There's a difference between running out of a natural resource and borrowing money . The nature and limitation of natural resources and their abundance is fixed. The nature and scarcity of money is a fiction humans can adjust. Big difference.
Mod this up one million. This is what conservatism is, when it's not religious headcases blowing up aborition clinics and tring to establish Christian Sharia Law in the US
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness
This is small government in action. This is what small government leads to- unbridled power of Big Brother corporations.
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Don't worry everyone, the "free market" will quickly drive the FB password seeking employers out of business because workers in the free market will elect to seek employment elsewhere.
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Wow an entire school of thought or two perhaps completely overthrown with three little words. You're amazing.
And to anyone else... if you don't know why he said what he or don't agree with it then it just proves that he's right and you ARE an idiot
Typical fucking asshole Asbergers case... I say it authoritatively, and with brevity somehow makes it true....
All those stupid philosophers and scientists who wasted their lives because they didn't understand that "science is Bayesian"... if ONLY you had been around then, you could have saved their careers and they wouldn't have wasted their lives....
WHAT a great man you are! There. Did someone finally say what you're constantly craving to hear?
Sorry but posts accusing entities- Google in this instance- of nefarious wrongdoing need to be backed by more than rhetoric for me to mod you up.
These kinds of posts only get to "5-insightful" by craftily positioning themselves, as you have for a few days now, to be very early responders to stories on/. ; in this case you were first.
I am a true geek and as natural and fit for me, I hate FB with a passion and will not join no matter who tries to coerce me. It's quite obviously one big spy machine where the subject of the spying is not merely your anonymized drop in an ocean of aggregated surfing habits of many, but rather the
specific identities and proclivities of your most personal (and otherwise) friends ,
your inner thoughts, fears, hopes dreams as detailed by you yourself in your own words
your youthful (and otherwise) dalliances with alcohol, (and other illicts) and sexual personas and passing fascinations
your cultural and political alliances
did I leave anything out?
Just leave the US market and the markets of AU and Japan and other software-patent countries. That's it, just leave. The market is big enough elsewhere to make yourselves rich by selling your product.
Once innovative, U.S. owned software start-ups are seen as leaving the US, the media will have its story.
Once the media has it's story, it will be written once and for all in the minds of the public as it really is- software patents kill innovation.
Once the public understands the issues as they really are, the lawmakers will be forced to do the right thing and ban software patents.
Yes, I am conspiring with my fellow developers right here on/.
If you have never heard really good speakers and you can't afford them, then don't seek them out because somehow you "remember" what they sounded like and everything else sounds like crap thenceforward.
So also with MP3 vs CDs. CDs are an effectively perfect reproduction of the music ( please analog people, not now...) and if you listen to the music you love on them and you're just of average sensitivity or better, you'll hurl your ipod / mp3 player out the window. So don't do it and you'll stay happy.
I "discovered" this when I foolishly started to order my existing CD collection as MP3 and AAC. Big fucking mistake and a total waste of money. Literally, I just erased what I bought.
My only problem is Sony et al have given up making *really good* CD players. Before 2000, you could buy extremely nice, brushed aluminum, ultra-thin unskippable portable CD players . With a pair of say Grado 325s (about 350 bucks open air high fidelity cans) you could have a full blown audiophile experience pumped directly into your ear equivalent to a high end home stereo system and $3000 dollar speakers. Now CD players are plastic crapola.
Here's the bottom line to all this. People in their teens and twenties are the ones who sustain the music industry. The purpose of music to most of these people is to serve as a shared electronic fire around which they gather while sharing their lives thoughts hopes frustrations and bodies. Shitty compression techniques like MP3 does not interfere with that in the least, and the more convenient it is to listen and share music, actually, the better that market is served.
Audiophiles have more than a touch of the Aspergers about them- they don't always *get* the larger social context that music exists in and prefer to contemplate wave form charts showing a speakers distortion levels at very high and low frequencies yadda yaddda yadda.
Music exists to be shared between people as a way of invoking an inexpressibly complex set of emotions and thoughts very directly. Thus the iconic image of the power of music for a generation -or two -is John Cusak in Say Anything standing in the rain holding aloft his shitty boom box blaring Peter Gabriel thus:
Yeah it's not true. We have negative or near zero population growth in developed countries. That's what the future looks like assuming we elevate the standard of living for everyone without crashing the planet. So breeding ourselves out of existence by the sheer numbers per se is not in our future. It's a fear whose time has come and gone.
First, I find online comments to slashdot stories to be the best part of slashdot and when i say best part I don't mean amusing or entertaining but rather educational and informative.
Second, it's not just slashdot I feel this way about.
Third online discussions are only just beginning to meet really clever technology where they will be elevated above the flamewars spam and mindless ejaculations that yes, do pepper the substantive stuff that fills all current online forums.
Finally this is old man talk. What would anyone every need a home PC for? Why would anyone want more than 64 k memory? If man was meant to fly then he'd have wings.
Blah blah blah
fucking blah blah blah
fuckin' blah
fuckin' blah
fuckin' blah blah blah.
This is the voice of a a guy whose shot his load and is out of ideas. That's why there's retirement, so people like Nick Denton can get the fuck out of the way and let young people with fresh ideas and unstale aspirations solve the problems he failed at.
Fuck you Nick. Go order some more viagra and head down south where you belong.
Please. Let's be real here. The fact is we'd be doing what needs to be done - see the Princeton Wedges concept- but for American conservatives who have made it their mission to, once again, deny any scientific reality which challenges whatever it is they are irrationally attached to. Nothing's - not one thing- has changed with these people since the time of Galileo
The fact is that conservatism and civilization are fundamentally incompatible. Whether you're talking about the Taliban in Afghanistan or the conservatives who voted this week to put Rick Santorum (www.santorum.com) in the office of the Presidency or the hard liners in Russia or the barbaric regimes in Africa who execute gays, to wherever extent conservatives get power, that's just how far back civilization gets set backwards.
We need to stop global warming as soon as humanly possible or everyone dies; it's really just that simple.
It's called civilization -and either you're with us or you're against us.
If you weren't born with a brain that can conceive of an egalitarian reality where everyone has an equal right to live and prosper, not just be given some vanishingly small chance to TRY to live and prosper, if you weren't born with a brain that can sort out that there's something called "reality" out there which is greater than the sum of your superstitions, projections, and fears, if you weren't born with a brain in which something other than your narcissistic preoccupation with other people's sexual behavior is the focus of your energy, if you were born greedy for power and "stuff" and the purpose of your life is to have as much stuff and power for yourself as you can while you reflexively rationalize every exploitative, domineering anti-egalitarian impulse your brain generates then basically you need to be engineered out of existence because yo're a clear and present danger to the rest of us.
This is what the third world war is- the war of science and rationalism against conservatives and irrationality and religious bigotry. The war of egalitarians against the greedheads. The war of the realists against the rationalizers. Global warming is just the first and perhaps the last battle ground.
Science the world over, in a world wide effort coordinated only by a shared understanding of what's at stake- all of human civilization- should find out what makes conservatives the way they are and engineer a antidote. Never mind asking permission; if talking about problems was going to influence conservatives to do the right thing for any problem, we'd have known about it by now.
We have a stark choice before us, we can either turn back global warming or we can all die. Some combination of technological fix and behaviour change is the solution. If we refuse to change our behavior at all, then we're rolling the dice on a technological fix which may not be forthcoming in time. The rational thing to do is to change our behavior while working towards new technologies.
It's the winners who write history- their way. Scientists the world over have to wake up and realize that they are thrown together -whether they like it or not- and constitute a defacto army and defender of humanity and civilization in a war against conservatives everywhere whether they like it or not and they can either come to terms with that reality and wage that war with a mind to winning it by any means at their disposal or they can die with the rest of us.
The fact that conservatives won't even admit that there is a problem (see Inhofe's book this week) and that they're causing through their resistance to change, their conservatism, the better part of it, that they are in fact threatening the continued existence of everyone else for all time proves one thing conclusively and forever and quite irrespective of how this all turns out and that one thing is this- conservatism and civilization are fundamentally incompatible. Case closed.
I am totally sympathetic to this POV and I will one up you and say the same applies to the sociopathic politician problem and criminal problem and the anti-science problem and the base superstition problem.
I am fully signed onto the idea that a lot of our societal problems and not just intelligence owe basically to the fact that humans are just whatever evolution shit out its ass over the course of a few million years.
That's a fact about us that is just an impedance mismatch with our higher aspirations and expectations for ourselves.
That said, you do have a false assumption buried in your claim. That assumption is that current methods of teaching are producing as good a product (if you'll forgive the prodcutization metaphor for human learning for a second) as can be produced.
Since we really don't have even a theoretical framework in which to think about the education of a single individuals mind and all the things in the environment and life experiences that can effect it one way or the other, it's hard to see how anyone can make that assumption and not run the risk of being proved wrong one day.
Notice that the idea that education is about as good as it can be runs counter to to a lot of people's personal experience including mine.
Although I went to a good public school and a highly competitive college, I would say that for all but a few moments I remember, it sucked - for a wide variety of reasons (memorization instead of reasoning and investigation, then five years of the sage on the stage at university,) and that sucking very negatively impacted me and my life.
By asserting that it's the case that people couldn't be much better no matter how we teach them, you're also accidentally implying that how we teach them is irrelevant to the outcome.
Either that or you're force to assert that without any real theory in place, we've somehow stumbled onto a system of teaching that produces about an optimal outcome.
That would be a first in engineering, to arrive at the best possible result in a complicated domain (imagine a machine or rocket or suchlike ) with no theory to guide your tinkering.
What we normally see is the deeper the theory, the more precise it is at describing the relationship between the underlying causal factors, the more powerful a technology we produce and not by a little, by some huge amount.
There's just no reason to believe that we have hit on the best way educate people or get them interested in educating themselves, especially given the expanding repertoire of experiences that computers afford us. These experiences are by their very nature are "close to" cognition itself and fit thinking and possibly education much more "closely" than any other previous technology.
Let's move the goalpost on what a "post PC world" is so we can be right, shall we? . Before the NON-demise of the PC finally became evident even to the "thin client" recently turned "cloud computing " evangelists, they talked about the "post PC world" as one where desktop computers were gone and computing power and cycles were going to be "like electricity" just *there*, anywhere, at the flip of a switch along with all your data.
Just like with the history of electrical generation, we will move from the days of big machines being present in every home to centrally localized and managed computing.
Now that that pipe dream(or "tube dream" ala the late Sen Ted Stevens) has become self-evidently false, they' re moving the goalposts in order to be seen as having been right.
Now to live in a post-PC world is to "have other than PCs become at all popular" (though still not as popular as PCs) .
One supposes they are doing this so they can make the claim to their speaking engagement / consulting clients that "they're the person who predicted our post-PC world in 1999..."
Whatever.
You know what? The post-PC world will happen when a better experience than a great keyboard, a great pointing device and three large flat screens is available to interact with.
Until then, people who have to create on computers rather than just consume screens of information will keep buying and loving their PCs in this "post PC world."
Now if you want to talk about a post WINDOWS or post M$ world, then pull up a chair and we can have a civilized conversation....
OK I see what he's saying and he's right. This is similar to the claims made for monstrously thick cables years ago. The claim then was the impedance of VERY thick cable , the resistance, was lower so more hi fi sound made it to the speaker.
The only problem was- no one could identify the difference in double blind studies. So much for that you might think but never think reality will interfere with marketing, and these fat cable companies are all doing OK even today.
Still doesn't make the schlock that Amazon and iTunes give you any better.
For anyone who isn't aware, the Hi Fi world is chock full of people who are basically insane and who not only will, but LOVE paying astronomical sums for any technology that promises higher hi fi. Thus the $150,000 home speakers and the $2500 cables and the ads that claim that their master craftsmen know *just exactly* how many times to wind some solid gold wire around some speaker part in order to get the highest high fidelity.
A similar situation exists with wines. Astronomical prices for nothing but the marketing around a bottle.
What can anyone say? Stupid people's money eventually drains away and the money of vain glorious stupid snobs gets hoovered out with an elephants trunk.
I don't buy music online because the quality is so bad. If you know what it sounds like on CD and then you listen to in courtesy of an iTunes download, whole parts of the range and timber are just awol and it's all you can think about.
noise canceling headphones are a horror if what you're interested in is getting as close as you can to "being there". Ditto stuff like DOLBY. All those switches stay in the OFF position.
I have to RTFA, but in general i will testify that there are a lot of us out here who love CDs because of extremely high fidelity of the music and loathe iTunes and Amazon downloads because it sounds like shit. We have money to spend, but we're not spending it on that.
So if someone is trying to rectify this and sell to this part of the missing consumer base , all I can say is "of course I want all my music to be in lossless digital format, stored on some device that fits in my pocket and with my entire collection readily available to me at any time.
Just like math, programming is inherently interesting, so yes, kids still take an interest in it. I think b/c of javascript there's probably ore programmers today than ever before and the profile of those people has changed from geek to just average.
The problem with your comment is that you overlook important details.
Bankers have accountants and lawyers that provide cover for them in terms of actual criminal wrongdoing. That's why the bankers aren't being prosecuted yet, because it's hard to prove criminality rather than incompetence. It's not like people haven't been trying and the AG of NYS is still trying and will probably get them *for something* the same way we got Al Capone *for something* (, in his case, income tax evasion.
LULSEC is just outright breaking the law, no chaser. That's called "mooning the giant" in the business world. The giant is going to notice you and do something about you.
Do well connected companies do blackhat things for large contractors businesses and politicians? We all have the feeling that they do, but there has to be specific allegations and specific cases, not just a general feeling of corruption.
The child sex slavery incidents are usually a reference to Dyncorp, details on Wikipedia and here:
Cari Lynn titled The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors And One Woman's Fight For Justice.
In Bosnia, they had immunity from prosecution- itself a ridiculous notion but there it was.
In Afghanistan they were investigated but you have to pin crimes on individuals doing specific acts and this is not so easy.
But to your point, the greater reality seems to be this: not many companies do why Dyncorp and Xe do. When push comes to shove, the government feels it needs these companies to do things. Thus the immunity from prosecution clauses and thus the invigorous investigation (what no hidden cameras and months of undercover work???? ).
Don't like this state of affairs? Then do what I do and stop voting Republican. It was Rumsfeld under Bush who wanted to downsize the military to save costs (and upsize private contracting by a cost equal to , oh, ten times that amount or more) .
No one is starting a competitor to Xe or Dyncorp. For this reason alone, they should not exist- monopoly power on necessary services to the government on the government dime should never be permitted to exist. Government should perform the services that fit anything like that description.
You cry about the end results, but do you vote? Do you express anything like the concerns I expressed to your congresscritter? Once the gun is loaded and trigger is pulled, the bullet IS going to fly to its target. You have to stop the action before it gets to the point of inevitability. Permitting Xe and Dyncorp to exist in the capacity they do was ABSOLUTELY going to lead to just what we see here, along with the lackluster prosecution in the name of "the greater good" .
LULZSEC on the other hand were just a bunch of lawbreaking joyriders shoving their bare asses out their car window as they drove by the chief of police's house.
Just because there's an unsolved armed robbery in a town doesn't mean vandals aren't prosecuted anymore.
I swear on all that is holy and right about/. that I was thrown out of a major public university for trying to implement this in 1998-1999. They KNOW where this leads and are putting it off as long as humanly possible.
It's not going to happen by change from within. It's got to be forced by change from without, and they need to find a new business model other than educating the nation's 18-35 year olds in basic courses.
It should be mandatory that all course material is put on line for all public universities no excuses. In fact, the videotaped lecture of all courses should be online.
There is so much here you can do it's pathetic that it hasn't even started as of 2011. What does that tell you about people/s motivations? If I were in uni again (please god, not me, take someone else...) , the last thing I would suggest is we do any part of the above
Put 2 and 2 together. HTML 1995. Course notes and lectures online.... 2012? uh... no.
They don't want this they REALLY don't want this. They see this not as just giving the milk away fro free, they're giving the cow away. So be it.
But they're not going to do it and they'll fight it with everything they have. It has to be an insurrection. Then they'll come along, sort of, with stipulations blah blah blah and it will be too fucking late for them.
here's the bottom line- the university should not exist in its present form. You can only prop yourself up with rich foreigners paying full tuition and bubble debt student loans and charity awards and attempts to club money out of baby seals by wielding uber-software patents for so long, then one day the bubble bursts and there isn't any more loan money and your cost structure is through the roof and the house of cards starts tumbling down.
The university is a zombie business model. Dead but doesn't know it yet. Dead, but still walking around.
Come on the educational system is a scam (not to say education.. Santorum... yes you.. sit back down..)
The professors palm off the shittiest lectures they can get away with using as little of their time as they can, the books are overpriced and under featured and tuition has the enviable position of being able to take government money without in any way being restrained by the same government.
That last point is why people think they hate government "interference" in the marketplace btw It's not that the government is in the market- the government is in the market in a million ways you'd never think of getting rid of- it's that it's been hobbled in the marketplace as a mere hapless payer of bills the politically connected coke snorting class of university administrations dream up.
If your class or teacher sucks, can you get your money back because your product is defective? Ditto on the shitola they force you to buy at the bookstore. It's unreadable, the questions range from the useless to the impossible (I really enjoy being told by the book after working on one problem for say three or four hours that there was no known solution or the solution when first discovered represented an advancement in mathematics... fuck you, assholes.
Which pretty well sums up everything anyone with any common sense has to say to the university- fuck you.
Fuck you for your insane and baseless inflation which you pursue relentlessly because your salary is positively correlated to the cost of tuition.
Fuck you for not changing - in 250 years - how people are taught even one iota - the fucking sage on the stage.
Fuck you for deliberately and maliciously keeping your courses and books offline. You had your fun kicking me out of university for trying to put course lectures online 12 years ago but trust me, I haven't been wasting my time and I haven't forgotten. Our company is going to take a baseball bat to the collective skull of your business model and by the time we're done, minding Khan Academy's servers is going to look like a good career move to you.;
Fuck you for systematically colluding with banks to steer people to worst-deal-ever student loans.
Fuck you for not giving a fucking shit about all the students I saw who earnestly wanted to learn something only to be met by a wall of blistering cynicism and indifference- a business in the real world would last exactly 6 months with your level of "service".
Fuck you for systematically lying and colluding to falsify the qualifications of in state students for the purpose of fattening your bottom line with daddy- can-pay-full-freight foreign students.
Fuck you for screwing over your TAs and paying them minimum wage while your fucking university presidents do shit like, oh, million dollar redecorations of their entire office floors so their fucking daughters can get fucking married there.
Fuck you for having zero quality control over your courses and fuck you for trying to present this as some type of fucking "academic freedom".
Fuck you for your lavish financial attention to fucking sports and fucking glitzy shitty pizza joints whose only purpose is to get another two three grand off mom and dad each semester while your academic cultural and social activities are starved of resources.
Fuck you for your coddling and rewarding of political skullduggery as a means to career advancement in your faculty. Do you really not know what goes on and can you really not think to counter it in any way? Oh that's right, that's who YOU are and how you got YOUR position.
Nevermind.
Count your fucking days, bitch. They're numbered.When the financial aid bubble bursts and people discover they have cheaper and better- both- ways to get an education, which is going to be at most one two years now? when that day comes I sincerely hope the crushed collective future you face leads directly to your putting a gun into your fucking collective mouths and pulling the fucking trigger.
Get real. Want more people to go into SE? LEt the market work and quit campaigning for an increase in H1Bs to address "desperate labor shortages!!!".
People enrolled in SE when the pay was high and the opportunities plenty. OF course high pay pisses management off because that's money that could have gone to their bonuses. So the corporations flooded the market with H1Bs to drive down wages and create abusive working conditions and whaddya know- people quit enrolling in SE.
If you want to see SE enrollment up, we need to see hard, structural safeguards in place against corporations jacking with immigration for the purpose of manipulating the labor market.
Oh and corporations don't love people over 40 either, even though they're easily the most experienced, versatile and productive IT workers available. Sorry, but most of "new" technology and languages are old wine in new bottles, or old ideas that were tried and retired because they were found to be fundamentally flawed- case in point the whole anti-relational, noSQL movement. But of course if you don't know history, because you're oh, 22 and you never studied history, you're doomed to repeat it.. at a great waste of time and money.
Why study for 5 and 8 years and go into triple digit debt just to have a 10 or 15 year career?
Slave labor is the only place management will ever be happy with. Other than that, "desperate labor shortage! Emergency Will Robinson... Emergency!"
Re:I've been observing Stratfor since its inceptio
on
Is Stratfor a "Joke"?
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I've subscribed (paid subscriptions) to many of them
Slashdot Mirror
never ask /. ers for advice.
a couple hundred posts and they're all OT , at least as far as I could stand to read...
There's a difference between running out of a natural resource and borrowing money . The nature and limitation of natural resources and their abundance is fixed. The nature and scarcity of money is a fiction humans can adjust. Big difference.
Mod this up one million. This is what conservatism is, when it's not religious headcases blowing up aborition clinics and tring to establish Christian Sharia Law in the US
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Don't worry everyone, the "free market" will quickly drive the FB password seeking employers out of business because workers in the free market will elect to seek employment elsewhere. END SARCASM
The article didn't site the actions "Congress" it sited the actions of Congressional Republicans.
The American government can indeed an awful thing- but only when people who fundamentally hate government assume power within it.
Science is etc...
Wow an entire school of thought or two perhaps completely overthrown with three little words. You're amazing.
And to anyone else... if you don't know why he said what he or don't agree with it then it just proves that he's right and you ARE an idiot
Typical fucking asshole Asbergers case... I say it authoritatively, and with brevity somehow makes it true. ...
All those stupid philosophers and scientists who wasted their lives because they didn't understand that "science is Bayesian"... if ONLY you had been around then, you could have saved their careers and they wouldn't have wasted their lives....
WHAT a great man you are! There. Did someone finally say what you're constantly craving to hear?
Which explains why Newt took Georgia better than all the political analysts laid end to end.
Sorry but posts accusing entities- Google in this instance- of nefarious wrongdoing need to be backed by more than rhetoric for me to mod you up.
These kinds of posts only get to "5-insightful" by craftily positioning themselves, as you have for a few days now, to be very early responders to stories on /. ; in this case you were first.
I am a true geek and as natural and fit for me, I hate FB with a passion and will not join no matter who tries to coerce me. It's quite obviously one big spy machine where the subject of the spying is not merely your anonymized drop in an ocean of aggregated surfing habits of many, but rather the
Big difference. Very big difference.
Just leave the US market and the markets of AU and Japan and other software-patent countries. That's it, just leave. The market is big enough elsewhere to make yourselves rich by selling your product.
Once innovative, U.S. owned software start-ups are seen as leaving the US, the media will have its story.
Once the media has it's story, it will be written once and for all in the minds of the public as it really is- software patents kill innovation.
Once the public understands the issues as they really are, the lawmakers will be forced to do the right thing and ban software patents.
Yes, I am conspiring with my fellow developers right here on /.
And yes, you can develop software here in the US and sell it elsewhere with impunity, owing directly to this Supreme Court decision: http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2007/04/supreme_court_n.php/ .
And no, I am am not a lawyer. I am human.
this.
If you have never heard really good speakers and you can't afford them, then don't seek them out because somehow you "remember" what they sounded like and everything else sounds like crap thenceforward.
So also with MP3 vs CDs. CDs are an effectively perfect reproduction of the music ( please analog people, not now...) and if you listen to the music you love on them and you're just of average sensitivity or better, you'll hurl your ipod / mp3 player out the window. So don't do it and you'll stay happy.
I "discovered" this when I foolishly started to order my existing CD collection as MP3 and AAC. Big fucking mistake and a total waste of money. Literally, I just erased what I bought.
My only problem is Sony et al have given up making *really good* CD players. Before 2000, you could buy extremely nice, brushed aluminum, ultra-thin unskippable portable CD players . With a pair of say Grado 325s (about 350 bucks open air high fidelity cans) you could have a full blown audiophile experience pumped directly into your ear equivalent to a high end home stereo system and $3000 dollar speakers. Now CD players are plastic crapola.
Here's the bottom line to all this. People in their teens and twenties are the ones who sustain the music industry. The purpose of music to most of these people is to serve as a shared electronic fire around which they gather while sharing their lives thoughts hopes frustrations and bodies. Shitty compression techniques like MP3 does not interfere with that in the least, and the more convenient it is to listen and share music, actually, the better that market is served.
Audiophiles have more than a touch of the Aspergers about them- they don't always *get* the larger social context that music exists in and prefer to contemplate wave form charts showing a speakers distortion levels at very high and low frequencies yadda yaddda yadda.
Music exists to be shared between people as a way of invoking an inexpressibly complex set of emotions and thoughts very directly. Thus the iconic image of the power of music for a generation -or two -is John Cusak in Say Anything standing in the rain holding aloft his shitty boom box blaring Peter Gabriel thus:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j379JbL-xM
Yeah it's not true. We have negative or near zero population growth in developed countries. That's what the future looks like assuming we elevate the standard of living for everyone without crashing the planet. So breeding ourselves out of existence by the sheer numbers per se is not in our future. It's a fear whose time has come and gone.
He's talking like a fucking old man.
First, I find online comments to slashdot stories to be the best part of slashdot and when i say best part I don't mean amusing or entertaining but rather educational and informative.
Second, it's not just slashdot I feel this way about.
Third online discussions are only just beginning to meet really clever technology where they will be elevated above the flamewars spam and mindless ejaculations that yes, do pepper the substantive stuff that fills all current online forums.
Finally this is old man talk. What would anyone every need a home PC for? Why would anyone want more than 64 k memory? If man was meant to fly then he'd have wings.
Blah blah blah
fucking blah blah blah
fuckin' blah
fuckin' blah
fuckin' blah blah blah.
This is the voice of a a guy whose shot his load and is out of ideas. That's why there's retirement, so people like Nick Denton can get the fuck out of the way and let young people with fresh ideas and unstale aspirations solve the problems he failed at.
Fuck you Nick. Go order some more viagra and head down south where you belong.
Please. Let's be real here. The fact is we'd be doing what needs to be done - see the Princeton Wedges concept- but for American conservatives who have made it their mission to, once again, deny any scientific reality which challenges whatever it is they are irrationally attached to. Nothing's - not one thing- has changed with these people since the time of Galileo
The fact is that conservatism and civilization are fundamentally incompatible. Whether you're talking about the Taliban in Afghanistan or the conservatives who voted this week to put Rick Santorum (www.santorum.com) in the office of the Presidency or the hard liners in Russia or the barbaric regimes in Africa who execute gays, to wherever extent conservatives get power, that's just how far back civilization gets set backwards.
We need to stop global warming as soon as humanly possible or everyone dies; it's really just that simple.
It's called civilization -and either you're with us or you're against us.
If you weren't born with a brain that can conceive of an egalitarian reality where everyone has an equal right to live and prosper, not just be given some vanishingly small chance to TRY to live and prosper, if you weren't born with a brain that can sort out that there's something called "reality" out there which is greater than the sum of your superstitions, projections, and fears, if you weren't born with a brain in which something other than your narcissistic preoccupation with other people's sexual behavior is the focus of your energy, if you were born greedy for power and "stuff" and the purpose of your life is to have as much stuff and power for yourself as you can while you reflexively rationalize every exploitative, domineering anti-egalitarian impulse your brain generates then basically you need to be engineered out of existence because yo're a clear and present danger to the rest of us.
This is what the third world war is- the war of science and rationalism against conservatives and irrationality and religious bigotry. The war of egalitarians against the greedheads. The war of the realists against the rationalizers. Global warming is just the first and perhaps the last battle ground.
Science the world over, in a world wide effort coordinated only by a shared understanding of what's at stake- all of human civilization- should find out what makes conservatives the way they are and engineer a antidote. Never mind asking permission; if talking about problems was going to influence conservatives to do the right thing for any problem, we'd have known about it by now.
We have a stark choice before us, we can either turn back global warming or we can all die. Some combination of technological fix and behaviour change is the solution. If we refuse to change our behavior at all, then we're rolling the dice on a technological fix which may not be forthcoming in time. The rational thing to do is to change our behavior while working towards new technologies.
It's the winners who write history- their way. Scientists the world over have to wake up and realize that they are thrown together -whether they like it or not- and constitute a defacto army and defender of humanity and civilization in a war against conservatives everywhere whether they like it or not and they can either come to terms with that reality and wage that war with a mind to winning it by any means at their disposal or they can die with the rest of us.
The fact that conservatives won't even admit that there is a problem (see Inhofe's book this week) and that they're causing through their resistance to change, their conservatism, the better part of it, that they are in fact threatening the continued existence of everyone else for all time proves one thing conclusively and forever and quite irrespective of how this all turns out and that one thing is this- conservatism and civilization are fundamentally incompatible. Case closed.
I am totally sympathetic to this POV and I will one up you and say the same applies to the sociopathic politician problem and criminal problem and the anti-science problem and the base superstition problem.
I am fully signed onto the idea that a lot of our societal problems and not just intelligence owe basically to the fact that humans are just whatever evolution shit out its ass over the course of a few million years.
That's a fact about us that is just an impedance mismatch with our higher aspirations and expectations for ourselves.
That said, you do have a false assumption buried in your claim. That assumption is that current methods of teaching are producing as good a product (if you'll forgive the prodcutization metaphor for human learning for a second) as can be produced.
Since we really don't have even a theoretical framework in which to think about the education of a single individuals mind and all the things in the environment and life experiences that can effect it one way or the other, it's hard to see how anyone can make that assumption and not run the risk of being proved wrong one day.
Notice that the idea that education is about as good as it can be runs counter to to a lot of people's personal experience including mine.
Although I went to a good public school and a highly competitive college, I would say that for all but a few moments I remember, it sucked - for a wide variety of reasons (memorization instead of reasoning and investigation, then five years of the sage on the stage at university,) and that sucking very negatively impacted me and my life.
By asserting that it's the case that people couldn't be much better no matter how we teach them, you're also accidentally implying that how we teach them is irrelevant to the outcome.
Either that or you're force to assert that without any real theory in place, we've somehow stumbled onto a system of teaching that produces about an optimal outcome.
That would be a first in engineering, to arrive at the best possible result in a complicated domain (imagine a machine or rocket or suchlike ) with no theory to guide your tinkering.
What we normally see is the deeper the theory, the more precise it is at describing the relationship between the underlying causal factors, the more powerful a technology we produce and not by a little, by some huge amount.
There's just no reason to believe that we have hit on the best way educate people or get them interested in educating themselves, especially given the expanding repertoire of experiences that computers afford us. These experiences are by their very nature are "close to" cognition itself and fit thinking and possibly education much more "closely" than any other previous technology.
Let's move the goalpost on what a "post PC world" is so we can be right, shall we? . Before the NON-demise of the PC finally became evident even to the "thin client" recently turned "cloud computing " evangelists, they talked about the "post PC world" as one where desktop computers were gone and computing power and cycles were going to be "like electricity" just *there*, anywhere, at the flip of a switch along with all your data.
Just like with the history of electrical generation, we will move from the days of big machines being present in every home to centrally localized and managed computing.
Now that that pipe dream(or "tube dream" ala the late Sen Ted Stevens) has become self-evidently false, they' re moving the goalposts in order to be seen as having been right.
Now to live in a post-PC world is to "have other than PCs become at all popular" (though still not as popular as PCs) .
One supposes they are doing this so they can make the claim to their speaking engagement / consulting clients that "they're the person who predicted our post-PC world in 1999..."
Whatever.
You know what? The post-PC world will happen when a better experience than a great keyboard, a great pointing device and three large flat screens is available to interact with.
Until then, people who have to create on computers rather than just consume screens of information will keep buying and loving their PCs in this "post PC world."
Now if you want to talk about a post WINDOWS or post M$ world, then pull up a chair and we can have a civilized conversation....
Please link us to the tests you mention which purport to show people able to distinguish between 192 and 48.
Thanks.
OK I see what he's saying and he's right. This is similar to the claims made for monstrously thick cables years ago. The claim then was the impedance of VERY thick cable , the resistance, was lower so more hi fi sound made it to the speaker.
The only problem was- no one could identify the difference in double blind studies. So much for that you might think but never think reality will interfere with marketing, and these fat cable companies are all doing OK even today.
Still doesn't make the schlock that Amazon and iTunes give you any better.
For anyone who isn't aware, the Hi Fi world is chock full of people who are basically insane and who not only will, but LOVE paying astronomical sums for any technology that promises higher hi fi. Thus the $150,000 home speakers and the $2500 cables and the ads that claim that their master craftsmen know *just exactly* how many times to wind some solid gold wire around some speaker part in order to get the highest high fidelity.
A similar situation exists with wines. Astronomical prices for nothing but the marketing around a bottle.
What can anyone say? Stupid people's money eventually drains away and the money of vain glorious stupid snobs gets hoovered out with an elephants trunk.
I don't buy music online because the quality is so bad. If you know what it sounds like on CD and then you listen to in courtesy of an iTunes download, whole parts of the range and timber are just awol and it's all you can think about.
noise canceling headphones are a horror if what you're interested in is getting as close as you can to "being there". Ditto stuff like DOLBY. All those switches stay in the OFF position.
I have to RTFA, but in general i will testify that there are a lot of us out here who love CDs because of extremely high fidelity of the music and loathe iTunes and Amazon downloads because it sounds like shit. We have money to spend, but we're not spending it on that.
So if someone is trying to rectify this and sell to this part of the missing consumer base , all I can say is "of course I want all my music to be in lossless digital format, stored on some device that fits in my pocket and with my entire collection readily available to me at any time.
Why?
Is this going to happen any time soon? "
Just like math, programming is inherently interesting, so yes, kids still take an interest in it. I think b/c of javascript there's probably ore programmers today than ever before and the profile of those people has changed from geek to just average.
I'm thinking Tea Party
The problem with your comment is that you overlook important details.
Bankers have accountants and lawyers that provide cover for them in terms of actual criminal wrongdoing. That's why the bankers aren't being prosecuted yet, because it's hard to prove criminality rather than incompetence. It's not like people haven't been trying and the AG of NYS is still trying and will probably get them *for something* the same way we got Al Capone *for something* (, in his case, income tax evasion.
LULSEC is just outright breaking the law, no chaser. That's called "mooning the giant" in the business world. The giant is going to notice you and do something about you.
Do well connected companies do blackhat things for large contractors businesses and politicians? We all have the feeling that they do, but there has to be specific allegations and specific cases, not just a general feeling of corruption.
The child sex slavery incidents are usually a reference to Dyncorp, details on Wikipedia and here:
Cari Lynn titled The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors And One Woman's Fight For Justice.
In Bosnia, they had immunity from prosecution- itself a ridiculous notion but there it was.
In Afghanistan they were investigated but you have to pin crimes on individuals doing specific acts and this is not so easy.
But to your point, the greater reality seems to be this: not many companies do why Dyncorp and Xe do. When push comes to shove, the government feels it needs these companies to do things. Thus the immunity from prosecution clauses and thus the invigorous investigation (what no hidden cameras and months of undercover work???? ).
Don't like this state of affairs? Then do what I do and stop voting Republican. It was Rumsfeld under Bush who wanted to downsize the military to save costs (and upsize private contracting by a cost equal to , oh, ten times that amount or more) .
No one is starting a competitor to Xe or Dyncorp. For this reason alone, they should not exist- monopoly power on necessary services to the government on the government dime should never be permitted to exist. Government should perform the services that fit anything like that description.
You cry about the end results, but do you vote? Do you express anything like the concerns I expressed to your congresscritter? Once the gun is loaded and trigger is pulled, the bullet IS going to fly to its target. You have to stop the action before it gets to the point of inevitability. Permitting Xe and Dyncorp to exist in the capacity they do was ABSOLUTELY going to lead to just what we see here, along with the lackluster prosecution in the name of "the greater good" .
LULZSEC on the other hand were just a bunch of lawbreaking joyriders shoving their bare asses out their car window as they drove by the chief of police's house.
Just because there's an unsolved armed robbery in a town doesn't mean vandals aren't prosecuted anymore.
It's not going to happen by change from within. It's got to be forced by change from without, and they need to find a new business model other than educating the nation's 18-35 year olds in basic courses.
It should be mandatory that all course material is put on line for all public universities no excuses. In fact, the videotaped lecture of all courses should be online.
There is so much here you can do it's pathetic that it hasn't even started as of 2011. What does that tell you about people/s motivations? If I were in uni again (please god, not me, take someone else...) , the last thing I would suggest is we do any part of the above
Put 2 and 2 together. HTML 1995. Course notes and lectures online.... 2012? uh... no.
They don't want this they REALLY don't want this. They see this not as just giving the milk away fro free, they're giving the cow away. So be it.
But they're not going to do it and they'll fight it with everything they have. It has to be an insurrection. Then they'll come along, sort of, with stipulations blah blah blah and it will be too fucking late for them.
here's the bottom line- the university should not exist in its present form. You can only prop yourself up with rich foreigners paying full tuition and bubble debt student loans and charity awards and attempts to club money out of baby seals by wielding uber-software patents for so long, then one day the bubble bursts and there isn't any more loan money and your cost structure is through the roof and the house of cards starts tumbling down.
The university is a zombie business model. Dead but doesn't know it yet. Dead, but still walking around.
Come on the educational system is a scam (not to say education.. Santorum... yes you.. sit back down..)
The professors palm off the shittiest lectures they can get away with using as little of their time as they can, the books are overpriced and under featured and tuition has the enviable position of being able to take government money without in any way being restrained by the same government.
That last point is why people think they hate government "interference" in the marketplace btw It's not that the government is in the market- the government is in the market in a million ways you'd never think of getting rid of- it's that it's been hobbled in the marketplace as a mere hapless payer of bills the politically connected coke snorting class of university administrations dream up.
If your class or teacher sucks, can you get your money back because your product is defective? Ditto on the shitola they force you to buy at the bookstore. It's unreadable, the questions range from the useless to the impossible (I really enjoy being told by the book after working on one problem for say three or four hours that there was no known solution or the solution when first discovered represented an advancement in mathematics... fuck you, assholes.
Which pretty well sums up everything anyone with any common sense has to say to the university- fuck you.
Fuck you for your insane and baseless inflation which you pursue relentlessly because your salary is positively correlated to the cost of tuition.
Fuck you for not changing - in 250 years - how people are taught even one iota - the fucking sage on the stage.
Fuck you for deliberately and maliciously keeping your courses and books offline. You had your fun kicking me out of university for trying to put course lectures online 12 years ago but trust me, I haven't been wasting my time and I haven't forgotten. Our company is going to take a baseball bat to the collective skull of your business model and by the time we're done, minding Khan Academy's servers is going to look like a good career move to you.;
Fuck you for systematically colluding with banks to steer people to worst-deal-ever student loans.
Fuck you for not giving a fucking shit about all the students I saw who earnestly wanted to learn something only to be met by a wall of blistering cynicism and indifference- a business in the real world would last exactly 6 months with your level of "service".
Fuck you for systematically lying and colluding to falsify the qualifications of in state students for the purpose of fattening your bottom line with daddy- can-pay-full-freight foreign students.
Fuck you for screwing over your TAs and paying them minimum wage while your fucking university presidents do shit like, oh, million dollar redecorations of their entire office floors so their fucking daughters can get fucking married there.
Fuck you for having zero quality control over your courses and fuck you for trying to present this as some type of fucking "academic freedom".
Fuck you for your lavish financial attention to fucking sports and fucking glitzy shitty pizza joints whose only purpose is to get another two three grand off mom and dad each semester while your academic cultural and social activities are starved of resources.
Fuck you for your coddling and rewarding of political skullduggery as a means to career advancement in your faculty. Do you really not know what goes on and can you really not think to counter it in any way? Oh that's right, that's who YOU are and how you got YOUR position.
Nevermind.
Count your fucking days, bitch. They're numbered.When the financial aid bubble bursts and people discover they have cheaper and better- both- ways to get an education, which is going to be at most one two years now? when that day comes I sincerely hope the crushed collective future you face leads directly to your putting a gun into your fucking collective mouths and pulling the fucking trigger.
Get real. Want more people to go into SE? LEt the market work and quit campaigning for an increase in H1Bs to address "desperate labor shortages!!!".
People enrolled in SE when the pay was high and the opportunities plenty. OF course high pay pisses management off because that's money that could have gone to their bonuses. So the corporations flooded the market with H1Bs to drive down wages and create abusive working conditions and whaddya know- people quit enrolling in SE.
If you want to see SE enrollment up, we need to see hard, structural safeguards in place against corporations jacking with immigration for the purpose of manipulating the labor market.
Oh and corporations don't love people over 40 either, even though they're easily the most experienced, versatile and productive IT workers available. Sorry, but most of "new" technology and languages are old wine in new bottles, or old ideas that were tried and retired because they were found to be fundamentally flawed- case in point the whole anti-relational, noSQL movement. But of course if you don't know history, because you're oh, 22 and you never studied history, you're doomed to repeat it.. at a great waste of time and money.
Why study for 5 and 8 years and go into triple digit debt just to have a 10 or 15 year career?
Slave labor is the only place management will ever be happy with. Other than that, "desperate labor shortage! Emergency Will Robinson ... Emergency!"
I've subscribed (paid subscriptions) to many of them
Wish I had your disposable income.