The "experts" have focused on squeezing blood out of a turnip or cracking the whip over the decades, but they don't know human nature nor do they show much evidence of catering to well-being (which would have a positive effect on productivity). Everyone has his own particular psychology and ecosystem. My office is like a sensory deprivation chamber -- no natural light, no noise (except the occasional cell block-like clang down the hallway when someone shuts his door. The sheer lack of stimulation in a small cube-shaped space -- as with ~200 pound mammals in old-fashioned zoos -- causes its own pacing back and forth. Evidently human experiments showed that after a certain time people actually begin to hallucinate, given lack of (diverse) sensory input. The senses (plural) evolved for millions of years to hunt for food and avoid danger. Real-time information processing, environmental interaction. Not sitting in a cell, staring at a screen.
Interesting in our modern society is that we have a plethora of terms describing short attention spans, but not nearly as many for a overly-long or poorly directed attention spans. These scenarios, which I've seen occur more frequently over the years, are llikewise responsible for loss of productivity. People focusing obsessively on minutiae, rabbit holes, constantly refactoring, not sticking to an 80/20 or 90/10 rule, etc. The modern office has no evolutionary basis in primate history.
Anyway, this guy summed it up tongue-in-cheek as ADD: Ambition Deficit Disorder: http://www.examiner.com/articl.... It turns out that there are not sufficient rewards in most large organization for hard work.
Well, at least government could more easily clamp down on white-collar crime, lending fraud, dirty CIA/drug banks, find missing e-mails, recover billions of disappeared money over the various wars that have been fought, excessive corporate influence, foreign influence, etc. Hahaha -- just kidding.
There was an episode in the second or third season in which a big-game hunter lands on the island and decides he wants to hunt humans instead. So he discretely interviews each of the castaways to determine which would present the greatest challenge for him. When he interviews the Professor (Jungian archetype for intelligence) he concludes that he'd have the professor bagged & mounted before the professor could figure out his next move.
The implication here is that there's an aspect of intelligence which suggests so-called intentionality, intelligence may be directed "toward" something, some problem, function, etc. Some problems are extremely complex and need some deliberation. Others are challenging in a different way, and need a snap/real-world decisions or cunning. Could be a language limitation also. We tend to confuse cleverness, wisdom, cunning, reptilian intelligence, memory, success, business or strategic/military knowledge, and learning ability all as "intelligence". I can't think of a single test which would gauge all of that.
One of the things that stinks about Slashdot is being labeled flamebait by people who have no idea who you are, what your credentials are, etc. I REALLY do have a triple-major under my belt, work in a Big-10 research library the past decade, took a grad course on the Philosophy of Mind, and hung out for a couple years on the AI-Philosophy Yahoo group (which included Marvin Minksy at the time). If I were judged by my peers, my comment here would not have been denigrated as the flamebait ramblings of someone who didn't have reasons for his statements.
And so I reiterate my commentary -- that the liberal arts, which typically includes philosophy, instructs primarily by deconstruction, not by construction. Its "job" or M.O. is not to build things or deliver objective/provable goods (e.g. inductive proof in math/csci). Anyone who thinks he can "prove" his theory definitively in philosophy would probably fail the course as an irrational polemic, whereas proof is the bread&butter of csci/math. So I mainly see philosophy as dragging CSci down into a pit of the uncomputable in which the solution isn't the point of the exercise at all.
What problems has philosophy "solved"? Is that the point of philosophy? I don't think so.
I have a BS in CSci, a BA in the liberal arts, and have taken a few philosophy courses.
I've become much more jaded about philosophy because it began to dawn on me after taking a grad course in philosophy that engineering/IT is about SOLVING general computational problems. We're looking for relationships between numbers, values, methods of computation, etc. which have a general purpose utility. In most cases, these pipes/algorithms are designed to be somewhat blind to the content going through them. It's a quest to solve general problems.
Philosophy, on the other hand, often "forgets" that its problems are often computational/logic, perhaps even totally unrelated to the subject being treated -- rather, there is a more general and underlying logical problem that gives rise to what appears to be a problem in ethics, a paradox in something or the other. Philosophers, in my experience, can get mired in a specific subject domain, when the problem is actually a general logic issue. I could provide many examples from the philosophy of mind, but I don't want to distract from this basic distinction between what computer science/algorithmics tends to be about -- and how philosophers tend to get mired in circular/uncomputable particulars.
The last problem with philosophy is that, I think, it doesn't actually WANT to solve problems -- lest it put itself and its faculty out of business as a relic of a previous age.
Well, maybe libraries need to build a string of tiny booths outdoors, each with a little consecutively numbered sign: Library 0, Library 1...Library N and one terminal, comfortable chair and window in each of them. It would seem to meet the letter of the agreement.;-)
Not really, it's arguably a regressive/recursive problem. Even if the encryption is 100%, the OS could have a back-door and the private key might leak out. There are potential weaknesses at all levels on the layered network model (for instance, the OSI model). I spent some time on this problem myself, designing a concept in which the machines would:
(a) print out a receipt to the voter, containing the vote itself -- as well as a unique session/hash number.
(b) print the same data on an internal paper-based receipt which is visible through a window (the voter could visually inspect it, and match it with his print-out or complain to the election judge immediately that there was a mismatch). This internal copy/spool would be retained for manual recounts.
(c) retain it electronically.
But in the end you have a system which is a LOT more complicated and expensive than an ordinary paper-based system, and therefore more easily corrupted in the end anyway.
You also have a system which probably can't handle write-ins, without complex handwriting analysis, it would be implemented by a vendor with heavy political connections to the party in charge (basically a truism), etc.
I genuinely believe it to be a regressive/recursive human/machine problem.
Let me add -- I think it was tough times that helped instantiate the free/open source movement in the first place. The off-shoring of good engineering/IT jobs abroad really began in earnest in the 80's, the dotcom bust of the 90's, etc. People's real earnings began to decline, price of housing shot up through the roof. Why pay $150-500 for a crippled operating system or bloated word processor if a free one became available? I predict tough times to spark a huge interest in gnu/linux. If people have to chose between upgrading their computer to Vista or making the next car payment, the choice is clear.
On the contrary, out-of-work software engineers will have some spare time on their hands. CSci grads facing a tough job market will be interested in building a portfolio for their first job interviews. What better way than to start or participate in an open source effort?
It's a neighborly thing to do. When times are tough, generosity is on the rise -- rather than decline. We've helped our neighbors with various things and vice-versa.
I disagree strongly -- the jury is still out on whether a "nanny state", "nanny OS", or "nanny ap" is ultimately helpful, or whether it just encourages user foolishness on the part of the masses, while simultaneously denting the liberty of the more advanced user.
php.net offers an excellent combination: formal function definitions, real-life user examples and comments, and cross-references to related functions. For all of Sun's over-engineering with Java, the javadocs are crap in comparison. As if they were written by a machine, very little in the way of example/commentary. (For what it's worth, I've been a professional PHP programmer for the past 8 years in a Big-10 research environment, and also do some Java as well.)
Though we all have different learning styles, I find that most people learn by example. Java's docs are mainly "preaching to the choir", poor in comparison to PHP's.
Bush and "right-wing" radio did a 180 cartwheel when Sarkozy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Sarkozy) got into power there. Gone was all of the anti-French diatribe, those liberty fries (as opposed to French Fries), those scoundrels who wouldn't help us "liberate" Kuwait back to its rightful monarchical ruler, etc. Sarkozy gives me the willies. But I agree with other posters here, if there is any country whose people will cause a repeat of the late 18th century popular revolutions, government reforms, and restoration of civil liberties it will be the French.
Interesting theories, but in my years as an undergrad in Anthropology (with some graduate/field school in archaeology) no single theory lept forward to explain the demise of Neanderthals.
In terms of this particular post, you'd need to rephrase some of your speculations into testable (scientific) hypotheses. We don't have terribly many skeletons of Neanderthals to work with, but you'd expect to find a statistically significant number of deaths due to physical trauma. You also might expect to find evidence on the Homo sapiens side as well. As I recall from my own studies, a unique warfare "toolkit" doesn't really appear in the archaeological record, artwork, etc. until long after the demise of Neanderthals. It's possible (more speculation) that they used their regular hunting weapons against one another, but there's no direct evidence of widespread hostilities.
It's also simplistic (19th century thinking) pop-framework to view everything in terms of competition, survival of the fittest, etc. That framework makes most sense in situations of higher population, population concentration, resource scarcity, modern market economics, etc. By any measure, world human (and Neanderthal) population was quite low at the time of the Neanderthals. Resources would have been wildly abundant by modern standards. If I were to speculate, or build a hypothesis, I would look at disease, interbreeding, and ultimately not draw any tight conclusions until we had a much larger number of specimens to examine. I forget the details (my undergrad days were 10-15 years ago), but as I recall the number of distinct individuals may only be ~200 or so. It's hard to say how representative that set may be.
I'm the opposite as well -- I find myself far more naturally productive at home in general. Working on house/yard/garden projects, etc. when I get into my gray windowless cubicle I'm about as productive as a prison inmate.
Well, we have given it up. Most real equity, despite 500 years of colonization in North America, probably belongs to the government or banks (foreign and domestic). I'm hoping that Citibank, Rothschilds, JP Morgan, etc. responsible for the housing bubble in most western countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_bubble) will go over to India, shoot their real estate into the stratosphere so that a programmer over there needs to spend $275K for that starter home, and the off-shoring game will be over. But there's one problem with my theory. After India, I suspect Africa will be the next market for cheap programmers...
Re:The keys to keeping your job in the global econ
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My Job Went To India
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That's interesting -- actually advocating a spiral to the bottom. I'd frankly rather get the pink slip, change careers into something that makes better cash and tell my supervisor what he can do with a substandard wage.
That doesn't mean much to us. Tell us what it costs to own a home in various parts of India. Without the income:cost-of-living ratio, the one figure is basically worthless.
The crux of the problem is that Fortune-500's can lower their greatest expenses: dodge corporate income taxes and hire developing world/sweatshop labor. But none of us can offshore OUR single greatest expense: housing. With the real estate bubble still going on, those of us trapped in the US will need to (a) pay a First World real estate bill (including leasing business space, etc. if you're self-employed) and (b) compete with the big companies that can take advantage of Free Trade, off-shoring, etc. to minimize their costs.
Bottom-line, I'd go self-employed tomorrow if I felt I could make ends meet. This isn't just an IT problem. Stripmalls have been built within 10 minutes of my home, 2-3 years ago -- and have been vacant ever since. The owners of the property, clearly, can afford to sit on it forever. They don't need to lower their lease in order to get small business tenants. They are part of a non-local economy, probably a large development/holding corporation (possibly even foreign). I heard from a neighbor that in addition to business leasing costs, some of the owners also demand a percentage of profits. There's just no competing sometimes -- the market isn't exactly free (sometimes it's a racket).
Although I've been a programmer (B.S. CSci) for more than a decade, I've had second thoughts about this industry. If I should lose my job, I'd probably change careers altogether. Something that can't be easily off-shored.
The current RFC's for e-mail, also, don't specify any particular encryption as e-mail goes from hop-to-hop. I've found it somewhat asymmetrical that we demand privacy in our bricks&mortar mailboxes, but not in our e-mail. If I walk over to my neighbor's mailbox and start reading, put in some of my own literature (without a postage stamp), etc. I'm breaking some serious crimes. Credit card companies, utilities, etc. also send private billing, financial, etc. material to me and there's an expectation of privacy in my mailbox. Why the total lack of the same expectation with e-mail? It may well take us in the X- or Y-Gen to reach higher position in government, policy, etc. to make that point. Commerce itself can't be well-suited to basically public or sniffable e-mail.
I monkeyed around with some long-standing applications just this week (after a several year hiatus), gnupg, gpg4win, and the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird. This stuff should really be "standard equipment" on everyone's desktop at this point. My problem is that my stodgy Boomer relatives can't overcome the barriers in setting this stuff up, and most other people just don't care. There's a sort of digital nudist culture out there, showing very little interest in a little privacy.
I'm a fan of YouTube (who isn't), but hadn't logged into my account for awhile and forgot the password when I tried commenting on a video. I had a reminder sent to my comcast e-mail account a day or two ago -- and it's been about 36 hours, and it never arrived! Assuming something was hosed with my YouTube account, I decided to create a new account, still no activation e-mail sent.
I then changed my YouTube preferences to my GMail account, and the confirmation e-mail arrived within like 2 minutes. No surprise, since Google owns both GMail and YouTube. But my curiosity was now aroused, so I changed the e-mail preferences on YouTube to my work account (I'm an open source programmer at a Big-10 university). Again, the YouTube confirmation came within like 2 minutes or so.
I logged into comcast.net under my main subscriber e-mail account today -- and deactivated ALL spam/filtering on that account. I then went back to YouTube and switched preferences back to my comcast account. It's been about 4 hours and, of course, there's been no e-mail from YouTube.
Anyone else notice this oddness between YouTube / Comcast? It irked me enough to create a little web site of it this afternoon, and post it on my blog as well (http://paulbramscher.blogspot.com/).
I went to my local CompUSA yesterday here in Minnesota. We were hammered with a blizzard this week, but I had to venture out to get new tires put on my Jeep. This didn't stop some (crazy?) guys holding CompUSA Closing: up to 20% off! signs in the tall snow banks. An employee inside told me they were notified on Feb. 28th.
Inside the store, I noticed that all sales were final. But as others here have posted, even with the discount (most items seemed only 10% discounted, perhaps this figure will climb as they get more eager to clear things out) the prices were still simply not competitive. For instance, I've had my eye on a 10 MP camera, the Canon A640. Via Amazon you can get them like ~$300 USD. They are $399 at CompUSA. Why spend $100 more?
And just like the poster above me here, there are the other Big Boxes within 5-10 minutes: Circuit City, Best Buy, Target, etc. Perhaps the Big Box era itself may begin waning. They are a sprawling blight and somewhat of an eyesore on our land. Would be awesome if we could tear most of them down, reconvert the parking lots back to native prairie and nature parks.
I think the Amazon model not only can show great promise for competition (which will benefit consumers, by keeping prices low), obvious convenience, but also (hopefully) give us an opportunity to rethink metastasized and redundant cookie-cutter sprawl. Almost any commodity is simply a click away today.
I've worked IT at a Big-10 research library the past 7 years and GPL'd SourceForge project: http://libdata.sourceforge.net/. There's an excellent web site, dedicated to evangelizing open source software in libraries: http://oss4lib.org/. One progressive company that jumps to my mind in particular has bridged the open source paradigm with the basic necessity of earning an income. My hat goes off to these guys hailing from Denmark: http://www.indexdata.dk/.
That said, libraries exist mainly as government-funded entities here in the US. And, when you think about it, government agencies by-and-large don't actually produce things themselves -- they primarily exist as subsidizing entities: they have a mission and a budget, and "contract out" to the private sector, whether it's building spaceships, tanks, spying on would-be terrorists (or you and me), or stocking libraries.
One of many problems that libraries are encountering, I think, is that open source technologies -- and information outlets -- sort of violate the long-standing tradition of government=subsidizer. There have been some attempts (R-Santorum, as I recall) who tried to limit NOAA from offering any weather service that competed with the private sector (Google the specifics). I wonder if there's some political pushing that wants to prevent libraries from treading on their vendors' bandwagons also. This is very problematic, since we're in a post-industrial era, and practically any service you offer potentially treads on someone else's interest in offering the same service -- but with a price tag.
I'm now middle-age, and worked in public libraries 11 years before my current gig at a large university. I've seen (and assisted) libraries go from card catalog to fully automated, to (slowly but surely) private database subsidizers. It's the Y and Z generations that will need to really hammer this one out. Your chief challenge will be to change the nonsense model that requires tax/tuition-funded faculty to publish in closed venues, relinquish many of their rights, and the citizens/students are forced to buy back the same rights. It's dead model. The etymology of "publish" means "to make public". Today's dynamic is quite the reverse, sort of the anti-publishing industry, setting up protected access barriers more so than conquering them. Ponder this carefully.
The other thing to keep in mind is that academic is "one of the last great medieval institutions" as an IT consultant I once worked with at the University termed it. I worry that they are antagonistic toward sources like the Wikipedia for all the wrong reasons. If you think about it carefully, professors grade papers based on (a) the accuracy of the information the student presents and (b) how well the student properly cited his/her sources. If the information was correct, why should it matter whether it was his astrophysicist neighbor (personal communications are citable sources), textbook A, research paper B, a ridiculously expensive database that the university had to subscribe to, or some free source of information?
I think I know the answer, but simply knowing it won't help matters at all. It'll entail a change of guard -- so it's up to the under-40 crowd to figure this one out, and when they become the next generation of library managers, university administrators, and IT directors suggesting that libraries might become Wikipedia mirrors (hint, hint) and contributors, things may then begin to iron out on their own.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The "experts" have focused on squeezing blood out of a turnip or cracking the whip over the decades, but they don't know human nature nor do they show much evidence of catering to well-being (which would have a positive effect on productivity). Everyone has his own particular psychology and ecosystem. My office is like a sensory deprivation chamber -- no natural light, no noise (except the occasional cell block-like clang down the hallway when someone shuts his door. The sheer lack of stimulation in a small cube-shaped space -- as with ~200 pound mammals in old-fashioned zoos -- causes its own pacing back and forth. Evidently human experiments showed that after a certain time people actually begin to hallucinate, given lack of (diverse) sensory input. The senses (plural) evolved for millions of years to hunt for food and avoid danger. Real-time information processing, environmental interaction. Not sitting in a cell, staring at a screen.
Interesting in our modern society is that we have a plethora of terms describing short attention spans, but not nearly as many for a overly-long or poorly directed attention spans. These scenarios, which I've seen occur more frequently over the years, are llikewise responsible for loss of productivity. People focusing obsessively on minutiae, rabbit holes, constantly refactoring, not sticking to an 80/20 or 90/10 rule, etc. The modern office has no evolutionary basis in primate history.
Anyway, this guy summed it up tongue-in-cheek as ADD: Ambition Deficit Disorder: http://www.examiner.com/articl.... It turns out that there are not sufficient rewards in most large organization for hard work.
Well, at least government could more easily clamp down on white-collar crime, lending fraud, dirty CIA/drug banks, find missing e-mails, recover billions of disappeared money over the various wars that have been fought, excessive corporate influence, foreign influence, etc. Hahaha -- just kidding.
There was an episode in the second or third season in which a big-game hunter lands on the island and decides he wants to hunt humans instead. So he discretely interviews each of the castaways to determine which would present the greatest challenge for him. When he interviews the Professor (Jungian archetype for intelligence) he concludes that he'd have the professor bagged & mounted before the professor could figure out his next move. The implication here is that there's an aspect of intelligence which suggests so-called intentionality, intelligence may be directed "toward" something, some problem, function, etc. Some problems are extremely complex and need some deliberation. Others are challenging in a different way, and need a snap/real-world decisions or cunning. Could be a language limitation also. We tend to confuse cleverness, wisdom, cunning, reptilian intelligence, memory, success, business or strategic/military knowledge, and learning ability all as "intelligence". I can't think of a single test which would gauge all of that.
One of the things that stinks about Slashdot is being labeled flamebait by people who have no idea who you are, what your credentials are, etc. I REALLY do have a triple-major under my belt, work in a Big-10 research library the past decade, took a grad course on the Philosophy of Mind, and hung out for a couple years on the AI-Philosophy Yahoo group (which included Marvin Minksy at the time). If I were judged by my peers, my comment here would not have been denigrated as the flamebait ramblings of someone who didn't have reasons for his statements.
And so I reiterate my commentary -- that the liberal arts, which typically includes philosophy, instructs primarily by deconstruction, not by construction. Its "job" or M.O. is not to build things or deliver objective/provable goods (e.g. inductive proof in math/csci). Anyone who thinks he can "prove" his theory definitively in philosophy would probably fail the course as an irrational polemic, whereas proof is the bread&butter of csci/math. So I mainly see philosophy as dragging CSci down into a pit of the uncomputable in which the solution isn't the point of the exercise at all.
What problems has philosophy "solved"? Is that the point of philosophy? I don't think so.
I have a BS in CSci, a BA in the liberal arts, and have taken a few philosophy courses.
I've become much more jaded about philosophy because it began to dawn on me after taking a grad course in philosophy that engineering/IT is about SOLVING general computational problems. We're looking for relationships between numbers, values, methods of computation, etc. which have a general purpose utility. In most cases, these pipes/algorithms are designed to be somewhat blind to the content going through them. It's a quest to solve general problems.
Philosophy, on the other hand, often "forgets" that its problems are often computational/logic, perhaps even totally unrelated to the subject being treated -- rather, there is a more general and underlying logical problem that gives rise to what appears to be a problem in ethics, a paradox in something or the other. Philosophers, in my experience, can get mired in a specific subject domain, when the problem is actually a general logic issue. I could provide many examples from the philosophy of mind, but I don't want to distract from this basic distinction between what computer science/algorithmics tends to be about -- and how philosophers tend to get mired in circular/uncomputable particulars. The last problem with philosophy is that, I think, it doesn't actually WANT to solve problems -- lest it put itself and its faculty out of business as a relic of a previous age.
Well, maybe libraries need to build a string of tiny booths outdoors, each with a little consecutively numbered sign: Library 0, Library 1...Library N and one terminal, comfortable chair and window in each of them. It would seem to meet the letter of the agreement. ;-)
Not really, it's arguably a regressive/recursive problem. Even if the encryption is 100%, the OS could have a back-door and the private key might leak out. There are potential weaknesses at all levels on the layered network model (for instance, the OSI model). I spent some time on this problem myself, designing a concept in which the machines would: (a) print out a receipt to the voter, containing the vote itself -- as well as a unique session/hash number. (b) print the same data on an internal paper-based receipt which is visible through a window (the voter could visually inspect it, and match it with his print-out or complain to the election judge immediately that there was a mismatch). This internal copy/spool would be retained for manual recounts. (c) retain it electronically. But in the end you have a system which is a LOT more complicated and expensive than an ordinary paper-based system, and therefore more easily corrupted in the end anyway. You also have a system which probably can't handle write-ins, without complex handwriting analysis, it would be implemented by a vendor with heavy political connections to the party in charge (basically a truism), etc. I genuinely believe it to be a regressive/recursive human/machine problem.
Let me add -- I think it was tough times that helped instantiate the free/open source movement in the first place. The off-shoring of good engineering/IT jobs abroad really began in earnest in the 80's, the dotcom bust of the 90's, etc. People's real earnings began to decline, price of housing shot up through the roof. Why pay $150-500 for a crippled operating system or bloated word processor if a free one became available? I predict tough times to spark a huge interest in gnu/linux. If people have to chose between upgrading their computer to Vista or making the next car payment, the choice is clear.
On the contrary, out-of-work software engineers will have some spare time on their hands. CSci grads facing a tough job market will be interested in building a portfolio for their first job interviews. What better way than to start or participate in an open source effort? It's a neighborly thing to do. When times are tough, generosity is on the rise -- rather than decline. We've helped our neighbors with various things and vice-versa.
I disagree strongly -- the jury is still out on whether a "nanny state", "nanny OS", or "nanny ap" is ultimately helpful, or whether it just encourages user foolishness on the part of the masses, while simultaneously denting the liberty of the more advanced user.
php.net offers an excellent combination: formal function definitions, real-life user examples and comments, and cross-references to related functions. For all of Sun's over-engineering with Java, the javadocs are crap in comparison. As if they were written by a machine, very little in the way of example/commentary. (For what it's worth, I've been a professional PHP programmer for the past 8 years in a Big-10 research environment, and also do some Java as well.) Though we all have different learning styles, I find that most people learn by example. Java's docs are mainly "preaching to the choir", poor in comparison to PHP's.
Is it headed our way? If so, we'll finally be able to put those Y2K generators to good use.
Bush and "right-wing" radio did a 180 cartwheel when Sarkozy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Sarkozy) got into power there. Gone was all of the anti-French diatribe, those liberty fries (as opposed to French Fries), those scoundrels who wouldn't help us "liberate" Kuwait back to its rightful monarchical ruler, etc. Sarkozy gives me the willies. But I agree with other posters here, if there is any country whose people will cause a repeat of the late 18th century popular revolutions, government reforms, and restoration of civil liberties it will be the French.
Interesting theories, but in my years as an undergrad in Anthropology (with some graduate/field school in archaeology) no single theory lept forward to explain the demise of Neanderthals. In terms of this particular post, you'd need to rephrase some of your speculations into testable (scientific) hypotheses. We don't have terribly many skeletons of Neanderthals to work with, but you'd expect to find a statistically significant number of deaths due to physical trauma. You also might expect to find evidence on the Homo sapiens side as well. As I recall from my own studies, a unique warfare "toolkit" doesn't really appear in the archaeological record, artwork, etc. until long after the demise of Neanderthals. It's possible (more speculation) that they used their regular hunting weapons against one another, but there's no direct evidence of widespread hostilities. It's also simplistic (19th century thinking) pop-framework to view everything in terms of competition, survival of the fittest, etc. That framework makes most sense in situations of higher population, population concentration, resource scarcity, modern market economics, etc. By any measure, world human (and Neanderthal) population was quite low at the time of the Neanderthals. Resources would have been wildly abundant by modern standards. If I were to speculate, or build a hypothesis, I would look at disease, interbreeding, and ultimately not draw any tight conclusions until we had a much larger number of specimens to examine. I forget the details (my undergrad days were 10-15 years ago), but as I recall the number of distinct individuals may only be ~200 or so. It's hard to say how representative that set may be.
I'm the opposite as well -- I find myself far more naturally productive at home in general. Working on house/yard/garden projects, etc. when I get into my gray windowless cubicle I'm about as productive as a prison inmate.
Well, we have given it up. Most real equity, despite 500 years of colonization in North America, probably belongs to the government or banks (foreign and domestic). I'm hoping that Citibank, Rothschilds, JP Morgan, etc. responsible for the housing bubble in most western countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_bubble) will go over to India, shoot their real estate into the stratosphere so that a programmer over there needs to spend $275K for that starter home, and the off-shoring game will be over. But there's one problem with my theory. After India, I suspect Africa will be the next market for cheap programmers...
That's interesting -- actually advocating a spiral to the bottom. I'd frankly rather get the pink slip, change careers into something that makes better cash and tell my supervisor what he can do with a substandard wage.
That doesn't mean much to us. Tell us what it costs to own a home in various parts of India. Without the income:cost-of-living ratio, the one figure is basically worthless.
The crux of the problem is that Fortune-500's can lower their greatest expenses: dodge corporate income taxes and hire developing world/sweatshop labor. But none of us can offshore OUR single greatest expense: housing. With the real estate bubble still going on, those of us trapped in the US will need to (a) pay a First World real estate bill (including leasing business space, etc. if you're self-employed) and (b) compete with the big companies that can take advantage of Free Trade, off-shoring, etc. to minimize their costs. Bottom-line, I'd go self-employed tomorrow if I felt I could make ends meet. This isn't just an IT problem. Stripmalls have been built within 10 minutes of my home, 2-3 years ago -- and have been vacant ever since. The owners of the property, clearly, can afford to sit on it forever. They don't need to lower their lease in order to get small business tenants. They are part of a non-local economy, probably a large development/holding corporation (possibly even foreign). I heard from a neighbor that in addition to business leasing costs, some of the owners also demand a percentage of profits. There's just no competing sometimes -- the market isn't exactly free (sometimes it's a racket). Although I've been a programmer (B.S. CSci) for more than a decade, I've had second thoughts about this industry. If I should lose my job, I'd probably change careers altogether. Something that can't be easily off-shored.
The current RFC's for e-mail, also, don't specify any particular encryption as e-mail goes from hop-to-hop. I've found it somewhat asymmetrical that we demand privacy in our bricks&mortar mailboxes, but not in our e-mail. If I walk over to my neighbor's mailbox and start reading, put in some of my own literature (without a postage stamp), etc. I'm breaking some serious crimes. Credit card companies, utilities, etc. also send private billing, financial, etc. material to me and there's an expectation of privacy in my mailbox. Why the total lack of the same expectation with e-mail? It may well take us in the X- or Y-Gen to reach higher position in government, policy, etc. to make that point. Commerce itself can't be well-suited to basically public or sniffable e-mail.
I monkeyed around with some long-standing applications just this week (after a several year hiatus), gnupg, gpg4win, and the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird. This stuff should really be "standard equipment" on everyone's desktop at this point. My problem is that my stodgy Boomer relatives can't overcome the barriers in setting this stuff up, and most other people just don't care. There's a sort of digital nudist culture out there, showing very little interest in a little privacy.
I'm a fan of YouTube (who isn't), but hadn't logged into my account for awhile and forgot the password when I tried commenting on a video. I had a reminder sent to my comcast e-mail account a day or two ago -- and it's been about 36 hours, and it never arrived! Assuming something was hosed with my YouTube account, I decided to create a new account, still no activation e-mail sent.
I then changed my YouTube preferences to my GMail account, and the confirmation e-mail arrived within like 2 minutes. No surprise, since Google owns both GMail and YouTube. But my curiosity was now aroused, so I changed the e-mail preferences on YouTube to my work account (I'm an open source programmer at a Big-10 university). Again, the YouTube confirmation came within like 2 minutes or so.
I logged into comcast.net under my main subscriber e-mail account today -- and deactivated ALL spam/filtering on that account. I then went back to YouTube and switched preferences back to my comcast account. It's been about 4 hours and, of course, there's been no e-mail from YouTube.
Anyone else notice this oddness between YouTube / Comcast? It irked me enough to create a little web site of it this afternoon, and post it on my blog as well (http://paulbramscher.blogspot.com/).
I went to my local CompUSA yesterday here in Minnesota. We were hammered with a blizzard this week, but I had to venture out to get new tires put on my Jeep. This didn't stop some (crazy?) guys holding CompUSA Closing: up to 20% off! signs in the tall snow banks. An employee inside told me they were notified on Feb. 28th.
Inside the store, I noticed that all sales were final. But as others here have posted, even with the discount (most items seemed only 10% discounted, perhaps this figure will climb as they get more eager to clear things out) the prices were still simply not competitive. For instance, I've had my eye on a 10 MP camera, the Canon A640. Via Amazon you can get them like ~$300 USD. They are $399 at CompUSA. Why spend $100 more?
And just like the poster above me here, there are the other Big Boxes within 5-10 minutes: Circuit City, Best Buy, Target, etc. Perhaps the Big Box era itself may begin waning. They are a sprawling blight and somewhat of an eyesore on our land. Would be awesome if we could tear most of them down, reconvert the parking lots back to native prairie and nature parks.
I think the Amazon model not only can show great promise for competition (which will benefit consumers, by keeping prices low), obvious convenience, but also (hopefully) give us an opportunity to rethink metastasized and redundant cookie-cutter sprawl. Almost any commodity is simply a click away today.
I've worked IT at a Big-10 research library the past 7 years and GPL'd SourceForge project: http://libdata.sourceforge.net/. There's an excellent web site, dedicated to evangelizing open source software in libraries: http://oss4lib.org/. One progressive company that jumps to my mind in particular has bridged the open source paradigm with the basic necessity of earning an income. My hat goes off to these guys hailing from Denmark: http://www.indexdata.dk/.
:-)
That said, libraries exist mainly as government-funded entities here in the US. And, when you think about it, government agencies by-and-large don't actually produce things themselves -- they primarily exist as subsidizing entities: they have a mission and a budget, and "contract out" to the private sector, whether it's building spaceships, tanks, spying on would-be terrorists (or you and me), or stocking libraries.
One of many problems that libraries are encountering, I think, is that open source technologies -- and information outlets -- sort of violate the long-standing tradition of government=subsidizer. There have been some attempts (R-Santorum, as I recall) who tried to limit NOAA from offering any weather service that competed with the private sector (Google the specifics). I wonder if there's some political pushing that wants to prevent libraries from treading on their vendors' bandwagons also. This is very problematic, since we're in a post-industrial era, and practically any service you offer potentially treads on someone else's interest in offering the same service -- but with a price tag.
I'm now middle-age, and worked in public libraries 11 years before my current gig at a large university. I've seen (and assisted) libraries go from card catalog to fully automated, to (slowly but surely) private database subsidizers. It's the Y and Z generations that will need to really hammer this one out. Your chief challenge will be to change the nonsense model that requires tax/tuition-funded faculty to publish in closed venues, relinquish many of their rights, and the citizens/students are forced to buy back the same rights. It's dead model. The etymology of "publish" means "to make public". Today's dynamic is quite the reverse, sort of the anti-publishing industry, setting up protected access barriers more so than conquering them. Ponder this carefully.
The other thing to keep in mind is that academic is "one of the last great medieval institutions" as an IT consultant I once worked with at the University termed it. I worry that they are antagonistic toward sources like the Wikipedia for all the wrong reasons. If you think about it carefully, professors grade papers based on (a) the accuracy of the information the student presents and (b) how well the student properly cited his/her sources. If the information was correct, why should it matter whether it was his astrophysicist neighbor (personal communications are citable sources), textbook A, research paper B, a ridiculously expensive database that the university had to subscribe to, or some free source of information?
I think I know the answer, but simply knowing it won't help matters at all. It'll entail a change of guard -- so it's up to the under-40 crowd to figure this one out, and when they become the next generation of library managers, university administrators, and IT directors suggesting that libraries might become Wikipedia mirrors (hint, hint) and contributors, things may then begin to iron out on their own.