Garrett M. Groff wrote: > First, nastiness and ridicule stifle reasoned > discussions and push intelligent people away from > participating. They (invariably) break down into > emotionally-charged, ad hominem attacks rather than > discussions of abstract topics.
Some ideas are worthy of rebuttal. Some are more appropriately dealt with by unmasking and ridicule. Hobbes published on a wide range of topics. On those topics where he got called a lunatic, physics and mathematics) we now have high quality information. On those topics where his writings were treated respectfully, we have a load of moldy bananas. The Royal Society used to have a motto, "nullius in verba", which means "take no-one's word for it", and its journals used to have a policy that authors must comply with any reasonable request by other researchers for materials, methods, or data necessary to verify the conclusion of the article. Unfortunately, papers coming to politically correct conclusions could seldom comply with such requests, so the Society quietly ceased to enforce that policy, and issued a new postmodern translation of their motto. There are a lot of moldy bananas in circulation. We are seriously overdue for some garbage removal. Faced with a confident assertion from an academic, and the beliefs of the general public, on past performance the first three people one meets in a pub are likely to be more reliable than the first professor from Academia. The garbage is not being collected and dumped. > Regarding the Wi-fi reference, I contend that > economic/business factors, primarily, led to the > release of weak security protocols (WEP). Untrue. WEP was just stupidity, and WPA was some more stupidity. We could have had exactly the same user interface and behavior as WPA personal with the same hardware, but prevented an offline dictionary attack. The problem and the solution were well known. If anyone had asked me, I could have told them what they were doing wrong, and how to do it right. > Technology does not exist in a vacuum, though > tech/geek types (including myself) often do not > consider the broader context in which the IT world > operates. So what was stopping them from doing it right, other than ignorance and stupidity? Today, every sophisticated traveller has a dictionary attack program to access some free wifi bandwidth wherever he may be. I am sure that was not the industry intention. Where we see hard science, we see a certain amount of ruthless brutality given to crap, as for example Thomas Hobbes being called a lunatic in "The proceedings of the royal society". Where we don't see ruthless brutality, the truth eventually gets covered in great piles of chicken droppings, for example string theory. If everyone gets respect, pretty soon no one deserves respect. For the graduates, we get grade inflation, for the postgrads, "courtesy". Both make it hard to discern actual expertise, leading to disasters such as the wifi standard. _______________________________________________ FDE mailing list FDE@www.xml-dev.com http://www.xml-dev.com/mailman/listinfo/fde
