http://www.cyberlearningstem.org/ is the website for a recent conference on STEM cyberlearning tools (CyTSE). A lot of really great presenters from academia and industry came together to show their latest and greatest efforts. You can find a lot of good links on the site back to the original projects at http://live.cyberlearningstem.org/
Here in Chicago I pay RCN $17 a month for their slowest cable modem. As a side benefit I used to get basic cable for free until they went all digital. Oh well. $17 a month for 1500kbs up and 379 kbs down isn't bad.
Your post is as confused as pudding. The article says this group wants to advertise their guild, i.e. they want free speech. The guild isn't demanding to restrict what anyone else can and can't say. They simply want to advertise "GLBT" without that being marked as "offensive." Apparently calling a groups of Orcs "fags" or "gay" is fine, but trying to form a guild through honest advertising is not. That's plain stupid and the owner of Blizzard has admitted as much.
I understand your point that Blizzard has a right to call their own shots about speech on what is "their land," but realistically, that's not how law operates and freedom of speech runs both ways in semi-public areas. The idiots can run around calling each other fags, and the real gays should be able to start their own guild without the interference of Blizzard's in-game police.
if you've ever done real-world web design that requires graphics, you'll realize this is a very important concern. If possible of course you'll want to make your website as scalable as possble. But just as different browsers behave differently (not just IE) and you have to sometimes find a good median solution, you need to do that with screen size, as well. And when you include graphics suddenly percentages go out the window, since many browsers won't resize images very nicely. Bicubic interpolation is nice, but not widely instantiated. Plus do you want to serve huge images that will get scaled down and increase load time like crazy? Or serve small files that when scaled up look crappy? The web is currently a nest of compromises and this concern is just another one. But it's a valid concern to be aware of, and to work into the design if you're at all concerned about "standard" view for a majority of viewers.
...Lucas releases the original theatrical versions of episodes 4, 5, & 6 on DVD in 3-5 years because of "pressure from fans". Basically the only reason he's not selling it right now is he knows he can get people who only want the original cut to settle for his "special" editions now, and then buy again a few years down the road. If he released multiple versions now it would just confuse consumers and fragment the buying base.
But it actually would be really easy for him to rerelease the theatrical versions in a restored state - what do you think he based all of the current footage on? Sure he added a bunch of stuff, but I guarantee he went back to the original negatives and separate effects shots, scanned those all in and cleaned them up before adding all the Special Edition crap. Essentially he already has what the people want. He just knows that a good number will buy twice (or more) if he's careful about his release strategy.
AHEM. Your "tempered" scale is the "equally tempered" scale and it's actually only recently (in the history of music) come into vogue. There's a great book called "Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization" by Stuart Isacoff. Basically Bach's Well Tempered Klavier is written for "well" tempered pianos, not "equal" (aka modern) temperament. And there are a ton of great keyboard works from that era which call for specific differently tempered tunings.
That said, you're right, most modern music is written for equal temperament. But if pianos were easier to tune to alternate temperaments I'm sure many composers would take advantage of that. Sure some might use it as a gimmick, but most serious piano composers are above gimmicks. And while I like John Cage and other modern radicals, it's not his kind of music that I think would benefit most from a piano that could quickly switch to alternate tunings, but the less experimental modern composers. Keyboard music didn't end when Mozart died.
"No one is forced to eat there, do business there, or work there, but they're somehow super oppressive and evil."
Where are the alternatives? Certainly not on the same drag as your McStarbucks and Taco Hut. Of course you can find smaller, non-viral-corporate-homogeneous restaurants, but not at the same level of convenience, which is all the American public seems to care about at this point. You could always brown bag your lunch each day, but where are you getting the food to put in your Brown Bag(TM)? Meijer? Dominicks? Safeway? While the business practices of these grocery stores probably isn't as questionable as McDonalds and Co., don't doubt for a second that the owners of these more regional chains look up to the business practicies of the "Big Boys" of the ubiquitous fast food companies. This alone is cause for concern despite the "unoriginal"-ness of Katz's post.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing for Katz, I'm just arguing against you. Katz obviously just read Fast Food Nation and decided to write a book report about it in a way that he thought the geeks at Slashdot might relate to. Katz isn't breaking new ground here, but neither are you with your simplistic and smug reply.
I can't believe this got modded up to a five.
"Give me convenience, or give me death!" - The Dead Kennedys
>>Every decision thats being made is being made by human beings, for human beings.
Wrong. Every decision is not being made *for* human beings. Often times we write code, design protocols and build interfaces based on ease of implementation, lowest cost, what's technically feasible, etc. Then we expect humans to adapt to the machines and not vice versa. That's not a reflection of our humanity, it's a reflection at best of humans making due with limited time and resources. We *can* do better, but oftentimes we sublimate our humanity to that soul-crushing inhuman force known as "the bottom line." That's not part of any definition of "humanity" I'd support.
As for living forever, that isn't clear at all. For one thing the brain cells aren't designed to reproduce at all, and once enough of them are dead you are too.
False. All recent literature indicates that brain cells do reproduce. They just reproduce in one part of the brain and then migrate to where they need to go. Brain tissue doesn't grow as fast as other tissue, but it does grow. see http://www.skally.net/ppsc/nerve.html
Dennett also has a great book called "Brain Children" which is a collection of articles written for obscure AI and psychology magazines. Mostly it's about cognitive modeling and advances in theoretical AI, but quite a bit of it is accessable to the abitious lay-reader.
Recommended for those who believe that complex adaptive behavior can be explained without stooping to quantum mumbo-jumbo.
"Once we stop making it such an issue, the problem will go away. Just look at Europe for instance, they don't have these problems because they don't make them such big issues." Not quite. There are fundamental structural differences in most European societies which make the real problem with underage drinking (driving drunk) much smaller than here in the US. Number one, the driving age is 18 or higher in many European countries, and cars are more expensive to have and maintain than in the US. Hence fewer young drivers. Number two, there is a much better public transportation system in general than the US. This reduces the drunk driving accidents in Euorope significantly, but they still have a big problem with people becoming alcoholics in their later years. So while they don't make it as taboo, they still have problems with it down the road. Just look Yeltsin and you'll know what I mean (OK OK that's not a strictly European example but close enough).
I agree that the focus is too much on the internet and not enough on the parent's responsibility to instill proper morals and codes of conduct into their children. And I agree that there are definite freedom of speech issues at stake here. But if your concern is actually the children and not the constitutional issues, then the real issue becomes MODERN WESTERN SOCIETY. Mom needs to work in order to make enough money to send Johnny and Sarah to good colleges. So she doesn't spend the time raising them that she should and keeps them at day care or leaves them to their own devices after school turning them into latch-key kids. She wants only the best material things that she can get for her kids and so has to rely essentially on surrogate parents to do the job of raising her young while she works. Of course she's going to want school to teach her kids about the dangers of sex and drugs and porn, since she doesn't have the time. The net-nannies and so on are just filling a niche and until we change the underlying substrate of modern society there will continue to be a large market for this dreck. It's not as simple as "making things less taboo", though that can help a lot.
While there are definitely some deserving entries on that list, they missed the Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, Divx, Beta, and a slew of others. Not that they were really trying to be comprehensive, but they managed to include "Wrong Way" Corrigan and not the Exxon Valdez? Something is wrong with this list. Also, since they included antibiotics then they should also have included the invention of the assembly line automobile as that particular invention is statistically the leading cause of death for the age group of 1 to 45 years (according to 1996 data obtained here). I'd say that's a pretty significant loser in anyone's book.
Katz may have been a bit lop-sided in his polemic, but he has a very pertinant point. Almost all of the genetic research that he alludes to is pie-in-the-sky research. These aren't immediately useful projects but "gee-whiz I bet we can make our own cell!" or "let's map the whole genome so we can patent it!" And these researchers run blindly on, never stopping to look around for fear that some one else will claim another "first" in history.
The point is not that genetic engineering can help; we all know it's supposed to be a 21st Century panacea, and there's no denying it can be used positively. But science for science's sake or non-altruistic ends is by far the most dangerous. Spurred on by the war mongers, the lead researchers in the Manhattan Project could not guarantee that the chain reaction they were going to create wouldn't propogate through the atmosphere and immolate the entire Earth, so they just set off thier bomb and hoped for the best. Of course we all know the bomb worked as they had hoped, but how many close calls do we get until a real doomsday device or Ice-9 is unleashed unwittingly?
This is not a call to halt progress, but simply make it accountable before something terrible happens. If you can't see that you've missed Katz's point entirely.
Don't even go there. Sleepy Hollow was admittedly a really beautiful film (as all Burton films are) but the plot and laughable love interest thread lost the movie entirely for me. If you're all about how gorgeous and how much money you can spend on design, then go see Sleepy Hollow. If you like a film that's actually entertaining, thought provoking (the existential overtones to Woody's dillemia) and laugh out loud funny, then forget Burton's newest and see Toy Story 2.
I believe it was Ernst Jünger who called this the "Age of the Titans". Titans being very powerful creatures with no intrinsic morality, either as gods or demons. Whether or not you wish to inplicate the Power of Myth (TM) into this argument is your perogative, but it's a decent preface to my main point.
Basically, technology is valueles by itself. "Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right" and this in and of itself should prove that there is more than simply the "dynamic of change" here. It's a feedback loop. Of course advances in technology affect our laws and our perceptions of the world, but the converse is also true. Technologies that are deemed more "important", either by the military or by whomever else has the resources to support research, will get more funding which will fuel growth and affect how that "value-free" technology will be harnessed. The web itself started at DARPA.
>>What would be the constituent parts of a technological philsophy? Morals, laws, human relations, captial relations? All of these are changed by technology. Sure, but these shape our technology too, from theory to application, from basic research to IPO. Granted there's no way to predict when the major paradigm shifts will happen (for example from a Newtonian to an Einstinian paradigm), it's still possible to guide and predict technology's impact on society over the long haul in broad strokes. We need models like EPCOT to guide us just as we need fiction like "1984" and "Brave New World" to show us the dangers inherent in certain technologies.
Philosophy is not static, and neither is our technology. I'd argue that we can understand the process of technology well by studying the philosophy of science (for ex. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn) and we can guide our visions of the future we want collectively by understanding our past visions of what we think our future will/should be. While that varies greatly from culture to culture, and that's nowhere near as rigourous an outline for a philosophy as the Critique of Pure Reason;) I still say it's pretty accurate and a better heuristic than "the only constant is change".
There's a lot of talk on this thread about how "WaReZ channels are okay because..." or "WareZ running hurts industry because..." when it's not that simple. Sure there are going to be some responsible folks who "demo" a game illegally via IRC and then go out and purchase it, just as there are those who don't. Would these people have been exposed to the game in the first place if it hadn't spread prolifically across the net? What is the net effect of sale losses due to small time pirating vs increased revenue due to free advertisement for the game spreading itself across the web? Is that measurable or quantifiable in any way? There are so many ways in which this equation for "lost profits" due to piracy can be skewed or manipulated to support one side or the other. It's all just meaningless conjecture without hard data to back up these claims, and a decent way of interpreting that data, all personal anecdotes aside. Of course companies are going to due something about piracy if they percieve they're losing profits, and of course users are going to defend their rights to "free" software in whatever thinly veiled way they can. There are pros and cons to piracy from both a coporate and an end user point of view, though coporations would probably deny this. Piracy spreads the particular software package's meme and brings it to the users consiousness as effectively as any other medium (print ad, TV ad, etc.) which can direct interest to the company and next time you're at the software store or shopping on-line you're more likely to buy that product. But piracy unchecked will undermine the software profit margin, prices will go up and more draconian software protection measures will be inplemented. A certain balance must be struck. Anyone who believes that piracy is all bad or the converse has a much too simple view of the dynamic here.
An interesting paper from August titled Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation by Seth Lloyd of MIT has been submitted to Nature. The abstract and article in TeX, PS and more can be found at http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9908043. It's a math heavy, but still accessible to the lay audience, and a fun read insomuch as Lloyd goes so far as to talk about outlandish theoreticals as black hole computers.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.cyberlearningstem.org/ is the website for a recent conference on STEM cyberlearning tools (CyTSE). A lot of really great presenters from academia and industry came together to show their latest and greatest efforts. You can find a lot of good links on the site back to the original projects at http://live.cyberlearningstem.org/
Here in Chicago I pay RCN $17 a month for their slowest cable modem. As a side benefit I used to get basic cable for free until they went all digital. Oh well. $17 a month for 1500kbs up and 379 kbs down isn't bad.
Your post is as confused as pudding. The article says this group wants to advertise their guild, i.e. they want free speech. The guild isn't demanding to restrict what anyone else can and can't say. They simply want to advertise "GLBT" without that being marked as "offensive." Apparently calling a groups of Orcs "fags" or "gay" is fine, but trying to form a guild through honest advertising is not. That's plain stupid and the owner of Blizzard has admitted as much.
I understand your point that Blizzard has a right to call their own shots about speech on what is "their land," but realistically, that's not how law operates and freedom of speech runs both ways in semi-public areas. The idiots can run around calling each other fags, and the real gays should be able to start their own guild without the interference of Blizzard's in-game police.
Dear fixed-width naysayers:
if you've ever done real-world web design that requires graphics, you'll realize this is a very important concern. If possible of course you'll want to make your website as scalable as possble. But just as different browsers behave differently (not just IE) and you have to sometimes find a good median solution, you need to do that with screen size, as well. And when you include graphics suddenly percentages go out the window, since many browsers won't resize images very nicely. Bicubic interpolation is nice, but not widely instantiated. Plus do you want to serve huge images that will get scaled down and increase load time like crazy? Or serve small files that when scaled up look crappy? The web is currently a nest of compromises and this concern is just another one. But it's a valid concern to be aware of, and to work into the design if you're at all concerned about "standard" view for a majority of viewers.
...Lucas releases the original theatrical versions of episodes 4, 5, & 6 on DVD in 3-5 years because of "pressure from fans". Basically the only reason he's not selling it right now is he knows he can get people who only want the original cut to settle for his "special" editions now, and then buy again a few years down the road. If he released multiple versions now it would just confuse consumers and fragment the buying base.
But it actually would be really easy for him to rerelease the theatrical versions in a restored state - what do you think he based all of the current footage on? Sure he added a bunch of stuff, but I guarantee he went back to the original negatives and separate effects shots, scanned those all in and cleaned them up before adding all the Special Edition crap. Essentially he already has what the people want. He just knows that a good number will buy twice (or more) if he's careful about his release strategy.
AHEM. Your "tempered" scale is the "equally tempered" scale and it's actually only recently (in the history of music) come into vogue. There's a great book called "Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization" by Stuart Isacoff. Basically Bach's Well Tempered Klavier is written for "well" tempered pianos, not "equal" (aka modern) temperament. And there are a ton of great keyboard works from that era which call for specific differently tempered tunings.
That said, you're right, most modern music is written for equal temperament. But if pianos were easier to tune to alternate temperaments I'm sure many composers would take advantage of that. Sure some might use it as a gimmick, but most serious piano composers are above gimmicks. And while I like John Cage and other modern radicals, it's not his kind of music that I think would benefit most from a piano that could quickly switch to alternate tunings, but the less experimental modern composers. Keyboard music didn't end when Mozart died.
"No one is forced to eat there, do business there, or work there, but they're somehow super oppressive and evil."
Where are the alternatives? Certainly not on the same drag as your McStarbucks and Taco Hut. Of course you can find smaller, non-viral-corporate-homogeneous restaurants, but not at the same level of convenience, which is all the American public seems to care about at this point. You could always brown bag your lunch each day, but where are you getting the food to put in your Brown Bag(TM)? Meijer? Dominicks? Safeway? While the business practices of these grocery stores probably isn't as questionable as McDonalds and Co., don't doubt for a second that the owners of these more regional chains look up to the business practicies of the "Big Boys" of the ubiquitous fast food companies. This alone is cause for concern despite the "unoriginal"-ness of Katz's post.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing for Katz, I'm just arguing against you. Katz obviously just read Fast Food Nation and decided to write a book report about it in a way that he thought the geeks at Slashdot might relate to. Katz isn't breaking new ground here, but neither are you with your simplistic and smug reply.
I can't believe this got modded up to a five.
"Give me convenience, or give me death!" - The Dead Kennedys
>>Every decision thats being made is being made by human beings, for human beings.
Wrong. Every decision is not being made *for* human beings. Often times we write code, design protocols and build interfaces based on ease of implementation, lowest cost, what's technically feasible, etc. Then we expect humans to adapt to the machines and not vice versa. That's not a reflection of our humanity, it's a reflection at best of humans making due with limited time and resources. We *can* do better, but oftentimes we sublimate our humanity to that soul-crushing inhuman force known as "the bottom line." That's not part of any definition of "humanity" I'd support.
As for living forever, that isn't clear at all. For one thing the brain cells aren't designed to reproduce at all, and once enough of them are dead you are too.
False. All recent literature indicates that brain cells do reproduce. They just reproduce in one part of the brain and then migrate to where they need to go. Brain tissue doesn't grow as fast as other tissue, but it does grow. see http://www.skally.net/ppsc/nerve.html
Recommended for those who believe that complex adaptive behavior can be explained without stooping to quantum mumbo-jumbo.
Not quite. There are fundamental structural differences in most European societies which make the real problem with underage drinking (driving drunk) much smaller than here in the US. Number one, the driving age is 18 or higher in many European countries, and cars are more expensive to have and maintain than in the US. Hence fewer young drivers. Number two, there is a much better public transportation system in general than the US. This reduces the drunk driving accidents in Euorope significantly, but they still have a big problem with people becoming alcoholics in their later years. So while they don't make it as taboo, they still have problems with it down the road. Just look Yeltsin and you'll know what I mean (OK OK that's not a strictly European example but close enough).
I agree that the focus is too much on the internet and not enough on the parent's responsibility to instill proper morals and codes of conduct into their children. And I agree that there are definite freedom of speech issues at stake here. But if your concern is actually the children and not the constitutional issues, then the real issue becomes MODERN WESTERN SOCIETY. Mom needs to work in order to make enough money to send Johnny and Sarah to good colleges. So she doesn't spend the time raising them that she should and keeps them at day care or leaves them to their own devices after school turning them into latch-key kids. She wants only the best material things that she can get for her kids and so has to rely essentially on surrogate parents to do the job of raising her young while she works. Of course she's going to want school to teach her kids about the dangers of sex and drugs and porn, since she doesn't have the time. The net-nannies and so on are just filling a niche and until we change the underlying substrate of modern society there will continue to be a large market for this dreck. It's not as simple as "making things less taboo", though that can help a lot.
While there are definitely some deserving entries on that list, they missed the Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, Divx, Beta, and a slew of others. Not that they were really trying to be comprehensive, but they managed to include "Wrong Way" Corrigan and not the Exxon Valdez? Something is wrong with this list. Also, since they included antibiotics then they should also have included the invention of the assembly line automobile as that particular invention is statistically the leading cause of death for the age group of 1 to 45 years (according to 1996 data obtained here). I'd say that's a pretty significant loser in anyone's book.
The point is not that genetic engineering can help; we all know it's supposed to be a 21st Century panacea, and there's no denying it can be used positively. But science for science's sake or non-altruistic ends is by far the most dangerous. Spurred on by the war mongers, the lead researchers in the Manhattan Project could not guarantee that the chain reaction they were going to create wouldn't propogate through the atmosphere and immolate the entire Earth, so they just set off thier bomb and hoped for the best. Of course we all know the bomb worked as they had hoped, but how many close calls do we get until a real doomsday device or Ice-9 is unleashed unwittingly?
This is not a call to halt progress, but simply make it accountable before something terrible happens. If you can't see that you've missed Katz's point entirely.
Colin
Don't even go there. Sleepy Hollow was admittedly a really beautiful film (as all Burton films are) but the plot and laughable love interest thread lost the movie entirely for me. If you're all about how gorgeous and how much money you can spend on design, then go see Sleepy Hollow. If you like a film that's actually entertaining, thought provoking (the existential overtones to Woody's dillemia) and laugh out loud funny, then forget Burton's newest and see Toy Story 2.
Basically, technology is valueles by itself. "Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right" and this in and of itself should prove that there is more than simply the "dynamic of change" here. It's a feedback loop. Of course advances in technology affect our laws and our perceptions of the world, but the converse is also true. Technologies that are deemed more "important", either by the military or by whomever else has the resources to support research, will get more funding which will fuel growth and affect how that "value-free" technology will be harnessed. The web itself started at DARPA.
>>What would be the constituent parts of a technological philsophy? Morals, laws, human relations, captial relations? All of these are changed by technology.
Sure, but these shape our technology too, from theory to application, from basic research to IPO. Granted there's no way to predict when the major paradigm shifts will happen (for example from a Newtonian to an Einstinian paradigm), it's still possible to guide and predict technology's impact on society over the long haul in broad strokes. We need models like EPCOT to guide us just as we need fiction like "1984" and "Brave New World" to show us the dangers inherent in certain technologies.
Philosophy is not static, and neither is our technology. I'd argue that we can understand the process of technology well by studying the philosophy of science (for ex. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn) and we can guide our visions of the future we want collectively by understanding our past visions of what we think our future will/should be. While that varies greatly from culture to culture, and that's nowhere near as rigourous an outline for a philosophy as the Critique of Pure Reason ;) I still say it's pretty accurate and a better heuristic than "the only constant is change".
There's a lot of talk on this thread about how "WaReZ channels are okay because..." or "WareZ running hurts industry because..." when it's not that simple. Sure there are going to be some responsible folks who "demo" a game illegally via IRC and then go out and purchase it, just as there are those who don't. Would these people have been exposed to the game in the first place if it hadn't spread prolifically across the net? What is the net effect of sale losses due to small time pirating vs increased revenue due to free advertisement for the game spreading itself across the web? Is that measurable or quantifiable in any way?
There are so many ways in which this equation for "lost profits" due to piracy can be skewed or manipulated to support one side or the other. It's all just meaningless conjecture without hard data to back up these claims, and a decent way of interpreting that data, all personal anecdotes aside. Of course companies are going to due something about piracy if they percieve they're losing profits, and of course users are going to defend their rights to "free" software in whatever thinly veiled way they can.
There are pros and cons to piracy from both a coporate and an end user point of view, though coporations would probably deny this. Piracy spreads the particular software package's meme and brings it to the users consiousness as effectively as any other medium (print ad, TV ad, etc.) which can direct interest to the company and next time you're at the software store or shopping on-line you're more likely to buy that product. But piracy unchecked will undermine the software profit margin, prices will go up and more draconian software protection measures will be inplemented. A certain balance must be struck. Anyone who believes that piracy is all bad or the converse has a much too simple view of the dynamic here.
An interesting paper from August titled Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation by Seth Lloyd of MIT has been submitted to Nature. The abstract and article in TeX, PS and more can be found at http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9908043 .
It's a math heavy, but still accessible to the lay audience, and a fun read insomuch as Lloyd goes so far as to talk about outlandish theoreticals as black hole computers.