People on Slashdot who say anything preceded by a form of '...history shows...' without substantial justification are practically holding out a red cloth and yelling 'Toro! Toro!'
Quite frankly I have a feeling that several are smart enough to be consciously trolling.
Oh FFS. I just accidentally deleted a very detailed essay in response, but I still want it said so here is the abridged version:
The US did not change Japan insofar as introducing much that was extrinsic, they simply promoted the aspect of Japanese culture they preferred. Japan had been at war with itself culturally for centuries, and could be metaphorically represented by Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Sen no Rikyu. The former was a ruthless bloodthirsty tyrant willing to use bushido as the means to put the world under his feet. The latter was a serene, pacifistic and wise aesthete who wanted nothing more than enjoy the subtleties of life. On the eve of the Imjin War (almost three centuries before WW2) Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered Sen no Rikyu to commit suicide for (what several historians believe was) his insolence in failing to support the imminent conflict. For the next several centuries, the warrior-oriented mode of Japanese culture and identity would be dominant through the end of the Second World War. (The internal cultural conflict even went so far as the outright persecution of Japanese Buddhists/pacifists.)
Then, due to both the rapid demographic shift caused by so many bushido-bound warriors dieing in the war as well as the pressures exerted by the American occupation, the cultural pendulum swung the opposite direction. The Americans were smart enough not to try to change the Japanese into something non-Japanese, that would never have worked, instead they picked the most useful (to their purpose) aspect of Japanese culture and essentially channeled the Japanese into themselves. A very, very wise and effective strategy. The demographics are striking, the Soka Gakkai sect of Buddhism (which was the only sect in Japan to staunchly oppose militarism) saw an increase in membership of 2500% in less than a decade. A massive and rapid cultural shift indeed, but not inside out, rather one side to another internally.
The conquistadors would like to have a word with you about what history shows, as would, ironically, the moors. Might we also have a word about the history of Anatolia? Hellenism and its effects on the Seleucid Kingdom(s)? Etc. etc.
I don't think you know half as much as you pretend to know about history or what it 'repeatedly shows'.
As you allude to yourself, people who actually understand and can apply material do not need to memorize (per se) to pass; however, those who can neither understand/apply nor memorize cannot pass, thus it is the minimum standard.
I'm not saying that those to whom abstract application does not come naturally cannot be productive, what I'm saying is I'm not sure that society's parents are willing to admit to themselves that some of their kids don't deserve diplomas or degrees and cannot hope for anything more than blue collar work at best.
I also suspect there are serious issues with teaching methods, both that different teaching methods work for different students [...]
Yes, and different methods is exactly what the mostly homogeneous public education system prevents, and why the minimum reform is the exertion of market pressures through vouchers. When public schools have to compete with private schools for enrollment and the money there attached, things will change for the better.
[...] students don't care if they are not properly motivated (students aren't stupid: they know if the teacher is just "teaching to the test" and not actually teaching anything useful).
Except that is exactly what happens in 90% of public school classrooms, and is a direct result of standardized tests and curriculum. Furthermore, kids ARE stupid when they don't work within a system that is fundamental to their success, even when it's broken. Yes, it boils down to being naught more than a societal hoop, but if jumping means the difference between middle and lower class, you jump. It's not like kids have something better to do with their time.
This is because memorization is a minimum standard. As long as education is geared toward the least-common denominator becoming a jack of all trades, the natural expression will remain 'memorize this and regurgitate it on tests.' It's fun to wax idealistic on applied knowledge, but the fact is that people cannot equally get from knowns to unknowns even after the framework for a given discipline is explained to them. To do that specialization would have to occur much earlier, at a high school or even middle school level.
And the uncomfortable elephant in the room is what do you do with the ones who can't specialize and can't apply? The ones who can barely pass rote memorization even with lowered standards? Pat them on the back and throw them at the nearest menial labor recruiter?
One of the central issues is the value of education is it is perceived by society/employers. On the one hand you have the 'push' of parents who all want their special snowflake to be a genius who graduates with a billion A+s and honors. On the other hand you have the 'pull' of employers who need to use education as a (not very accurate) measure of a person's fitness for work. Grade inflation drives down the value of diplomas and degrees, such that most employers see degrees as a minimum standard and diplomas as practically worthless. The simple and inexorable dynamic of the curve dictates that a sizable number of people should not receive diplomas, degrees, etc. But that is in opposition to the social pressure to 'improve graduation rates' etc. no matter the cost.
It's not a sustainable environment and it will eventually force radical new stratifications of education or social collapse. There are signs of the former, as many industries are now aggrieved with dozens to hundreds of certifications purveyed by as many certifying authorities, though these too are usually accomplished using the same 'teach the test' mentality and don't address the core problem. Some future paradigm will arise from them perhaps, as might be glimpsed in the Cisco certifications' labs that require more demonstrable applied skill than just answering a multiple choice question.
The main problem will be that humans don't make that much milk and one woman is only going to produce enough product for a few babies.
While you are correct, I think this just means that we'll have to do some selective breeding just as with dairy cows. After all, it's not like pre-domesticated cows produced anything like the volumes seen on dairy farms today.
The real problem is that cows don't have minimum wage laws, OSHA, etc. While there are probably some women, especially in the developing world, desperate enough to become professional milk-producers, the operating expenses must naturally be higher than a cow-based dairy producer. Add to that the health regulations and oversight for magnitudes higher risk of harmful pathogen transmission (human to human > cow to human).
If somebody is going to try to hack the NSA, they have the skill to break the trivial encryption on wireless networks too. So what does that mean? No wireless networks ever? Live in fear? Fuck that.
There have already been cases where people have deliberately planted CP on some schmuck's PC to try to frame them as a sex offender. Framing people (deliberately or incidentally) is hardly a new phenomenon, and the justice system will be forced to adapt to these new expressions of it effectively.
If somebody wanted to, right now they could rent a car that looked like mine, forge a license plate, and run tons of red lights with cameras (or those even worse speed cameras some shitty jurisdictions have), and I'd get the bill. Does that mean I live in fear? Permanently log the coordinates of my vehicle all the time? Whatever.
In the first and more practical place, there is the protection of simple probability. All of these things are so unlikely that special effort against them is a waste of time. In the second and more subjective place, it's a matter of principle. I refuse to live a paranoid life. I'm not going to tiptoe around every corner expecting a serial killer, or never go online so I can never be hacked/phished/framed for criminal activity, or even be anything less than my true self for fear of what it might do to my future. If my true self isn't my future too, what's the point? Fuck. That. Shit.
Gen Xers are still nervous, yes, but Ys and Zs increasingly less so. I expect there to be sea change of sex positivism after the Boomers are gone. In fact that's why most of this discourse occurs in other channels, our parents and employers (who are often our parents' generation or like Gen X feel socially obligated to affect a similar outlook even if they don't believe it themselves) read facebook and other such things. So whenever porn manages to become an open topic of discussion for a group it is usually on IRC or at house parties or similar.
The social stigma is dieing, and at some point there will be a critical mass that will radically alter the role of sexuality as a shameful force in social structures/contexts.
Everybody thinks continuums and scales are better, that's an intuitive inclination toward a range of choices, but the reality was revealed through YouTube: most people either rated things 5/5 or 1/5. That's why they replaced the scale with up/down.
Campus networks and corporate networks are really, really different animals. I used to work in a major university's IT dept. In the first place, the network is always considered compromised. Perimeter security (which has been an outmoded paradigm for at least a decade anyway) isn't even bothered with as theater. Unlike a corporate network, there is no standard build/image for the students' systems, no OS standards, no patching standards, no guaranty of access or efficacy of group policy, etc. It's a hodge-podge of a hundred different brands/configs running a hundred different OSes, and most of them are laptops that walk in and out the door everyday to go off and pick up amazing malware from friends, family, and public access.
Now granted I only have experience with the way one institution handled things, but I wager that a lot of them are similar. Pretty much the only thing we did on the security side was make sure that one or two systems weren't using up huge portions of the available bandwidth. When that happened they were tracked down and given a talking-to. Otherwise it's herding cats, and there were so many usability issues every day we didn't have the time/manpower to worry about zoomj what if somebody has an open access point?!
Lending out firearms vs. allowing people to use an internet connection are not parallel scenarios. Are Starbucks or public libraries criminally liable for what people do on their wireless networks? Hell no. If somebody walked into a hotel, picked up a courtesy phone and made a death threat, would the hotel be liable for having a courtesy phone? Of course not. Public access does not always equate to public liability, especially when it comes to communications.
Japan turned away several French trade missions before the United States' Commodore Perry came along and said "trade or we'll blow your shit up."
Even if things have come a long way since colonialism, I wouldn't be surprised if American diplomats were a little more forceful (and had more leverage) than French ones about insisting that aid be taken.
Preindustrial human society might have been relatively uncomfortable, inconvenient, and logistically disconnected, but it was by no means dead. Given that there are tribes in South America that are self-sustaining at a population of dozens to hundreds, that really isn't a valid concern either. According to Lynn Jorde and Henry Harpending's genetic research, the entire population of modern humans was at one time less than ten thousand primarily due to the huge environmental distress caused by the Toba eruption. Using these figures as precedents, as much as 99.99999% of the current human population could be killed and there would still be the possibility of recovery. Humans are resilient motherfuckers. They can survive virtually anywhere and eat virtually anything.
The difference of course being that bacteria die, and each species thereof has a specific and usually very limited environmental range that it can operate in. So while there are temperate bacteria and extromophile bacteria that can live in the arctic or thermal vents, they can't be transplanted between those conditions.
Further, and this is almost more important, bacteria and other microorganisms as well as plants and animals live in a de facto equilibrium. Yes, it's not the result of self imposed limits, but it is the result of each species struggling against each other for resources in its given niche, and while some species might get a little ahead of others over time, natural selection does not, as a matter of its function, hand a species an atomic bomb from out of nowhere. The closest thing to that in nature was the Oxygen Catastrophe of the Siderian period, and that killed most of the lifeforms which existed before that time.
The point is that organic life is not prepared to contend with artificial life for resources. Even the most advanced animal predator is not going to best a main battle tank, and at a microorganism level that's exactly the sort of competition that would exist between bacteria and self-replicating nanomachines.
Volcanoes are not primarily caused by local differences in surface strata composition. There is a reason why volcanoes occur along fault lines and especially subduction/divergence zones. Volcanoes are driven in their development and activity primarily by activity in the mantle itself, whether that is melting crust in suduction zones causing plumes of lighter materials or plumes cascading out of the core itself to form hotspots. This is stark contrast to your artificially simplistic description of an equalization of pressure. Volcanoes occur where pressure is not equal.
The crust itself is surprisingly resilient in places where there are no special pressures. The Kola borehole proved that. Over seven and a half miles down and there was no explosion of pressure. If seven and a half miles of rock can be removed to no ill effect, then substituting it with water should not be as big a problem as you think it is, difference in weight not withstanding.
I'm not sure if you and those of like mind responding are seriously stupid or just trolling. Volcanoes have been doing this as long as the earth has had a crust. It's not going to do anything to 'core spin' or cause some unstoppable lava flow. It's not like the earth is a fucking water balloon that's going to pop as soon as somebody pokes it with a pin.
As much as people love to get worked up about doomsday science, I think the only real credible threats are grey goo and malevolent strong AI, and both of those things are probably at least another generation or two away.
There is too much genetic diversity and geographic separation of human populations for a virus to wipe them all out. Even in the middle of some of the worst of plagues some people were immune. The energy involved in achieving any kind of planetary effects is for all intents and purposes currently impossible to produce, and if H bombs didn't ignite the atmosphere, what, if anything, could?
Uh, Firefox was built more or less from the ground up. You might recall that the Mozilla Foundation used to have a browser actually called "Mozilla"... that was the rebranding of Netscape. Firefox is completely different from Netscape.
Slashdot Mirror
People on Slashdot who say anything preceded by a form of '...history shows...' without substantial justification are practically holding out a red cloth and yelling 'Toro! Toro!'
Quite frankly I have a feeling that several are smart enough to be consciously trolling.
Oh FFS. I just accidentally deleted a very detailed essay in response, but I still want it said so here is the abridged version:
The US did not change Japan insofar as introducing much that was extrinsic, they simply promoted the aspect of Japanese culture they preferred. Japan had been at war with itself culturally for centuries, and could be metaphorically represented by Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Sen no Rikyu. The former was a ruthless bloodthirsty tyrant willing to use bushido as the means to put the world under his feet. The latter was a serene, pacifistic and wise aesthete who wanted nothing more than enjoy the subtleties of life. On the eve of the Imjin War (almost three centuries before WW2) Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered Sen no Rikyu to commit suicide for (what several historians believe was) his insolence in failing to support the imminent conflict. For the next several centuries, the warrior-oriented mode of Japanese culture and identity would be dominant through the end of the Second World War. (The internal cultural conflict even went so far as the outright persecution of Japanese Buddhists/pacifists.)
Then, due to both the rapid demographic shift caused by so many bushido-bound warriors dieing in the war as well as the pressures exerted by the American occupation, the cultural pendulum swung the opposite direction. The Americans were smart enough not to try to change the Japanese into something non-Japanese, that would never have worked, instead they picked the most useful (to their purpose) aspect of Japanese culture and essentially channeled the Japanese into themselves. A very, very wise and effective strategy. The demographics are striking, the Soka Gakkai sect of Buddhism (which was the only sect in Japan to staunchly oppose militarism) saw an increase in membership of 2500% in less than a decade. A massive and rapid cultural shift indeed, but not inside out, rather one side to another internally.
The conquistadors would like to have a word with you about what history shows, as would, ironically, the moors. Might we also have a word about the history of Anatolia? Hellenism and its effects on the Seleucid Kingdom(s)? Etc. etc.
I don't think you know half as much as you pretend to know about history or what it 'repeatedly shows'.
I'm not saying that those to whom abstract application does not come naturally cannot be productive, what I'm saying is I'm not sure that society's parents are willing to admit to themselves that some of their kids don't deserve diplomas or degrees and cannot hope for anything more than blue collar work at best.
I also suspect there are serious issues with teaching methods, both that different teaching methods work for different students [...]
Yes, and different methods is exactly what the mostly homogeneous public education system prevents, and why the minimum reform is the exertion of market pressures through vouchers. When public schools have to compete with private schools for enrollment and the money there attached, things will change for the better.
[...] students don't care if they are not properly motivated (students aren't stupid: they know if the teacher is just "teaching to the test" and not actually teaching anything useful).
Except that is exactly what happens in 90% of public school classrooms, and is a direct result of standardized tests and curriculum. Furthermore, kids ARE stupid when they don't work within a system that is fundamental to their success, even when it's broken. Yes, it boils down to being naught more than a societal hoop, but if jumping means the difference between middle and lower class, you jump. It's not like kids have something better to do with their time.
This is because memorization is a minimum standard. As long as education is geared toward the least-common denominator becoming a jack of all trades, the natural expression will remain 'memorize this and regurgitate it on tests.' It's fun to wax idealistic on applied knowledge, but the fact is that people cannot equally get from knowns to unknowns even after the framework for a given discipline is explained to them. To do that specialization would have to occur much earlier, at a high school or even middle school level.
And the uncomfortable elephant in the room is what do you do with the ones who can't specialize and can't apply? The ones who can barely pass rote memorization even with lowered standards? Pat them on the back and throw them at the nearest menial labor recruiter?
One of the central issues is the value of education is it is perceived by society/employers. On the one hand you have the 'push' of parents who all want their special snowflake to be a genius who graduates with a billion A+s and honors. On the other hand you have the 'pull' of employers who need to use education as a (not very accurate) measure of a person's fitness for work. Grade inflation drives down the value of diplomas and degrees, such that most employers see degrees as a minimum standard and diplomas as practically worthless. The simple and inexorable dynamic of the curve dictates that a sizable number of people should not receive diplomas, degrees, etc. But that is in opposition to the social pressure to 'improve graduation rates' etc. no matter the cost.
It's not a sustainable environment and it will eventually force radical new stratifications of education or social collapse. There are signs of the former, as many industries are now aggrieved with dozens to hundreds of certifications purveyed by as many certifying authorities, though these too are usually accomplished using the same 'teach the test' mentality and don't address the core problem. Some future paradigm will arise from them perhaps, as might be glimpsed in the Cisco certifications' labs that require more demonstrable applied skill than just answering a multiple choice question.
Funny is that according to the Article, Algebra II is really one of (IMHO) useless parts of the curriculum (yes, I had it in High School)
ended up using some of it in Engineering School after all
Remind me to stay far, far away from anything you engineer.
So are you a bigot who denies that there are ethnic Jews, or just stupid? Jews and Judaism may frequently overlap, but they are not one and the same.
The main problem will be that humans don't make that much milk and one woman is only going to produce enough product for a few babies.
While you are correct, I think this just means that we'll have to do some selective breeding just as with dairy cows. After all, it's not like pre-domesticated cows produced anything like the volumes seen on dairy farms today.
The real problem is that cows don't have minimum wage laws, OSHA, etc. While there are probably some women, especially in the developing world, desperate enough to become professional milk-producers, the operating expenses must naturally be higher than a cow-based dairy producer. Add to that the health regulations and oversight for magnitudes higher risk of harmful pathogen transmission (human to human > cow to human).
Maybe he should run for office from Mercer Island, WA instead... they have an institution that would help him out ;-p
If somebody is going to try to hack the NSA, they have the skill to break the trivial encryption on wireless networks too. So what does that mean? No wireless networks ever? Live in fear? Fuck that.
There have already been cases where people have deliberately planted CP on some schmuck's PC to try to frame them as a sex offender. Framing people (deliberately or incidentally) is hardly a new phenomenon, and the justice system will be forced to adapt to these new expressions of it effectively.
If somebody wanted to, right now they could rent a car that looked like mine, forge a license plate, and run tons of red lights with cameras (or those even worse speed cameras some shitty jurisdictions have), and I'd get the bill. Does that mean I live in fear? Permanently log the coordinates of my vehicle all the time? Whatever.
In the first and more practical place, there is the protection of simple probability. All of these things are so unlikely that special effort against them is a waste of time. In the second and more subjective place, it's a matter of principle. I refuse to live a paranoid life. I'm not going to tiptoe around every corner expecting a serial killer, or never go online so I can never be hacked/phished/framed for criminal activity, or even be anything less than my true self for fear of what it might do to my future. If my true self isn't my future too, what's the point? Fuck. That. Shit.
Gen Xers are still nervous, yes, but Ys and Zs increasingly less so. I expect there to be sea change of sex positivism after the Boomers are gone. In fact that's why most of this discourse occurs in other channels, our parents and employers (who are often our parents' generation or like Gen X feel socially obligated to affect a similar outlook even if they don't believe it themselves) read facebook and other such things. So whenever porn manages to become an open topic of discussion for a group it is usually on IRC or at house parties or similar.
The social stigma is dieing, and at some point there will be a critical mass that will radically alter the role of sexuality as a shameful force in social structures/contexts.
Everybody thinks continuums and scales are better, that's an intuitive inclination toward a range of choices, but the reality was revealed through YouTube: most people either rated things 5/5 or 1/5. That's why they replaced the scale with up/down.
You forget this is the internet. The internet is for porn. Expect much +1ings of popular pornstars and such.
Campus networks and corporate networks are really, really different animals. I used to work in a major university's IT dept. In the first place, the network is always considered compromised. Perimeter security (which has been an outmoded paradigm for at least a decade anyway) isn't even bothered with as theater. Unlike a corporate network, there is no standard build/image for the students' systems, no OS standards, no patching standards, no guaranty of access or efficacy of group policy, etc. It's a hodge-podge of a hundred different brands/configs running a hundred different OSes, and most of them are laptops that walk in and out the door everyday to go off and pick up amazing malware from friends, family, and public access.
Now granted I only have experience with the way one institution handled things, but I wager that a lot of them are similar. Pretty much the only thing we did on the security side was make sure that one or two systems weren't using up huge portions of the available bandwidth. When that happened they were tracked down and given a talking-to. Otherwise it's herding cats, and there were so many usability issues every day we didn't have the time/manpower to worry about zoomj what if somebody has an open access point?!
Lending out firearms vs. allowing people to use an internet connection are not parallel scenarios. Are Starbucks or public libraries criminally liable for what people do on their wireless networks? Hell no. If somebody walked into a hotel, picked up a courtesy phone and made a death threat, would the hotel be liable for having a courtesy phone? Of course not. Public access does not always equate to public liability, especially when it comes to communications.
For somebody who pretends to be proud of their behavior, you sure are anonymous when you talk about it.
Japan turned away several French trade missions before the United States' Commodore Perry came along and said "trade or we'll blow your shit up."
Even if things have come a long way since colonialism, I wouldn't be surprised if American diplomats were a little more forceful (and had more leverage) than French ones about insisting that aid be taken.
The other dozen CD key jokes weren't doing it for ya, eh?
Preindustrial human society might have been relatively uncomfortable, inconvenient, and logistically disconnected, but it was by no means dead. Given that there are tribes in South America that are self-sustaining at a population of dozens to hundreds, that really isn't a valid concern either. According to Lynn Jorde and Henry Harpending's genetic research, the entire population of modern humans was at one time less than ten thousand primarily due to the huge environmental distress caused by the Toba eruption. Using these figures as precedents, as much as 99.99999% of the current human population could be killed and there would still be the possibility of recovery. Humans are resilient motherfuckers. They can survive virtually anywhere and eat virtually anything.
The difference of course being that bacteria die, and each species thereof has a specific and usually very limited environmental range that it can operate in. So while there are temperate bacteria and extromophile bacteria that can live in the arctic or thermal vents, they can't be transplanted between those conditions.
Further, and this is almost more important, bacteria and other microorganisms as well as plants and animals live in a de facto equilibrium. Yes, it's not the result of self imposed limits, but it is the result of each species struggling against each other for resources in its given niche, and while some species might get a little ahead of others over time, natural selection does not, as a matter of its function, hand a species an atomic bomb from out of nowhere. The closest thing to that in nature was the Oxygen Catastrophe of the Siderian period, and that killed most of the lifeforms which existed before that time.
The point is that organic life is not prepared to contend with artificial life for resources. Even the most advanced animal predator is not going to best a main battle tank, and at a microorganism level that's exactly the sort of competition that would exist between bacteria and self-replicating nanomachines.
Volcanoes are not primarily caused by local differences in surface strata composition. There is a reason why volcanoes occur along fault lines and especially subduction/divergence zones. Volcanoes are driven in their development and activity primarily by activity in the mantle itself, whether that is melting crust in suduction zones causing plumes of lighter materials or plumes cascading out of the core itself to form hotspots. This is stark contrast to your artificially simplistic description of an equalization of pressure. Volcanoes occur where pressure is not equal.
The crust itself is surprisingly resilient in places where there are no special pressures. The Kola borehole proved that. Over seven and a half miles down and there was no explosion of pressure. If seven and a half miles of rock can be removed to no ill effect, then substituting it with water should not be as big a problem as you think it is, difference in weight not withstanding.
I'm not sure if you and those of like mind responding are seriously stupid or just trolling. Volcanoes have been doing this as long as the earth has had a crust. It's not going to do anything to 'core spin' or cause some unstoppable lava flow. It's not like the earth is a fucking water balloon that's going to pop as soon as somebody pokes it with a pin.
As much as people love to get worked up about doomsday science, I think the only real credible threats are grey goo and malevolent strong AI, and both of those things are probably at least another generation or two away.
There is too much genetic diversity and geographic separation of human populations for a virus to wipe them all out. Even in the middle of some of the worst of plagues some people were immune. The energy involved in achieving any kind of planetary effects is for all intents and purposes currently impossible to produce, and if H bombs didn't ignite the atmosphere, what, if anything, could?
Uh, Firefox was built more or less from the ground up. You might recall that the Mozilla Foundation used to have a browser actually called "Mozilla" ... that was the rebranding of Netscape. Firefox is completely different from Netscape.
Sounds like insufficient Preparation to me.