Re: spinoza programming language status report (or, disruptive technology is always late)

On May 15, 7:43 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
spinoza1111said:





On May 15, 3:16 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
spinoza1111said:

On May 12, 9:46 am, Mike <m.fee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<snip>

You _thought_ the professor was encouraging you...but maybe the
*** was just setting you up!

Perhaps. If that's the case, if there are no adults at wikipedia (and
this may be the case),

Case in point: they listened to some bozo about Schildt, as a result of
which the page on him is now very misleading.

Schildt was given a page inappropriately.

What have you got against Schildt? He's a best-selling author. Lots of
best-selling authors have Wikipedia pages. Why not Schildt?

Dan Appleman is even more prolific, founded a company, and is
personally a great guy; he's done a lot of pro bono work for his
community and I was honored to work for him. But he doesn't have a
wikipedia page, since, probably, geek celebrity is usually just not
enough. And after what happened to Schildt, it's unlikely he'd want
one. Being slashdotted by Microsoft haters was enough.

[I am of course speculating and not speaking on his behalf here.]

My editor at Apress started
two companies and has written several well-received books, but Dan
Appleman isn't profiled in wikipedia, although he's mentioned in thee
article on Apress...because nobody wanted to target him.

You seem to think the purpose of Wikipedia pages is to target people. It
isn't. The theoretical purpose of Wikipedia pages is to inform Wikipedia's
readership (and all too often, the practical purpose is to misinform
them). In the case of the Schildt page, useful information about the flaws
in Schildt's works was removed, making the page less informative than it
had hitherto been.

That's crazy. The history of science is not a history of exposed
fraud. It is generally silent about fraud and blind alleys. No-one
remembers the inventor of the concept of the aether.

If you spend your time chronicling and biographing the story of people
you think are scientific or technical bounders, then you are either
doing a public service or you yourself are a bounder.

You are doing a public service if and only if people cannot be the
judge of the material presented by the potential cad-bounder-fraud for
themselves, and need be told by insiders such as Clive Feather that
the man's a fraud. However, this if true leads to an infinite regress
that does not itself obtain: IF people cannot rely, when using a
technical book, on their own intuition, their own logic, and on
experimentation on their own systems, but need "enlightened"
authorities such as Clive the Feather (ha!) to tell them what to
think, then qui custodet raises its head. They'd need someone to tell
them whether Clive was as we Americans say "on the level", and another
person in the series to tell us whether third chap was on the level,
and so forth, ad infinitum and ad nauseum.

Therefore, if you occupy yourself with the failings of a single man,
you become a sort of horse-leech of fame and instead of accomplishing
a goddamn thing of note, you ride your adversary to Gehenna. You join
a sad lot of people indeed, for it includes the poet *maudit* Robert
Greene, who in a scurrilous phamplet "A Groates-Worth of Wit Bought
with a Pound of Repentance", proposed to tell the people that despite
the popularity of the plays of a certain "Upstart Crow", plays like
The First Part of the Contention (twixt Lancaster and York), Titus
Andronicus, and so on, the Crow was in fact a tyger's hearte wrapt in
a player's hide, stealing the thunder of the Jove he attacked.

The vilest man tries to gain notoriety by horse-leeching and secretary-
birding of this nature. Clive Feather is such a horse leech and
secretary bird, jealous of fame and a thief of reputation. To suck, to
suck, the very blood to suck:

"To England I'll steal, and there, I'll steal" - Henry V



The page is now locked owing to edit warring (without discussion on
the Talk page) that continually reinserted the "Criticism" despite the
fact that I took it out...with an explanation...each time.

When a bozo vandalises a Wiki page, nobody is under any obligation to leave
it vandalised. You are not the sole authority on Wiki content - and, since
it seems that you've been banned from updating Wikipedia, you have even
less say than most people. Your doing, of course.

[Falsetto voice like Stuart Whiteman in Dodgeball] ooo I'm banned from
editing wikipedia

I'm banned from editing wikipedia because I'm old enough not to suck
up to my inferiors.


then it needs to be shut down.

Which bit of "freedom of speech" were you struggling with, Mr
Everyone-Else-Is-A-Fascist?

No committment to freedom of speech has to support "speech" with the
intent to so act as to destroy free speech!

Wikipedia can hardly be claimed to be an opponent of free speech. It's an
online encyclopaedia, for pity's sake, not a politician! In suggesting
that it should be shut down, you are opposing freedom of speech. By your
own argument, one could now argue for /you/ to be shut down - except that
to do so would be to invite the same argument to be visited upon oneself,
and round and round it goes.

No, it doesn't go "round and round". The world isn't flat.

As I showed with my gedanken experiment, which seems to have been over
your head, a system which allows its members to be eliminated by any
other member is unsustainable because it's a state of nature
(Hobbes).

You'll search my posts in vain in this ng for any such behavior, for
the simple reason that it's impossible in usenet. Instead, you'll find
that I stick to the issues and not the personalities, even when I am
subtasking in such a way as to make feebler intellects conclude that I
am off topic.

Sure, ACTUAL trolling and vandalism, once properly defined, can be
eradicated: but in Wikipedia, this has been transformed into a white
or red Terror. People who post non-anonymously and who mean every
fucking word of what they say aren't trolls no matter how many time
somebody calls them a troll. And "vandalism" is never additive: just
as "Banksy", the anonymous London graffitti artist, improves and adds
to old buildings (by painting two Bobbies kissing each other) doesn't
interfere with the "message" of some old building, adding to articles
isn't "vandalism". It might be POV or original research, but to
loosely call it vandalism, to call responsible and sincere non-
anonymous posting "trolling" or adding information, even opinions,
"vandalism" is to use sloppy English.

Motivated by malice, this invites the victim to reply in kind. But it
isn't "anarchy". Insofar as people have access to inner wikipedia
rings, it becomes instead literal terror, as defined by Lyotard: the
will to eliminate your partner in a dialogue.

On wikipedia, not once did I try to remove or block another poster.

Today, this is being done to people in the absence of any reply, and I
believe its being done after stealing their intellectual production so
as to eliminate all but a few insiders, so that Wales can publish a
wikipedia for profit based on slave labor.

Schildt was exercising "freedom of speech" under the Constitution of
the United States and your own constitution.

So?

Correspondingly, others
had a perfect right to criticise his ideas.

Right. But *you* decided that they should not do so on Wikipedia - as a
result of which the Wikipedia article is now broken and misleading.

No, because as I myself was informed several times, OPINIONS HAVE NO
PLACE IN WIKIPEDIA.

Your view that the standard defines C, on which Feather based his
attack, was an opinion, not a true or false statement about an
idealized mathematical calculus, because C is defined in practice.

You think you can recognize "vandalism", "trolling" and opinion
itself. The problem is you're an uncultured thug with broadband, and
unequal to the task. I suggest that you get out and play a sport to
get your anger channeled into a more productive venture until such
time as you've acquired the education, and the decency, to so
criticise others.



But under libel law, their
speech becomes action when they turn to calling Herb names that call
into question his standing on the job and in his community.

I don't know of anyone who calls Herbert Schildt names. If you're referring
to the widely-known term "bullschildt", that is not a nomenclature that is
applied to Herbert Schildt (although it certainly applies to his books).

Oh, bite my ass. Counsel must think we're idiots. CHILDREN tease other
children with a malicious and childish intent to cause pain by making
a game out of a name.



<snip>

You're the Fascist, and you don't even understand why.

I support freedom of speech, which you say makes me a Fascist, and you want
Wikipedia to be shut down - which presumably makes you a liberal? Well
done - you have actually outclassed Humpty-Dumpty.

Einstein, don't make a complete fool of yourself.

You don't support freedom of speech because you constantly try here to
give pain and endanger reputations of professionals like Navia, by
interfering with technical discussions with statements that question
their competence on a permanent record accessible to corporate
surveillance.

Wikipedia is probably illegal insofar as it pays less than minimum
wage (0<M, get it?) so that Wales can make money. If there were any
decent labor lawyers left in the USA, Wales would be in court today.
It is a platform for libel, and free speech cannot, I repeat cannot,
be exercised in the course of committing or enabling criminal acts.



--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999- Hide quoted text -

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