I actually agree with you for the most part. And you have a good point. However...
There is value in being able to prove your identity in a bunch of different contexts - like withdrawing money from the bank. It doesn't matter who you are, it only matters that you own the account that you are withdrawing from.
What you overlook is that increasingly those records are linked up with other records, and the data used to verify who you are for those various linked records is increasingly easy to find.
In cases of identity theft or even outright clerical errors on your credit report, for example, you do need to be able to differentiate the things actually connected to you vs. the accounts opened and other transactions done in your name, in an account held by a company that connects data to your actual accounts, but which you actually didn't do.
Before the internet era, theft of identity and this sort of identity fraud was possible, but even when it happened, you might never even had known about it... since all your accounts and transaction histories weren't being shared among so many companies.
However, nowadays it is much easier for you to end up with something connected to your name that never should have been. And in those cases, having some sort of absolute identity to connect to stuff you've actually done can be very helpful, rather than just contextual intereractions that might be connected to other things which might not have anything to do with you.
So far they've been playing a shell game with domains, but they're being pretty aggressively pursued.
Fine -- even if Pirate Bay disappears (or even the whole torrent-sharing apparatus), a hundred more things like it will arise. People have been claiming that a dystopic future where media can never be shared will happen ever since the first MPAA complaints against Napster almost 15 years ago.
What we've seen in the meantime is a gradual -- yes gradual -- move toward greater (legal) access to ever more media at cheaper prices, but yes, accompanied by greater demands for DRM and licensing.
If there's one thing people will get up-in-arms over in modern democracy, it's access to crappy television, movies, and music. If the licensing and DRM stuff gets out of control, there will be push-back... and that's even if governments basically shut down the internet, which is the only way that things like the Pirate Bay will all end completely. (Which would likely lead to outright revolt... eventually.)
What's more likely is that the major media companies will eventually find ways to license the media in a way that makes it more convenient, with more variety, and at a significantly lower cost to consumers than they paid 15-20 years ago before file-sharing started.
It may not be the world you dreamed of where "all information is free" and unicorns fly around rainbows, but it will make 99.9% of couch potatoes happier and give them more and better access than they had before.
And meanwhile, there will probably still be some things like the Pirate Bay floating around.
It's beginning to look more like a world where the media companies control everything is inevitable.
Maybe... but those media companies had a lot of control before the internet. And I sincerely doubt we're returning to a place where there is less opportunity for free exchange of information than there was before the internet anytime soon -- even with some further restrictions.
Software has matured to the point that 12 year old Windows XP, 10 year old Office 2003 and 8 year old Photoshop CS2 are still perfectly fine and able to do everything that most people need.
I'd like to emphasize this point too, since it seems to be at the center of the problem with the question posed here. Why exactly would businesses even want to upgrade? What does it get them?
I'd push the dates back even further and say that a lot of business software reached maturity -- as measured by the functionality that more than 99% of employees need and use on a regular basis -- roughly 25 years ago. (Web browsers would obviously be a little later, since the modern "web" didn't exist yet.)
What exactly do most office employees do today that couldn't have been done with a late 1980s copy of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS? Even the first version of Photoshop in 1989 was an instant hit and was perfectly adequate for most user's needs in terms of functionality (though you'd need a Mac).
Now, I'll grant you that the DOS interfaces seem a little clunky compared to today, but 99% of the functionality that most people need was already there. I know at least one person who continued using his 386 until a couple years ago for all of his business needs other than modern internet browsing, with his old DOS-based WordPerfect churning out new documents every week and some ancient version of Excel for Windows 3.1 for his business spreadsheets.
I think the reason software appears to have "matured" in the early 2000s is because we finally hit some magical threshold of computer literacy in the workforce. It's not that the old DOS or Windows 3.x systems couldn't do what businesses needed; it's just that it was still possible in 1990 to be an office worker and not really "do computers," particularly if you were over 35-40 years old and/or in a small business.
By 2000, that just wasn't acceptable anymore. Everyone was expected to be relatively fluent with computers -- including even those older people who were "excused" in 1990, but now had been trained and forced to adopt the ways of the new "machine." Young people entering the workforce had grown up with PCs, so they knew how to use them intuitively. Computer illiteracy was no longer an option.
It should be expected that soon after that moment when computers became entrenched that people would start to realize that "new" isn't always better, if no significant new functionality is added. Early adopters of computers could get excited about the next new version of Word or Excel -- "Wow, did you see what WordPerfect 6.0 can do? Did you see the cool new graph options in Excel 95?" But by the early 2000s those people were outnumbered by loads of older people in their late 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s who didn't really grow up using computers heavily and had just barely caught on to the systems they were supposed to be fluent in.
Why the heck would these older people -- the bulk of the workforce a decade ago -- want to keep adopting a new UI every other year? Why would businesses want to try to get them to? They finally got all these older office workers literate on the systems they had. And what new functionality does any of this new crap give anyone, in terms of basic everyday business needs for the average office worker?
Here we are, 25 years later, with computers that have 10,000 times as much RAM and hard drives 10,000 times as big, and many people still have a clunky word processor that's bloated with too many functions and a spreadsheet that seems to run slow sometimes. The UI is the only major thing that keeps changing. Businesses only care about the core functionality... and once they hit a critical mass of workers who were fluent on a particular UI, why the heck would they ever want to change?
why do we feel the need to claim that intelligent machines would need to be similar to or work like real brains?
I don't think we do.
I absolutely understand what you mean here. I don't think most AI researchers actually think they are "recreating wetware" explicitly or that the "artificial neurons" in "neural nets" are really anything like real neurons.
On the other hand, a lot of the nomenclature of AI seems to deliberately try to make analogies -- "deep learning," "neural nets," "blur the line between hardware and wetware," etc. -- to human or animal brain functions.
Hence my rhetorical question about why we feel the need to claim that our intelligent machines work similar to real brains. AI researchers clearly know that they aren't really "recreating" things, but yet we keep developing new nomenclature that makes it sound like we are... the whole Slashdot summary for this article is effectively making these comparisons.
I say all of the following as a big fan of AI research. I just think we need to drop the rhetoric that we're somehow recreating brains -- why do we feel the need to claim that intelligent machines would need to be similar to or work like real brains?
Anyhow...
We can now almost convincingly partially recreate the wetware functions of Drosophila melanogaster.
Interesting wording. Let's take this apart:
now: the present
almost convincingly: not really "convincingly" then, right? since "convincingly" isn't really a partial thing -- evidence is usually enough to "convince" you or not, if I say study data "almost convinced me," I usually mean it had argument and fluff that made it appear to be good but it turned out to be crap in the end
partially recreate: yeah, it's pretty "partial," and you have to read "recreate" as something more like "make a very inexact blackbox model that probably doesn't work at all the same but maybe outputs a few things in a similar fashion"
functions: this word is chosen wisely, since the "neural net" models are really just algorithms, i.e., functions, which probably don't act anything like real "neurons" in the real world at all
In sum, we have a few algorithms that seem to take input and produce some usable output in a manner very vaguely like a few things that we've observed in the brains of fruit flies. Claiming that this at all "recreates" the "wetware" implies that we understand a lot more about brain function and that our algorithms ("artificial neurons"? hardly) are a lot more advanced and subtle than they are.
Fully how that inconvenient word "militia" tends to get ignored every time the 2nd amendment comes up
Here's what the amendment says:
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Let's just change the text to some less politicized issue:
"A well-educated electorate being necessary to a continuing free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed."
I suppose you'd interpret such a statement to mean that we only have a right to read books in order to promote good voters, right? If it's not promoting citizenship, we can ban the books, right? Oh, you're not registered to vote, eh? Let's confiscate all the books in your house... right?
Of course not. The first clause just gives one explicit justification -- among many possible ones -- for the end of the sentence. It's obvious that the Founders thought that the militias were important, which is why they were mentioned. But they weren't the only thing the 2nd amendment was about, which is clear from the structure of the sentence. (It doesn't say: "the right of the militia to keep and bear arms...")
2L/100km is obviously twice as efficient as 4L/100km since 4 is twice as large as 2. Easy enough to do in your head.
50km/L is obviously twice as efficient as 25km/L since 50 is twice as large as 25. Just as easy since it's the exact same math.
I usually don't try to defend posts that I've already written critiques of, but I don't think you get the point of the person you were responding to.
The point of those who prefer gal./mile or L/km is that it allows an easier mathematical comparison of savings for a given decrease in the number. The way you choose your numbers obscures this a bit.
For example, let's say you own a 15 MPG large pickup and a 35 MPG compact car. Let's say you're considering upgrading one of these to save some gas. You could upgrade your truck to a 20 MPG truck, or you could upgrade your 35 MPG compact to a 45 MPG hybrid. Which will save you more in gas?
Actual studies of real people in the real world (most of whom can't really do math at all) show that most people automatically think you should upgrade the compact to a hybrid. After all, you gain 10 MPG there, whereas upgrading the pickup gains 5 MPG.
Of course, that's nonsense, but it's hard to see for many people unless you show them the gallons/100 miles stats.
In that case, you have a 6.67 gal/100mi truck that you'd be upgrading to a 5 gal/100mi truck, saving a net 1.67 gal/100mi.
If you upgrade the car, you'd be going from 2.86 to 2.22 gal/100mi, and only saving 0.63 gal/100mi.
In other words, assuming you use both vehicles regularly, you'd save over 2.5 times as much gas traveling the same distance by trading in the pickup truck.
As I noted in my post above, MPG is relevant for people on fixed budgets or with fixed amounts of gas. Gal./100mi would be a more intuitive measure for people with relatively fixed distances they need to travel.
The vast majority of people who look at these MPG stickers to evaluate a car they are going to buy won't bother to do the conversion (even if they can figure out how, which is doubtful for the vast majority of consumers).
Complaining about how dumb people are isn't going to solve the problem of fuel economy -- why not give consumers numbers that will easily show things useful to them (i.e., both MPG and gal./mi).
If you do 10% better in one car, you'll probably also do 10% better in the other one.
That may be so, but miles per gallon is a misleading measurement on which to base the "10% better" calculation. 30MPG to 33MPG is *not* 10% better efficiency.
First, I would note that the GP said nothing about efficiency. The GP just said you would "do 10% better." MPG and gallons per 100 miles are just different measurements, useful for different types of calculations.
In some cases, MPG actually is a good measure, and 33 MPG is actually 10% better than 30 MPG.
For example, let's say that I'm not buying a car to use for my normal commutes, but I want a car to go on weekend road trips. I don't have a huge amount of money, so I have budgeted X amount of dollars for my fuel costs for my trips. Buying a car with 30 MPG instead of 20 MPG will actually get me 50% farther on my trips, which may mean I can take more of them or visit places that are farther away. In that sense, the 30 MPG car is 50% better than the 20 MPG car.
Similarly, let's say I'm still on a tight budget and looking for a new/different job. How far I can go on my potential commute might be based on the amount I have budgeted for gas. Again, in this case, a 30 MPG car will allow me to to have a 50% greater commute distance.
Is this a measure of greater "fuel efficiency"? No, not really. But, in cases where your budget or gas is constrained, MPG could actually be a measure of how much "better" a car could be for you.
If they switched to a burn rate measurement, like L/100km (that the rest of the world uses), or even Gal./100mi, then you actually could do the math in your head for how much more or less efficient the vehicle is.
I agree that this would be a better way to visualize fuel economy. But again, except for people who are really worried about the environment (not a bad thing), for most people the decision is going to be about practicality.
Your gal./100mi measurement would be great as a practical measure for someone who has fixed distances to travel rather than a fixed budget for gas. For people who use their cars primarily for commuting rather than for occasional road trips, they may just need to travel X miles per week. In such a case, a gal./100mi measurement will give an intuitive sense of what's "better" and by how much.
You're probably right that the gal./100mi system would be a better comparison for many (probably most) people.
But lots of people in the world rely on public transport for commuting and primarily use their cars for occasional tasks. And lots of people in the world have significant constraints on the amount of money they can afford to pay for gas. Those are the limiting factors for them, not a constant commute of X miles. For them, MPG is actually a more intuitive measurement of whether a car is 10% "better" from a practical standpoint.
THIS. Why not let me use the kind of strong password or passphrase that works for me? A password policy that has random restrictions (at least one number, at least one uppercase letter, no more than three lowercase letters in a row, etc.) just encourages the shortest weakest password that barely satisfies the constraints.... and it gives hackers information to figure out what passwords probably look like.
Just give people a realistic password meter, set some minimum level of complexity, and let them decide how to make it strong. The website that has five constraints on the exact structure of your password but then requires it to be 8-10 characters maximum is just idiotic, not to mention incredibly annoying for users.
As for password reuse, is that really your problem? What about a giant flashing warning next to the password meter that says "DO NOT REUSE PASSWORDS FROM OTHER SITES OR YOUR OTHER DEVICES HERE. IF YOU DO, YOU DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK. IF SOMEONE, SOMEHOW GETS YOUR PASSWORD EVEN BY HACKING THIS SITE, WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR PROTECTING YOUR DATA ELSEWHERE." Make the user click the giant flashing warning three times. Problem solved?
And college basketball teams are discriminatory. If you are less than 4 feet tall, it does not matter that you are a pretty good player for your size, you cannot get on a team.
Actually, you may be onto something here. Back before the NBA and the (somewhat racist) idea that the "native" abilities of African-Americans allow them to jump higher and perform better, the mythology from the 1920s through the 1940s or so was that to be a great basketball player, you had to be short and Jewish (and likely from Philly).
It was claimed that these Jewish players succeeded because they were short. In fact, many players were rather successful -- because they were closer to the ground, they had better balance, could maneuver faster, were great at stealing, fast low passing, etc.
Obviously a lot of the press played off of Jewish stereotypes at the time, just as they play off of African-American stereotypes now.
But I actually would think it might make for an interesting game to put more of those short, quick players mixed in with all the 7-foot players today. They probably wouldn't win, but it might change the game and force the taller players to develop completely different skills and styles of play to do well consistently.
Publicizing these type of stories is good, but how can we best see their powers reigned in and actually enforce respecting our rights?
One thing to consider: just in the past few days, the TSA has finally complied with a court ruling from July 2011 that said they had illegally implemented new scanning policies without requesting public comment. EPIC has finally managed to get the TSA to set up the comment system.
Some people might consider submitting comments. The TSA probably won't listen directly. But they will become part of public record, and if a court case ever does manage to really challenge some of the TSA policies, it will be harder for courts to say, "Well, nobody seems bothered very much by all the enhanced scanning and patdowns."
By the way, from the summary:
they are over a month beyond the statutory mandate for issuing a written determination
That's NOTHING. After illegally failing to take public comments before implementing a massive change to the accepted norms for searches, federal courts directly ordered the TSA to comply with taking comments. You can still read all the news stories from July 2011, when people thought we finally had some sort of victory for privacy -- maybe the TSA would finally listen. But they did NOTHING. Presumably, they were just waiting, hoping that Americans would get used to the new searches, and they wouldn't have to deal with the problem. After a full year had passed, EPIC finally got a hearing to consider a writ of mandamus to force the order to be adhered to. (Seriously -- a federal agency refusing to implement a simple court order?? After a year of dragging their feet, the courts, if they were at all honest, should have implemented an emergency stay right then and there and shut down the scanners until the TSA complied... at a minimum. If your average citizen did something like this, they'd be tossed in jail for contempt of court.)
Months more passed, and finally the writ of mandamus was denied, because the TSA said it would finally get around to dealing with this issue by Feb.-Mar. 2013. And it seems they waited until the last few days possible to finally implement the comment system.
If you have something serious to say about this, here's your chance. It may or may not make a difference, but I think it's certainly more likely to be effective than complaining on Slashdot every week or two when a new TSA story comes along.
a slab of concrete has been found with an uptime of 3737 years
You exaggerate. The oldest concrete structure I know of is the dome of the Pantheon, and that's only been around for 1887 years. Time will tell if it was well built.
Umm, who cares about what "you know of"? What matters is historical fact. The Colosseum, for example, contains large amounts of concrete and was finished a half-century before the Pantheon. Lots of concrete was used in rebuilding after the great fire in Rome in the mid first century as well. But, of course, Roman concrete was around for centuries before that.
And yet, all of this is irrelevant, since concrete was used in Egypt, Syria, China, and other places thousands of years earlier. There are in fact concrete columns in Egypt that are still standing and have been dated to roughly 3600 years old. There are examples of floors and other smaller structures that have been discovered elsewhere that are much older. Romans perfected the materials and used them on a huge scale, but the basic idea of concrete is much, much older.
One more thing -- I think you grossly underestimate the amount of free educational
materials available now, much of which has been created relatively recently. I was referring to century-old textbooks to learn basic info that's common to most primary and secondary curricula. But there's plenty of free stuff and free textbooks in lots of fields out there if you look. I'll again make my claim that unless you're in a research field that needs access to the latest published stuff, 99% of people can get all the educational stuff necessary to survive from a combination of old public domain stuff and new public domain stuff.
The fallacy in your comments is that you apparently think most people learn stuff by reading books. Most people do not acquire most of the life skills and even job skills to get through the day by reading books. They learn life skills and job skills by interacting with others, by apprenticing, by imitating, etc. When they do consult books for a job or something, it's generally for reference, not to learn basic skills "to function in the world."
There's a reason why employers would much rather hire someone with even a couple years of experience for almost all careers, rather than a guy straight out of high school or college. Most practical infomation you need to succeed in a job is learned through experience, not by reading books.
And as for my friends, I can't think of anyone I'm close to now whom I became friends with because of their knowledge of pop culture. Actually, most of friends are people who similarly spend a lot of time discussing old stuff -- literature or classical
music or whatever. I'm not claiming this is typical, but your assumptions are not always correct.
But that's irrelevant. Almost all of your supposed things you "couldn't" do without a copyrighted book are actually things that people usually learn from each other, not a book. Who the heck learns how to operate heating and air conditioning in their house from a book? You see your parents do it. Usually when you buy your first home, you call up your dad of stuff goes wrong, or you call in a professional who mostly knows how to fix things from real-world experience, not from reading a book. (Maybe they might consult a spec sheet or something that's hardly enforced by copyright.)
it's a way of justifying obtaining something you want enough to download but not enough to pay the asking price for.
Why is that a bad thing? I am not willing to pay for a horse-drawn carriage ride either, that's why I get in my car and drive it to my destination.
First off, that's a terrible analogy. Your solution is to find a way to have what you want (a ride) by making use of your own equipment and resources. The equivalent scenario for a movie would be to say, "I don't want to pay for entertainment. I'll use my own movie-making software to create my own."
Regardless, what's "wrong" with obtaining something without being willing to pay the asking price? Let's put this is clearer terms: Suppose you hire a lawyer to draw up some documents for you (a will, or whatever). The lawyer has the requisite professional training to create a good document that will stand up in court.
But then suppose you meet with the lawyer after he has done his work, he shows you the documents and say, "That will be $250." And you say, "Oh, sorry, I don't know that I want to pay that much." Then, when the lawyer goes to the bathroom, you download the files for the document to a USB stick and leave.
Any reasonable interpretation of this scenario is that you "stole" this lawyer's work. Yes, that's what it's called when someone offers something for sale, and rather than paying, you just take it. It doesn't matter whether it's physical property or a service.
And artists are people too. They have skills. We have a system in place that is supposed to allow them to be rewarded for their efforts, just like the lawyer.
I fully admit that system is broken in a multitude of ways, unfairly favors corporate interests and ridiculous copyright terms, and doesn't generally reward those who produce the artistic content that much.
But that still doesn't mean it's just okay to take something that you're not willing to pay for. Or can you explain how my lawyer scenario is different? Aren't you just making a copy of information that wants to be "free" in that case??
One could argue that much of entertainment is art, and art is food for the brain, without which it will wither and die.
There are thousands and thousands of public domain resources available -- reading the literary canon at Project Gutenberg is enough "artistic stimulation" for dozens of lifetimes, and I doubt you're going to miss some aspect of the human experience from thousands of years of writing that you'd get from the latest romance comedy or most of the othe crap put out in pop media and Hollywood.
Books, at the very least, would be necessary for my children to become educated enough to function in the world, and those are copyrighted.
Give us an example of information necessary to "function in the world" that can't generally be taught from a century-old textbook, of which there are thousands in the public domain. Unless your kids are cutting-edge researchers, they can probably learn the rest of stuff on the job as an apprentice rather than studying a book "to function in the world." Tech jobs are one area where old textbooks don't exist, but many tech people actively create free resources these days for learners.
I'm not at all defending the copyright system, which is incredibly broken at this time. But the idea that you'd "starve" your brain or that you couldn't educate your kids without copyrighted stuff is nonsense. You just WANT all that new crap.
You are right genetics do not determine everything but they have a very, very large influence.
I'm not at all saying that it doesn't take a certain minimum level of intelligence to do many jobs. But I do think you overstate the case for genetics. Lots of people also end up in a career track because of social factors (their parents' wealth and education, their racial and ethnic background, their gender, how much schooling they have and whether they were presented with educational opportunities, etc.).
Low-income families may not be able to provide opportunities for their kids to try out programming outside of school, or parents may just not even think of that option. Even kids who do have the opportunity might not seriously consider programming unless they try it out for a while -- as they might have to in a class.
To put my point simply, few kids will consider programming as a career unless they get some exposure to it. Encouraging more schools to teach it will necessarily give more opportunities to the minority of kids who do have the necessary intelligence, and thus you actually do have a better chance of turning out more programmers.
Absolute minimum IQ to be a computer programmer is around 110. [snip] And if they're really smart, they go on to be doctors or lawyers or wall street somethings and make more money rather than put up with the long hours, deadline pressures and the job insecurity that goes with being a programmer.
Actually, if we go with your implicit definition of "smart" based on IQ scores, your claim about salary isn't actually true. There are a lot of mixed data about very high IQs and whether they actually benefit salary. Sure, people with a 110 or 120 IQ do tend to make more money than people with 100, and that's pretty well established. (That said, where you were born, your education, your parents' wealth, your race, your gender, etc. have been shown to contribute as much or greater impact compared to raw IQ scores on salary outcomes.)
But once you get much above that (130 or higher), the results of studies have been pretty mixed. If they end up in a job that is a "good fit" they will do well, but that doesn't necessarily include a high salary.
For example, generally speaking, the average Ph.D. hard science researcher probably has a higher IQ than the average doctor or lawyer. But they don't tend to make as much money -- yet they do research because they're smart and the work is intellectually engaging to them.
Most people can be taught to program in some fashion only a few however will every be any good at it.
What's your point? If you aren't good enough to be a professional at something, you should never try it or even be exposed to it? Let's shut down all the Little League games -- "the dirty little secret though is genetics play a key role and only a couple of kids on any team (at most) have any aptitude for it. Most people can be taught to hit a ball in some fashion only a few however will ever be any good at it."
If kids are never encouraged to try something out, they'll never figure out what they might actually be good at. And many activities teach useful skills regardless of whether the participants are "any good at it" -- baseball might teach coordination, teamwork, whatever, programming might teach critical thinking about problems, etc.
I fail to see what deserves "+5 insightful" for noting that some people are better at a particular skill than others, or might have a particular aptitude for it... or -- heavens! -- might actually just work hard at it because they're interested rather than being genetically predisposed to be a good programmer.
(Whatever the hell that means -- I don't think computers have been around long enough to put evolutionary pressure on humans to develop a gene for "good coding." And if you're making a claim about how you're required to have a particular IQ or other intelligence marker we claim a genetic basis for, well, I know a lot of people who are incredibly intelligent but terrible at programming, which is a particular skill that seems to require all sorts of personality and intelligence traits to do well... if you've found a genetic marker for "good coding skills," please let us know!)
Anyhow, as the Gates quote in the summary says, good programming does require critical thinking skills and logical thinking. We used to do things like this in schools when we required kids to do proofs in geometry classes, for example. How many kids did we ever expect to become theoretical mathematicians?? A much smaller number than we think might end up doing some coding some day.
Good thinking skills can be transferable. And "genetics" doesn't determine everything about your life.
So electronic communication is reducing the needs for letters
I suppose you haven't noticed the huge proliferation of junk mail delivered by the postal service in the past couple decades? When I was growing up, I remember running with excitement after the post office truck went by to see if there was anything in the mailbox. On at least half of the days, nothing came -- if there was something, it was one letter or a bill... except around holidays or birthdays or something.
Nowadays, it's incredibly rare for a day to go by where the mail carrier doesn't dump at least a half dozen random fliers, ads, etc. in my box. And that's even after I have switched to electronic billing, estatements, etc. for most things.
Conservatively, I'd say I receive at least 4-5 times the volume of letterish size mail compared to my parents a few decades ago.
Maybe you're right about what the USPS needs to worry about in 10 or 20 years, but right now they seem to be delivering more letter-sized stuff than probably ever before. So I don't think your argument that this is the current "real problem" is correct -- or, if it is, they need to charge more for bulk mail.
The copyright system is completely broken, and it doesn't work anymore. And I agree that the MPAA/RIAA's actions in recent years have been horrible and ridiculous.
That said...
The world is finally getting sick and tired of hearing stupid shit from the MPAA/RIAA media mafia.
I'm finally getting sick and tired of hearing stupid BS analogies on Slashdot.
I deserve profits for life because i worked on construction of all MPAA buildings. I'll be waiting for my royalty check you deadbeat fucks.
Sounds pretty stupid. But hey. That's what you're arguing on some non physical property. So pay me now. Or forever shut the fuck up.
Nope. Not at all. That's not what's being argued. There are plenty of circumstances where people invest time, money, effort, or resources into something and are guaranteed a return on future profits. Lots of building projects require investors, many of which put up money up-front with a guarantee that they'll get profits down the line. Employees are sometimes awarded with stock options, which allows them to share in future profits of a company, often long after they're no longer contributing directly to it. Heck, local co-op stores and such sometimes have structures where you put in an initial investment of time and effort or money and get a share in profits at the end of the year.
Your post, which for some reason has been modded "+5 insightful" implicitly denies that up-front investment should ever be rewarded down the line.
Just because construction workers are generally not in a place to negotiate profit-sharing contracts to get a piece of future revenues generated from use of their work doesn't mean that no one does it. Investors in the building project itself might.
Copyright law may be broken, but it was actually one place where individuals without a lot of money could actually assert some sort of influence in getting rewards for sometimes a huge initial creative effort. Yes, I know some people will chime in and say that historically publishers still made a lot of those profits -- but individual authors did too. And they didn't have to have huge amounts of money or power to negotiate some sort of contract -- it was just part of law. All you needed to do was submit a copyright registration (or, later, not even that).
I completely agree that all of the crap happening as a result of the MPAA/RIAA is terrible, and I think it will be really difficult to create a new copyright law that could actually work in the age of digital media.
But that doesn't mean that the basic idea that people might make initial investments of time or resources and then be guaranteed a stake in future profits is as ridiculous as you make it sound. It happens all the time in a multitude of situations. Your hypothetical construction worker just didn't have that negotiated into his contract or written into law somewhere. Instead, he negotiated to be paid upfront, rather than not getting a wage at all for his hard work and promised the mere possibility of future profits if the building actually made any money down the road.
In the real world, credit card companies make the most off of people who can't manage money. Transaction fees are one thing, but interest rates and various other late fees, missed payment fees, etc. can add a LOT more per card user. The ideal card user to a card company is someone who is a complete idiot with money, overspending as much as possible while just barely not going into bankruptcy (and therefore still responsible for forking over huge interest payments).
If you don't think credit card companies target people who can't manage money, you don't understand the real world. For a person who spends beyond his means, the best "account book" is an envelope with cash -- because when the cash is gone, you can't incur more debt... and you quickly realize that you need to keep enough cash in that envelope to do things like buy food and pay your bills rather than swiping a piece of plastic for that impulse buy at the clothing store or whatever.
You do not have the right to say whatever you want. Hate speech or inciting violence are not protected. Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942.
Not quite right regarding hate speech.
You do not have the right to incite imminent violence or breach of the peace. Chaplinsky also says you can't do that through direct personal insults.
However, Chaplinsky has explicitly been ruled NOT to allow standard "hate speech" laws that target offensive speech toward a generic group or classification of people (race, sexuality, etc.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.A.V._v._City_of_St._Paul
Mod this up. The GP's interpretation of the Chaplinsky decision is not correct. The "fighting words" doctrine was actually related to the previous "clear and present danger" standard, which was later revised to "imminent and lawless action."
"Fighting words" also has generally been taken to apply to direct and personal insults, not "hate speech" against a generic group (race, sexuality, etc.). In fact, the Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that Chaplinsky CANNOT be used to justify a "hate speech" law that targets offensive speech against particular groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.A.V._v._City_of_St._Paul
Slashdot Mirror
I actually agree with you for the most part. And you have a good point. However...
There is value in being able to prove your identity in a bunch of different contexts - like withdrawing money from the bank. It doesn't matter who you are, it only matters that you own the account that you are withdrawing from.
What you overlook is that increasingly those records are linked up with other records, and the data used to verify who you are for those various linked records is increasingly easy to find.
In cases of identity theft or even outright clerical errors on your credit report, for example, you do need to be able to differentiate the things actually connected to you vs. the accounts opened and other transactions done in your name, in an account held by a company that connects data to your actual accounts, but which you actually didn't do.
Before the internet era, theft of identity and this sort of identity fraud was possible, but even when it happened, you might never even had known about it... since all your accounts and transaction histories weren't being shared among so many companies.
However, nowadays it is much easier for you to end up with something connected to your name that never should have been. And in those cases, having some sort of absolute identity to connect to stuff you've actually done can be very helpful, rather than just contextual intereractions that might be connected to other things which might not have anything to do with you.
So far they've been playing a shell game with domains, but they're being pretty aggressively pursued.
Fine -- even if Pirate Bay disappears (or even the whole torrent-sharing apparatus), a hundred more things like it will arise. People have been claiming that a dystopic future where media can never be shared will happen ever since the first MPAA complaints against Napster almost 15 years ago.
What we've seen in the meantime is a gradual -- yes gradual -- move toward greater (legal) access to ever more media at cheaper prices, but yes, accompanied by greater demands for DRM and licensing.
If there's one thing people will get up-in-arms over in modern democracy, it's access to crappy television, movies, and music. If the licensing and DRM stuff gets out of control, there will be push-back... and that's even if governments basically shut down the internet, which is the only way that things like the Pirate Bay will all end completely. (Which would likely lead to outright revolt... eventually.)
What's more likely is that the major media companies will eventually find ways to license the media in a way that makes it more convenient, with more variety, and at a significantly lower cost to consumers than they paid 15-20 years ago before file-sharing started.
It may not be the world you dreamed of where "all information is free" and unicorns fly around rainbows, but it will make 99.9% of couch potatoes happier and give them more and better access than they had before.
And meanwhile, there will probably still be some things like the Pirate Bay floating around.
It's beginning to look more like a world where the media companies control everything is inevitable.
Maybe... but those media companies had a lot of control before the internet. And I sincerely doubt we're returning to a place where there is less opportunity for free exchange of information than there was before the internet anytime soon -- even with some further restrictions.
An excellent post. Thank you.
Software has matured to the point that 12 year old Windows XP, 10 year old Office 2003 and 8 year old Photoshop CS2 are still perfectly fine and able to do everything that most people need.
I'd like to emphasize this point too, since it seems to be at the center of the problem with the question posed here. Why exactly would businesses even want to upgrade? What does it get them?
I'd push the dates back even further and say that a lot of business software reached maturity -- as measured by the functionality that more than 99% of employees need and use on a regular basis -- roughly 25 years ago. (Web browsers would obviously be a little later, since the modern "web" didn't exist yet.)
What exactly do most office employees do today that couldn't have been done with a late 1980s copy of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS? Even the first version of Photoshop in 1989 was an instant hit and was perfectly adequate for most user's needs in terms of functionality (though you'd need a Mac).
Now, I'll grant you that the DOS interfaces seem a little clunky compared to today, but 99% of the functionality that most people need was already there. I know at least one person who continued using his 386 until a couple years ago for all of his business needs other than modern internet browsing, with his old DOS-based WordPerfect churning out new documents every week and some ancient version of Excel for Windows 3.1 for his business spreadsheets.
I think the reason software appears to have "matured" in the early 2000s is because we finally hit some magical threshold of computer literacy in the workforce. It's not that the old DOS or Windows 3.x systems couldn't do what businesses needed; it's just that it was still possible in 1990 to be an office worker and not really "do computers," particularly if you were over 35-40 years old and/or in a small business.
By 2000, that just wasn't acceptable anymore. Everyone was expected to be relatively fluent with computers -- including even those older people who were "excused" in 1990, but now had been trained and forced to adopt the ways of the new "machine." Young people entering the workforce had grown up with PCs, so they knew how to use them intuitively. Computer illiteracy was no longer an option.
It should be expected that soon after that moment when computers became entrenched that people would start to realize that "new" isn't always better, if no significant new functionality is added. Early adopters of computers could get excited about the next new version of Word or Excel -- "Wow, did you see what WordPerfect 6.0 can do? Did you see the cool new graph options in Excel 95?" But by the early 2000s those people were outnumbered by loads of older people in their late 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s who didn't really grow up using computers heavily and had just barely caught on to the systems they were supposed to be fluent in.
Why the heck would these older people -- the bulk of the workforce a decade ago -- want to keep adopting a new UI every other year? Why would businesses want to try to get them to? They finally got all these older office workers literate on the systems they had. And what new functionality does any of this new crap give anyone, in terms of basic everyday business needs for the average office worker?
Here we are, 25 years later, with computers that have 10,000 times as much RAM and hard drives 10,000 times as big, and many people still have a clunky word processor that's bloated with too many functions and a spreadsheet that seems to run slow sometimes. The UI is the only major thing that keeps changing. Businesses only care about the core functionality... and once they hit a critical mass of workers who were fluent on a particular UI, why the heck would they ever want to change?
why do we feel the need to claim that intelligent machines would need to be similar to or work like real brains?
I don't think we do.
I absolutely understand what you mean here. I don't think most AI researchers actually think they are "recreating wetware" explicitly or that the "artificial neurons" in "neural nets" are really anything like real neurons.
On the other hand, a lot of the nomenclature of AI seems to deliberately try to make analogies -- "deep learning," "neural nets," "blur the line between hardware and wetware," etc. -- to human or animal brain functions.
Hence my rhetorical question about why we feel the need to claim that our intelligent machines work similar to real brains. AI researchers clearly know that they aren't really "recreating" things, but yet we keep developing new nomenclature that makes it sound like we are... the whole Slashdot summary for this article is effectively making these comparisons.
I say all of the following as a big fan of AI research. I just think we need to drop the rhetoric that we're somehow recreating brains -- why do we feel the need to claim that intelligent machines would need to be similar to or work like real brains?
Anyhow...
We can now almost convincingly partially recreate the wetware functions of Drosophila melanogaster.
Interesting wording. Let's take this apart:
In sum, we have a few algorithms that seem to take input and produce some usable output in a manner very vaguely like a few things that we've observed in the brains of fruit flies. Claiming that this at all "recreates" the "wetware" implies that we understand a lot more about brain function and that our algorithms ("artificial neurons"? hardly) are a lot more advanced and subtle than they are.
Fully how that inconvenient word "militia" tends to get ignored every time the 2nd amendment comes up
Here's what the amendment says:
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Let's just change the text to some less politicized issue:
"A well-educated electorate being necessary to a continuing free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed."
I suppose you'd interpret such a statement to mean that we only have a right to read books in order to promote good voters, right? If it's not promoting citizenship, we can ban the books, right? Oh, you're not registered to vote, eh? Let's confiscate all the books in your house... right?
Of course not. The first clause just gives one explicit justification -- among many possible ones -- for the end of the sentence. It's obvious that the Founders thought that the militias were important, which is why they were mentioned. But they weren't the only thing the 2nd amendment was about, which is clear from the structure of the sentence. (It doesn't say: "the right of the militia to keep and bear arms...")
2L/100km is obviously twice as efficient as 4L/100km since 4 is twice as large as 2. Easy enough to do in your head.
50km/L is obviously twice as efficient as 25km/L since 50 is twice as large as 25. Just as easy since it's the exact same math.
I usually don't try to defend posts that I've already written critiques of, but I don't think you get the point of the person you were responding to.
The point of those who prefer gal./mile or L/km is that it allows an easier mathematical comparison of savings for a given decrease in the number. The way you choose your numbers obscures this a bit.
For example, let's say you own a 15 MPG large pickup and a 35 MPG compact car. Let's say you're considering upgrading one of these to save some gas. You could upgrade your truck to a 20 MPG truck, or you could upgrade your 35 MPG compact to a 45 MPG hybrid. Which will save you more in gas?
Actual studies of real people in the real world (most of whom can't really do math at all) show that most people automatically think you should upgrade the compact to a hybrid. After all, you gain 10 MPG there, whereas upgrading the pickup gains 5 MPG.
Of course, that's nonsense, but it's hard to see for many people unless you show them the gallons/100 miles stats.
In that case, you have a 6.67 gal/100mi truck that you'd be upgrading to a 5 gal/100mi truck, saving a net 1.67 gal/100mi.
If you upgrade the car, you'd be going from 2.86 to 2.22 gal/100mi, and only saving 0.63 gal/100mi.
In other words, assuming you use both vehicles regularly, you'd save over 2.5 times as much gas traveling the same distance by trading in the pickup truck.
As I noted in my post above, MPG is relevant for people on fixed budgets or with fixed amounts of gas. Gal./100mi would be a more intuitive measure for people with relatively fixed distances they need to travel.
The vast majority of people who look at these MPG stickers to evaluate a car they are going to buy won't bother to do the conversion (even if they can figure out how, which is doubtful for the vast majority of consumers).
Complaining about how dumb people are isn't going to solve the problem of fuel economy -- why not give consumers numbers that will easily show things useful to them (i.e., both MPG and gal./mi).
If you do 10% better in one car, you'll probably also do 10% better in the other one.
That may be so, but miles per gallon is a misleading measurement on which to base the "10% better" calculation. 30MPG to 33MPG is *not* 10% better efficiency.
First, I would note that the GP said nothing about efficiency. The GP just said you would "do 10% better." MPG and gallons per 100 miles are just different measurements, useful for different types of calculations.
In some cases, MPG actually is a good measure, and 33 MPG is actually 10% better than 30 MPG.
For example, let's say that I'm not buying a car to use for my normal commutes, but I want a car to go on weekend road trips. I don't have a huge amount of money, so I have budgeted X amount of dollars for my fuel costs for my trips. Buying a car with 30 MPG instead of 20 MPG will actually get me 50% farther on my trips, which may mean I can take more of them or visit places that are farther away. In that sense, the 30 MPG car is 50% better than the 20 MPG car.
Similarly, let's say I'm still on a tight budget and looking for a new/different job. How far I can go on my potential commute might be based on the amount I have budgeted for gas. Again, in this case, a 30 MPG car will allow me to to have a 50% greater commute distance.
Is this a measure of greater "fuel efficiency"? No, not really. But, in cases where your budget or gas is constrained, MPG could actually be a measure of how much "better" a car could be for you.
If they switched to a burn rate measurement, like L/100km (that the rest of the world uses), or even Gal./100mi, then you actually could do the math in your head for how much more or less efficient the vehicle is.
I agree that this would be a better way to visualize fuel economy. But again, except for people who are really worried about the environment (not a bad thing), for most people the decision is going to be about practicality.
Your gal./100mi measurement would be great as a practical measure for someone who has fixed distances to travel rather than a fixed budget for gas. For people who use their cars primarily for commuting rather than for occasional road trips, they may just need to travel X miles per week. In such a case, a gal./100mi measurement will give an intuitive sense of what's "better" and by how much.
You're probably right that the gal./100mi system would be a better comparison for many (probably most) people.
But lots of people in the world rely on public transport for commuting and primarily use their cars for occasional tasks. And lots of people in the world have significant constraints on the amount of money they can afford to pay for gas. Those are the limiting factors for them, not a constant commute of X miles. For them, MPG is actually a more intuitive measurement of whether a car is 10% "better" from a practical standpoint.
THIS. Why not let me use the kind of strong password or passphrase that works for me? A password policy that has random restrictions (at least one number, at least one uppercase letter, no more than three lowercase letters in a row, etc.) just encourages the shortest weakest password that barely satisfies the constraints.... and it gives hackers information to figure out what passwords probably look like.
Just give people a realistic password meter, set some minimum level of complexity, and let them decide how to make it strong. The website that has five constraints on the exact structure of your password but then requires it to be 8-10 characters maximum is just idiotic, not to mention incredibly annoying for users.
As for password reuse, is that really your problem? What about a giant flashing warning next to the password meter that says "DO NOT REUSE PASSWORDS FROM OTHER SITES OR YOUR OTHER DEVICES HERE. IF YOU DO, YOU DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK. IF SOMEONE, SOMEHOW GETS YOUR PASSWORD EVEN BY HACKING THIS SITE, WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR PROTECTING YOUR DATA ELSEWHERE." Make the user click the giant flashing warning three times. Problem solved?
And college basketball teams are discriminatory. If you are less than 4 feet tall, it does not matter that you are a pretty good player for your size, you cannot get on a team.
Actually, you may be onto something here. Back before the NBA and the (somewhat racist) idea that the "native" abilities of African-Americans allow them to jump higher and perform better, the mythology from the 1920s through the 1940s or so was that to be a great basketball player, you had to be short and Jewish (and likely from Philly).
It was claimed that these Jewish players succeeded because they were short. In fact, many players were rather successful -- because they were closer to the ground, they had better balance, could maneuver faster, were great at stealing, fast low passing, etc.
Obviously a lot of the press played off of Jewish stereotypes at the time, just as they play off of African-American stereotypes now.
But I actually would think it might make for an interesting game to put more of those short, quick players mixed in with all the 7-foot players today. They probably wouldn't win, but it might change the game and force the taller players to develop completely different skills and styles of play to do well consistently.
Sorry, the link I gave before was to the list of comments received. Here's the link to the main summary with all documents and information.
Publicizing these type of stories is good, but how can we best see their powers reigned in and actually enforce respecting our rights?
One thing to consider: just in the past few days, the TSA has finally complied with a court ruling from July 2011 that said they had illegally implemented new scanning policies without requesting public comment. EPIC has finally managed to get the TSA to set up the comment system.
Some people might consider submitting comments. The TSA probably won't listen directly. But they will become part of public record, and if a court case ever does manage to really challenge some of the TSA policies, it will be harder for courts to say, "Well, nobody seems bothered very much by all the enhanced scanning and patdowns."
By the way, from the summary:
they are over a month beyond the statutory mandate for issuing a written determination
That's NOTHING. After illegally failing to take public comments before implementing a massive change to the accepted norms for searches, federal courts directly ordered the TSA to comply with taking comments. You can still read all the news stories from July 2011, when people thought we finally had some sort of victory for privacy -- maybe the TSA would finally listen. But they did NOTHING. Presumably, they were just waiting, hoping that Americans would get used to the new searches, and they wouldn't have to deal with the problem. After a full year had passed, EPIC finally got a hearing to consider a writ of mandamus to force the order to be adhered to. (Seriously -- a federal agency refusing to implement a simple court order?? After a year of dragging their feet, the courts, if they were at all honest, should have implemented an emergency stay right then and there and shut down the scanners until the TSA complied... at a minimum. If your average citizen did something like this, they'd be tossed in jail for contempt of court.)
Months more passed, and finally the writ of mandamus was denied, because the TSA said it would finally get around to dealing with this issue by Feb.-Mar. 2013. And it seems they waited until the last few days possible to finally implement the comment system.
If you have something serious to say about this, here's your chance. It may or may not make a difference, but I think it's certainly more likely to be effective than complaining on Slashdot every week or two when a new TSA story comes along.
a slab of concrete has been found with an uptime of 3737 years
You exaggerate. The oldest concrete structure I know of is the dome of the Pantheon, and that's only been around for 1887 years. Time will tell if it was well built.
Umm, who cares about what "you know of"? What matters is historical fact. The Colosseum, for example, contains large amounts of concrete and was finished a half-century before the Pantheon. Lots of concrete was used in rebuilding after the great fire in Rome in the mid first century as well. But, of course, Roman concrete was around for centuries before that.
And yet, all of this is irrelevant, since concrete was used in Egypt, Syria, China, and other places thousands of years earlier. There are in fact concrete columns in Egypt that are still standing and have been dated to roughly 3600 years old. There are examples of floors and other smaller structures that have been discovered elsewhere that are much older. Romans perfected the materials and used them on a huge scale, but the basic idea of concrete is much, much older.
One more thing -- I think you grossly underestimate the amount of free educational materials available now, much of which has been created relatively recently. I was referring to century-old textbooks to learn basic info that's common to most primary and secondary curricula. But there's plenty of free stuff and free textbooks in lots of fields out there if you look. I'll again make my claim that unless you're in a research field that needs access to the latest published stuff, 99% of people can get all the educational stuff necessary to survive from a combination of old public domain stuff and new public domain stuff.
There's a reason why employers would much rather hire someone with even a couple years of experience for almost all careers, rather than a guy straight out of high school or college. Most practical infomation you need to succeed in a job is learned through experience, not by reading books.
And as for my friends, I can't think of anyone I'm close to now whom I became friends with because of their knowledge of pop culture. Actually, most of friends are people who similarly spend a lot of time discussing old stuff -- literature or classical music or whatever. I'm not claiming this is typical, but your assumptions are not always correct.
But that's irrelevant. Almost all of your supposed things you "couldn't" do without a copyrighted book are actually things that people usually learn from each other, not a book. Who the heck learns how to operate heating and air conditioning in their house from a book? You see your parents do it. Usually when you buy your first home, you call up your dad of stuff goes wrong, or you call in a professional who mostly knows how to fix things from real-world experience, not from reading a book. (Maybe they might consult a spec sheet or something that's hardly enforced by copyright.)
it's a way of justifying obtaining something you want enough to download but not enough to pay the asking price for.
Why is that a bad thing? I am not willing to pay for a horse-drawn carriage ride either, that's why I get in my car and drive it to my destination.
First off, that's a terrible analogy. Your solution is to find a way to have what you want (a ride) by making use of your own equipment and resources. The equivalent scenario for a movie would be to say, "I don't want to pay for entertainment. I'll use my own movie-making software to create my own."
Regardless, what's "wrong" with obtaining something without being willing to pay the asking price? Let's put this is clearer terms: Suppose you hire a lawyer to draw up some documents for you (a will, or whatever). The lawyer has the requisite professional training to create a good document that will stand up in court.
But then suppose you meet with the lawyer after he has done his work, he shows you the documents and say, "That will be $250." And you say, "Oh, sorry, I don't know that I want to pay that much." Then, when the lawyer goes to the bathroom, you download the files for the document to a USB stick and leave.
Any reasonable interpretation of this scenario is that you "stole" this lawyer's work. Yes, that's what it's called when someone offers something for sale, and rather than paying, you just take it. It doesn't matter whether it's physical property or a service.
And artists are people too. They have skills. We have a system in place that is supposed to allow them to be rewarded for their efforts, just like the lawyer.
I fully admit that system is broken in a multitude of ways, unfairly favors corporate interests and ridiculous copyright terms, and doesn't generally reward those who produce the artistic content that much.
But that still doesn't mean it's just okay to take something that you're not willing to pay for. Or can you explain how my lawyer scenario is different? Aren't you just making a copy of information that wants to be "free" in that case??
One could argue that much of entertainment is art, and art is food for the brain, without which it will wither and die.
There are thousands and thousands of public domain resources available -- reading the literary canon at Project Gutenberg is enough "artistic stimulation" for dozens of lifetimes, and I doubt you're going to miss some aspect of the human experience from thousands of years of writing that you'd get from the latest romance comedy or most of the othe crap put out in pop media and Hollywood.
Books, at the very least, would be necessary for my children to become educated enough to function in the world, and those are copyrighted.
Give us an example of information necessary to "function in the world" that can't generally be taught from a century-old textbook, of which there are thousands in the public domain. Unless your kids are cutting-edge researchers, they can probably learn the rest of stuff on the job as an apprentice rather than studying a book "to function in the world." Tech jobs are one area where old textbooks don't exist, but many tech people actively create free resources these days for learners.
I'm not at all defending the copyright system, which is incredibly broken at this time. But the idea that you'd "starve" your brain or that you couldn't educate your kids without copyrighted stuff is nonsense. You just WANT all that new crap.
You are right genetics do not determine everything but they have a very, very large influence.
I'm not at all saying that it doesn't take a certain minimum level of intelligence to do many jobs. But I do think you overstate the case for genetics. Lots of people also end up in a career track because of social factors (their parents' wealth and education, their racial and ethnic background, their gender, how much schooling they have and whether they were presented with educational opportunities, etc.).
Low-income families may not be able to provide opportunities for their kids to try out programming outside of school, or parents may just not even think of that option. Even kids who do have the opportunity might not seriously consider programming unless they try it out for a while -- as they might have to in a class.
To put my point simply, few kids will consider programming as a career unless they get some exposure to it. Encouraging more schools to teach it will necessarily give more opportunities to the minority of kids who do have the necessary intelligence, and thus you actually do have a better chance of turning out more programmers.
Absolute minimum IQ to be a computer programmer is around 110. [snip] And if they're really smart, they go on to be doctors or lawyers or wall street somethings and make more money rather than put up with the long hours, deadline pressures and the job insecurity that goes with being a programmer.
Actually, if we go with your implicit definition of "smart" based on IQ scores, your claim about salary isn't actually true. There are a lot of mixed data about very high IQs and whether they actually benefit salary. Sure, people with a 110 or 120 IQ do tend to make more money than people with 100, and that's pretty well established. (That said, where you were born, your education, your parents' wealth, your race, your gender, etc. have been shown to contribute as much or greater impact compared to raw IQ scores on salary outcomes.)
But once you get much above that (130 or higher), the results of studies have been pretty mixed. If they end up in a job that is a "good fit" they will do well, but that doesn't necessarily include a high salary.
For example, generally speaking, the average Ph.D. hard science researcher probably has a higher IQ than the average doctor or lawyer. But they don't tend to make as much money -- yet they do research because they're smart and the work is intellectually engaging to them.
Most people can be taught to program in some fashion only a few however will every be any good at it.
What's your point? If you aren't good enough to be a professional at something, you should never try it or even be exposed to it? Let's shut down all the Little League games -- "the dirty little secret though is genetics play a key role and only a couple of kids on any team (at most) have any aptitude for it. Most people can be taught to hit a ball in some fashion only a few however will ever be any good at it."
If kids are never encouraged to try something out, they'll never figure out what they might actually be good at. And many activities teach useful skills regardless of whether the participants are "any good at it" -- baseball might teach coordination, teamwork, whatever, programming might teach critical thinking about problems, etc.
I fail to see what deserves "+5 insightful" for noting that some people are better at a particular skill than others, or might have a particular aptitude for it... or -- heavens! -- might actually just work hard at it because they're interested rather than being genetically predisposed to be a good programmer.
(Whatever the hell that means -- I don't think computers have been around long enough to put evolutionary pressure on humans to develop a gene for "good coding." And if you're making a claim about how you're required to have a particular IQ or other intelligence marker we claim a genetic basis for, well, I know a lot of people who are incredibly intelligent but terrible at programming, which is a particular skill that seems to require all sorts of personality and intelligence traits to do well... if you've found a genetic marker for "good coding skills," please let us know!)
Anyhow, as the Gates quote in the summary says, good programming does require critical thinking skills and logical thinking. We used to do things like this in schools when we required kids to do proofs in geometry classes, for example. How many kids did we ever expect to become theoretical mathematicians?? A much smaller number than we think might end up doing some coding some day.
Good thinking skills can be transferable. And "genetics" doesn't determine everything about your life.
So electronic communication is reducing the needs for letters
I suppose you haven't noticed the huge proliferation of junk mail delivered by the postal service in the past couple decades? When I was growing up, I remember running with excitement after the post office truck went by to see if there was anything in the mailbox. On at least half of the days, nothing came -- if there was something, it was one letter or a bill... except around holidays or birthdays or something.
Nowadays, it's incredibly rare for a day to go by where the mail carrier doesn't dump at least a half dozen random fliers, ads, etc. in my box. And that's even after I have switched to electronic billing, estatements, etc. for most things.
Conservatively, I'd say I receive at least 4-5 times the volume of letterish size mail compared to my parents a few decades ago.
Maybe you're right about what the USPS needs to worry about in 10 or 20 years, but right now they seem to be delivering more letter-sized stuff than probably ever before. So I don't think your argument that this is the current "real problem" is correct -- or, if it is, they need to charge more for bulk mail.
The copyright system is completely broken, and it doesn't work anymore. And I agree that the MPAA/RIAA's actions in recent years have been horrible and ridiculous.
That said...
The world is finally getting sick and tired of hearing stupid shit from the MPAA/RIAA media mafia.
I'm finally getting sick and tired of hearing stupid BS analogies on Slashdot.
I deserve profits for life because i worked on construction of all MPAA buildings. I'll be waiting for my royalty check you deadbeat fucks.
Sounds pretty stupid. But hey. That's what you're arguing on some non physical property. So pay me now. Or forever shut the fuck up.
Nope. Not at all. That's not what's being argued. There are plenty of circumstances where people invest time, money, effort, or resources into something and are guaranteed a return on future profits. Lots of building projects require investors, many of which put up money up-front with a guarantee that they'll get profits down the line. Employees are sometimes awarded with stock options, which allows them to share in future profits of a company, often long after they're no longer contributing directly to it. Heck, local co-op stores and such sometimes have structures where you put in an initial investment of time and effort or money and get a share in profits at the end of the year.
Your post, which for some reason has been modded "+5 insightful" implicitly denies that up-front investment should ever be rewarded down the line.
Just because construction workers are generally not in a place to negotiate profit-sharing contracts to get a piece of future revenues generated from use of their work doesn't mean that no one does it. Investors in the building project itself might.
Copyright law may be broken, but it was actually one place where individuals without a lot of money could actually assert some sort of influence in getting rewards for sometimes a huge initial creative effort. Yes, I know some people will chime in and say that historically publishers still made a lot of those profits -- but individual authors did too. And they didn't have to have huge amounts of money or power to negotiate some sort of contract -- it was just part of law. All you needed to do was submit a copyright registration (or, later, not even that).
I completely agree that all of the crap happening as a result of the MPAA/RIAA is terrible, and I think it will be really difficult to create a new copyright law that could actually work in the age of digital media.
But that doesn't mean that the basic idea that people might make initial investments of time or resources and then be guaranteed a stake in future profits is as ridiculous as you make it sound. It happens all the time in a multitude of situations. Your hypothetical construction worker just didn't have that negotiated into his contract or written into law somewhere. Instead, he negotiated to be paid upfront, rather than not getting a wage at all for his hard work and promised the mere possibility of future profits if the building actually made any money down the road.
If you don't think credit card companies target people who can't manage money, you don't understand the real world. For a person who spends beyond his means, the best "account book" is an envelope with cash -- because when the cash is gone, you can't incur more debt... and you quickly realize that you need to keep enough cash in that envelope to do things like buy food and pay your bills rather than swiping a piece of plastic for that impulse buy at the clothing store or whatever.
You do not have the right to say whatever you want. Hate speech or inciting violence are not protected. Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942.
Not quite right regarding hate speech.
You do not have the right to incite imminent violence or breach of the peace. Chaplinsky also says you can't do that through direct personal insults.
However, Chaplinsky has explicitly been ruled NOT to allow standard "hate speech" laws that target offensive speech toward a generic group or classification of people (race, sexuality, etc.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.A.V._v._City_of_St._Paul
Mod this up. The GP's interpretation of the Chaplinsky decision is not correct. The "fighting words" doctrine was actually related to the previous "clear and present danger" standard, which was later revised to "imminent and lawless action."
"Fighting words" also has generally been taken to apply to direct and personal insults, not "hate speech" against a generic group (race, sexuality, etc.). In fact, the Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that Chaplinsky CANNOT be used to justify a "hate speech" law that targets offensive speech against particular groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.A.V._v._City_of_St._Paul