"It's what separates kings from bums lying around on the side of the road."
Since kingship is, by definition, hereditary, I'm pretty sure that what separates kings from bums is largely a mere accident of birth.
Just as we have evolved with an unrealistic perceptual bias to see lions in forest shadows - thinking you see one where there isn't one is low cost, failing to see one when there is one is a potentially lineage-ending move - we've also evolved to think that we have much more influence on the course of our lives than we do.
We have limited self control; our conscious minds can really only inhibit unconscious impulses, and that only to a limited extent. Nevertheless, we've evolved to believe that we have much greater control than we do so that we continue to try to exercise the limited control that we do have, rather than not trying at all because we see our distinctly limited self control for what it is.
Just to be clear, the article is written by someone associated with Sophos, a commercial anti-malware firm. ClamXav for Mac OS X is free, the engine is open source, it has regular malware definition updates, and monitors any directory or directories the user specifies. Well written, powerful, open source, free software. www.clamxav.com
To summarize the link "CLOS is not as limited in its functionality as the lame language I learned first (i.e., Java, C++, etc.) and since the lame language I learned first is the very definition of OO, CLOS isn't OO."
Such people see OO principally as a form of bondage. The link focuses heavily on encapsulation (i.e., restricting the programmer) rather than flexibility and capability (i.e., empowering the programmer).
You can have any degree of encapsulation and restriction you want with CLOS (see the responses in the link for precisely how). But you can't have any degree of freedom and power you want in Java, etc. Defining OO by how much your language limits programmer power and flexibility is a painful mistake.
The whole article is based on three premises about human cognition. All three are false. What is clear to me is that many people who engage in "web thinking" as the author calls it have an absurdly caricaturish notion of human thought and interaction before the advent of the internet.
Here are the three premises:
"As hominids we have a million years of experience with the properties and behavior of physical things. And as individuals we have lifetimes of such experience. Based on those experiences, here are some things we know:
1. If I give you a thing then it’s yours until you give it back. We can’t both use it.
2. If I want to make a collection of things, I get a bucket and put things into it. A thing is either in the bucket or it isn’t. The same thing can’t be in two buckets at the same time.
3. If I invite you to work on a project using my collection of things, you have to visit my house."
And here's why they're false:
1. Human beings have had shared spaces and things such as temples, communal dwellings, canals, bridges, roads etc. that many individuals could and did contribute to and improve, and in many cases the whole community could use simultaneously. The internet is not a radical departure in this regard - it's yet another example of the kind of social construct that's as old as our species.
2. So a cardinal can't simultaneously be a member of the category "things that are red" and the category "bird" and the category "animal" - at least that's what the article claims. Apparently this sort of flexible thinking had to wait for the invention of the internet. I'm just awed that anyone is so ignorant of human thought and history to think such a thing, much less commit it to writing and publish it.
3. So people throughout human history never collaborated by writing and exchanging letters, or phone calls. According to the author this never happened until the advent of the internet.
The whole article is wildly hyperbolic and yet another sign that we are caught up in bubble 2.0.
"Anyway, running a country on eloquence alone hasn’t worked out disastrously – or at least not yet"
The largest empire the world has ever seen whittled down to its homeland, a naval base in the med, and some godforsaken islands in the south atlantic. I'd call that pretty disastrous.
It'll only get worse. In an increasingly technical world, the brits have the wrong culture of Snow's two cutures running the show.
the NASDAQ went from over 5000 to under 2000. how can this be characterized as anything other than a bubble bursting?