Exactly. I'm not even sure if I'd agree with author's goal in an idea world.
What does he want, some independent body of academics, bureaucrats, public input, commercial bodies... setting up the HTML spec without any idea of how it will be implemented, used...
Oh no... as far as I'm concerned, you want to determine the fate of HTML, you build a browser (or some connected product) and join the committee. Fight it out.
Wishing people to be rational, scientific people makes as much sense as wishing people to be kind, generous, caring people.
Do you wish to have some kind of scientific authority governing society. Of course it could not be elected as that just brings back these irrational non-scientific people. So it is an unelected scientific council in charge of society.
As we all to 'trust' these experts with power just because they claim to be with science. Are we to trust them to be uncorruptable? You know how well it works out when you give a group of people power of society. The Catholic church was once trusted as the bastion of morality. Meanwhile, they're doing the complete opposite of morality. Some molesting young children. Many covering it all up.
It is 'impossible' to have a group of people in power who actually adhere to their chosen creed. Do I trust scientists with power... absolutely not... and anyone who actually looks at history and empirical evidence would not want any scientist in power either. They will not adhere to the creed they claim. Ultimately, power is enforced by the police, army, and the tax man.
You just need to look at the whole ethanol debacle in the US. All that wasted money just because people wanted a 'green' policy and government's wanted votes. Politics is inherently corrupting. Mixing science with politics is not going to purify science. Politics will corrupt science.
Also, most of the decisions governing society are not hard cold science... like the force of gravity. They are issues of social and economic 'sciences' which do not have the purity of science. They are fundamentally impossible to be sciences... due to their non-repeatability. Go back to your basic elementary school science class and the basic ingredient to the scientific method is repeatability. How do you repeat the great depression to see what variables caused it... how do you repeat it to see what solutions fixed it... how do you quantify thing to apply them today when the conditions have changed?
Most decisions to be made in a society are not that of math, science, or physics. By in large, those decisions are handled by scientists and engineers and people in the know anyways. The rare time it intersects regular life (global warming...), it is already outside the realm of pure science. The debate about global warming is rarely about the science of it... but on what we should do about it... even though people fight about the science... it is not really about the science. It is about taxation, government power, economics... Just because global warming exists doesn't mean it should be taxed, governments should have more power, or our economies should be transformed or sacrificed.
Even if theoretically you could have experts in taxation, government power, economics... the value you placed on each of those fields is a value judgment unto itself.
They are of values. Before you can apply the scientific method to 'solve' a problem... you first need to decide on your goal. That goal is your value system.
Is your goal to extend life as much as possible? Is your goal to have a good family life? Is your goal to have fun? Is your goal to be spiritual? Is you goal to advance science as much possible?
And advancing science as much as possible is a value... no different from anything else. There are loads of people who just want to live their life, have some kids, and pass on. They have as much say in anything as you.
And so back to the original question... of what is the alternative? Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Since you are a scientifically minded person and are no doubt loving of empirical evidence... find me a group of unelected people who have ruled without abusing their power for more than few generations.
There is no alternative beyond creating a dictatorship... which I would say is worse than dealing with a democracy.
Because society always has people who want to live off the wealth generated by others... regardless of their political affiliation. Just like Communist propaganda tried to motivate its workers. Do you think anyone on the left actually values engineers? Or do they just value the wealth the engineers produce that they can spend on their allies? Hint... find me a state that gives good labor laws for engineers... you won't find it. We're all exempt. So we can work our asses off... so some leftest public sector union can live off our wealth and work 9-5 with a pension...
I'm pretty sure you'd rather work for a US company as an engineer than a Chinese one.
And of course, they complain when others aren't working so hard to build all the wealth.
In most of the Western world, we have huge swaths of people who are living off past wealth (teachers, police officers, finance people, bureaucrats, service workers...). These are people who exist in pretty much every country. Yet their standard of living is much higher in America and other western countries... and its not because of some innate western right to a higher standard of living. It's because the productive workers produce things other people value... which pays for it all.
What most of the Western world is experiencing... and the reason why the whole western world is in so much debt... is those who live off the wealth are earning more than their share relative to those who produce it. So of course... who would want to produce it?
I live in Canada... and everytime I turn on the news... I see bureaucrats... talking about how Canadian private sector needs to be more innovative and compete globally. We're not doing our job. Oh, I do apologize... for not creating enough wealth to pay for your lifestyle. It's hard to compete when I've had engineers leave their jobs to become teachers because it pays better and with a pension...
Then of course the only solution these idiots come up with... is to make it worse for us producers. Let's pay teacher's more... so we can make another profession more attractive than engineering. Let's sign more free trade agreements to force Canadian industry to compete and innovate... sure... let's take a country like Canada where the our labor system is inverted where our top people want to go into public sector, finance... and pit them against India/China where the best people become engineers and they are poor enough to still have a ridiculous work ethic... and see who wins. It's not that we don't have smart western people... they just don't want to do the work because better options exist. Let's have government innovation funds to put more finance people in charge of startups instead of developing real long term industries...
But anyways... it's just a realignment happening. Just be smart about it. Producers will never be part of the ruling class. I've realized... I was stupid for not realizing this. Join the ruling class... the public sector unions, finance people, protected professions... and ride the country as it goes down.
Age doesn't matter. Experience matters Skill matters the most.
One of the worst things you can do is be paid more than you're worth... you're the first to do when the job cuts come. It is one of the reasons software developers can climb the wage ladder very quickly... but they also top out quickly. It's a very good thing. Raises just based on seniority would not be in the best interest of older workers... as management would ask... why should we pay this senior person such a high salary, when a lesser experienced person could be up to speed in a about a year.
While I was hired with a new grad salary... I quickly rose to the the senior developer pay level. You won't find that in many industries. The reality is I produce and contribute just as much if not more than people with 20 years experience. So I should be paid the same.
Now I don't know this particular new grad. Maybe he is a really bright person. Maybe this senior developer is not really that talented.
We really don't know. Only the manager can judge... and ultimately, they have to be responsible such things. Maybe the manager is taking a gamble on this kid. Who knows... if he flops, one would hope the manager down grades them (that rarely happens though)
It's amazing to see people continuously insult those who are successful. As if their success is magical. Maybe there is something to Zuckerberg's way to run a company? Maybe the Steve Jobs perfectionist kingdom has something to do with Apple's success.
I don't work inside facebook... but maybe the way it is run does force people who have influence to have good relationships with engineers. I could easily write a snarky comment about ways of management where there is a disconnect between engineers and product management.
Quite frankly... if you can't get an engineer to not say your idea is 'stupid'... maybe it is you who doesn't have the ability to influence people. That is a skill needed in any kind of organization. Maybe Zukerberg believes those are the people... the ones who can build conses and influence... who are the ones who should rise up. Sounds perfectly plausible to me.
Seriously... evil? Ooooh... his company bundled software and used aggressive sales techniques and contracts.
It might be against the law. But it's not evil... nor do I think morally wrong in of itself. Not everything illegal is evil. not everything good is legal or mandated.
1. Property taxes drive business to the suburbs and beyond... thus increasing the need for the car. Most traffic is cause by commercial sprawl, not residential sprawl. It is very easy to get people on a train to a central location. I can't really emphasize this one more. I live in Toronto... where Toronto kept its commercial property taxes higher than residential ones for years. This led to jobs bleeding to the burbs. Our whole transit system is 'downtown Toronto' oriented... yet that's not where increasing numbers of people need to go for their jobs. So we have traffic in the reverse direction (from downtown to the burbs) that is just as bad as into downtown.
2. Transit users never want to pay for transit. Car drivers have traditionally paid for the use of the car by gas taxes. Gas taxes which for years have not gone into roads. Yet transit users never want to pay the cost of transit... and the appropriate expansion. This has led to an underinvestment in transit in many areas... combined with the general association big union with transit... means costs go up... while fares don't go up...
3. High immigration rates without corresponding increase in transit only increases problems. If high rates of immigration led to corresponding high economic growth which then led to more investment in infrastructure... wonderful... but I'm not sure that's the case in every jurisdiction.
4. Government subsidies for home ownership encourage people to buy a home. Thus setting down roots permanently and getting into the position you describe where you are often not optimally located near work. Renting allows for more labor mobility. I currently rent as I'm young and I'm not sure where my next job is going to be. With all the interest you pay on a mortgage, legal fees, upkeep... one wonder if owning a home today is freedom from a landlord... or have you just traded the landlord for the bank:P...
But yes... people will just try and fix the problem... without making it impact them. That's in people's nature.
If society ever gets to the point where robots are there to do everything, money would really cease to have value.
At best, money would act as a rationing system for the things robots produced.
As long as there are tasks requiring human labor, you can never have a 'basic' income... as assuming the basic income provided enough to house, feed, transport... people, people would rather do that than do the work. People would rather be on the receiving end of production, than the producing end.
Would you rather get a basic income living a good city life... or go work in the mines to mine lithium to provide the batteries? Seriously... who would want to go work in the mines?
And suppose one did go work in the mines... what would the extra 'money' buy you? You can kiss most service jobs goodbye... as who wants to work fast food or waiting tables when they get a guaranteed income from the government that provides them with a good quality of life.
Money's biggest problem is people view it as some abstract thing that has value independent of everything. Money to have value must have someone on the other side willing to accept it for their work.
Rather than a basic income, job sharing should be used if we ever get to that point where things are so automated.
First of all, having dual cores is not just about switching between apps. There's a lot of background processing and signalling that goes on behind the scenes on smart phones. They use the CPU for lots of things. Not all cellphone IO is handled by dedicated chips. Your CPU sees some of the traffic. It is why your device slows down when downloading a file or something.
Even if all the 'apps' stay on the one core, but all these background tasks run on the other core, it will make a huge improvement for the end user experience.
We hear the same arguments about people who say more cores are useless as programs are not written for such multi-threadedness... well yeah... having more cores might not improve the experience of one heavy app running at a time (like a compiler or simulator) if it's not optimized for it. But what it does do is allow lots of different applications to run at the same time... smoothly... for a much better end user experience.
I'd tempted to agree. A compelling story is infinitely more important than 'choices'.
Let's take bioshock. It's a great environment and a great story... but the game play itself... a regular shooter. The choices you get to make don't really affect your game play in any significant way. They just affect the outcome of a cut scene at the end. These days, once I'm done a game like this, I just go on youtube and see the alternate endings.
Then you have the bioware world of choice. Choose your class of character. Choose to save the village or not. Choose to be good or evil. Choose to kill the dragon or just walk away... All this would be fine and dandy except the costs are high to creating such really high quality version of such a game. If you actually create different content for different choices, someone playing the game through once doesn't even see all the hard work you do. So you end up with a lot of choices that basically lead you to the exact same game play.
However, I still end up replaying these bioware games because your game play can change based on the type of character you are (mage, thief...). Would I play the whole story over again as the same class... just making different story choices? Nah... as I said... I know the path basically ends up the same... and I can youtube any videos or cutscenes. In general this is a good formula. Play as a different class and make different game choices... you might well... you're replaying the game.
As to saving to avoid consequences. I do it as well. I think games that purposefully try and counter this and annoying at best. There were a few times in mass effect 2 where you're 'forced' (immediately follows a mission or cutscene) into consequential conversation. So you didnt have a save right before the consequence. I found this more annoying than anything. Thankfully most of these were just the romance decisions... and I youtubed the alternate scenarios. I don't see the point is game designers trying to impose making a hard choice by replaying the whole game just to see an alternate path. it's probably futile... and most of all... chances are the alternate path doesn't really offer anything significant beyond something I can lookup on youtube.
At least they are not charging customers more for going over. Instead they just stop you from downloading more. I wish all companies did this. Then you have to manually buy more GB or minutes.
In any case, anyone know if the wireless data protocols allow the cell phone tower to 'throttle' devices. Wireless is a bit different from wired in that for wireless the mere act of trying to send/receive data from the device takes up precious bandwidth. In wired networks, most of the problems occur inside the network operators equipment.
What I mean by this is the cell-phone tower sends a command to the device like: "limit your upload to 5 kb/s" Is something like this part of the standard? In this way, it would be puzzling why they even have bandwidth caps. Just throttle heavy users down so all they can do is browse webpages once they pass a certain point.
I remember when we had unlimited internet a while ago. Yet companies had throttling. Then people complained about throttling. Today we have all these bandwidth caps.
Yes I work in networking... I know about peering costs and the limits of bandwidth. Yes, you cannot have everyone maxing out their data all the time.
However, having dealt with ISPs many times at the vendor level, I had a very bad feeling when throttling fell out of favor for bandwidth caps.
I would rather have had them keep throttling. It keeps consumers paying a fixed rate. And networks can compete with their network management. I remember people would switch if Bell was throttling, but Rogers wasn't... or they'd go to TekSavvy... or something.
I would dare say the government should step in and ban bandwidth limits. Every internet plan should be unlimited... and the ISP can throttle the USER... not on type of data... but the user. That way networks that are managed well will attract more users.
But that would be a simple 1 line piece of sensible legislation. Can't happen in any country:P
I don't know where people get the idea that you need qualified experts in the field to teach. Yes, I'm an engineer... and also a teacher. I taught high school math and computer science.
You have a class of diverse students. Some super smart. Okay, my advanced training can help these kids a little bit. But honestly, they're just as capable learning on their own. There's the whole whack of average kids... who by in large need a fairly generic lesson plan... that we all have. I always found it weird in teaching how little is shared. If the ministry developed lessons and common lesson plans, it would make the first few years of teaching so much easier. Then you have the troubled kids from broken homes, behavioral issues... they're not going to benefit from any advanced learning I have.
Heck, my University experience was similar. The brilliant profs were great, but generally couldn't teach for beans. Most of my actual learning was with me and text book and working out problems and projects. Sometimes a little help from TAs and what not.
Just try teaching for a bit... or maybe remember your high school days. Your teacher is up there. They organize some lesson plan. They teach something. They take up homework. They let you work on some problems or in groups. Then class is over. rinse and repeat. It really is about the lesson plan... which does not require experts to deliver it.
I would honestly say that on average, the knowledge of a teacher is way way way way down at the bottom of the list of things that affect student outcomes. Things like: Teacher attitude Class control Curriculum Student background (good parents, bad parents, how much they learn at home) Support Staff (give me a few good teaching assistant over an expert anyday) Culture...
As to: "It's my contention that those who have a nice career and a deep knowledge of math and/or science should consider spending the last few years working as a (fully qualified) teacher."
Ideally that would be the case. However, you understand how unions work? Seniority and the like. It's not like I could just walk into a teaching job as an engineer just because I'm more qualified. Nothing would make me happier than to start teaching again in a few years full time. But it's not going to happen. Best of all, if I do start teaching, I'll get the class no one wants to teach grade 9 basic math... as that is what seniority is all about. In a fantasy world of mine, most of teaching is done by people 'retiring' in their field so they actually have life experience in the field.
I'm just a regular worker bee and what I've been told and seen since birth is that free trade and globalization is good and it is the future. I won't go into my own views on that... but I've accepted it.
One of the realities of that is you have to accept that an Australian, American, Canadian, European... is no more entitled to a high standard of living than an Indian, Chinese, Brazilian. And so when I see a western manufacturer complain they cannot compete... I say... why should I care more about you than about the poor struggling Chinese person?
And yes, the expectation that wages always go up is also contrary to this. Most of the western world should be facing deflation everything. Our wages should be falling across the board... since we've all accepted free trade. In Detroit, you cannot pay teachers, nurses, doctors, police officers what they used to make, when the high paying auto jobs are cut. Your public sector wages must always align with your median private sector wage. Some allowance is made for heavy export countries. It is why Mexico can't pay its doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers 'good' wages. Their private sector does not generate the wealth to support it.
Most of the western world really just wants to continue thinking it is in the colonial days. This is especially true of the 'left' in most western countries. We want cheap food for all... but we won't work on our own farms... that is for latins and asians. We expect easy jobs... meanwhile buying cheap tshirts made in Bangledesh where someone works their bum off for 12 hours a day. Just think about the transaction that takes place here. Some poor asian works hard for 12 hours a day making t-shirts. Some western person who does nothing close to that level of labor expect to buy that tshirt cheaply. From a trade perspective it is ridiculous. Ditto for Ipods, computers. We want to work on all the interesting jobs (innovation, creative)... while everything else is done by others. Meanwhile these creative jobs are really not that numerous. You can employ a few people... enough for a small nation... but not an large country.
What do we really produce of the world that entitles us to such a high standard of living? Not very much... It's an artifact of history and it is changing. Australia/Canada are kind of fortunate to at least have natural resources to push their standard of living up. Germany has manufacturing. But the rest of the western world... produces nothing. Greeks should have a poorer standard of living than Indians.
And so... back to the original statement... why should I care more about your manufacturing business than I do about some poor Asian? Because you're closer to me... because you contribute to my tax base... because your poverty would be much closer to me... Sure... all true... but free trade says otherwise... and I've accepted it. So compete, change jobs, or change countries...:P
My guess is Microsoft is not going to release Windows for ARM as a general purpose OS like windows.
Instead, they would have the version available for OEMs to build systems. My guess is they treat distribution more like a mobile OS than what we are accustomed to with Windows. That is to say, you don't install programs via downloads or DVDs. Instead you install apps via an app-store. This avoids people saying 'Why won't my Word 2007' work on this windows.
As far as netbooks/tablets go, it makes perfect sense.
Of course, they just might include some kind of compatibility/virtualization... but who knows...
William F. Buckley Jr. once said "that he would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston phone directory than by the entire faculty of Harvard University."
I know this is slashdot and everyone worships the alter of experts... but experts derive their power from political bodies... who are ultimately corrupted by special interests.
Maybe an enlightened expert could come up with the optimal policy, but finding and empowering only that expert is an impossible task.
I would honestly settle for a panel of 100 RANDOM citizens (yes even Joe the plumber) to sit down, write some guidelines of the things 'we all know', and then rule on how companies implement them. Regular people are able to understand 'fairness' better than any politician.
Basically... do the job of the FCC or another governing body. Maybe keep a few of the FCC experts to 'explain' some of the technical details to the citizen panel. But the citizen panel must write and approve every single rule.
Yes, the citizen panel won't be perfect. It might not give the optimal solution. But I talk to regular people of all stripes everyday... and I think they could come up with a reasonable and fair policy... much better than a political body could.
It wasn't that long ago I went through school In university, we were forbidden to use calculators in any class where it would be an advantage.
In the classes we were allowed to, it was because it was going to be pointless... (we dealt mainly with variables...)
It got so bad, even on exams that needed a final numerical answer, I would just do all the calculations as variables... then when I had finished all the question, I'd go back and try and do the final calculations.
Today, that really helps me as a software developer... that skill of treating everything as a variable and abstracting it out.
In any case. After graduating as an engineer, I taught high school math and computer science for a while.
With education there is a real fantasy.
Sure, we'd love to get rid of objective boring tests that can be passed just by rote learning.
But there's a few big problems with this.
1. Kids cheat...and I mean... cheat a lot. The more 'project' work you give them, the more leeway they have to just cheat or copy or leach off others in group assignments.
2. Simple objective testing acts as a filter. And more explanatory or subjective testing... turns out to be rote learning. Take something as simple as fractions. Now if you're a good math student, you will understand what you're doing with fractions (common denominators, cross multiplying...). Great. Sure, you could just be rote learner and memorize the steps. Yet, you know that shows some skill to memorize those steps.
What is worse is when you ask for a paragraph asking them to explain fractions (yes... as a teacher, I had to do this one year). They just rote memorized the explanation:P
3. Memorization is a part of life. Not everyone is destined for a job as a free-thinking creative person. Heck, most jobs are not that. Most jobs are learning to do a skill really really really well. Even for someone as skilled as a brain surgeon. Would I want someone creative as a brain surgeon? Or would I want someone who memorized everything about the brain, the operation, and practiced the operation day in and day out?
Would you perhaps tune out some more creative people... possibly. But another part of schooling as learning to deal with handling instruction, working hard...
Most smart students have no problem with some rote learning. There are *some* smart students who do, and they tend to have attitude problems. I think they're either destined for greatness or nothing. The smartest guy I knew in University had this problem too. Brilliant guy... but last heard, he wasn't working... he was thinking of ideas traveling the far east. They're not really going to benefit from normal education anyways.
Now you certainly need a balance. I think you assign some marks to English grammar and spelling on any test. Even if it's a history class where you're not directly testing English.
As a historian, are you not going to be writing essays? Even as a software developer, are you not going to be writing specs, emails, user documentation...?
Life is not dissected into such neat little boxes called subjects... and neither should education.
"That's what you've said after all, is that your "right" to not feel imagined sexual tension is more important than the right of another to be themselves and actually express their existence as a sexual being."
and where did I say that?
I'd be more than happy to live in a world of unisex washrooms and everything. Everyone would be treated equally in such a world.
Yet that is not the world we live in. I'm pretty sure I'd be arrested if I ran through the streets naked as well. I'd also be arrested if I spent my time in the girl's washroom or shower.
By removing DADT, but keeping in place the current segregation of men and woman, we are 'discriminating' against people. There's no way around that either. We 'respect' the sexual tension between men and women enough to build separate beds, showers... but we don't 'respect' the sexual tension between men and between women. That's discrimination.
That's the only point I was making. In this world, DADT was a very practical policy for the military. The military is afterall an institution where you have to give up much of your individuality for the 'greater good' anyways. The initial joining in voluntary, but once in, there's a whole host of restrictions on you.
Was it 'legally' pure...no... but neither is a world without DADT. There's just another kind of discrimination.
Do I think it's the end of the world if DADT is gone? Nope... but I don't think it resolves a whole lot actually. We'll just be in a world where military superiors will have to sit around dealing with this stuff on a case by case and individual by individual basis.
But for a military organization... where lives are at stake... it was a very practical policy when it was in use.
And why should rural areas get 'good mail service'. This is the same problem we face with telecommunications. Some people expect rural areas to have the same telecom ability as dense urban cores.
I'm not saying urban life is better than rural life... but there are costs to each. Live in the city and you get good mail service, good telecom, good restaurants... but you have to deal with traffic, high home prices, crime... Live in rural areas and you get cheap housing, clean air, peace, nature... but you have to deal with poor telecom, poor mail service...
Maybe it is only reasonable to expect rural mail service once in every 2 weeks and it costs a bit more. So be it.
Well... let's look at the rational behind don't ask, don't tell.
Why do we separate men/women in terms of sleeping areas, washrooms, showers...?
Because there is sexual tension between men and women and certain areas are deemed private. It is deemed that you have a certain 'right' to not feel violated or sexual tension.
Now along comes a homosexual. Well... now what happens? Does a male soldier not have the same right to not feel violated or sexual tension with a homosexual soldier showering next to him. This would be the same kind of sexual tension felt if a women was showering in the same shower as a guy. Ditto for women and lesbians.
A lot of people just dismiss this... oh... a homosexual guy is not checking you out.. so why should you feel violated. Well... we could easily say... why should a woman feel violated if she showers in front of a man?
So what do we do here?
Well, we could get rid of all sexual references... but remember that includes traditional heterosexual references. So no more male/female washroom... only unisex. No separate sleeping areas. If we could get to this point in society... wonderful... but we're not there yet. This is actually the only option that does not discriminate between people.
Almost any other policy discriminates against one group or another. Allow homosexuals to be openly homosexual and you deny the right to privacy and protection from sexual tension to heterosexual men and women from their homosexual counterparts. The right would still exist between heterosexual men and heterosexual woman.
Discrimination I say!... and I'm not being sarcastic there. There is almost no way to arrange this that would be free of discrimination.
So don't ask.. don't tell... a very reasonable policy. We keep the separation of men and women. We don't need to change all our of military bases, washrooms, showers... You minimize the sexual tension by making sure no one knows if someone is homosexual. It's not perfect as you probably know some percentage of the military is homosexual... but its minimized as you don't know which person.
Don't ask, don't tell.. made a lot of practical sense. Did it discriminate against homosexual right to express themselves. Yes... but we're dealing with competing rights here. The right to express yourself versus the right of someone else to be free from sexual tension.
If we were some kind of imaginary enlightened... post sexual society... we could indeed get rid of all sexuality and have uni-sex washrooms, sleeping areas... and none of this would be a problem.
You can wonder... though the impact of public education on literacy is debatable. Read The literacy myth: cultural integration and social structure in the nineteenth century by Graffb
One can argue quite realistically that literacy was on the way up due to the introduction of the printing press. Mass education was implemented more to control the reading so the government could control what the people were taught. Much like how the in Europe the Church tried to control literacy to the clergy.
We certainly can't rerun history to find out... but I'd certainly say it is a possible alternative.
One might wonder how society invented anything prior to government's funding everything. One might wonder about Thomas Edison inventing and plowing the profits into research labs. One might wonder about JP Morgan bank rolling Nicoli Tesla. One might wonder about the CEO of RIM, who made his fortune building blackberries... then funnels a large sum to the Perimeter institute of theoretical physics.
This is not to say government funded science doesn't lead to results.
But left alone, smart intelligent people seem to discover things on their own. If you're truly smart enough to do ground breaking research... chances are you're going to do that with or without government help. You're naturally curious that way. Just like a musician is going to produce music regardless of whether the government funds them or not.
About the only thing I used to think government would do is provide big funds for things like the particle accelerator... but then I think... the CEO rim might fund that. Bill Gates is giving his billions in wealth to charity. Were there some scientist with a need to build it and governments were not doing it, they would probably do it.
Just like people will say things like 'the government started the internet'. Well sure.. but networks were not exactly groundbreaking. We would have ended up with digital communication regardless of the government's involvement. Lots of private companies were involved in their network business. It might not be called 'the internet'... but in the big picture, it would fulfill the task.
Truly brilliant people like einstein would do basic research on their own. Other ideas are more practical and businesses would invest in the promise of profits.
Maybe government funded science speeds up the process... possibly... but I don't think the world would be at a loss of discoveries if the government stopped funding science. History seems to have found plenty of discoveries without government projects.
One of the first things you learn as an engineer is to first define your goal as broadly as possible. The 'how' always comes later... and must remain as flexibly as possible.
The single biggest problem with education is the goal is not 'to educate children'. A variety of people have already determined the 'how'... no matter if it doesn't actually improve the greater goal of educating kids.
- it must be a public system. no voucher, no school choice - minimize segregation of kids (male/female/disabled/ability/class/culture)...
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. I'm not even sure if I'd agree with author's goal in an idea world.
What does he want, some independent body of academics, bureaucrats, public input, commercial bodies... setting up the HTML spec without any idea of how it will be implemented, used...
Oh no... as far as I'm concerned, you want to determine the fate of HTML, you build a browser (or some connected product) and join the committee. Fight it out.
What is the alternative?
Wishing people to be rational, scientific people makes as much sense as wishing people to be kind, generous, caring people.
Do you wish to have some kind of scientific authority governing society. Of course it could not be elected as that just brings back these irrational non-scientific people.
So it is an unelected scientific council in charge of society.
As we all to 'trust' these experts with power just because they claim to be with science.
Are we to trust them to be uncorruptable? You know how well it works out when you give a group of people power of society.
The Catholic church was once trusted as the bastion of morality. Meanwhile, they're doing the complete opposite of morality. Some molesting young children. Many covering it all up.
It is 'impossible' to have a group of people in power who actually adhere to their chosen creed.
Do I trust scientists with power... absolutely not... and anyone who actually looks at history and empirical evidence would not want any scientist in power either. They will not adhere to the creed they claim. Ultimately, power is enforced by the police, army, and the tax man.
You just need to look at the whole ethanol debacle in the US. All that wasted money just because people wanted a 'green' policy and government's wanted votes. Politics is inherently corrupting. Mixing science with politics is not going to purify science. Politics will corrupt science.
Also, most of the decisions governing society are not hard cold science... like the force of gravity. They are issues of social and economic 'sciences' which do not have the purity of science. They are fundamentally impossible to be sciences... due to their non-repeatability. Go back to your basic elementary school science class and the basic ingredient to the scientific method is repeatability. How do you repeat the great depression to see what variables caused it... how do you repeat it to see what solutions fixed it... how do you quantify thing to apply them today when the conditions have changed?
Most decisions to be made in a society are not that of math, science, or physics. By in large, those decisions are handled by scientists and engineers and people in the know anyways. The rare time it intersects regular life (global warming...), it is already outside the realm of pure science. The debate about global warming is rarely about the science of it... but on what we should do about it... even though people fight about the science... it is not really about the science.
It is about taxation, government power, economics...
Just because global warming exists doesn't mean it should be taxed, governments should have more power, or our economies should be transformed or sacrificed.
Even if theoretically you could have experts in taxation, government power, economics... the value you placed on each of those fields is a value judgment unto itself.
They are of values.
Before you can apply the scientific method to 'solve' a problem... you first need to decide on your goal.
That goal is your value system.
Is your goal to extend life as much as possible? Is your goal to have a good family life? Is your goal to have fun? Is your goal to be spiritual? Is you goal to advance science as much possible?
And advancing science as much as possible is a value... no different from anything else. There are loads of people who just want to live their life, have some kids, and pass on. They have as much say in anything as you.
And so back to the original question... of what is the alternative?
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Since you are a scientifically minded person and are no doubt loving of empirical evidence... find me a group of unelected people who have ruled without abusing their power for more than few generations.
There is no alternative beyond creating a dictatorship... which I would say is worse than dealing with a democracy.
Because society always has people who want to live off the wealth generated by others... regardless of their political affiliation. Just like Communist propaganda tried to motivate its workers. Do you think anyone on the left actually values engineers? Or do they just value the wealth the engineers produce that they can spend on their allies? Hint... find me a state that gives good labor laws for engineers... you won't find it. We're all exempt. So we can work our asses off... so some leftest public sector union can live off our wealth and work 9-5 with a pension...
I'm pretty sure you'd rather work for a US company as an engineer than a Chinese one.
And of course, they complain when others aren't working so hard to build all the wealth.
In most of the Western world, we have huge swaths of people who are living off past wealth (teachers, police officers, finance people, bureaucrats, service workers...). These are people who exist in pretty much every country. Yet their standard of living is much higher in America and other western countries... and its not because of some innate western right to a higher standard of living. It's because the productive workers produce things other people value... which pays for it all.
What most of the Western world is experiencing... and the reason why the whole western world is in so much debt... is those who live off the wealth are earning more than their share relative to those who produce it. So of course... who would want to produce it?
I live in Canada... and everytime I turn on the news... I see bureaucrats... talking about how Canadian private sector needs to be more innovative and compete globally. We're not doing our job. Oh, I do apologize... for not creating enough wealth to pay for your lifestyle. It's hard to compete when I've had engineers leave their jobs to become teachers because it pays better and with a pension...
Then of course the only solution these idiots come up with... is to make it worse for us producers. Let's pay teacher's more... so we can make another profession more attractive than engineering. Let's sign more free trade agreements to force Canadian industry to compete and innovate... sure... let's take a country like Canada where the our labor system is inverted where our top people want to go into public sector, finance... and pit them against India/China where the best people become engineers and they are poor enough to still have a ridiculous work ethic... and see who wins. It's not that we don't have smart western people... they just don't want to do the work because better options exist. Let's have government innovation funds to put more finance people in charge of startups instead of developing real long term industries...
But anyways... it's just a realignment happening. Just be smart about it. Producers will never be part of the ruling class. I've realized... I was stupid for not realizing this. Join the ruling class... the public sector unions, finance people, protected professions... and ride the country as it goes down.
umm. we're not talking about personalities... but ways of management here.
Age doesn't matter.
Experience matters
Skill matters the most.
One of the worst things you can do is be paid more than you're worth... you're the first to do when the job cuts come.
It is one of the reasons software developers can climb the wage ladder very quickly... but they also top out quickly.
It's a very good thing. Raises just based on seniority would not be in the best interest of older workers... as management would ask... why should we pay this senior person such a high salary, when a lesser experienced person could be up to speed in a about a year.
While I was hired with a new grad salary... I quickly rose to the the senior developer pay level. You won't find that in many industries. The reality is I produce and contribute just as much if not more than people with 20 years experience. So I should be paid the same.
Now I don't know this particular new grad.
Maybe he is a really bright person.
Maybe this senior developer is not really that talented.
We really don't know. Only the manager can judge... and ultimately, they have to be responsible such things.
Maybe the manager is taking a gamble on this kid. Who knows... if he flops, one would hope the manager down grades them (that rarely happens though)
And what is wrong with that?
It's amazing to see people continuously insult those who are successful. As if their success is magical.
Maybe there is something to Zuckerberg's way to run a company?
Maybe the Steve Jobs perfectionist kingdom has something to do with Apple's success.
I don't work inside facebook... but maybe the way it is run does force people who have influence to have good relationships with engineers. I could easily write a snarky comment about ways of management where there is a disconnect between engineers and product management.
Quite frankly... if you can't get an engineer to not say your idea is 'stupid'... maybe it is you who doesn't have the ability to influence people. That is a skill needed in any kind of organization. Maybe Zukerberg believes those are the people... the ones who can build conses and influence... who are the ones who should rise up. Sounds perfectly plausible to me.
What did Bill Gates do that was evil?
Seriously... evil?
Ooooh... his company bundled software and used aggressive sales techniques and contracts.
It might be against the law. But it's not evil... nor do I think morally wrong in of itself.
Not everything illegal is evil.
not everything good is legal or mandated.
yeah... because building a multi-billion dollar company and ending up on the top of PC revolution is not something to be admired... /s
Exactly.
Government policy affects so many things.
1. Property taxes drive business to the suburbs and beyond... thus increasing the need for the car. Most traffic is cause by commercial sprawl, not residential sprawl. It is very easy to get people on a train to a central location. I can't really emphasize this one more. I live in Toronto... where Toronto kept its commercial property taxes higher than residential ones for years. This led to jobs bleeding to the burbs. Our whole transit system is 'downtown Toronto' oriented... yet that's not where increasing numbers of people need to go for their jobs. So we have traffic in the reverse direction (from downtown to the burbs) that is just as bad as into downtown.
2. Transit users never want to pay for transit. Car drivers have traditionally paid for the use of the car by gas taxes. Gas taxes which for years have not gone into roads. Yet transit users never want to pay the cost of transit... and the appropriate expansion. This has led to an underinvestment in transit in many areas... combined with the general association big union with transit... means costs go up... while fares don't go up...
3. High immigration rates without corresponding increase in transit only increases problems. If high rates of immigration led to corresponding high economic growth which then led to more investment in infrastructure... wonderful... but I'm not sure that's the case in every jurisdiction.
4. Government subsidies for home ownership encourage people to buy a home. Thus setting down roots permanently and getting into the position you describe where you are often not optimally located near work. Renting allows for more labor mobility. I currently rent as I'm young and I'm not sure where my next job is going to be. With all the interest you pay on a mortgage, legal fees, upkeep... one wonder if owning a home today is freedom from a landlord... or have you just traded the landlord for the bank :P ...
But yes... people will just try and fix the problem... without making it impact them.
That's in people's nature.
If society ever gets to the point where robots are there to do everything, money would really cease to have value.
At best, money would act as a rationing system for the things robots produced.
As long as there are tasks requiring human labor, you can never have a 'basic' income... as assuming the basic income provided enough to house, feed, transport... people, people would rather do that than do the work. People would rather be on the receiving end of production, than the producing end.
Would you rather get a basic income living a good city life... or go work in the mines to mine lithium to provide the batteries?
Seriously... who would want to go work in the mines?
And suppose one did go work in the mines... what would the extra 'money' buy you?
You can kiss most service jobs goodbye... as who wants to work fast food or waiting tables when they get a guaranteed income from the government that provides them with a good quality of life.
Money's biggest problem is people view it as some abstract thing that has value independent of everything. Money to have value must have someone on the other side willing to accept it for their work.
Rather than a basic income, job sharing should be used if we ever get to that point where things are so automated.
First of all, having dual cores is not just about switching between apps.
There's a lot of background processing and signalling that goes on behind the scenes on smart phones. They use the CPU for lots of things. Not all cellphone IO is handled by dedicated chips. Your CPU sees some of the traffic. It is why your device slows down when downloading a file or something.
Even if all the 'apps' stay on the one core, but all these background tasks run on the other core, it will make a huge improvement for the end user experience.
We hear the same arguments about people who say more cores are useless as programs are not written for such multi-threadedness... well yeah... having more cores might not improve the experience of one heavy app running at a time (like a compiler or simulator) if it's not optimized for it. But what it does do is allow lots of different applications to run at the same time... smoothly... for a much better end user experience.
I'd tempted to agree. A compelling story is infinitely more important than 'choices'.
Let's take bioshock. It's a great environment and a great story... but the game play itself... a regular shooter. The choices you get to make don't really affect your game play in any significant way. They just affect the outcome of a cut scene at the end. These days, once I'm done a game like this, I just go on youtube and see the alternate endings.
Then you have the bioware world of choice. Choose your class of character. Choose to save the village or not. Choose to be good or evil. Choose to kill the dragon or just walk away... All this would be fine and dandy except the costs are high to creating such really high quality version of such a game. If you actually create different content for different choices, someone playing the game through once doesn't even see all the hard work you do. So you end up with a lot of choices that basically lead you to the exact same game play.
However, I still end up replaying these bioware games because your game play can change based on the type of character you are (mage, thief ...). Would I play the whole story over again as the same class... just making different story choices? Nah... as I said... I know the path basically ends up the same... and I can youtube any videos or cutscenes. In general this is a good formula. Play as a different class and make different game choices... you might well... you're replaying the game.
As to saving to avoid consequences. I do it as well. I think games that purposefully try and counter this and annoying at best. There were a few times in mass effect 2 where you're 'forced' (immediately follows a mission or cutscene) into consequential conversation. So you didnt have a save right before the consequence. I found this more annoying than anything. Thankfully most of these were just the romance decisions... and I youtubed the alternate scenarios. I don't see the point is game designers trying to impose making a hard choice by replaying the whole game just to see an alternate path. it's probably futile... and most of all... chances are the alternate path doesn't really offer anything significant beyond something I can lookup on youtube.
At least they are not charging customers more for going over. Instead they just stop you from downloading more.
I wish all companies did this. Then you have to manually buy more GB or minutes.
In any case, anyone know if the wireless data protocols allow the cell phone tower to 'throttle' devices.
Wireless is a bit different from wired in that for wireless the mere act of trying to send/receive data from the device takes up precious bandwidth.
In wired networks, most of the problems occur inside the network operators equipment.
What I mean by this is the cell-phone tower sends a command to the device like: "limit your upload to 5 kb/s"
Is something like this part of the standard?
In this way, it would be puzzling why they even have bandwidth caps. Just throttle heavy users down so all they can do is browse webpages once they pass a certain point.
I remember when we had unlimited internet a while ago. Yet companies had throttling.
Then people complained about throttling. Today we have all these bandwidth caps.
Yes I work in networking... I know about peering costs and the limits of bandwidth.
Yes, you cannot have everyone maxing out their data all the time.
However, having dealt with ISPs many times at the vendor level, I had a very bad feeling when throttling fell out of favor for bandwidth caps.
I would rather have had them keep throttling. It keeps consumers paying a fixed rate. And networks can compete with their network management.
I remember people would switch if Bell was throttling, but Rogers wasn't... or they'd go to TekSavvy... or something.
I would dare say the government should step in and ban bandwidth limits. Every internet plan should be unlimited... and the ISP can throttle the USER... not on type of data... but the user.
That way networks that are managed well will attract more users.
But that would be a simple 1 line piece of sensible legislation. :P
Can't happen in any country
I don't know where people get the idea that you need qualified experts in the field to teach.
Yes, I'm an engineer... and also a teacher. I taught high school math and computer science.
You have a class of diverse students.
Some super smart. Okay, my advanced training can help these kids a little bit. But honestly, they're just as capable learning on their own.
There's the whole whack of average kids... who by in large need a fairly generic lesson plan... that we all have. I always found it weird in teaching how little is shared. If the ministry developed lessons and common lesson plans, it would make the first few years of teaching so much easier.
Then you have the troubled kids from broken homes, behavioral issues... they're not going to benefit from any advanced learning I have.
Heck, my University experience was similar. The brilliant profs were great, but generally couldn't teach for beans. Most of my actual learning was with me and text book and working out problems and projects. Sometimes a little help from TAs and what not.
Just try teaching for a bit... or maybe remember your high school days. Your teacher is up there. They organize some lesson plan. They teach something. They take up homework. They let you work on some problems or in groups. Then class is over. rinse and repeat. It really is about the lesson plan... which does not require experts to deliver it.
I would honestly say that on average, the knowledge of a teacher is way way way way down at the bottom of the list of things that affect student outcomes. ...
Things like:
Teacher attitude
Class control
Curriculum
Student background (good parents, bad parents, how much they learn at home)
Support Staff (give me a few good teaching assistant over an expert anyday)
Culture
As to:
"It's my contention that those who have a nice career and a deep knowledge of math and/or science should consider spending the last few years working as a (fully qualified) teacher."
Ideally that would be the case. However, you understand how unions work? Seniority and the like. It's not like I could just walk into a teaching job as an engineer just because I'm more qualified. Nothing would make me happier than to start teaching again in a few years full time. But it's not going to happen. Best of all, if I do start teaching, I'll get the class no one wants to teach grade 9 basic math... as that is what seniority is all about. In a fantasy world of mine, most of teaching is done by people 'retiring' in their field so they actually have life experience in the field.
While all true.
I'm just a regular worker bee and what I've been told and seen since birth is that free trade and globalization is good and it is the future. I won't go into my own views on that... but I've accepted it.
One of the realities of that is you have to accept that an Australian, American, Canadian, European... is no more entitled to a high standard of living than an Indian, Chinese, Brazilian. And so when I see a western manufacturer complain they cannot compete... I say... why should I care more about you than about the poor struggling Chinese person?
And yes, the expectation that wages always go up is also contrary to this. Most of the western world should be facing deflation everything. Our wages should be falling across the board... since we've all accepted free trade. In Detroit, you cannot pay teachers, nurses, doctors, police officers what they used to make, when the high paying auto jobs are cut. Your public sector wages must always align with your median private sector wage. Some allowance is made for heavy export countries. It is why Mexico can't pay its doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers 'good' wages. Their private sector does not generate the wealth to support it.
Most of the western world really just wants to continue thinking it is in the colonial days. This is especially true of the 'left' in most western countries.
We want cheap food for all... but we won't work on our own farms... that is for latins and asians.
We expect easy jobs... meanwhile buying cheap tshirts made in Bangledesh where someone works their bum off for 12 hours a day. Just think about the transaction that takes place here. Some poor asian works hard for 12 hours a day making t-shirts. Some western person who does nothing close to that level of labor expect to buy that tshirt cheaply. From a trade perspective it is ridiculous.
Ditto for Ipods, computers.
We want to work on all the interesting jobs (innovation, creative)... while everything else is done by others. Meanwhile these creative jobs are really not that numerous. You can employ a few people... enough for a small nation... but not an large country.
What do we really produce of the world that entitles us to such a high standard of living? Not very much... It's an artifact of history and it is changing.
Australia/Canada are kind of fortunate to at least have natural resources to push their standard of living up.
Germany has manufacturing.
But the rest of the western world... produces nothing. Greeks should have a poorer standard of living than Indians.
And so... back to the original statement... why should I care more about your manufacturing business than I do about some poor Asian? :P
Because you're closer to me... because you contribute to my tax base... because your poverty would be much closer to me...
Sure... all true... but free trade says otherwise... and I've accepted it. So compete, change jobs, or change countries...
My guess is Microsoft is not going to release Windows for ARM as a general purpose OS like windows.
Instead, they would have the version available for OEMs to build systems.
My guess is they treat distribution more like a mobile OS than what we are accustomed to with Windows.
That is to say, you don't install programs via downloads or DVDs. Instead you install apps via an app-store. This avoids people saying 'Why won't my Word 2007' work on this windows.
As far as netbooks/tablets go, it makes perfect sense.
Of course, they just might include some kind of compatibility/virtualization... but who knows...
William F. Buckley Jr. once said "that he would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston phone directory than by the entire faculty of Harvard University."
I know this is slashdot and everyone worships the alter of experts... but experts derive their power from political bodies... who are ultimately corrupted by special interests.
Maybe an enlightened expert could come up with the optimal policy, but finding and empowering only that expert is an impossible task.
I would honestly settle for a panel of 100 RANDOM citizens (yes even Joe the plumber) to sit down, write some guidelines of the things 'we all know', and then rule on how companies implement them. Regular people are able to understand 'fairness' better than any politician.
Basically... do the job of the FCC or another governing body. Maybe keep a few of the FCC experts to 'explain' some of the technical details to the citizen panel. But the citizen panel must write and approve every single rule.
Yes, the citizen panel won't be perfect. It might not give the optimal solution. But I talk to regular people of all stripes everyday... and I think they could come up with a reasonable and fair policy... much better than a political body could.
It wasn't that long ago I went through school In university, we were forbidden to use calculators in any class where it would be an advantage.
In the classes we were allowed to, it was because it was going to be pointless... (we dealt mainly with variables...)
It got so bad, even on exams that needed a final numerical answer, I would just do all the calculations as variables... then when I had finished all the question, I'd go back and try and do the final calculations.
Today, that really helps me as a software developer... that skill of treating everything as a variable and abstracting it out.
In any case. After graduating as an engineer, I taught high school math and computer science for a while.
With education there is a real fantasy.
Sure, we'd love to get rid of objective boring tests that can be passed just by rote learning.
But there's a few big problems with this.
1. Kids cheat...and I mean... cheat a lot. The more 'project' work you give them, the more leeway they have to just cheat or copy or leach off others in group assignments.
2. Simple objective testing acts as a filter. And more explanatory or subjective testing... turns out to be rote learning. Take something as simple as fractions. Now if you're a good math student, you will understand what you're doing with fractions (common denominators, cross multiplying...). Great. Sure, you could just be rote learner and memorize the steps. Yet, you know that shows some skill to memorize those steps.
What is worse is when you ask for a paragraph asking them to explain fractions (yes... as a teacher, I had to do this one year). They just rote memorized the explanation :P
3. Memorization is a part of life. Not everyone is destined for a job as a free-thinking creative person. Heck, most jobs are not that. Most jobs are learning to do a skill really really really well. Even for someone as skilled as a brain surgeon. Would I want someone creative as a brain surgeon? Or would I want someone who memorized everything about the brain, the operation, and practiced the operation day in and day out?
Would you perhaps tune out some more creative people... possibly. But another part of schooling as learning to deal with handling instruction, working hard...
Most smart students have no problem with some rote learning. There are *some* smart students who do, and they tend to have attitude problems. I think they're either destined for greatness or nothing. The smartest guy I knew in University had this problem too. Brilliant guy... but last heard, he wasn't working... he was thinking of ideas traveling the far east. They're not really going to benefit from normal education anyways.
Now you certainly need a balance. I think you assign some marks to English grammar and spelling on any test. Even if it's a history class where you're not directly testing English.
As a historian, are you not going to be writing essays? Even as a software developer, are you not going to be writing specs, emails, user documentation...?
Life is not dissected into such neat little boxes called subjects... and neither should education.
"That's what you've said after all, is that your "right" to not feel imagined sexual tension is more important than the right of another to be themselves and actually express their existence as a sexual being."
and where did I say that?
I'd be more than happy to live in a world of unisex washrooms and everything. Everyone would be treated equally in such a world.
Yet that is not the world we live in.
I'm pretty sure I'd be arrested if I ran through the streets naked as well.
I'd also be arrested if I spent my time in the girl's washroom or shower.
By removing DADT, but keeping in place the current segregation of men and woman, we are 'discriminating' against people. There's no way around that either. We 'respect' the sexual tension between men and women enough to build separate beds, showers... but we don't 'respect' the sexual tension between men and between women. That's discrimination.
That's the only point I was making.
In this world, DADT was a very practical policy for the military.
The military is afterall an institution where you have to give up much of your individuality for the 'greater good' anyways. The initial joining in voluntary, but once in, there's a whole host of restrictions on you.
Was it 'legally' pure...no... but neither is a world without DADT. There's just another kind of discrimination.
Do I think it's the end of the world if DADT is gone? Nope... but I don't think it resolves a whole lot actually. We'll just be in a world where military superiors will have to sit around dealing with this stuff on a case by case and individual by individual basis.
But for a military organization... where lives are at stake... it was a very practical policy when it was in use.
But I guess I must just be a bigot.
And why should rural areas get 'good mail service'.
This is the same problem we face with telecommunications. Some people expect rural areas to have the same telecom ability as dense urban cores.
I'm not saying urban life is better than rural life... but there are costs to each.
Live in the city and you get good mail service, good telecom, good restaurants... but you have to deal with traffic, high home prices, crime...
Live in rural areas and you get cheap housing, clean air, peace, nature... but you have to deal with poor telecom, poor mail service...
Maybe it is only reasonable to expect rural mail service once in every 2 weeks and it costs a bit more.
So be it.
Well... let's look at the rational behind don't ask, don't tell.
Why do we separate men/women in terms of sleeping areas, washrooms, showers...?
Because there is sexual tension between men and women and certain areas are deemed private.
It is deemed that you have a certain 'right' to not feel violated or sexual tension.
Now along comes a homosexual.
Well... now what happens?
Does a male soldier not have the same right to not feel violated or sexual tension with a homosexual soldier showering next to him. This would be the same kind of sexual tension felt if a women was showering in the same shower as a guy. Ditto for women and lesbians.
A lot of people just dismiss this... oh... a homosexual guy is not checking you out.. so why should you feel violated. Well... we could easily say... why should a woman feel violated if she showers in front of a man?
So what do we do here?
Well, we could get rid of all sexual references... but remember that includes traditional heterosexual references. So no more male/female washroom... only unisex. No separate sleeping areas.
If we could get to this point in society... wonderful... but we're not there yet. This is actually the only option that does not discriminate between people.
Almost any other policy discriminates against one group or another.
Allow homosexuals to be openly homosexual and you deny the right to privacy and protection from sexual tension to heterosexual men and women from their homosexual counterparts. The right would still exist between heterosexual men and heterosexual woman.
Discrimination I say!... and I'm not being sarcastic there. There is almost no way to arrange this that would be free of discrimination.
So don't ask.. don't tell... a very reasonable policy. We keep the separation of men and women. We don't need to change all our of military bases, washrooms, showers... You minimize the sexual tension by making sure no one knows if someone is homosexual. It's not perfect as you probably know some percentage of the military is homosexual... but its minimized as you don't know which person.
Don't ask, don't tell.. made a lot of practical sense. Did it discriminate against homosexual right to express themselves. Yes... but we're dealing with competing rights here. The right to express yourself versus the right of someone else to be free from sexual tension.
If we were some kind of imaginary enlightened... post sexual society... we could indeed get rid of all sexuality and have uni-sex washrooms, sleeping areas... and none of this would be a problem.
You can wonder... though the impact of public education on literacy is debatable.
Read
The literacy myth: cultural integration and social structure in the nineteenth century by Graffb
One can argue quite realistically that literacy was on the way up due to the introduction of the printing press.
Mass education was implemented more to control the reading so the government could control what the people were taught.
Much like how the in Europe the Church tried to control literacy to the clergy.
We certainly can't rerun history to find out... but I'd certainly say it is a possible alternative.
One might wonder how society invented anything prior to government's funding everything.
One might wonder about Thomas Edison inventing and plowing the profits into research labs.
One might wonder about JP Morgan bank rolling Nicoli Tesla.
One might wonder about the CEO of RIM, who made his fortune building blackberries... then funnels a large sum to the Perimeter institute of theoretical physics.
This is not to say government funded science doesn't lead to results.
But left alone, smart intelligent people seem to discover things on their own.
If you're truly smart enough to do ground breaking research... chances are you're going to do that with or without government help. You're naturally curious that way. Just like a musician is going to produce music regardless of whether the government funds them or not.
About the only thing I used to think government would do is provide big funds for things like the particle accelerator... but then I think... the CEO rim might fund that. Bill Gates is giving his billions in wealth to charity. Were there some scientist with a need to build it and governments were not doing it, they would probably do it.
Just like people will say things like 'the government started the internet'. Well sure.. but networks were not exactly groundbreaking. We would have ended up with digital communication regardless of the government's involvement. Lots of private companies were involved in their network business. It might not be called 'the internet'... but in the big picture, it would fulfill the task.
Truly brilliant people like einstein would do basic research on their own.
Other ideas are more practical and businesses would invest in the promise of profits.
Maybe government funded science speeds up the process... possibly...
but I don't think the world would be at a loss of discoveries if the government stopped funding science.
History seems to have found plenty of discoveries without government projects.
and why is urban PUBLIC education such a goal?
One of the first things you learn as an engineer is to first define your goal as broadly as possible. The 'how' always comes later... and must remain as flexibly as possible.
The single biggest problem with education is the goal is not 'to educate children'. A variety of people have already determined the 'how'... no matter if it doesn't actually improve the greater goal of educating kids.
- it must be a public system. no voucher, no school choice ...
- minimize segregation of kids (male/female/disabled/ability/class/culture)