"Radiation shielding is hard, its not impossible."
Good points. Freeman Dyson says much the same, and does some calculations showing that in one of his essays, where he says, adjusted for inflation, the costs to go from Europe to the Americas was on the order of what it would cost now to go into space. Remember, many people coming over to the "colonies" came as indentured servants who had to work off their travel for seven years. So, as a ballpark figure, let's guesstimate that person was giving up US$100K per year for inflation-adjusted wages (people typically worked six days a week and fourteen hours a day back then), and that's US$700,000 as an indenture. So, the move to North America was not that cheap for many.
All that said though, I would point out that the same sorts of technologies we need to live in space (such as near 100% recycling, healthier materials to be around, improved agriculture, portable doctoring and a better understanding of human nutrition and health, flexible manufacturing, improved governing processes for small communities, accessible digital libraries, improved conflict resolution skills, and so on), are mostly the *same* things we need to make Spaceship Earth work for everybody. So, overall, there is no deep conflict between an interest in space habitats and trying to make the Earth a better place.
Thanks for the reply. I now see where you are coming from in relation to focusing on one common type of welding and seeing Linus' comment in a cultural context of bluntness. Certainly both points have a lot of truth to them. I've seen a picture of welder hanging upside down from ropes while welding a beam on a huge local building, and that sure demonstrated impressive combination of technical and acrobatic skills. And I'm a fan of "World's Toughest Fixes", even though perhaps they just edit out the profanity?:-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_Toughest_Fixes
At the risk of showing more welding ignorance,:-) as well of my ignorance about theater lighting,:-) let me try again to extend your welding analogy again, in a different direction, to adjust for those points. Anyway, I'm just having fun here at this point... So, maybe the analogy won't hold up to scrutiny.
Let's say some guy is employed by RedWelding, Inc., and is doing some welding inside the Sydney Opera House, putting up some new spotlights supplied by a third-party vendor (replacing older spotlights). RedWelding is doing the repairs gratis, even though RedWelding is paying their employee. These new lights are being installed right over the seats of concertgoers because the mayor of Sydney said that is where they should go. Suddenly, some part of one of the lights falls on a seat (thankfully unoccupied as the hall was closed for maintenance). People start talking about the accident. The welder wonders aloud if maybe the light had a weakness in it that caused it to separate from its base (but had not yet looked to see if it was indeed from a bad weld instead). The mayor of the city is then quoted in a front page the Sydney Morning Herald. Using profanity, the mayor says the welder personally has displayed the grossest negligence as a welder and is entirely responsible for the problem. The mayor, who is also an accomplished welder, is going to weld back in an old light right away. The welder responds politely in a letter to the editor that, yes, the welding could have been better. He adds the reason he was up there adding new lights was because the old lights were in danger of falling too, and that deeper issue still needs to be fixed, even if the mayor puts back an old light. The reply is ignored by the mayor.
Now, imagine we also all know this is not the first time this has happened, and further imagine that any long-time theatergoer would know that many people have in the past been killed by falling lights in the Sydney opera house. Still, a lot of people rush to defend the mayor, applauding the strong language. They say this is the way you have to talk to bad welders to get them to shape up. If only more people talked this way, they say, the Sydney Opera House would be a much safer place to listen to music, rather than seeing many patrons of the arts killed each year from falling spotlights. Some even say they wish their boss was more like the mayor and was concerned more about the quality of modern theater than politeness or bureaucratic niceties. They say if you are going to weld on an important public project, you have to be ready for being on the receiving end of this kind of tough quality-assuring profanity.
Then, some smartass (me:-) comes along and writes a letter to the editor of the NYTimes, which also picked up the story. He asks, how can Sydney expect to have a safe opera house if the mayor forbids the welders from using darkened welding masks (a language with better semantics than C), and the mayor keeps welders working 72 hours in a row without breaks (no message passing that allows for smaller modules)? Yes, an accident happened, but it involved many factors and maybe we should try to figure out what all of them were, rather than just blame the welder personally (even if the welder did indeed make one or more mistakes). The smartass goes further and says, maybe the mayor sh
Basically, the USA uses a token system to ration the output of our industrial base. We call these Kanban-like tokens "fiat dollars". While such tokens could legally be printed in any needed quantity by the US treasury, they way most are issued in practice is by creating debt through borrowing from the semi-public Federal Reserve. If the US was to have a "balanced budget", the money supply of fiat dollars would be restricted and we would have an even worse economic depression. That is the biggest difference between government debt and household debt.
Another difference is related to getting out of debt. Because these tokens (as paper of as bits in a computer) are accepted internationally, the US can create "debts" in terms of tokens in banking computers exchanged for real goods from China and real physical materials like oil and ore from elsewhere. If China or other countries come to collect the debts in the future, what do they have to collect except some ones and zeros in a computer? If they demand paper tokens, the US government can just print them and call is "Quantitative Easing". If a US household tried that, it would be illegal and would be called "counterfeiting". So, it is a good confidence game for the US government as long as you can run it -- with the downside though that the USA has exported all its manufacturing know-how to China in the process and is now dependent on China which gives China a lot of physical authority over the USA. Essentially, the Chinese people have paid a tax by consuming less so that the Chinese society could rapidly industrialize and gain this power over the USA (rather than, say, defer consumption to build up a huge military like the US did).
That omission aside, your points on good ways for the USA to invest in its future are great!
One other idea I might add is that "retirement" should be replaced with a "basic income" for all from birth. Why should old people get a basic income and medical care (Social Security and Medicare) when younger people and their parents do not? We could divide equally 50% of the US GDP as a basic income and then let people compete over who gets the rest. That will help deal with the issue of increased structural unemployment from increasing robotics and other automation, expanded voluntary social networks, improved subsistence production via solar panels and 3D printers, and more effective government planning via the internet -- which can all reduce the need for paid employment.
I got the idea earlier from someone's slashdot sig around then which I saw in passing -- wish I could figure out who. The sig was something like: "If it is intellectual property, why isn't it taxed?"
In the variant I proposed, anyone could pay the money to put the copyright into the public domain (not purchase it for themselves).
Lawrence Lessig proposed something simpler -- a small ($50) tax after fifty years to re-register a copyright. That way at least all the abandoned works would become public domain when the tax was not paid on them (which would be a matter of public record). So, even some simple steps could be a huge step forward.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park ==== Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980), by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.
Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."[2]
To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16â"20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3]:166 The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.
The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no response.[4] Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding. ====
Thus I now joke that the USSR needed to guard its physical borders to keep people from escaping, but the USA needs to guard its medicine cabinets...
Of course, different drugs affect different neurotransmitters, so crack cocaine may have different results in such a situation than opiates like morphine.
Perhaps a bigger issue affecting most people who will read this is overcoming "The Pleasure Trap" related to junk foods: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx "Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
I don't feel you've understood my point about message passing (which goes beyond microkernels which are an example of it). You asked for an example of a microkernel success and I supplied one -- one which shows Linux was in a sense obsolete a decade before it was started relative to QNX. Smalltalk circa 1980 also shows the obsolescence of most software systems before they were developed -- gradually over the past three decades, most software systems have become more and more Smalltalk-like while still missing the message passing essence.
I also don't understand your comment critical about welding -- what specifically have I said about welding that is wrong by my extending the welding analogy by pointing to how modern welding is done with automated examples in automotive assembly and ship construction intended to assure higher quality welds systematically? Or, what have I said about management style that you specifically disagree with (where I cited how IBM trained its managers and also reference Total Quality Management principles like an organization like GE emphasizes)?
The Linux Kernel has been under development for twenty years. If it still has serious problems with handling change management and regression testing, that seems like an indication of design flaws both in architecture and social processes. To be clear, many to most software projects face such issues, so the Linux kernel would not be unique in that sense. That is all part of why "Software is Hard": http://gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html
Granted, Linus' git system (or any DVCS in general like Darcs which I used previously) is a great step forward from another angle to help any sort of community software development. Getting people to use DVCS broadly may be a bigger accomplishment for Linus than the kernel itself. Although, now that I think about that, is the absolute need for git (or previously BitKeeper), and features like git-bisect, also a reflection of deeper issues the kernel development process continues to struggle with because of a monolithic design? If the kernel was more modular in a message passing sense, then there might not be so much pressure to maintain essentially just one big source tree for a specific kernel version because independent driver modules could then progress more easily in smaller independent source archives loosely coupled through a common message passing interface?
So, again, is the stress Linus is continually under to maintain kernel quality a result of the monolithic design decision? And does that stress then manifest itself in what we just saw on the kernel list? Of course, hypothetical managers/friends of Linus then can got the next step along Total Quality Management to think about other aspects behind potentially faulty behavior (and Linus did clearly miss some of the context of why the patch was being done and why it failed). For example, if a software developer's arteries get clogged, there is less oxygen and nutrients going to the brain, so thinking quality declines; so, perhaps any stress from a monolithic kernel architecture hitting its limits is then amplified from the standard health problems software developers get in the USA from vitamin D deficiency and not eating enough vegetables and omega-3s now that Linus is probably eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) way in the USA? Contrast SAD with a program Finland initiated in 1972 to improve the physical cardiovascular health (and thus mental health) of its population: "Finland -- a case study in health eating" http://www.irishhealth.com/clin/ffl/finland.html "A community-based program was set up to reduce the risk factors for cardiovascular disease. In the Finnish health care structure health centres provide the primary health services. At the start of the program no extra personnel were hired and the project was incorporated into the work of health centre staff. Health care c
QNX was initially released around 1982 and so existed about the IBM PC PC-DOS was released. QNX was far superior and ran on PC hardware. The only reason it did not win "hearts and minds" was marketing and business relationships. Back then in the 1980s, with QNX, you could easily network a bunch of IBM PCs and run arbitrary processes anywhere on the network.
"Linus is being critical but there's no threat of kicking someone off the development team."
Well, I guess different people can read Linus' strong language in different ways: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 "Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
You can swat a mule on the butt with a two-by-four-inch board and maybe that will get it moving (though the mule might kick you in the head first), but if you do the same thing to a cat you might kill it. So, people can argue for strong invective as being appropriate sometimes, but clearly it is also inappropriate sometimes. Was it appropriate here? Is a kernel software developer more like a mule or a cat? Well, whether the language was appropriate or not, if you believe the kernel maintainers and patch submitters replies, there seems to have been more going on there than Linus seemed to have understood when Linus started using strong language. That seems problematical -- especially, if one could read Linus' strong language as not only saying this kernel maintainers role was in jeopardy but that, likely by extension, his entire career could be in jeopardy? There is a lot more potential stuff going on here when Linus flames someone to such a degree. The kernel is not just a typical FOSS project, and I'd guess this maintainer is likely a paid employee somewhere. I also tend to agree with other posters who suggest that such language, in response to a maintainer asking a question, is not going to cultivate a question asking culture, and ultimately that is going to pose a greater difficulty to the Linux kernel then a bad patch in an experimental kernel that was quickly reverted.
Again, whether using a 2X4 to get someone's attention was appropriate or not in this case, the deeper issue may also be that the strong emotions expressed by Linus may reflect a fundamental problematical issue in the Linux kernel architecture and development processes. Why does Linus have to be so afraid of so many continually needed patches breaking the system in a hard-to-understand and test way? At some point, it may be reasonable to say that what *most* users need is not a 20% or whatever performance improvement by a monolithic kernel but instead maybe what they would be better off with is a microkernel that supports easier upgrades, improved reliability, easier portability, and thus helps software developers to do new things with less effort and higher quality. And as QNX demonstrated in the 1980s, being able to do easy parallel processing across a network of thousands or millions of processors exchanging messages may be ultimately a much bigger performance boost than, say, a few percent greater performance on one processor. That is the promise of "message passing" whether implemented in a microkernel or not.
See this talk by Alan Kay for more on message passing: htt
Well, it's not clear your are replying entirely only specifically to my points, but any quick google search on robotic welding will produce stuff like: http://www.lincolnelectric.com/en-us/support/application-stories/Pages/chrysler-dodge-motorsports-robotic-welding.aspx "Similar to every passenger car manufactured, race cars incorporate thousands of welds. Dodge teams were spending many hours manually MIG welding the frame, middle section and front and rear clips that make up each car frame kit. Wanting to reduce man hours, as well as increase weld consistencies for the teams, Chrysler investigated robotic welding options and decided on a Lincoln Electric/Fanuc robotic welding cell. The result: Chrysler realized a 75 percent decrease in chassis assembly time when compared to hand welding the chassis. The Lincoln Electric/Fanuc robotic welding cell offered other benefits as well, a more consistent chassis for the teams and the cost savings associated with the reduced man hours to weld the chassis by hand.... Oâ(TM)Dell explains that the consistency of the weld, including torch angles and travel speeds, was difficult to keep consistent during manual welding, especially if different people welded different sections of the chassis. This translated into variations in weld quality, which could result in lower strength welds. Too often, an inconsistent weld pattern resulted in distortion on the center and rear sections that were unpredictable and resulted in a dimensionally unstable assembly.... The roughly 50 hours the teams previously spent welding the center and rear sections can now be used to focus on other aspects of assembling the car."
Or, to see a video of a human in a hard had "operating" a 21st century welding system (at 0:50-01:10 of a ten minute video): "Arc Welding Ships - Kawasaki Robotic" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBFSfyZoX-o "Specialized Arc Welding System for Ship Building. Robots are lowered down from the ceiling and automaticaly secured in the ribs of large shipping vessels. The robots use sensing to find the area to be welded and execute the process."
Another company selling such equipment: http://www.kranendonk.com/en/double-hull-welding "Welding the double hull of a ship is difficult because of the limited space. For robots it is easier to get into these spaces but the programming is an issue. KRANENDONK developed several double hull solutions which are combined with RinasWeld. Using this software component programming is not an automation issue. As an addition the RinasWeld software enables multiple robots to work together."
There are other things I've seen that say essentially that human welders just can't produce most of the kind of welds needed in some current automobile designs in terms of consistency. I think it is a reasonable analogy to expectations for human accuracy in any domain. In the 1980s I managed a robotics lab that was involved in repurposing a GE P50 robot designed for welding to other purposes like carving 3D shapes. While it has taken decades, those sorts of ideas and technologies are spreading everywhere now (as should be obvious to any regular reader of slashdot). Like another person replied to my comment, organizations need to design processes accepting that humans make mistakes (including mistakes about making mistakes). And yes, that is driving many pushes to automation, for good or bad -- including in places like China with otherwise cheap labor. With about a decade of flat employment levels in the USA while the US GDP has risen by something like 30%, these are not "fantasies" about people being put out of work -- these are realities. See for details: http://pdfernhout.net/b
I liked your approach, but that said, qwak23 makes a good point in reply about how different people respond better or worse to different interactional styles. There is a book called "Motherstyles" about how the same applies for raising kids. http://www.motherstyles.com/
Going with your approach here, one thing to do is step back and see the context (which I do not know about for the kernel list and that maintainer). If you were really commenting in a real situation, there would be more context. And so, beyond what you said, and depending on the relationship, something might be said like: "Bill, you've done a hundred excellent welds in a row here, and I know you've done great work on other projects. However, this weld is substandard and dangerous for these reasons. Is something going on in your life that led to this change? Lack of sleep? Overwork? Family problems? Are your tools damaged? Are the supplies substandard? Do you lack adequate training for this particular type of welding? Etc. The weld needs to be redone. You're generally a good performer and I want to keep you on the project. The deeper question is, how can we also keep this issue from happening again? What can I do as your manager to help you do your job better?"
A philosophy of "Total Quality Management" goes beyond detecting and correcting a specific defect. It includes looking at the context for a defect so that similar defects don't happen again in the future. Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_quality_management
For the software realm, consider how Linus could have reviewed multiple levels of the Linux Kernel's (and related application sphere's and test environment's) "fault tolerance": "A Conceptual Framework for System Fault Tolerance" http://hissa.nist.gov/chissa/SEI_Framework/framework_1.html "A major problem in transitioning fault tolerance practices to the practitioner community is a lack of a common view of what fault tolerance is, and how it can help in the design of reliable computer systems. This document takes a step towards making fault tolerance more understandable by proposing a conceptual framework. The framework provides a consistent vocabulary for fault tolerance concepts, discusses how systems fail, describes commonly used mechanisms for making systems fault tolerant, and provides some rules for developing fault tolerant systems."
People make mistakes. People even make mistakes about making mistakes (not seeing them, denying them, deflecting blame, etc.). So a big issue is, what social and architectural systems do we build around that to ensure the systems work well, anyway? Things like redundancy, modularity, and testability are important in that context.
One thing of concern to me about this (not knowing the kernel communications culture or the previous interactions of Linus and this maintainer) is whether the Linux kernel (and development community) has maybe reached some point where old development methods are breaking down in trying to support an every growing monolithic kernel approach? I initially reswisted using Linux in the 1990s because I knew there were alternative architectures available, like from QNX, Erlang, Actor, or Smalltalk, and I had hoped those alternatives would prevail. I started using GNU/Linux only when it seemed like the social momentum there was unstoppable. Thus my previous comment on "message passing" as perhaps a better architecture for software in the 21st century because if can help address theses issues of redundancy, modularity, and testability as ways to manage risk from complexity. Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMPL
AC, thanks for the link. This post by Laurent Pinchart explains further: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/89 "The patch uses the -ENOENT error code internally in the uvcvideo driver to inform the caller function (internal to the driver) that the requested control doesn't exist. It was never meant to be returned out of the driver, and definitely not to userspace. This is clearly a bug."
From reading that, it does seem like, as you suggest, Linus may have jumped to an incorrect conclusion about that error code (intended to indicate a bad path) and why it was in the code. However, he or someone else might have instead, with a more complete understanding of the history of the patch, then reasonably questioned the design choice of reusing that error to mean something a bit different internally, precisely because this sort of problem could (and did) arise.
Of course, if one starts asking questions, then issues like having cryptic error codes is another deeper issue.
Although then one could take that all the way back to even deeper design issues, like how a message passing approach like Smalltalk, Actor, and Erlang pioneered may be better for the kernel of software for the 21st century?
So, "crap" is perhaps relative to your frame of reference?:-)
Ultimately, a big piece of software is more a community than anything else. I don't know enough about the norms of the Linux kernel community to know what was appropriate in that context.
P.S. I used to look forward to BYTE magazine in the early years often more for ads that articles. So, it was possible at least then with an ad-supported medium to do a good job. And it was not because the ads were funny, but because they told me a lot about what was going on in the industry, including what was possible.
We need to use online information to move more of our economy in the 21st century to beyond money (towards high-tech subsistence with gardening robots and solar panels, a bigger gift-economy with online exchange of ideas, and better internet-empowered participatory planning at all levels of government), and to soften the money-focused parts with a "basic income" (perhaps 1/2 of the GDP evenly distributed).
We need to make this social transition because our technologies have become too powerful to do things in ironically stupid uncompassionate ways anymore (based on scarcity assumptions), since WWII and other events since have shown how easy it is to institutionalize the systematic destruction of large numbers of human beings using the tools of abundance (one of which is communication systems and another being transport systems). See Marshall Brain's book "Manna" for examples of two ways forward, one awful and one hopefully better: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
------ (***) Some criticism of Cohen: Cohen misses that hunter/gatherers had more spare time and freedom than agriculturalists (even if they had different difficulties). He also misses that "artificial scarcity" comes from more than advertising to increase demand -- artificial scarcity comes from rent-seeking through state-enforced monopolies (like patents, copyrights, overly broad trademarks, and so on) and by laws that direct corporate welfare through subsidies (like to the beef, dairy, and corn industries) or ignoring negative externalities (like pollution from coal) or systemic risks (like from financial or nuclear meltdowns). And being in the UK then, he ignores how the "war is a racket" that now so dominates US political expenditures now. His later writing is interesting because he begins to focus on the need for *moral* transformation in our society (more akin to getting non-land owners and women the right to vote, or abolishing slavery).
Good point, AC! Certainly cows and termites can break down fiber with different gut bacteria (and different gut architecture). http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/547cellulose.html "Animals such as cows, horses, sheep, goats, and termites have symbiotic bacteria in the intestinal tract. These symbiotic bacteria possess the necessary enzymes to digest cellulose in the GI tract. They have the required enzymes for the breakdown or hydrolysis of the cellulose; the animals do not, not even termites, have the correct enzymes. No vertebrate can digest cellulose directly."
That said, somehow I doubt humans could do it because we are not multi-stomached ruminants, but it would be great to see more science studies about it. Maybe you will be proven right and some humans with the right bacteria can do it better than other?
You might want to look into vitamin D deficiency. Your body uses vitamin D to help regulate the inflammatory process, both to start it up and, more importantly in this case, to shut it down.
Note that what that person called "high dose" vitamin D may actually be closer to what people really need because the RDA may be 5X-10X too low for many adults; see: http://www.grassrootshealth.net/
So, your restricted diet style may be compensating for vitamin D deficiency, and so put you at risk of getting other nutrient deficiencies? With that said, I could also readily believe your gut bacteria has adapted to such a diet and complain if you changed it.
However, you may also have something like a sulfur-related allergy that might lead to problems with brassicas like cabbage (which may be somewhat independent of other issues). Even if you can't eat the fiber, you might also want to look into vegetable juicing to at least get the phytonutrients. There are also powdered formulations of phytonutrients, but I doubt they are as good.
You might want to also consider a pro-biotic of some sort, perhaps even something like "Primal Defense" if your doctor OKs it (that particular one is a bit controversial, so do your own research on it, and there are certainly less controversial ones). Gross as it may sound, you could also look into "fecal transplants".
"Oh, look, he was also interested in electronics, we could a) teach him to become and engineer, helping to ensure our future prosperity and competitiveness in the world, or b) lock him in prison!"
AC, your point is another application of the idea in my sig which I have not thought about before. Thanks for pointing it out so clearly. From one assumption of human nature, this kid has the potential to be a productive member of our society on an upward spiral. With another assumption about human nature, this kid is set on the course of becoming a drain on our society in a downward spiral.
And the further we all go down the downward spiral, the harder it gets to find the resources to help children grow well into productive members of society (whether good public libraries, or healthy nutrition, or good chemistry sets). So then, as our society decays further, the more and more likely we are to assume the worst, and then we get the worst.
Echoing another of your points, when I was in High School, I found out the Junior Engineering and Technical Society (JETS) club had been disbanded a couple years earlier because the students had been working towards purchasing enough materials to build a big rocket (because it could in theory have hit an airplane). So, it became a "Computer Club" probably because that seemed "safer". So, I got support to learn about computers but not about how to make rockets. About a decade ago, I talked with someone at NASA who said they had a very difficult time hiring anyone these days to be an actual "rocket scientist" because kids have not experience anymore with rocketry and explosives. Is it any surprise NASA has a hard time "getting it up" these days and could not design a good successor to the Space Shuttle despite so much time and money? So, because of that 1970s fear, probably duplicated across the USA, we all remain imprisoned on planet Earth rather than being able to move into the "High Frontier" and reach for the stars. Meanwhile, we have to worry about "The Singularity" and Terminator-like military AIs getting out of control. And we also have to worry about robots taking most of the jobs (without an adequate economic policy like a basic income to distribute what robots can produce, see Marshall Brain's book "Manna") in part because we are still locked in a scarcity-assuming economics from lack of access to space resources like solar energy and asteroidal ore.
Around the globe, the USA is unfortunately busy creating terrorists like by killing women and children as "collateral damage" against suspected militants (intentionally or not). In the same way, out of the same emotion of fear, it looks like the USA is certainly working hard to take a potential engineer as this student was and turn him against society.
US president Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." I might not go that far, but it is a good thing to think about. Related: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html?_r=0 "But the satire was rooted in a statistical fact: in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented."
With about two million US citizens in prison (10X what if probably should be) and several times that on probation, with about half for non-violent drug offenses and/or for being a minority, it would be easy to argue this self-fulfilling prophecy has been operating for decades. It is just now expanding further and
From: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm ==== Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You'd have to be an idiot to agree with my plan -- at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.
And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite.3 The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven't even considered the battering ram aspect of cars -- why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?
It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold.... ====
More on the kid and what he was found with:
http://www.myfoxphilly.com/story/20385390/fi ""He really cares about people," she said. "He's kind, he's loving, he's brilliant...I think this is fear because of what just happened in Connecticut." The mother of the high school junior asked us not to identify her or her son. He may be sitting in a juvenile detention center, but she says he's a fine young man who volunteers to help senior citizens and was once a Boy Scout. She says his passion for collecting old stuff, taking it apart and rebuilding things lead to this arrest... "
"The student in this case didn't exactly make the best of decisions: With tensions high, it would probably be better to not be drawing guns or give any potential "danger indicators" to school officials, etc."
For adults, your point might make sense. but kids may process information like the tragedy in CT by role-playing through it. That is described in a book called "The War Play Dilemma" by by Diane E. Levin and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, which I review here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html "The "dilemma" is about a fundamental conflict parents face when dealing with war play. On the one hand, most parents want children to grow and develop by working through developmental issues (like learning to deal with conflict, learning self-control, and learning respect for themselves and others through play, including play involving conflicts as hands-on-learning). On the other hand, most parents want to convey social values related to their beliefs about violence and war as ways to solve social conflicts. The authors clearly do not say all war play is bad, and they also point out that even a cracker can be turned into a gun with one bite. The authors say there are no easy general answers to this dilemma in all situations, but provide a range of options...."
People who draw may often draw what is on their mind. With 24X7 news coverage of the tragedy, how could guns not be on the minds of a lot of kids?
Beyond all the other insightful comments people have made here, this NJ situation shows the fundamental lack of understanding that is so prevalent in so many schools about how children really learn and grow.
So, if there is an answer to your question, it is because the school kid was already in a form of prison, and then he broke the written or unwritten prison rules, and he is now being further punished. What was the original crime that landed him in a day-prison called "school" though? Just being young? For alternatives, see: http://www.educationrevolution.org/
As New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto wrote: http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency....
That said, I liked your insightful and ironic point. As another poster replied, you made probably the best comment here.
Dr. Joel Fuhrman recommends making salad dressings from ground up nuts or adding things like avocados to get healthy fats into there. I agree good fats help in feelign full too. Joel Fuhrman talsk about the body's "appestat" that controls when we stop eating and how the main determinats are whether the stomach is full (fiber) and whether their are enough nutrients (supplied mostly by veggies).
That said, I know what you mean about comfort food. It is a hard habit to break if at allt -- and it just goes to show that health is a social thing. Good luck.
...and more fruits and beans, and a limited amount of nuts, seeds, and whole grains. Eat a lot less of everything else. See Dr. Joel Fuhrman's book "Eat to Live" for the details. Or for a slightly different approach, see the book "What Color is Your Diet" by David Heber, MD, PhD, founding director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition, and dietitian Susan Bowerman, MS, RD. Or the book "The Pleasure Trap" by Doug Lisle and ALan Goldhamer. A great graph here: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
This is not to disagree that people vary, including in bacteria and their gut. But the basics are that leafy green vegetable have the least calories per amount of volume in the stomach, followed by fruits and beans. Fill up on those, and there is just not room for high calorie foods.
"People don't like believing that cops will lie in court and falsely accuse people of stuff and are just bad/evil in general. So they don't believe it."
A book about that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_Were_Made_(But_Not_by_Me) "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) is a non-fiction book by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, first published in 2007. It deals with cognitive dissonance, self-serving bias and other cognitive biases, using these psychological theories to illustrate how the perpetrators of hurtful acts justify and rationalize their behavior. It describes a positive feedback loop of action and self-deception by which slight differences between people's attitudes become polarised."
There is a whole chapter on how good cops go bad one small step at a time.
That said, I'd expect a solid majority of police officers are trying to do the best job they can under difficult circumstances. The police are on the front lines of the fact that the USA is a very broken and disintegrating society in many ways, very much in need of a good dose of self-renewal.
As I comment here about John Gardner's 1971 book "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society": http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html === From John Gardner's 1971 book:
"As I was browsing in a university bookstore recently, I heard an apple-cheeked girl say to her companion, "The truth is that our society and everything in it is in a state of decay." I studied her carefully and I must report that she did not seem even slightly decayed. But what of the society as a whole? Decay is hardly the word for what is happening to us. We are witnessing changes so profound and far-reaching that the mind can hardly grasp all the implications.... Only the blind and complacent could fail to recognize the great tasks of renewal facing us -- in government, in education,..."
John Gardner goes on to say that every generation faces the problem of renewing itself to meet new challenges emerging from the very success of the old ways of doing things. And he suggests that social values are not some drying up old reservoir, but rather a reservoir of variable capacity that must be recharged anew in every generation. Democracy -- use it or lose it. Free speech on the internet -- use it or lose it. Social capital -- use it or lose it? ===
It's a documented reality: http://www.thewaronkids.com/ "The War on Kids is a documentary on Public Education in America. While several documentaries on schools have come out since The War on Kids, these films tend to be either propaganda for charter schools or look at symptoms without any appreciation or understanding of underlying issues. To be a great documentary, it is essential to do the necessary work and dig deeper to uncover the heart of the problems observed. The numerous failures and pathologies associated with school are predominantly due to it autocratic structure. Because no one wants to voluntarily relinquish power, this fundamental problem is never addressed or even recognized."
Slashdot Mirror
"Radiation shielding is hard, its not impossible."
Good points. Freeman Dyson says much the same, and does some calculations showing that in one of his essays, where he says, adjusted for inflation, the costs to go from Europe to the Americas was on the order of what it would cost now to go into space. Remember, many people coming over to the "colonies" came as indentured servants who had to work off their travel for seven years. So, as a ballpark figure, let's guesstimate that person was giving up US$100K per year for inflation-adjusted wages (people typically worked six days a week and fourteen hours a day back then), and that's US$700,000 as an indenture. So, the move to North America was not that cheap for many.
On radiation shielding, see Marshall Savage's "The Millennial Project" where he suggests simply having two layers of transparent plastic with six feet of water between them. We could get the water in space from asteroids or comets (or launch the water from the earth or the moon via mass driver). Radiation problem solved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Other ideas from the Carter Administration:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
Read James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" and "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" for some realistic hard sci-fi set in habitats.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm
More ideas:
http://www.openvirgle.net/
All that said though, I would point out that the same sorts of technologies we need to live in space (such as near 100% recycling, healthier materials to be around, improved agriculture, portable doctoring and a better understanding of human nutrition and health, flexible manufacturing, improved governing processes for small communities, accessible digital libraries, improved conflict resolution skills, and so on), are mostly the *same* things we need to make Spaceship Earth work for everybody. So, overall, there is no deep conflict between an interest in space habitats and trying to make the Earth a better place.
Thanks for the reply. I now see where you are coming from in relation to focusing on one common type of welding and seeing Linus' comment in a cultural context of bluntness. Certainly both points have a lot of truth to them. I've seen a picture of welder hanging upside down from ropes while welding a beam on a huge local building, and that sure demonstrated impressive combination of technical and acrobatic skills. And I'm a fan of "World's Toughest Fixes", even though perhaps they just edit out the profanity? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_Toughest_Fixes
At the risk of showing more welding ignorance, :-) as well of my ignorance about theater lighting, :-) let me try again to extend your welding analogy again, in a different direction, to adjust for those points. Anyway, I'm just having fun here at this point... So, maybe the analogy won't hold up to scrutiny.
Let's say some guy is employed by RedWelding, Inc., and is doing some welding inside the Sydney Opera House, putting up some new spotlights supplied by a third-party vendor (replacing older spotlights). RedWelding is doing the repairs gratis, even though RedWelding is paying their employee. These new lights are being installed right over the seats of concertgoers because the mayor of Sydney said that is where they should go. Suddenly, some part of one of the lights falls on a seat (thankfully unoccupied as the hall was closed for maintenance). People start talking about the accident. The welder wonders aloud if maybe the light had a weakness in it that caused it to separate from its base (but had not yet looked to see if it was indeed from a bad weld instead). The mayor of the city is then quoted in a front page the Sydney Morning Herald. Using profanity, the mayor says the welder personally has displayed the grossest negligence as a welder and is entirely responsible for the problem. The mayor, who is also an accomplished welder, is going to weld back in an old light right away. The welder responds politely in a letter to the editor that, yes, the welding could have been better. He adds the reason he was up there adding new lights was because the old lights were in danger of falling too, and that deeper issue still needs to be fixed, even if the mayor puts back an old light. The reply is ignored by the mayor.
Now, imagine we also all know this is not the first time this has happened, and further imagine that any long-time theatergoer would know that many people have in the past been killed by falling lights in the Sydney opera house. Still, a lot of people rush to defend the mayor, applauding the strong language. They say this is the way you have to talk to bad welders to get them to shape up. If only more people talked this way, they say, the Sydney Opera House would be a much safer place to listen to music, rather than seeing many patrons of the arts killed each year from falling spotlights. Some even say they wish their boss was more like the mayor and was concerned more about the quality of modern theater than politeness or bureaucratic niceties. They say if you are going to weld on an important public project, you have to be ready for being on the receiving end of this kind of tough quality-assuring profanity.
Then, some smartass (me :-) comes along and writes a letter to the editor of the NYTimes, which also picked up the story. He asks, how can Sydney expect to have a safe opera house if the mayor forbids the welders from using darkened welding masks (a language with better semantics than C), and the mayor keeps welders working 72 hours in a row without breaks (no message passing that allows for smaller modules)? Yes, an accident happened, but it involved many factors and maybe we should try to figure out what all of them were, rather than just blame the welder personally (even if the welder did indeed make one or more mistakes). The smartass goes further and says, maybe the mayor sh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_as_Debt
Basically, the USA uses a token system to ration the output of our industrial base. We call these Kanban-like tokens "fiat dollars". While such tokens could legally be printed in any needed quantity by the US treasury, they way most are issued in practice is by creating debt through borrowing from the semi-public Federal Reserve. If the US was to have a "balanced budget", the money supply of fiat dollars would be restricted and we would have an even worse economic depression. That is the biggest difference between government debt and household debt.
Another difference is related to getting out of debt. Because these tokens (as paper of as bits in a computer) are accepted internationally, the US can create "debts" in terms of tokens in banking computers exchanged for real goods from China and real physical materials like oil and ore from elsewhere. If China or other countries come to collect the debts in the future, what do they have to collect except some ones and zeros in a computer? If they demand paper tokens, the US government can just print them and call is "Quantitative Easing". If a US household tried that, it would be illegal and would be called "counterfeiting". So, it is a good confidence game for the US government as long as you can run it -- with the downside though that the USA has exported all its manufacturing know-how to China in the process and is now dependent on China which gives China a lot of physical authority over the USA. Essentially, the Chinese people have paid a tax by consuming less so that the Chinese society could rapidly industrialize and gain this power over the USA (rather than, say, defer consumption to build up a huge military like the US did).
That omission aside, your points on good ways for the USA to invest in its future are great!
One other idea I might add is that "retirement" should be replaced with a "basic income" for all from birth. Why should old people get a basic income and medical care (Social Security and Medicare) when younger people and their parents do not? We could divide equally 50% of the US GDP as a basic income and then let people compete over who gets the rest. That will help deal with the issue of increased structural unemployment from increasing robotics and other automation, expanded voluntary social networks, improved subsistence production via solar panels and 3D printers, and more effective government planning via the internet -- which can all reduce the need for paid employment.
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html
I got the idea earlier from someone's slashdot sig around then which I saw in passing -- wish I could figure out who. The sig was something like: "If it is intellectual property, why isn't it taxed?"
In the variant I proposed, anyone could pay the money to put the copyright into the public domain (not purchase it for themselves).
Lawrence Lessig proposed something simpler -- a small ($50) tax after fifty years to re-register a copyright. That way at least all the abandoned works would become public domain when the tax was not paid on them (which would be a matter of public record). So, even some simple steps could be a huge step forward.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
====
Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980), by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.
Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."[2]
To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16â"20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3]:166 The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.
The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no response.[4] Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding.
====
Thus I now joke that the USSR needed to guard its physical borders to keep people from escaping, but the USA needs to guard its medicine cabinets...
Of course, different drugs affect different neurotransmitters, so crack cocaine may have different results in such a situation than opiates like morphine.
Perhaps a bigger issue affecting most people who will read this is overcoming "The Pleasure Trap" related to junk foods:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
"Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
So, what we need is the right sort of mutants...
I don't feel you've understood my point about message passing (which goes beyond microkernels which are an example of it). You asked for an example of a microkernel success and I supplied one -- one which shows Linux was in a sense obsolete a decade before it was started relative to QNX. Smalltalk circa 1980 also shows the obsolescence of most software systems before they were developed -- gradually over the past three decades, most software systems have become more and more Smalltalk-like while still missing the message passing essence.
I also don't understand your comment critical about welding -- what specifically have I said about welding that is wrong by my extending the welding analogy by pointing to how modern welding is done with automated examples in automotive assembly and ship construction intended to assure higher quality welds systematically? Or, what have I said about management style that you specifically disagree with (where I cited how IBM trained its managers and also reference Total Quality Management principles like an organization like GE emphasizes)?
The Linux Kernel has been under development for twenty years. If it still has serious problems with handling change management and regression testing, that seems like an indication of design flaws both in architecture and social processes. To be clear, many to most software projects face such issues, so the Linux kernel would not be unique in that sense. That is all part of why "Software is Hard":
http://gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html
Granted, Linus' git system (or any DVCS in general like Darcs which I used previously) is a great step forward from another angle to help any sort of community software development. Getting people to use DVCS broadly may be a bigger accomplishment for Linus than the kernel itself. Although, now that I think about that, is the absolute need for git (or previously BitKeeper), and features like git-bisect, also a reflection of deeper issues the kernel development process continues to struggle with because of a monolithic design? If the kernel was more modular in a message passing sense, then there might not be so much pressure to maintain essentially just one big source tree for a specific kernel version because independent driver modules could then progress more easily in smaller independent source archives loosely coupled through a common message passing interface?
So, again, is the stress Linus is continually under to maintain kernel quality a result of the monolithic design decision? And does that stress then manifest itself in what we just saw on the kernel list? Of course, hypothetical managers/friends of Linus then can got the next step along Total Quality Management to think about other aspects behind potentially faulty behavior (and Linus did clearly miss some of the context of why the patch was being done and why it failed). For example, if a software developer's arteries get clogged, there is less oxygen and nutrients going to the brain, so thinking quality declines; so, perhaps any stress from a monolithic kernel architecture hitting its limits is then amplified from the standard health problems software developers get in the USA from vitamin D deficiency and not eating enough vegetables and omega-3s now that Linus is probably eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) way in the USA? Contrast SAD with a program Finland initiated in 1972 to improve the physical cardiovascular health (and thus mental health) of its population:
"Finland -- a case study in health eating"
http://www.irishhealth.com/clin/ffl/finland.html
"A community-based program was set up to reduce the risk factors for cardiovascular disease. In the Finnish health care structure health centres provide the primary health services. At the start of the program no extra personnel were hired and the project was incorporated into the work of health centre staff. Health care c
"With respect, where is there an production example of a microkernel that "won"?"
http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.3.2/neutrino/sys_arch/kernel.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX
http://www.qnx.com/company/customer_stories/
QNX was initially released around 1982 and so existed about the IBM PC PC-DOS was released. QNX was far superior and ran on PC hardware. The only reason it did not win "hearts and minds" was marketing and business relationships. Back then in the 1980s, with QNX, you could easily network a bunch of IBM PCs and run arbitrary processes anywhere on the network.
In general, the message passing idea is much deeper than a "kernel" though. Smalltalk is a great example of it. So is Erlang:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)#Distribution
"Linus is being critical but there's no threat of kicking someone off the development team."
Well, I guess different people can read Linus' strong language in different ways:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
"Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
You can swat a mule on the butt with a two-by-four-inch board and maybe that will get it moving (though the mule might kick you in the head first), but if you do the same thing to a cat you might kill it. So, people can argue for strong invective as being appropriate sometimes, but clearly it is also inappropriate sometimes. Was it appropriate here? Is a kernel software developer more like a mule or a cat? Well, whether the language was appropriate or not, if you believe the kernel maintainers and patch submitters replies, there seems to have been more going on there than Linus seemed to have understood when Linus started using strong language. That seems problematical -- especially, if one could read Linus' strong language as not only saying this kernel maintainers role was in jeopardy but that, likely by extension, his entire career could be in jeopardy? There is a lot more potential stuff going on here when Linus flames someone to such a degree. The kernel is not just a typical FOSS project, and I'd guess this maintainer is likely a paid employee somewhere. I also tend to agree with other posters who suggest that such language, in response to a maintainer asking a question, is not going to cultivate a question asking culture, and ultimately that is going to pose a greater difficulty to the Linux kernel then a bad patch in an experimental kernel that was quickly reverted.
Again, whether using a 2X4 to get someone's attention was appropriate or not in this case, the deeper issue may also be that the strong emotions expressed by Linus may reflect a fundamental problematical issue in the Linux kernel architecture and development processes. Why does Linus have to be so afraid of so many continually needed patches breaking the system in a hard-to-understand and test way? At some point, it may be reasonable to say that what *most* users need is not a 20% or whatever performance improvement by a monolithic kernel but instead maybe what they would be better off with is a microkernel that supports easier upgrades, improved reliability, easier portability, and thus helps software developers to do new things with less effort and higher quality. And as QNX demonstrated in the 1980s, being able to do easy parallel processing across a network of thousands or millions of processors exchanging messages may be ultimately a much bigger performance boost than, say, a few percent greater performance on one processor. That is the promise of "message passing" whether implemented in a microkernel or not.
See this talk by Alan Kay for more on message passing:
htt
Well, it's not clear your are replying entirely only specifically to my points, but any quick google search on robotic welding will produce stuff like: ... Oâ(TM)Dell explains that the consistency of the weld, including torch angles and travel speeds, was difficult to keep consistent during manual welding, especially if different people welded different sections of the chassis. This translated into variations in weld quality, which could result in lower strength welds. Too often, an inconsistent weld pattern resulted in distortion on the center and rear sections that were unpredictable and resulted in a dimensionally unstable assembly. ... The roughly 50 hours the teams previously spent welding the center and rear sections can now be used to focus on other aspects of assembling the car."
http://www.lincolnelectric.com/en-us/support/application-stories/Pages/chrysler-dodge-motorsports-robotic-welding.aspx
"Similar to every passenger car manufactured, race cars incorporate thousands of welds. Dodge teams were spending many hours manually MIG welding the frame, middle section and front and rear clips that make up each car frame kit. Wanting to reduce man hours, as well as increase weld consistencies for the teams, Chrysler investigated robotic welding options and decided on a Lincoln Electric/Fanuc robotic welding cell. The result: Chrysler realized a 75 percent decrease in chassis assembly time when compared to hand welding the chassis. The Lincoln Electric/Fanuc robotic welding cell offered other benefits as well, a more consistent chassis for the teams and the cost savings associated with the reduced man hours to weld the chassis by hand.
Or, to see a video of a human in a hard had "operating" a 21st century welding system (at 0:50-01:10 of a ten minute video):
"Arc Welding Ships - Kawasaki Robotic"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBFSfyZoX-o
"Specialized Arc Welding System for Ship Building. Robots are lowered down from the ceiling and automaticaly secured in the ribs of large shipping vessels. The robots use sensing to find the area to be welded and execute the process."
Another company selling such equipment:
http://www.kranendonk.com/en/double-hull-welding
"Welding the double hull of a ship is difficult because of the limited space. For robots it is easier to get into these spaces but the programming is an issue. KRANENDONK developed several double hull solutions which are combined with RinasWeld. Using this software component programming is not an automation issue. As an addition the RinasWeld software enables multiple robots to work together."
There are other things I've seen that say essentially that human welders just can't produce most of the kind of welds needed in some current automobile designs in terms of consistency. I think it is a reasonable analogy to expectations for human accuracy in any domain. In the 1980s I managed a robotics lab that was involved in repurposing a GE P50 robot designed for welding to other purposes like carving 3D shapes. While it has taken decades, those sorts of ideas and technologies are spreading everywhere now (as should be obvious to any regular reader of slashdot). Like another person replied to my comment, organizations need to design processes accepting that humans make mistakes (including mistakes about making mistakes). And yes, that is driving many pushes to automation, for good or bad -- including in places like China with otherwise cheap labor. With about a decade of flat employment levels in the USA while the US GDP has risen by something like 30%, these are not "fantasies" about people being put out of work -- these are realities. See for details: http://pdfernhout.net/b
I liked your approach, but that said, qwak23 makes a good point in reply about how different people respond better or worse to different interactional styles. There is a book called "Motherstyles" about how the same applies for raising kids.
http://www.motherstyles.com/
Going with your approach here, one thing to do is step back and see the context (which I do not know about for the kernel list and that maintainer). If you were really commenting in a real situation, there would be more context. And so, beyond what you said, and depending on the relationship, something might be said like: "Bill, you've done a hundred excellent welds in a row here, and I know you've done great work on other projects. However, this weld is substandard and dangerous for these reasons. Is something going on in your life that led to this change? Lack of sleep? Overwork? Family problems? Are your tools damaged? Are the supplies substandard? Do you lack adequate training for this particular type of welding? Etc. The weld needs to be redone. You're generally a good performer and I want to keep you on the project. The deeper question is, how can we also keep this issue from happening again? What can I do as your manager to help you do your job better?"
A philosophy of "Total Quality Management" goes beyond detecting and correcting a specific defect. It includes looking at the context for a defect so that similar defects don't happen again in the future. Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_quality_management
For the software realm, consider how Linus could have reviewed multiple levels of the Linux Kernel's (and related application sphere's and test environment's) "fault tolerance":
"A Conceptual Framework for System Fault Tolerance"
http://hissa.nist.gov/chissa/SEI_Framework/framework_1.html
"A major problem in transitioning fault tolerance practices to the practitioner community is a lack of a common view of what fault tolerance is, and how it can help in the design of reliable computer systems. This document takes a step towards making fault tolerance more understandable by proposing a conceptual framework. The framework provides a consistent vocabulary for fault tolerance concepts, discusses how systems fail, describes commonly used mechanisms for making systems fault tolerant, and provides some rules for developing fault tolerant systems."
People make mistakes. People even make mistakes about making mistakes (not seeing them, denying them, deflecting blame, etc.). So a big issue is, what social and architectural systems do we build around that to ensure the systems work well, anyway? Things like redundancy, modularity, and testability are important in that context.
One thing of concern to me about this (not knowing the kernel communications culture or the previous interactions of Linus and this maintainer) is whether the Linux kernel (and development community) has maybe reached some point where old development methods are breaking down in trying to support an every growing monolithic kernel approach? I initially reswisted using Linux in the 1990s because I knew there were alternative architectures available, like from QNX, Erlang, Actor, or Smalltalk, and I had hoped those alternatives would prevail. I started using GNU/Linux only when it seemed like the social momentum there was unstoppable. Thus my previous comment on "message passing" as perhaps a better architecture for software in the 21st century because if can help address theses issues of redundancy, modularity, and testability as ways to manage risk from complexity. Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMPL
See point #8 here:
AC, thanks for the link. This post by Laurent Pinchart explains further: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/89
"The patch uses the -ENOENT error code internally in the uvcvideo driver to inform the caller function (internal to the driver) that the requested control doesn't exist. It was never meant to be returned out of the driver, and definitely not to userspace. This is clearly a bug."
From reading that, it does seem like, as you suggest, Linus may have jumped to an incorrect conclusion about that error code (intended to indicate a bad path) and why it was in the code. However, he or someone else might have instead, with a more complete understanding of the history of the patch, then reasonably questioned the design choice of reusing that error to mean something a bit different internally, precisely because this sort of problem could (and did) arise.
Of course, if one starts asking questions, then issues like having cryptic error codes is another deeper issue.
Although then one could take that all the way back to even deeper design issues, like how a message passing approach like Smalltalk, Actor, and Erlang pioneered may be better for the kernel of software for the 21st century?
So, "crap" is perhaps relative to your frame of reference? :-)
Anyway, it looks to me like there were mistakes made all around -- the patch developer, the kernel maintainer, and Linus. And that does not include all the other decisions by many other people who lead up to this. See also: http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Berenstain_Bears_and_the_Blame_Game.html?id=p8oMWMMdU2gC
Ultimately, a big piece of software is more a community than anything else. I don't know enough about the norms of the Linux kernel community to know what was appropriate in that context.
P.S. I used to look forward to BYTE magazine in the early years often more for ads that articles. So, it was possible at least then with an ad-supported medium to do a good job. And it was not because the ads were funny, but because they told me a lot about what was going on in the industry, including what was possible.
We need to use online information to move more of our economy in the 21st century to beyond money (towards high-tech subsistence with gardening robots and solar panels, a bigger gift-economy with online exchange of ideas, and better internet-empowered participatory planning at all levels of government), and to soften the money-focused parts with a "basic income" (perhaps 1/2 of the GDP evenly distributed).
See as just one example, from around 1986 (an example the web makes possible through online publishing) about why the deeper logic behind such an article is failing:
"G. A. Cohen - Against Capitalism" (***)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA9WPQeow9c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD1YEzd6QzQ
We need to make this social transition because our technologies have become too powerful to do things in ironically stupid uncompassionate ways anymore (based on scarcity assumptions), since WWII and other events since have shown how easy it is to institutionalize the systematic destruction of large numbers of human beings using the tools of abundance (one of which is communication systems and another being transport systems). See Marshall Brain's book "Manna" for examples of two ways forward, one awful and one hopefully better:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Or read James P. Hogans' Voyage From Yesteryear.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
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(***) Some criticism of Cohen: Cohen misses that hunter/gatherers had more spare time and freedom than agriculturalists (even if they had different difficulties). He also misses that "artificial scarcity" comes from more than advertising to increase demand -- artificial scarcity comes from rent-seeking through state-enforced monopolies (like patents, copyrights, overly broad trademarks, and so on) and by laws that direct corporate welfare through subsidies (like to the beef, dairy, and corn industries) or ignoring negative externalities (like pollution from coal) or systemic risks (like from financial or nuclear meltdowns). And being in the UK then, he ignores how the "war is a racket" that now so dominates US political expenditures now. His later writing is interesting because he begins to focus on the need for *moral* transformation in our society (more akin to getting non-land owners and women the right to vote, or abolishing slavery).
Good point, AC! Certainly cows and termites can break down fiber with different gut bacteria (and different gut architecture).
http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/547cellulose.html
"Animals such as cows, horses, sheep, goats, and termites have symbiotic bacteria in the intestinal tract. These symbiotic bacteria possess the necessary enzymes to digest cellulose in the GI tract. They have the required enzymes for the breakdown or hydrolysis of the cellulose; the animals do not, not even termites, have the correct enzymes. No vertebrate can digest cellulose directly."
That said, somehow I doubt humans could do it because we are not multi-stomached ruminants, but it would be great to see more science studies about it. Maybe you will be proven right and some humans with the right bacteria can do it better than other?
You might want to look into vitamin D deficiency. Your body uses vitamin D to help regulate the inflammatory process, both to start it up and, more importantly in this case, to shut it down.
Example anecdote: http://www.healthboards.com/boards/irritable-bowel-syndrome-ibs/824836-vitamin-d-helped-my-ibs-read-please.html
Note that what that person called "high dose" vitamin D may actually be closer to what people really need because the RDA may be 5X-10X too low for many adults; see:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/
So, your restricted diet style may be compensating for vitamin D deficiency, and so put you at risk of getting other nutrient deficiencies? With that said, I could also readily believe your gut bacteria has adapted to such a diet and complain if you changed it.
However, you may also have something like a sulfur-related allergy that might lead to problems with brassicas like cabbage (which may be somewhat independent of other issues). Even if you can't eat the fiber, you might also want to look into vegetable juicing to at least get the phytonutrients. There are also powdered formulations of phytonutrients, but I doubt they are as good.
You might want to also consider a pro-biotic of some sort, perhaps even something like "Primal Defense" if your doctor OKs it (that particular one is a bit controversial, so do your own research on it, and there are certainly less controversial ones). Gross as it may sound, you could also look into "fecal transplants".
Good luck!
... that you use with him to organize family memories for your grandchildren...
Wish I had mod points right now.
Now project that forward another 30 years...
"Oh, look, he was also interested in electronics, we could a) teach him to become and engineer, helping to ensure our future prosperity and competitiveness in the world, or b) lock him in prison!"
AC, your point is another application of the idea in my sig which I have not thought about before. Thanks for pointing it out so clearly. From one assumption of human nature, this kid has the potential to be a productive member of our society on an upward spiral. With another assumption about human nature, this kid is set on the course of becoming a drain on our society in a downward spiral.
And the further we all go down the downward spiral, the harder it gets to find the resources to help children grow well into productive members of society (whether good public libraries, or healthy nutrition, or good chemistry sets). So then, as our society decays further, the more and more likely we are to assume the worst, and then we get the worst.
Echoing another of your points, when I was in High School, I found out the Junior Engineering and Technical Society (JETS) club had been disbanded a couple years earlier because the students had been working towards purchasing enough materials to build a big rocket (because it could in theory have hit an airplane). So, it became a "Computer Club" probably because that seemed "safer". So, I got support to learn about computers but not about how to make rockets. About a decade ago, I talked with someone at NASA who said they had a very difficult time hiring anyone these days to be an actual "rocket scientist" because kids have not experience anymore with rocketry and explosives. Is it any surprise NASA has a hard time "getting it up" these days and could not design a good successor to the Space Shuttle despite so much time and money? So, because of that 1970s fear, probably duplicated across the USA, we all remain imprisoned on planet Earth rather than being able to move into the "High Frontier" and reach for the stars. Meanwhile, we have to worry about "The Singularity" and Terminator-like military AIs getting out of control. And we also have to worry about robots taking most of the jobs (without an adequate economic policy like a basic income to distribute what robots can produce, see Marshall Brain's book "Manna") in part because we are still locked in a scarcity-assuming economics from lack of access to space resources like solar energy and asteroidal ore.
Around the globe, the USA is unfortunately busy creating terrorists like by killing women and children as "collateral damage" against suspected militants (intentionally or not). In the same way, out of the same emotion of fear, it looks like the USA is certainly working hard to take a potential engineer as this student was and turn him against society.
Some people might strongly disagree with going much further with that analogy though:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100195201/comparing-obamas-drone-attacks-in-pakistan-to-the-shooting-at-sandy-hook-is-the-most-infantile-kind-of-anti-imperialism/
US president Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." I might not go that far, but it is a good thing to think about. Related: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html?_r=0
"But the satire was rooted in a statistical fact: in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented."
With about two million US citizens in prison (10X what if probably should be) and several times that on probation, with about half for non-violent drug offenses and/or for being a minority, it would be easy to argue this self-fulfilling prophecy has been operating for decades. It is just now expanding further and
From: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm ...
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Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You'd have to be an idiot to agree with my plan -- at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.
And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite.3 The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven't even considered the battering ram aspect of cars -- why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?
It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold.
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More on the kid and what he was found with:
http://www.myfoxphilly.com/story/20385390/fi .. "
""He really cares about people," she said. "He's kind, he's loving, he's brilliant...I think this is fear because of what just happened in Connecticut." The mother of the high school junior asked us not to identify her or her son. He may be sitting in a juvenile detention center, but she says he's a fine young man who volunteers to help senior citizens and was once a Boy Scout. She says his passion for collecting old stuff, taking it apart and rebuilding things lead to this arrest.
http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?2,1482541,1482565
"The evening news reported that what was taken from the home included cleaning fluids and flour, steel wool and a cell phone."
"The student in this case didn't exactly make the best of decisions: With tensions high, it would probably be better to not be drawing guns or give any potential "danger indicators" to school officials, etc."
For adults, your point might make sense. but kids may process information like the tragedy in CT by role-playing through it. That is described in a book called "The War Play Dilemma" by by Diane E. Levin and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, which I review here: ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
"The "dilemma" is about a fundamental conflict parents face when dealing with war play. On the one hand, most parents want children to grow and develop by working through developmental issues (like learning to deal with conflict, learning self-control, and learning respect for themselves and others through play, including play involving conflicts as hands-on-learning). On the other hand, most parents want to convey social values related to their beliefs about violence and war as ways to solve social conflicts. The authors clearly do not say all war play is bad, and they also point out that even a cracker can be turned into a gun with one bite. The authors say there are no easy general answers to this dilemma in all situations, but provide a range of options.
People who draw may often draw what is on their mind. With 24X7 news coverage of the tragedy, how could guns not be on the minds of a lot of kids?
Beyond all the other insightful comments people have made here, this NJ situation shows the fundamental lack of understanding that is so prevalent in so many schools about how children really learn and grow.
Better information on how kids learn:
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0fg73WnLWQ
http://www.holtgws.com/howchildrenlearn.html
http://www.alfiekohn.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogmtAQlp9HI
And also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8RulhBVzbk
So, if there is an answer to your question, it is because the school kid was already in a form of prison, and then he broke the written or unwritten prison rules, and he is now being further punished. What was the original crime that landed him in a day-prison called "school" though? Just being young? For alternatives, see: http://www.educationrevolution.org/
As New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto wrote: ...
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency.
That said, I liked your insightful and ironic point. As another poster replied, you made probably the best comment here.
See my comment here about feeling full by eating a lot more leafy greens: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3335159&cid=42372385
Dr. Joel Fuhrman recommends making salad dressings from ground up nuts or adding things like avocados to get healthy fats into there. I agree good fats help in feelign full too. Joel Fuhrman talsk about the body's "appestat" that controls when we stop eating and how the main determinats are whether the stomach is full (fiber) and whether their are enough nutrients (supplied mostly by veggies).
That said, I know what you mean about comfort food. It is a hard habit to break if at allt -- and it just goes to show that health is a social thing. Good luck.
...and more fruits and beans, and a limited amount of nuts, seeds, and whole grains. Eat a lot less of everything else. See Dr. Joel Fuhrman's book "Eat to Live" for the details. Or for a slightly different approach, see the book "What Color is Your Diet" by David Heber, MD, PhD, founding director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition, and dietitian Susan Bowerman, MS, RD. Or the book "The Pleasure Trap" by Doug Lisle and ALan Goldhamer. A great graph here:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
This is not to disagree that people vary, including in bacteria and their gut. But the basics are that leafy green vegetable have the least calories per amount of volume in the stomach, followed by fruits and beans. Fill up on those, and there is just not room for high calorie foods.
"People don't like believing that cops will lie in court and falsely accuse people of stuff and are just bad/evil in general. So they don't believe it."
A book about that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_Were_Made_(But_Not_by_Me)
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) is a non-fiction book by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, first published in 2007. It deals with cognitive dissonance, self-serving bias and other cognitive biases, using these psychological theories to illustrate how the perpetrators of hurtful acts justify and rationalize their behavior. It describes a positive feedback loop of action and self-deception by which slight differences between people's attitudes become polarised."
There is a whole chapter on how good cops go bad one small step at a time.
That said, I'd expect a solid majority of police officers are trying to do the best job they can under difficult circumstances. The police are on the front lines of the fact that the USA is a very broken and disintegrating society in many ways, very much in need of a good dose of self-renewal.
As I comment here about John Gardner's 1971 book "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society": ... Only the blind and complacent could fail to recognize the great tasks of renewal facing us -- in government, in education, ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
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From John Gardner's 1971 book:
"As I was browsing in a university bookstore recently, I heard an apple-cheeked girl say to her companion, "The truth is that our society and everything in it is in a state of decay." I studied her carefully and I must report that she did not seem even slightly decayed. But what of the society as a whole? Decay is hardly the word for what is happening to us. We are witnessing changes so profound and far-reaching that the mind can hardly grasp all the implications.
John Gardner goes on to say that every generation faces the problem of renewing itself to meet new challenges emerging from the very success of the old ways of doing things. And he suggests that social values are not some drying up old reservoir, but rather a reservoir of variable capacity that must be recharged anew in every generation. Democracy -- use it or lose it. Free speech on the internet -- use it or lose it. Social capital -- use it or lose it?
===
Some of Gardner's book:
http://books.google.com/books/about/Self_Renewal.html?id=U5hXpnwUmW4C
It's a documented reality: http://www.thewaronkids.com/
"The War on Kids is a documentary on Public Education in America. While several documentaries on schools have come out since The War on Kids, these films tend to be either propaganda for charter schools or look at symptoms without any appreciation or understanding of underlying issues. To be a great documentary, it is essential to do the necessary work and dig deeper to uncover the heart of the problems observed. The numerous failures and pathologies associated with school are predominantly due to it autocratic structure. Because no one wants to voluntarily relinquish power, this fundamental problem is never addressed or even recognized."