reading them, is their debunking of mainstream economics pseudoscientific assumptions. They are at the top of their game when they take a macro-economics equation, break it down in its main components, and proceed to show analytically how what it describes is pure, glorified nonsense.
So, here's what must be done to really turn economics into the mostly scientific discipline it can ever be: take Austrian criticism of macro-economics, add the state of the art in cognitive sciences, develop an actually valid psychology-based micro-economics from both (it won't be Austrian's praxeology), and then, by way of reductionist thinking, build from then, step by step and floor-by-floor, a bottom-up macro-economics that's based on something actually relevant and universally valid (which "money" most definitely isn't).
Then, and only then, at least a semblance of actually working models.
Loved the typo in your comment subject ("competetion"). I guess I got a new catch phrases from it: "Competition leads to competention". Much better than the grammatically correct but non-rhyming "competence". :-)
Why not just find a quiet spot for an hour or two, then sit down and learn it?
That's not the problem. I already figured the commands I need to use "right know" to have things moving. That isn't the same as understanding what's going on, much less understanding the principles behind git's process and why they are as they are. When it comes to development tools, being an end user doesn't work for me. I want to fully grok them, not merely go with the motions. And so far git has eluded me. Using it in this way is like "knowing" an equation by rote memorization alone, without any real understanding of why the result is what it is or what it means. And this is just... wrong.
I've got two older female UX designers using GIT to manage their XML based wireframes. they create repos, add existing files, setup a dev branch, make changes, create feature branches in GITflow, merge features into dev, resolve conflicts, merge to dev, tag, create release branches, tag, merge to trunk.
This. What I'd love would be to see a week of this on paper (well, screen), no step excluded, even if without any explanation of the commands, as I could look them upon elsewhere.
You should really take a look at the Pro Git book. http://git-scm.com/book It assumes very little, and should be able to take any developer worth their salt from "lolwhat's source control?" to proficiency fairly quickly.
I did. It's one of the books I'm reading, and one I find very weak. It's all abstract concepts and toy examples, not git solving real problems for a real developer trying to do some real stuff.
My ideal git book would show git being added to an existing project, then used to develop it a little, then to test alternate features, then merge those that worked, going through the whole process of resolving a set of conflicts (real code conflicts, with a real solution, on the real project, step-by-step, not "foo.bar here differs from foo.bar there, solve it and mark as solved then commit" or the some other such generality), setting stable versions, doing stuff on those etc., with extensive discussion of what was going on behind the scenes, at the file system level, of all the people involved, for every high-level activity.
My boss is going to turn purple. He hates git & anything devised by Torvalds.
Truth be told, git isn't intuitive. I've been learning it in the last few days, and I still feel it works backwards (compared to what I'm used to think). Sure, in time I'll feel comfortable with it and start doing some of the amazing stuff I see mentioned around, but my, it's quite the steep learning curve!
I'd love it if someone were to write a set of detailed, hands on, step-by-baby-step, by-example tutorials, for different usage scenarios, showing the evolution of some real system being developed rather than abstracts "branch a", "tag b", "file foo.bar.1" etc., explaining command by command in long details that didn't assume you already knew what's going on. Everything I find while Googling, from the official site, to wikis, to tutorials, to blogs, even to actual books, including the most basic stuff, feels like I've jumped directly into chapter 10 of a work from which the first 9 have been ripped off. It's counter-intuitiveness taken to a whole new level...
Yep. First it's Git, then it's Microsoft GCC, then there's the Apache Solution Server and before too long they're selling Aladdin - The Microsoft LAMP Solution.
Call me crazy, but I don't think any of this is impossible. If at some point Microsoft feels fully embracing the Unix world (of which they never really divorced) would be in their best interest, they'd do all of this and more. Sure, they're really, REALLY attached to Windows, but in the end it all boils down to market and business opportunities. The moment the business world, i.e., their mains customers, starts switching en masse to Unix and Unix-like systems, so will they, if not for other reason that survival.
Not that this has any chance of happening while legacy systems are still required everywhere. For the next few years, perhaps decades, they'll stick to their own stuff. But beyond that things might change quite a bit, in quite surprising ways. Including for the worse.
Your examples are good, but don't apply to what I'm referring. Both the Big Bang, as well as the extinction of the dinosaurs, the origin of life etc. aren't single brute data points from which you work towards inferring a theory, they're single events derived from theories. Those theories (general relativity in the case of the Big Bang, fluid mechanics and ecology in the case of the extinction event, etc.), in turn, were developed from generalizing from an enormous amount of data points.
A single data point would be something like, let's take a common myth, a god being born as an human being. We have science of what human beings are and what they can and cannot do because we have, quite literally, billions of examples around. None among the ones at hand, however, is a god (as far as I know). So, we don't have any science on what "human-embodied godhood" would be. We can infer that it'd have many similarities with normal human beings, but not to which extent. We also have (supposed) "eyewitness reports" on a handful of such cases, but those only lend to some weak additional data points: "x% of witnesses of alleged human-embodied gods say that, regarding 'xyz', 'a'; y% say that 'b'; z% say that 'c', etc.". Hence, no science on human-embodied godhood, other than this simple affirmation: "we don't have data points".
This kind of thing also applies to anything subjective. You can do brain scans of people going through prayer, meditation or whatever, correlate those measurements to whatever they declare as eyewitnesses of their own subjectivity, get a lot of percentages, and infer some quite interesting stuff about the correlations and possible causal paths. But whether those subjective experiences are themselves real or not, no conclusion is possible, because the experiences aren't themselves data points.
In any case, taking a principled stance on whether lack of such data points means lack of reality isn't itself science, it's philosophy. And thus, not a matter of concern to science itself, although, evidently, possible of concern to scientists (in their philosophical capacity).
It would seem that, by definition, it is going to be unexplainable by natural law and may be, by extension, "supernaturally" unsuitable for reproduction.
It's even simpler than that. The scientific method is good for discovering everything it covers. One can always make the philosophical assumption that what it cover is everything, but that's an assertion that cannot be proved.
Case in point (pointed by Aristotle): one-off events are outside science's problem domain. Science is about comparing and generalizing. If you don't have two of something, you cannot compare them, and hence you cannot develop any theory on it. At best you cat say that it hasn't happened twice, or at least to you, but that's it.
Of course, that never happens because when the pieces come together for the first time, unanticipated problems occur.
This, IMHO, is also the central difference between science and engineering, and why the former doesn't translate directly into the later. A scientific theory describes a sequence of causes and effects that's valid for an isolated system. So, while every theory can be absolutely true within its experimental constraints, the moment you take more than one and try to make both work together, all those ignored parameters start showing their ugly heads. Or, put another way:
* Scientific Basis: Theory_1, Theory_2, Theory_3, ... ... + Huge_WTF
* Naively Engineered Stuff: Theory_1 + Theory_2 + Theory_3 +
Refined theories, computer models and tons upon tons of practice can ease the whole endeavor a lot, so that with a team of experience engineers it becomes something more like this:
* Wisely Engineered Stuff: Theory_1 + Theory_2 + Known_WTF_1_2 + Theory_3 + Known_WTF_1_3 + Known_WTF_2_3 + Known_Extra_WTF_1_2_3 + Theory_4 + ... + Remaining_WTF
That last bit, however, will be there no matter what, and you'll only figure it out by actually building the damn thing and iterating over it, no two ways about it.
Not to mention, it's just as much a limitation of x86_64 architecture as to why it's not included. Once the CPU is put into 64bit mode, it only has enough registers for 64bit and 32bit applications.
Hmm... I can run a 32-bit VM OS within a 64-bit OS, and a 16-bit application within said 32 bit OS. Are those in-VM 16-bit registers emulated?
This was before SP3, though, and I may have had to skip SP2 as well. Can't remember.
No, you can do it with a properly nLite'd SP3 too. I've seen it running quite happily in a first gen Eee PC 2G.
I don't have a way to make this more fair
I think the solution is simple: it doesn't matter how many stuff you did at a level, if you get convicted, your total punishment cannot be more than the minimum punishment in the next level.
So, let's say 'c' had a minimum of 2 years in jail. Then 1 document downloaded or 1 million documents plus server crashes etc., the maximum punishment for your set of 'd' crimes should be 2 years (minus 1 second) tops. Got out of jail, committed another sequence of 'ds', and got caught? Another 2 years (minus 1s). And so on and so forth, for as long as you kept committing d-level crimes. And what if you committed a huge set of 'd' crimes, plus a single 'c', all grouped into a single prosecution? Then your punishment should be equal to two minimum 'cs' minimum up to that 'c' typical one plus one minimum 'c', both together limited to the minimum 'b'. Rinse, repeat. Any finally: after you're out of jail, any new conviction for old crimes in the same level you already were punished for could, at most, add be for the remaining time until you achieved that maximum (if you got 1.5 years jail time for a set of 'd', new charges for old 'ds' would only be able to add up to 6 months of new jail time, so that the total would still be below a c-minimum).
That'd keep things balanced. The only way to increase the punishment would be by changing the minimum next-level punishment. Absent that, no matter how much of a dick a prosecutor or a judge were, they'd be limited by the maximum punishment limit.
You forgot e) victimless crimes, such as drugs, gambling, prostitution, etc.
No, because those shouldn't be in a list of punishable offenses to begin with. ;-)
To the dispassionate and disinterested outside observer, a mentally disturbed man committed suicide.
No. To a dispassionate and disinterested outside observer, someone was being punished much more harshly than whatever he deserved.
It's simply really. Murder should carry the harshest punishment, whatever "harshest" means in a given culture. Anything that caused less severe damage should be punished less severly, in roughly this decreasing order: a) murder; b) physical damage to another person, c) physical damage to another's property, d) no physical damage to anyone.
Moral issues arise when one does something at 'd' level, but the law (and those enforcing it) are so sick they want to punish him at 'c+' level. Swartz case is a prime example, and clear symptom, of this very sickness.
Ah, so these are the servers behind those still-functional-after-hundreds-of-years terminals in our future post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland!
Way to straw man the topic, eh?
And despite the best attempts of computer science and software engineering, much of it is guided more by craft principles than by rigorous scientific or engineering methods.
And the interesting thing about all this is that there's a sizable group of programmers who not only think of programming as a craft, but want it to become even more so, up to the point of resurrecting the old three-level system of professional advancement from apprentice to journeyman then master craftsman. The book that introduced me to the subject was the quite inspiring Apprenticeship Patterns, which I highly recommend for anyone interested. And as usual, Wikipedia offers plenty of references.
It doesn't sound any more logical or likely or sensible or less self contradictory that way...
Perhaps, but reality itself has this habit of showing time and again that, if anything, humanity's logical capabilities, sensibleness and reliance on binary categorization is all but good for describing how things actually are. The jump from common sense into good metaphysics, which deals heavily with combining seemingly contradictory statements, is as disturbing and disorienting at first glance as that of jumping from common sense into advanced physics. Both require some serious rewiring until you can start actually understanding what's going on in there.
And then you have the really weird stuff, such as Christian "negative theology", which replaces every "is" in my previous post's definitions with an "isn't", or Buddhism's concept of emptyness, which requires a double negation of the combination of every pair of contradictory statements, and as such go hand in hand with timeless quantum mechanics in the scale of incomprehensibleness.
That's one of the effects of globalization: Manufacturing jobs move towards desperation, because that's the cheapest place to hire people and bribe the government into doing the company's bidding.
Everything can be rendered in a positive or negative light, and this is a prime example. Where one sees greedy capitalists going after the desperate, another will see capitalism doing what it does best: improving everything it touches. In this case, first one place, then another, then another, until everywhere has been improved. After all, what's better? For those desperate people to not get the much better jobs, wages, working conditions etc. those companies bring with them?
Furthermore, once the last desperate people has been "capitalized up" from desperation, there's nothing else to but to continue improving them further, moving then to places previously improved, so that as the bottom rises, so does everyone else, in a kind of FILO queue economic sequence.
In order to get rid of the last three items, they also need to get rid of all the Catholic missionaries.
Yes, because surely Africa would be much better without the 964 hospitals, 5,000 medical clinics, 260 leprosariums, 650 rest homes, 800 orphanage and 2,000 kindergartens the evil, evil Catholic Church keeps there.
While I certainly prefer your viewpoint, I am not prepared to say that you have the 'correct' viewpoint and all the many Christians through history who disagreed with you are wrong.
Fair enough, specially because since I myself am not a Christian it'd be preposterous to dictate to Christians how they should properly interpret Christianity. But I'd like to point out that, while your considerations are spot on, it's also historically true that Christianity managed a switch towards individualism with relative ease compared to other similarly self-centered religions. Judaism, for instance, managed it by redefining itself out of its proselytist self of old into a closed, mostly ethnic religion, what isn't quite the same because it looks more like giving up ("well, they aren't Jews, so let them do their stuff, it's none of our business") compared to Christianity's approach of redoubling its proselytizing at every junction. For that to happen, yes, Christianity had to go through a sequence of wars with no clear winner until outright exhaustion caused them to reevaluate things and go for a different strategy. Luckily for them, when it happened the New Testament text didn't put too much of a barrier to things, which is precisely the luxury Muslims don't have.