Frankly, I am more and more coming to this point of view, as far as users are concerned. Let them think the tiny god could become angry with them if they browse the wrong folders, or tamper with the holy configurations.
You can't teach them enough to be fully competent. If you teach them a little, you just make them dangerous, able to screw up on a much more profound level.
This reminds me of the reasoning behind the prime directive...
This is strictly a technological problem, and capitalism is VERY good at solving these kinds of problems.
Fusion is the answer. Maybe not local fusion; maybe we'll never be able to do small scale fusion.
I agree that fusion is the answer, and I agree that it's a technological problem. I disagree that capitalism is very good at solving these kinds of problems. I do not see energy companies rushing to invest large amounts of money in fusion research, because they do not foresee immediate personal benefits from doing so. Instead, most of our best fusion research so far has been funded by governments. This is socialistic, not capitalistic, and it will have to continue for a while if we are to succeed in a reasonable time frame.
The benefits of capitalism in this area will likely only kick in once fusion technology is established, and companies foresee potential profit within a reasonable time frame, and begin establishing plants. But even then, initial plants will probably be a bit expensive to build, as new technology usually is, so this will probably require government grants and incentives, again more socialistic and less capitalistic, in order to prod investment in this area. Then capitalism can take over and begin to provide us with cheap and sustained fusion.
If we instead left the development of fusion exclusively to the market, fusion would take a prohibitively long time due to the initial expense of overcoming the technological hurdles. It is better for the economy as a whole for us to fund the research with a centralized effort.
The FBI can find out where I live without Amazon or Google.
Yeah, but the FBI isn't supposed to know that you bought a book called "Why Bush is a Tyrant." The point being, it becomes quite dangerous if the government is allowed to keep tabs on what you read, because the political freedom which comes from freedom of speech requires that ideas can be exchanged and learned without fear of consequences.
Not to mention, the incoming link count is significantly low. Google bases its valuation of sites on the incoming links, and that site has none. The grandparent poster needs to either spend money on advertising, or get more people to link to the site.
If there was demand for programmers of the caliber you mention and companies willing to pay salaries deserving of such abilities there would be more people studying towards such a position.
But if companies are going to just throw up their hands and say "we can't hire competent people, there aren't enough of them in the world, they only doom themselves to a continued shortfall in talent, and an increase in buggy software.
Part of the problem is simply that the higher you draw the threshold, you start to get into areas of natural talent which seem to be more difficult to train. But an even bigger problem is the problem of identifying the people with the highest skills. When you're staring there looking at a resume, the best and brightest with the skills to write the most reliable code don't have resumes that look much different from everyone else's resume. Usually programmers can spot which other programmers have abnormally high skill in this area after working with them, so you can find these people by word of mouth, but this doesn't get automatically translated into resume content which can allow you to pick the correct employee out of the crowd.
My best advice to anyone reading is, if you think you can code like this, and you want to seek out a high salary job based on your unique skill, then you can try proving your skill by releasing open source code which demonstrates this fact. This could give you a boost, but not always one comprehended by the people responsible for hiring at all locations.
Your color coding system is interesting. A similar proposal which would be interesting would be to have the system keep track of who contributed each portion of text, and for every edit made, the one editing would have to choose whether they are enhancing, modifying, or contradicting previous content. Then this could be used to produce rough automated scorings of which editors produce content which can be convergently built upon, and which editors produce content which is controversial and inflamatory (any such system would make eroneous attributions sometimes, but in the longterm should average out to a reasonably accurate attributions). This could also be used to give an automatic rating label for whether articles are stable and convergent or controversial and divergent.
This would essentially function like mod-points for a wiki.
Some have said that wikipedia's strength is in the fact that it's editable by pirates, but critics claim that ninjas only edit at the discretion of pirates.
(Why do all Wikipedia articles degenerate into this format?)
It may not be prime, but it's possible. Aren't all numbers "possible" prime numbers?
Not the ones ending in 4...:)
Re:Wikipedia on Aspartame oddly omitted by Google
on
Merck's Deleted Data
·
· Score: 1
How's this to boggle your mind. This morning I remembered this conversation and checked the wikipedia aspartame pagerank in google, and it had a pagerank of 6 (which is fairly high). This evening, the wikipedia aspartame pagerank went from 6 to 0 and the page dropped out of the aspartame search list completely. Something really anomalous is going on there, and I wish I understood it...
In which case Wikipedia should do much better than Britannica. After all, there are many obscure topics for which Wikipedia has an articles and Britannica doesn't. Any hard copy encyclopedia is going to get trounced by Wikipedia for articles on popular culture and recent events, for instance.
That's because, for all that people go around calling Wikipedia an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. It's an information index. If you want to evaluate Wikipedia on popular culture or current events, the proper comparison is Google, rather than Britannica. Do a Google search, examine the top few entries, and see if you can obtain valuable information faster and more efficiently in Google, or by following links in Wikipedia. There are some entries where Google wins this comparison, and some where Wikipedia wins. There are also some places where Wikipedia is more accurate in such a comparison, and some places where Google is more accurate.
An attempt at a rigorous comparison might be intriguing.
The implicit moral argument here is: If you could ask the mice for consent, and they had accurate knowledge of the options, they would choose to live in the lab rather than in the wild.
But is that a relevant moral argument if the "if" portion is impossible? The fact is, mice can't make a choice using a human scale of knowledge and awareness because they cannot have it. The argument first anthropomorphizes the mouse, then tries to speculate what it would choose if it were a human rather than a mouse. But if it were a human, we all agree we wouldn't put it in that situation in the first place, so the whole argument falls apart.
There's a moral argument to be made, perhaps, but I don't think that one works very well.
Gnome developers often take a step back and redo stuff the right way, not just the way people got used to.
I've used Gnome for a long time, but one person's "the right way" is another persons's "hey, I just had a new idea". After a while, that continual reinvention from scratch prevents things from evolving into anything resembling an advanced state. I get this constant feel with Gnome like it's "almost finished" for the last three or four years. Perhaps it just has a few too many chefs with a few too many novel ideas, and not enough guiding visionaries pushing it toward an organized cohesion.
I don't think many people here trust it, at least not under anything resembling current models. The major problem is that trust is so prevalent elsewhere. While vast majorities of computing experts are shouting about how dangerous electronic voting is in its current form, the general public is either unaware of the problem, or attributes the shouting to lunatic conspiracy theorists.
I personally think you have to approach conspiracies with a supply/demand approach. When there's a demand for a conspiracy, and a means of supplying one, then inevitably someone will produce one. The rewards are so great for having a voting conspiracy that we can't do much about the demand side. So what we have to do is make sure no mechanism exists for supplying a voting conspiracy. So long as their exists such a mechanism, people will try to use it.
One of the biggest problems is that aspartame is trashed so frequently on the internet... posting an anecdotal report about how your "near photographic memory" is now gone simply makes you look like a quack.
Funny. Another problem on the internet is people calling someone else a "quack" after doing little more than a summary perusal of the literature themselves.
Many of the studies referenced in the document you provided are severely lacking in experimental design. For example, while headaches from aspartame frequently come the day after consumption, a study was presented in which aspartame and placebo are switched every 24 hours, and then the placebo was shown to cause more headaches. This was provided as the sole and primary source of evidence that aspartame does not cause more headaches than a placebo, yet it did not actually test what is commonly experienced.
As in the example of the Merck research, and in the case of some aspartame research, there is a significant problem with research being funded and directed by the food and drug companies that stand to profit from the results of the research. We are experiencing a significant problem with the quality of research performed in this way, and a change is required.
It is known that aspartame's primary ingredient, phenylalanine, crosses the blood brain barrier and significantly disrupts normal neural function. This effect can be directly measured. For a slightly more extended summary perusal of the literature, you can start here or here.
You'll find that studies exist which indicate significant caution about aspartame is warranted, with results such as seisures and headaches.
If you pay attention, you'll also find that many of the other "studies" in the literature are far from impartial. For example, here's a nice flowery "scientific review" of the safety of aspartame, except that if you check the author affiliations, you'll find that they work for NutraSweet. Oh, and if you're paying a lot of attention, you'll even notice that S.S. Schiffman, the author of the study I was complaining about above that was used by the EU to "show" that aspartame doesn't cause headaches, is on that list of the authors working for NutraSweet.
Please question your sources of information a little more carefully before you go throwing around the "quack" label next time.
I seriously don't believe that Monsanto/Searle thought there was anything wrong with aspartame (unlike Merck, apparently.) They just believed that they knew better than anyone else, and getting this on the market was more important than listening to nervous people, (who might very well be right, as it turns out.)
A conspiracy to intentionally be irresponsible with people's health and lives is still a conspiracy.
When they realized how big this thing is going to be, it was too late.
The problem isn't the $100 laptop. Most people in the developed world don't need a laptop archaic enough to cost 1/3rd of their TV. The problem is that if there exists a functional $100 laptop, then that means there can exist a viable market for the mid-range of $250 to $400 laptops, and this is what frightens hardware manufacturers. The lower laptop costs go, the less money there is to divide up among each hardware component.
It's almost inevitable that the laptop industry would follow the progression of the desktop industry toward a market dominated by cheap, but fully functional, products. But just because it's inevitable, that doesn't mean they have to like it...
It's not particularly obvious, but * * Beatles Beatles keeps submitting (legitimate) stories where his username links to random websites that apparently have nothing to do with him or the story.
If guests can go on a talk show, and at the end of the segment announce the book they just released, then what's the harm in someone submitting an article and linking their url back to their web page? As long as the article is a quality submission this doesn't seem to be much different from normal practice in other domains.
No one ever disputed that wiki is good for something. The question is, what things are they good for.
My personal feeling is that wikipedia's most important role is as a starting point for research, rather than as an ending point. It doesn't always tell you fact, but it does index majority viewpoints very efficiently. On many topics, wikipedia can make a more useful starting point than google. This is why it's essential for wikipedia articles to contain extensive citations, since the goal should be to be able to use wikipedia as a routing point to find authoritative information, rather than as a primary source of authoritative information.
The problem then is not the system of wikipedia, but simply the mindset people have in interpreting it. People want wikipedia to be accurate and factual, when by its very nature, it will only be as accurate as the majority opinions of active editors.
That's probably the single most important time-saving suggestion. Essentially every program you use regularly should be a keyboard shortcut. Set up one for web browsers, terminals, calculators, email, basically every command you use on a daily or weekly basis. The overhead of remembering a few shortcuts will pay you back many times over when they become habit.
Also, use keyboard shortcuts for closing windows, and for tabbing between multiple windows. The best way to help this, is to keep the number of windows on one desktop screenspace under control. So use multiple desktops and use a command like alt-F1 through alt-Fwhatever to switch between them. Also, establish habits like using one desktop for certain categories of use. One desktop space can be for instant messaging and email, one for web browsing, one for programming, etc. This will enable you to switch from one task to another with relative ease.
When you are doing something like looking up functions or command references on one desktop space, programming on a second desktop space, and testing on a third, then good organization like this can greatly improve your efficiency.
I still think we ought to focus on Solar power in particular for third world nations. Solar is the real solution to the future energy production issues. I've found quotes for Solar power setups (including batteries for storage) for "large" houses that cost about $25,000.... This is why it's popoular in places like Africa
Many of the countries in Africa have a GDP per capita of around $1600 or so. If you consider how much of their GDP per capita that $25,000 amounts to, it's the equivalent of a typical American spending around $625,000 on solar power.
That certainly doesn't sound like a viable solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I am more and more coming to this point of view, as far as users are concerned. Let them think the tiny god could become angry with them if they browse the wrong folders, or tamper with the holy configurations.
You can't teach them enough to be fully competent. If you teach them a little, you just make them dangerous, able to screw up on a much more profound level.
This reminds me of the reasoning behind the prime directive...
This is strictly a technological problem, and capitalism is VERY good at solving these kinds of problems.
Fusion is the answer. Maybe not local fusion; maybe we'll never be able to do small scale fusion.
I agree that fusion is the answer, and I agree that it's a technological problem. I disagree that capitalism is very good at solving these kinds of problems. I do not see energy companies rushing to invest large amounts of money in fusion research, because they do not foresee immediate personal benefits from doing so. Instead, most of our best fusion research so far has been funded by governments. This is socialistic, not capitalistic, and it will have to continue for a while if we are to succeed in a reasonable time frame.
The benefits of capitalism in this area will likely only kick in once fusion technology is established, and companies foresee potential profit within a reasonable time frame, and begin establishing plants. But even then, initial plants will probably be a bit expensive to build, as new technology usually is, so this will probably require government grants and incentives, again more socialistic and less capitalistic, in order to prod investment in this area. Then capitalism can take over and begin to provide us with cheap and sustained fusion.
If we instead left the development of fusion exclusively to the market, fusion would take a prohibitively long time due to the initial expense of overcoming the technological hurdles. It is better for the economy as a whole for us to fund the research with a centralized effort.
there is no connection between fact-checking and plagarism
;)
Sure there is. If they plagiarized more, maybe they'd get fewer things wrong.
I still don't get it.
The FBI can find out where I live without Amazon or Google.
Yeah, but the FBI isn't supposed to know that you bought a book called "Why Bush is a Tyrant." The point being, it becomes quite dangerous if the government is allowed to keep tabs on what you read, because the political freedom which comes from freedom of speech requires that ideas can be exchanged and learned without fear of consequences.
Not to mention, the incoming link count is significantly low. Google bases its valuation of sites on the incoming links, and that site has none. The grandparent poster needs to either spend money on advertising, or get more people to link to the site.
If there was demand for programmers of the caliber you mention and companies willing to pay salaries deserving of such abilities there would be more people studying towards such a position.
But if companies are going to just throw up their hands and say "we can't hire competent people, there aren't enough of them in the world, they only doom themselves to a continued shortfall in talent, and an increase in buggy software.
Part of the problem is simply that the higher you draw the threshold, you start to get into areas of natural talent which seem to be more difficult to train. But an even bigger problem is the problem of identifying the people with the highest skills. When you're staring there looking at a resume, the best and brightest with the skills to write the most reliable code don't have resumes that look much different from everyone else's resume. Usually programmers can spot which other programmers have abnormally high skill in this area after working with them, so you can find these people by word of mouth, but this doesn't get automatically translated into resume content which can allow you to pick the correct employee out of the crowd.
My best advice to anyone reading is, if you think you can code like this, and you want to seek out a high salary job based on your unique skill, then you can try proving your skill by releasing open source code which demonstrates this fact. This could give you a boost, but not always one comprehended by the people responsible for hiring at all locations.
Your color coding system is interesting. A similar proposal which would be interesting would be to have the system keep track of who contributed each portion of text, and for every edit made, the one editing would have to choose whether they are enhancing, modifying, or contradicting previous content. Then this could be used to produce rough automated scorings of which editors produce content which can be convergently built upon, and which editors produce content which is controversial and inflamatory (any such system would make eroneous attributions sometimes, but in the longterm should average out to a reasonably accurate attributions). This could also be used to give an automatic rating label for whether articles are stable and convergent or controversial and divergent.
This would essentially function like mod-points for a wiki.
edit:
Some have said that wikipedia's strength is in the fact that it's editable by pirates, but critics claim that ninjas only edit at the discretion of pirates.
(Why do all Wikipedia articles degenerate into this format?)
Not everybody gets to choose what goes into the Linux kernel - Linus has final say in that - but I don't see anybody calling Linux "sort of free".
You just gave me a shudder as I imagined a wikilinux kernel...
It may not be prime, but it's possible. Aren't all numbers "possible" prime numbers?
:)
Not the ones ending in 4...
How's this to boggle your mind. This morning I remembered this conversation and checked the wikipedia aspartame pagerank in google, and it had a pagerank of 6 (which is fairly high). This evening, the wikipedia aspartame pagerank went from 6 to 0 and the page dropped out of the aspartame search list completely. Something really anomalous is going on there, and I wish I understood it...
In which case Wikipedia should do much better than Britannica. After all, there are many obscure topics for which Wikipedia has an articles and Britannica doesn't. Any hard copy encyclopedia is going to get trounced by Wikipedia for articles on popular culture and recent events, for instance.
That's because, for all that people go around calling Wikipedia an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. It's an information index. If you want to evaluate Wikipedia on popular culture or current events, the proper comparison is Google, rather than Britannica. Do a Google search, examine the top few entries, and see if you can obtain valuable information faster and more efficiently in Google, or by following links in Wikipedia. There are some entries where Google wins this comparison, and some where Wikipedia wins. There are also some places where Wikipedia is more accurate in such a comparison, and some places where Google is more accurate.
An attempt at a rigorous comparison might be intriguing.
The implicit moral argument here is: If you could ask the mice for consent, and they had accurate knowledge of the options, they would choose to live in the lab rather than in the wild.
But is that a relevant moral argument if the "if" portion is impossible? The fact is, mice can't make a choice using a human scale of knowledge and awareness because they cannot have it. The argument first anthropomorphizes the mouse, then tries to speculate what it would choose if it were a human rather than a mouse. But if it were a human, we all agree we wouldn't put it in that situation in the first place, so the whole argument falls apart.
There's a moral argument to be made, perhaps, but I don't think that one works very well.
Bush was only listening to the one on the right side anyway.
Gnome developers often take a step back and redo stuff the right way, not just the way people got used to.
I've used Gnome for a long time, but one person's "the right way" is another persons's "hey, I just had a new idea". After a while, that continual reinvention from scratch prevents things from evolving into anything resembling an advanced state. I get this constant feel with Gnome like it's "almost finished" for the last three or four years. Perhaps it just has a few too many chefs with a few too many novel ideas, and not enough guiding visionaries pushing it toward an organized cohesion.
I don't think many people here trust it, at least not under anything resembling current models. The major problem is that trust is so prevalent elsewhere. While vast majorities of computing experts are shouting about how dangerous electronic voting is in its current form, the general public is either unaware of the problem, or attributes the shouting to lunatic conspiracy theorists.
I personally think you have to approach conspiracies with a supply/demand approach. When there's a demand for a conspiracy, and a means of supplying one, then inevitably someone will produce one. The rewards are so great for having a voting conspiracy that we can't do much about the demand side. So what we have to do is make sure no mechanism exists for supplying a voting conspiracy. So long as their exists such a mechanism, people will try to use it.
One of the biggest problems is that aspartame is trashed so frequently on the internet... posting an anecdotal report about how your "near photographic memory" is now gone simply makes you look like a quack.
Funny. Another problem on the internet is people calling someone else a "quack" after doing little more than a summary perusal of the literature themselves.
Many of the studies referenced in the document you provided are severely lacking in experimental design. For example, while headaches from aspartame frequently come the day after consumption, a study was presented in which aspartame and placebo are switched every 24 hours, and then the placebo was shown to cause more headaches. This was provided as the sole and primary source of evidence that aspartame does not cause more headaches than a placebo, yet it did not actually test what is commonly experienced.
As in the example of the Merck research, and in the case of some aspartame research, there is a significant problem with research being funded and directed by the food and drug companies that stand to profit from the results of the research. We are experiencing a significant problem with the quality of research performed in this way, and a change is required.
It is known that aspartame's primary ingredient, phenylalanine, crosses the blood brain barrier and significantly disrupts normal neural function. This effect can be directly measured. For a slightly more extended summary perusal of the literature, you can start here or here.
You'll find that studies exist which indicate significant caution about aspartame is warranted, with results such as seisures and headaches.
If you pay attention, you'll also find that many of the other "studies" in the literature are far from impartial. For example, here's a nice flowery "scientific review" of the safety of aspartame, except that if you check the author affiliations, you'll find that they work for NutraSweet. Oh, and if you're paying a lot of attention, you'll even notice that S.S. Schiffman, the author of the study I was complaining about above that was used by the EU to "show" that aspartame doesn't cause headaches, is on that list of the authors working for NutraSweet.
Please question your sources of information a little more carefully before you go throwing around the "quack" label next time.
I seriously don't believe that Monsanto/Searle thought there was anything wrong with aspartame (unlike Merck, apparently.) They just believed that they knew better than anyone else, and getting this on the market was more important than listening to nervous people, (who might very well be right, as it turns out.)
A conspiracy to intentionally be irresponsible with people's health and lives is still a conspiracy.
It appears you are trying to fudge the results of your study. Would you like assistance from a Microsoft-certified professional?
When they realized how big this thing is going to be, it was too late.
The problem isn't the $100 laptop. Most people in the developed world don't need a laptop archaic enough to cost 1/3rd of their TV. The problem is that if there exists a functional $100 laptop, then that means there can exist a viable market for the mid-range of $250 to $400 laptops, and this is what frightens hardware manufacturers. The lower laptop costs go, the less money there is to divide up among each hardware component.
It's almost inevitable that the laptop industry would follow the progression of the desktop industry toward a market dominated by cheap, but fully functional, products. But just because it's inevitable, that doesn't mean they have to like it...
It's not particularly obvious, but * * Beatles Beatles keeps submitting (legitimate) stories where his username links to random websites that apparently have nothing to do with him or the story.
If guests can go on a talk show, and at the end of the segment announce the book they just released, then what's the harm in someone submitting an article and linking their url back to their web page? As long as the article is a quality submission this doesn't seem to be much different from normal practice in other domains.
No one ever disputed that wiki is good for something. The question is, what things are they good for.
My personal feeling is that wikipedia's most important role is as a starting point for research, rather than as an ending point. It doesn't always tell you fact, but it does index majority viewpoints very efficiently. On many topics, wikipedia can make a more useful starting point than google. This is why it's essential for wikipedia articles to contain extensive citations, since the goal should be to be able to use wikipedia as a routing point to find authoritative information, rather than as a primary source of authoritative information.
The problem then is not the system of wikipedia, but simply the mindset people have in interpreting it. People want wikipedia to be accurate and factual, when by its very nature, it will only be as accurate as the majority opinions of active editors.
So we should build really heavy sky-scraper vehicles, and drive them all around the major fault lines to regularly massage the Earth? :)
That's probably the single most important time-saving suggestion. Essentially every program you use regularly should be a keyboard shortcut. Set up one for web browsers, terminals, calculators, email, basically every command you use on a daily or weekly basis. The overhead of remembering a few shortcuts will pay you back many times over when they become habit.
Also, use keyboard shortcuts for closing windows, and for tabbing between multiple windows. The best way to help this, is to keep the number of windows on one desktop screenspace under control. So use multiple desktops and use a command like alt-F1 through alt-Fwhatever to switch between them. Also, establish habits like using one desktop for certain categories of use. One desktop space can be for instant messaging and email, one for web browsing, one for programming, etc. This will enable you to switch from one task to another with relative ease.
When you are doing something like looking up functions or command references on one desktop space, programming on a second desktop space, and testing on a third, then good organization like this can greatly improve your efficiency.
I still think we ought to focus on Solar power in particular for third world nations. Solar is the real solution to the future energy production issues. I've found quotes for Solar power setups (including batteries for storage) for "large" houses that cost about $25,000. ... This is why it's popoular in places like Africa
Many of the countries in Africa have a GDP per capita of around $1600 or so. If you consider how much of their GDP per capita that $25,000 amounts to, it's the equivalent of a typical American spending around $625,000 on solar power.
That certainly doesn't sound like a viable solution.