Your comment is so far off base it should be modded +5, Funny.
That's great! In fact the comment has garnered an interesting assortment of Troll (WTF? I am honestly surprised) and Insightful (personally, I thought it was insightful, even if it includes the inflammatory word "fuck").
Obama seems like a really good guy and I think, in general, his heart is in the right place. But it is hard for me to imagine that anyone in the valley, or any nerd reading this News for Nerds, could consider him and especially Biden to be in the thrall of the copyright/IP cartel whose interests are almost always in opposition to innovation. Ditto on supporting the NSA in their deep infiltration of ISPs and major web companies. I think their actions add, rather than remove risk to the United States.
Or did you consider the current republican any of pro education, pro ACA (or maybe you think I'm deranged to consider it pro entrepreneur? It makes it easier for people to leave big companies for startups and keep insurance) not pro big business or pro rentier? If you think any of those things, well, let's just agree to disagree.
None of this is intended to praise the Democrats, don't get me wrong!
Yes, Obama shows up in the valley to collect money and then departs to fuck the valley to the benefit of the RIAA et al and the so-called security apparatus.
But clearly the Republicans would be worse, as they are the anti-business (or at least anti-entrepreneur), anti-education, anti-ACA (a very pro entrepreneurism law) and pro-big business, pro-rentier party. I am not sure any tea party or high party official could even find silicon valley on a map.
So Obama ends up by default with the bucks on a combination of lesser-of-two-evils and star-struck-close-to-greatness bases.
I'm not quite sure where Dean Fitzgerald is coming from with this editorial. It's not as if every accredited ABET school doesn't already teach humanities as part of its engineering curriculum....This strikes me as yet another in a very long series of not-so-subtle digs at STEM curriculums.
I think you miss two important points of her essay.
The first is that she is at MIT. She makes the point that MIT has already "drunk the kool aid" of the importance of the humanities and that even in a highly "STEM" institution like that, Humanities are considered crucial. In fact MIT has only 6 "schools", and Humanities is one of them on par with Engineering and Science.
But MIT can get away with setting its own standards, and that leads to her other point: that there is a strong emerging fetishism with STEM, and with degrees that train (as opposed to educate) you with "skills" that soon become irrelevant. A desire for more science and engineering graduates does seem like a good thing given where the USA is right now, and we have evidence from the sputnik scare that it probably can have a good result. But if we fetishize it at the expense of the humanities, we won't get what we want (a stronger, more dynamic society that helps everyone).
She's not advocating that, say, Bowdoin adopt MIT's requirement that humanities majors take multivariate calculus, E&M, do lab work etc. just like everyone else. But she is saying that if even one the most prestigious "STEM" schools considers the liberal arts crucial, perhaps they are. And the fact that someone from MIT is writing it, rather than someone from a liberal arts-only school, makes it a more convincing argument.
In too many humanities courses, it's not about critical thinking, it's about figuring out the personal beliefs of the professor, because in many cases your grade depends on not offending those beliefs.
There are poorly taught classes in Engineering and especially CS as well. Personally, all the thermo I took at MIT was worthless and I had to learn it all over again in my 40s.
Yes, it's hard to identify crappy liberal arts teaching, especially when some of the interesting work does challenge orthodox thinking (since of course some of the crappiest also challenge orthodoxy). But really is that all that different from an engineering class that teaches only the stuff that's easiest to teach? It can be objectively valid, yet useless in the real world.
Note: I have a course 21 (humanities) degree from MIT.
Well, the fifth amendment to the US constitution ends with
nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Seems like a clear case of "private property being taken for public use." Possibly even "deprived of property".
Ignore Silicon Valley...it used to be a hot-bed of science and technological innovation. Now it is a magnet for designer coffee-swigging social cloud blog web 2.0 get rich quick smartphone app hipsters.
Close, but you described San Francisco. We have some of those loons too down here in the Valley, but we also have real stuff.
The out of town reporters are up in the city too, and don’t know the difference, but frankly it’s easier to get work done with them not around as well.
Note to the press: "Hackers" doesn't mean what you think is means.
So true.
Interestingly House of Cards which includes a character who is a cracker and hacker (appears to have good hacking skills which he uses to break into systems). It appeared that the writers had actually made an effort to learn about the culture(s). For example there was a well done attack that combined social engineering and sleight of hand to defeat two factor authentication.
Unfortunately his lines still made it clear that the writers didn’t really understand what those words really meant (sorta like when the marketing department uses the word “cloud”). And the set department still made the usual nonsensical computer displays. As for the character himself. well he was hardly glorified. In fact if I ever met a person like that my overshelming desire would be to smite him with a copy of the V7 manual. Twice, if he kept moving.
At least he is getting attention. It is far worse to be ignored than to be feared or hated. I don't even encounter microsoft in my daily life any more -- I'm sure it's in that ATM or airport kiosk, but I don't notice it. Other than that, it's rare to even see a 'winders' machine at a coffee shop or around town. Even my kid's school is all mac & iPad.
They're still minting money. But think about it: they are still minting money even though everything they've tried to do post W&O has failed[*]. Their cash cow is on autopilot -- not only within the company but outside too. Which means it has no mindshare, any more than the company that makes the concrete in my house foundation has mindshare. That's a pretty sucky place to be.
[*] when I mean failed I mean accumulated profits/losses are in negative territory for all other meaningful segments (bing, xbox, azure, surface). Keyboards and mice are profitable but don't move the needle on a company the size of MS.
Actually, I'm quite certain it's not. Not without a dramatic change in Google's culture, which I don't see happening.
I used to think so too, then they reduced the highlighting of the ads that surround the search results (so that people are more likely to click on them), then started pushing people to G+...
I do think they still try not to be evil, but as Upton Sinclair pointed out, when your salary depends on something you tend to start to decide it's OK .
I wish google implemented captchas for sending me email[] If you solve the captcha, you would enter my "first-line-of-defense whitelist"
You can easily implement this kind of thing if by running your own server. Google is quite unlikely to implement complicated features that few people would actually use.
OK, admittedly they implemented Google+ which is complicated and which O(0) people actually use, but I claim that’s the exception not the rule.
Or what about when Google steps the “unsubscribe” feature to 2.0, in which the marketer can bid on being able to send 1, 2, 3, n more messages before the “unsubscribe” takes effect?
Or v3.0 in which the sender can pay to have unsubscribe NOT appear or to have their mail “opt out” of any spam filtering?
In this age of rent-seeking monopolies and cartels at least we can be sure that there is healthy competition for the title of "Worst Company in America".
IBM used to do this: you could pay different prices for different clock speeds; if you paid for an upgrade the technician would arrive and remove the "slow down" jumper.
Oddly enough people felt ripped off by this. Who'da thunk it?
That's a great point, that there are still some Germans living with their past. But when the war ended, it was clear that Nazism was defeated then and there. Our legacy of slavery moved at a different pace. After the U.S. Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment simply abolished slavery. There were no other laws that suddenly gave the freed slaves any big pile of extra rights, privileges, protections, or reparations that didn't apply to others.
Actually the end of the war was a slow and messy affair (the break in Japan was cleaner) and various successor movements do break out around Europe from time to time (look at the current government in Hungary for example, as well as some parties in the balkans, perhaps including, to reconnect to TFA, Breaking Dawn). Postwar by Tony Judt is a good summary.
In the US those other laws you talk about were passed and implemented, but reconstruction was rolled back after a change in government. It's a nice A/B experiment, actually.
...if a handful of skinheads goosesteps up and down the street yelling "Sieg heil!", there are a hundred non-skinheads who yell "go home you morons" at them.
Does this strategy work? Well, the neo-Nazis here are very marginalized.
Basically I agree strongly with what you wrote in both philosophy and practice. But I cut Germany some slack here, using the US as the example.
Nazism was a “philosphy” that was harnessed to the state within living memory. As a result there are plenty of remaining artifacts around from old driving licenses or professional certificates (e.g. Opticians) or marriage licenses that are still valid documents (old German driving licenses had no expiration dates) which bear swastikas and other nazi references. There are still old granddads who had fun shooting guns in the war. I know one friend’s dad, drafted at 17 in 1944, who's main memories are crazy russians running through hi farm trying to defect to the west. Plus learning to shoot. But every once in a while he uses an old aphorism from his childhood that's not only disturbing, but doesn't even agree with how he lived his life. I am sure there are living grandparents with stories they learned in school in the 30s and who were happy with those times. So since the wound is still fresh, this is a part of trying to heal it.
Compare that to the US. The civil war ended in 1865 but old southern racists survived well into the 1920s (even reaching the presidency, with Wilson) and the Jim Crow legacy continued into the 1960s and beyond. The reconstruction program which was killed early in the US was the equivalent of the reconstruction of Germany, which, in these laws, continues to this day.
I agree with Brandeis that "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants" so feel free speech should be extremely free. But the German's position shouldn't be rejected out of hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Your comment is so far off base it should be modded +5, Funny.
That's great! In fact the comment has garnered an interesting assortment of Troll (WTF? I am honestly surprised) and Insightful (personally, I thought it was insightful, even if it includes the inflammatory word "fuck").
Obama seems like a really good guy and I think, in general, his heart is in the right place. But it is hard for me to imagine that anyone in the valley, or any nerd reading this News for Nerds, could consider him and especially Biden to be in the thrall of the copyright/IP cartel whose interests are almost always in opposition to innovation. Ditto on supporting the NSA in their deep infiltration of ISPs and major web companies. I think their actions add, rather than remove risk to the United States.
Or did you consider the current republican any of pro education, pro ACA (or maybe you think I'm deranged to consider it pro entrepreneur? It makes it easier for people to leave big companies for startups and keep insurance) not pro big business or pro rentier? If you think any of those things, well, let's just agree to disagree.
None of this is intended to praise the Democrats, don't get me wrong!
Yes, Obama shows up in the valley to collect money and then departs to fuck the valley to the benefit of the RIAA et al and the so-called security apparatus.
But clearly the Republicans would be worse, as they are the anti-business (or at least anti-entrepreneur), anti-education, anti-ACA (a very pro entrepreneurism law) and pro-big business, pro-rentier party. I am not sure any tea party or high party official could even find silicon valley on a map.
So Obama ends up by default with the bucks on a combination of lesser-of-two-evils and star-struck-close-to-greatness bases.
I'm not quite sure where Dean Fitzgerald is coming from with this editorial. It's not as if every accredited ABET school doesn't already teach humanities as part of its engineering curriculum. ...This strikes me as yet another in a very long series of not-so-subtle digs at STEM curriculums.
I think you miss two important points of her essay.
The first is that she is at MIT. She makes the point that MIT has already "drunk the kool aid" of the importance of the humanities and that even in a highly "STEM" institution like that, Humanities are considered crucial. In fact MIT has only 6 "schools", and Humanities is one of them on par with Engineering and Science.
But MIT can get away with setting its own standards, and that leads to her other point: that there is a strong emerging fetishism with STEM, and with degrees that train (as opposed to educate) you with "skills" that soon become irrelevant. A desire for more science and engineering graduates does seem like a good thing given where the USA is right now, and we have evidence from the sputnik scare that it probably can have a good result. But if we fetishize it at the expense of the humanities, we won't get what we want (a stronger, more dynamic society that helps everyone).
She's not advocating that, say, Bowdoin adopt MIT's requirement that humanities majors take multivariate calculus, E&M, do lab work etc. just like everyone else. But she is saying that if even one the most prestigious "STEM" schools considers the liberal arts crucial, perhaps they are. And the fact that someone from MIT is writing it, rather than someone from a liberal arts-only school, makes it a more convincing argument.
In too many humanities courses, it's not about critical thinking, it's about figuring out the personal beliefs of the professor, because in many cases your grade depends on not offending those beliefs.
There are poorly taught classes in Engineering and especially CS as well. Personally, all the thermo I took at MIT was worthless and I had to learn it all over again in my 40s.
Yes, it's hard to identify crappy liberal arts teaching, especially when some of the interesting work does challenge orthodox thinking (since of course some of the crappiest also challenge orthodoxy). But really is that all that different from an engineering class that teaches only the stuff that's easiest to teach? It can be objectively valid, yet useless in the real world.
Note: I have a course 21 (humanities) degree from MIT.
Holy crap you have to actually compile it yourself! What is the world coming to? You mean hacking isn’t just plugging stuff together?
OK the thing has problems, that’s news. But if compiling is considered hard, well, it’s hard to see you as a nerd.
I might be naive in believing that this second "extended random' was covert, rather than the EC weakening that the NSA bought.
Two words: Sovereign Immnunity.
Well, the fifth amendment to the US constitution ends with
Seems like a clear case of "private property being taken for public use." Possibly even "deprived of property".
EMC paid $2.6B for RSA. Could they sue the NSA for destroying the value of their property? What would be just compensation?
Ignore Silicon Valley...it used to be a hot-bed of science and technological innovation. Now it is a magnet for designer coffee-swigging social cloud blog web 2.0 get rich quick smartphone app hipsters.
Close, but you described San Francisco. We have some of those loons too down here in the Valley, but we also have real stuff.
The out of town reporters are up in the city too, and don’t know the difference, but frankly it’s easier to get work done with them not around as well.
Note to the press: "Hackers" doesn't mean what you think is means.
So true.
Interestingly House of Cards which includes a character who is a cracker and hacker (appears to have good hacking skills which he uses to break into systems). It appeared that the writers had actually made an effort to learn about the culture(s). For example there was a well done attack that combined social engineering and sleight of hand to defeat two factor authentication.
Unfortunately his lines still made it clear that the writers didn’t really understand what those words really meant (sorta like when the marketing department uses the word “cloud”). And the set department still made the usual nonsensical computer displays. As for the character himself. well he was hardly glorified. In fact if I ever met a person like that my overshelming desire would be to smite him with a copy of the V7 manual. Twice, if he kept moving.
Then I shall glorify the fast-acting AC.
(take only as directed).
At least he is getting attention. It is far worse to be ignored than to be feared or hated. I don't even encounter microsoft in my daily life any more -- I'm sure it's in that ATM or airport kiosk, but I don't notice it. Other than that, it's rare to even see a 'winders' machine at a coffee shop or around town. Even my kid's school is all mac & iPad.
They're still minting money. But think about it: they are still minting money even though everything they've tried to do post W&O has failed[*]. Their cash cow is on autopilot -- not only within the company but outside too. Which means it has no mindshare, any more than the company that makes the concrete in my house foundation has mindshare. That's a pretty sucky place to be.
[*] when I mean failed I mean accumulated profits/losses are in negative territory for all other meaningful segments (bing, xbox, azure, surface). Keyboards and mice are profitable but don't move the needle on a company the size of MS.
You know it’s coming...
Actually, I'm quite certain it's not. Not without a dramatic change in Google's culture, which I don't see happening.
I used to think so too, then they reduced the highlighting of the ads that surround the search results (so that people are more likely to click on them), then started pushing people to G+...
I do think they still try not to be evil, but as Upton Sinclair pointed out, when your salary depends on something you tend to start to decide it's OK .
I wish google implemented captchas for sending me email[] If you solve the captcha, you would enter my "first-line-of-defense whitelist"
You can easily implement this kind of thing if by running your own server. Google is quite unlikely to implement complicated features that few people would actually use.
OK, admittedly they implemented Google+ which is complicated and which O(0) people actually use, but I claim that’s the exception not the rule.
Or what about when Google steps the “unsubscribe” feature to 2.0, in which the marketer can bid on being able to send 1, 2, 3, n more messages before the “unsubscribe” takes effect?
Or v3.0 in which the sender can pay to have unsubscribe NOT appear or to have their mail “opt out” of any spam filtering?
You know it’s coming...
Apparently he is still the president of norks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Once again the government acts like they're supposed to copy Terry Gilliam.
In this age of rent-seeking monopolies and cartels at least we can be sure that there is healthy competition for the title of "Worst Company in America".
Heh, in college, I got a Discover card with a 2 liter bottle of Sunkist soda.
That doesn’t sound very practical. Sure, it can help with your hydration issues, but how did you fit it in your wallet?
640K ought to be enough for anybody
This summary is needlessly breathless. For all we know, Google plans to use this chipset in the next rev glasses.
Usually I like to learn things, but this...... (shakes head).
I hope someone mods your post up.
IBM used to do this: you could pay different prices for different clock speeds; if you paid for an upgrade the technician would arrive and remove the "slow down" jumper.
Oddly enough people felt ripped off by this. Who'da thunk it?
That's a great point, that there are still some Germans living with their past. But when the war ended, it was clear that Nazism was defeated then and there. Our legacy of slavery moved at a different pace. After the U.S. Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment simply abolished slavery. There were no other laws that suddenly gave the freed slaves any big pile of extra rights, privileges, protections, or reparations that didn't apply to others.
Actually the end of the war was a slow and messy affair (the break in Japan was cleaner) and various successor movements do break out around Europe from time to time (look at the current government in Hungary for example, as well as some parties in the balkans, perhaps including, to reconnect to TFA, Breaking Dawn). Postwar by Tony Judt is a good summary.
In the US those other laws you talk about were passed and implemented, but reconstruction was rolled back after a change in government. It's a nice A/B experiment, actually.
...if a handful of skinheads goosesteps up and down the street yelling "Sieg heil!", there are a hundred non-skinheads who yell "go home you morons" at them.
Does this strategy work? Well, the neo-Nazis here are very marginalized.
Basically I agree strongly with what you wrote in both philosophy and practice. But I cut Germany some slack here, using the US as the example.
Nazism was a “philosphy” that was harnessed to the state within living memory. As a result there are plenty of remaining artifacts around from old driving licenses or professional certificates (e.g. Opticians) or marriage licenses that are still valid documents (old German driving licenses had no expiration dates) which bear swastikas and other nazi references. There are still old granddads who had fun shooting guns in the war. I know one friend’s dad, drafted at 17 in 1944, who's main memories are crazy russians running through hi farm trying to defect to the west. Plus learning to shoot. But every once in a while he uses an old aphorism from his childhood that's not only disturbing, but doesn't even agree with how he lived his life. I am sure there are living grandparents with stories they learned in school in the 30s and who were happy with those times. So since the wound is still fresh, this is a part of trying to heal it.
Compare that to the US. The civil war ended in 1865 but old southern racists survived well into the 1920s (even reaching the presidency, with Wilson) and the Jim Crow legacy continued into the 1960s and beyond. The reconstruction program which was killed early in the US was the equivalent of the reconstruction of Germany, which, in these laws, continues to this day.
I agree with Brandeis that "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants" so feel free speech should be extremely free. But the German's position shouldn't be rejected out of hand.
Especially when you start talking into account how government entities like the NSA "care" about the people
Oh they care about the people, don't worry about that! They care like the bull cares about the cow.