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Techies Must Educate Governments
Rub3X writes "Those in the know about technology must spend more time reaching out to governments and helping them understand the Internet's role in society, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Tuesday.
'The average person in government is not of the age of people who are using all this stuff,' Schmidt said at a public symposium here hosted by the National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. 'There is a generational gap, and it's very, very real.'"
Techies spend thousands of hours educating government in the US. They do it in hearings, they do it as advisors, they do it as assistants. Even PACs try to teach these people how various elements of technology work, albeit often for the wrong reasons. Lack of teaching is not the problem. Nor is the problem lack of information these representatives can access on their own, so they can learn on their own, as any of American's best and brightest citizens — such as many of those here on slashdot — manage each and every day.
Nor is the problem the age of the representative. I'm closing on 60, and I know a great deal about technology. My mother knew more than any representative I am aware of when she died recently, and she was almost 90. I inherited her dual CPU Dell running Red Hat SMP when she died. She wrote some pretty tricky perl scripts; I wish I could have converted her to Python, but alas. I didn't say she was perfect.
In the US, the problem is that the parties keep putting incompetent (and worse) people up for election. Consequently the American people, having no effective way of dealing with the two-party monopoly upon government seats of power, keeps voting these incompetents into congress and the senate.
So the Internet is a series of tubes, you can't say words on television that are common in every schoolyard, and the human body is a matter for shame. And those are the small problems. Worse, we've invaded a country under false pretenses, with no valid reason beyond those already exposed as nonsense, the bill of rights has been forsaken, and the congress and the senate have seen fit to make the entire judicial process one that the executive can control from start to finish.
The tree of liberty is dead. It has been shat upon by millions and millions of sheep, trampled by elephants and donkeys, and finally the pulp was sold by that lady with the blindfold and one tit hanging out for King George to write out "signing statements" upon.
I'd tell you to vote libertarian, but most of you are just going to put another democrat or republican into office anyway. Literally, a crying shame. We have fallen so far.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Techies Must Educate Governments
Sorry, we don't have time. We're too busy destroying our lives playing WOW.
Voting! Or, as V put it, "People should not be afraid of the government. The government should be afraid of the people."
Those who have worked in government and industry for 20+ years like me will probably agree that the influx of greedy PHB's into the upper ranks of IT/Engineering has laid waste to the talent that was once there.
Back in the day, senior management was listening to deep techies who knew their stuff - they relied on our training and experience to lay down systems that did the job well.
Times are different now. Most management I've seen is populated by greedy, power-hungy know-nothings who think outsourcing a core competency is a good idea. Mortagaging the future of the company they work for is, in fact, *their* core competency. And in the process, they rid the company of those who hold the institutional knowledge and have the technical depth to create great products/services for the company.
These management types will not (as opposed to "can not") be educated - it interferes with their world-domination plan. Nothing short of a sustained "flight to integrity" will turn this tide.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
They are not dense. They are very intelegent, and work hard at doing their jobs.
Which is getting elected. That is what they are paid for, that is what counts.
The important part of a politician's job is gathering votes. Not ruling a country. We are supposed to only give votes to those who we think will do a good job of ruling, but the measured quantity in a politician's life is the number of votes they get.
It is not that they are not smart. It is that they have learned that applying smarts to ruling a country does not get them as many votes as applying smarts to getting votes does. I'm not sure how to change that, but that is the root problem.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Given the notorious unreliablity of our voting process (broken voting machines, lost ballots boxes, etc) coupled with complete unaccountability (no proof of how my vote was registered, no recipt) why would I think my vote was ever counted in the first place? We refused UN oversight of our elections and you still expect me to believe in the voting process as a way to fix our broken system?
From: http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0706-09.htm "We the undersigned Members of Congress hereby request the Electoral Assistance Division of the United Nations Department of Political Affairs to send election observers to monitor the presidential election in the United States scheduled for November 2, 2004. We are deeply concerned that the right of U.S. citizens to vote in free and fair elections is again in jeopardy"
Sorry, We haven't been a Democracy for quite some time.
We are all just people.