That fear only exists in countries that still function primarily on private, for-profit, deregulated health insurance companies out to screw you out of money, though. And the number of countries like that is dwindling fast.
Consider France. As far as I understand (correct me if I'm wrong), people who have chronic illnesses and/or more debilitating diseases actually pay LESS (or nothing at all) for their health care expenses. This health care system is consistently rated the best in the entire world by the WHO, and has more or less been running phenomenally for more than half a century.
You realize that they need to raise taxes to support all of the social programs that help millions of Americans every day, particularly welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, public schools, food stamps, police, fire departments, public transportation, water departments, libraries, and broadcasting.
You can't seriously expect the government to help you out without the money they need to do it. You also cannot hope that private industry would handle any of these services better than the government; they are all about price-fixing and maximizing profits while minimizing their own risk. In other words, they're out to get their hands in your pockets and make like bandits.
Letting the government run your life is not a democracy its a monarch a socialist counrtry a dictatorship but it is not a free one with people taking responsibilities onto themselves.
Do you even understand the differences between socialism and dictatorship? I ask because they are on complete opposite ends of the political spectrum, and you can't accuse a government of being both. It's not possible to be both.
Okay, now we're getting somewhere; for the most part, I have to agree with you, I simply have a few points of contention:
I suspect that if this were true, then the divorce rate would not be so high, but then, actors have not been the best role models for this one. I also draw a distinction between superficial acquaintences who talk about the weather and pop culture versus real friends who share everything and are deeply involved in each other's lives. The asymmetric relationship between the fan and the entertainer is a terrible model for the latter type.
I don't really believe there are a terribly large number of people that try to reconcile the two different relationships; indeed, I believe we are all either naturally or artificially equipped with the mechanisms we need to distinguish the two and be perfectly functional people. In fact, it seems to me that, in a way, these asymmetric relationships they form with celebrities are a way in which they enjoy learning; the tendency seems to be treating celebrities less as people and more as a subject that's continually evolving, one that their friends also find interesting.
It's funny that so many people don't seem to recognize a connection between an educational system based on rote memorization instead of curiosity and discovery, and a general population that is turned off to learning and often views it as a terrible burden (have you ever worked a tech support line?). To quote Samuel Clemens, I believe that the Slashdot crowd never allowed their schooling to interfere with their education. For that reason, they have a natural appreciation of knowledge and discovery. I believe that all people are born with this (just consider how many "why" questions small children constantly ask about the world) but often lose by the time they go through the meat-grinder known as public schooling.
So I agree with you that most people undervalue learning and education. I just see that as a product of artificial conditioning and do not view it as the way human beings inherently are. That means it is not set in stone, that people who are this way are not doomed to remain this way for their entire lives. It means it's a matter of what we value, which is something that can change, especially if enough concerned people are willing to speak about it. To think otherwise would be a defeatist attitude.
Oh, believe me, I understand this all too well. I think most of us can even see it in ourselves (I highly doubt there is a single person here who can claim they have not grown to be slightly less inquisitive than they were as a child), and it's an incredibly distressing subject. That being said, there are already a ton of people that have been turned off to learning, and we can't really fault them for it, nor can we fault anything that panders to them; indeed, it seems that it only resonates with the people who are already part of its culture and does not seem to actively draw people in. It will likely die off (or, more likely, simply scale down) if/when public schooling becomes better, but I feel it's more of a symptom than a problem. I don't feel like it's an offensive symptom, either, just an unfortunate one.
I'll say it this way. If most human beings had deep and abiding meaning and purpose in their lives, we would find ourselves in a much better world. Much of the celebrity-worship, consumerism, and politics of control are actually substitutes for a truly fulfilling existence. So are these roller-coaster personal relationships where people say they love each other, yet act in an adversarial, manipulative manner towards the other person. So is the belief that climbing the corporate ladder in order to make more money is the only worthy use of your time, that the years devoted to your formal education served no purpose other than to obtain for you a position in a hierarchy.
I agree with you wholeheartedly here, but I also feel like it's a subject that's fairly hard to
I was clearly trolling with a topical claim, but, since you want a serious discussion (or, appear to), let's have one:
I feel like you are underestimating the role of entertainers in our culture; certainly we live in a world where their importance has been inflated beyond belief, but the claim that news related to them is irrelevant and wasteful is flat-out wrong; the people who spend time watching it and absorbing it are not asocial and do not form asymmetric relationships, as you seem to be predicting, but rather use that knowledge they gather to foster their relationships with other people. Knowledge of popular culture actually helps people socialize and form relationships with other people.
Furthermore, you claim that they should be using their time to educate themselves, find meaningful relationships with other people (as I said earlier, pop culture news helps level the playing field here, making it easier to connect with new people, which is where any meaningful relationship has to start), and find real purpose and meaning in their life.
While I can't argue that their time would not be better spent educating themselves, I do posit that our own view of how valuable education is comes at least partially from the culture most Slashdot users come from; we are a community mostly consisting of people that actually like to learn things, which is a trait that doesn't appear in everybody. To the people it doesn't appear in, educating themselves is not going to make their life better, it's more or less going to be worthless.
On top of that, you claim that they should be using their time to find real meaning and purpose in their life; you seem to be assuming that there needs to be more to life than maintaining a healthy and successful social life while being a (generally) productive member of society (or at least being one of the gears that keeps the machine turning). If I'm wrong in this assumption, please call me out on this; I mostly want to clarify this point.
I've always felt that games need to adapt more realistic AI that adapts to the players actions as they go on. I fully understand that what I'm about to describe is an incredibly complicated system that would be pretty difficult to implement, but it does seem like a good guide to go by.
Say I'm playing Splinter Cell. I've been going pretty stealthy throughout this mission, and the guards should be getting more and more wary of this, paying more attention to air vents, shadowy areas, et cetera. Because of this, they're leaving the more bombastic pathways a little bit less guarded, meaning I could tear in through the front door, guns blazing, taking them completely by surprise. Or, if I have a history of disabling people in a particular way, the guards could start protecting themselves from those particular attacks.
Maybe I'm just crazy, but I think this seems entirely reasonable!
Who wants to dig up his cables and cut them next time we think he breaks the law he wants in place? I'd be up for it, if I lived in France, and I think it would be a pretty great message.
I believe most high schools teach 1984 in their normal curriculum already, so I don't think it's necessary to put it in this class. It should certainly be mentioned, but I believe Brave New World is probably more appropriate for this class (and, as far as I know, isn't as often taught as 1984 is).
Also please please please don't ruin Sci-Fi for these kids. Your choices very much so need to allow them to reflect upon the parallels between the worlds of these novels and our own, and traditional high school English courses tend to utterly fail at doing this. Please work as hard as you can to make this one different.
You're misunderstanding what Tim Anderson wrote. He said that it was hard to get past all of the marketing blather, which is an entirely different thing. He's saying that it's hard to find information in the sea of advertising-speak that Microsoft's website heaps upon you (as opposed to plain, useful information), not that it is hard to navigate because they advertise.
I'm sorry, but no amount of training is going to make you better able to find information when it is presented to you as tiny text in a sea of tiny text than when it is presented to you plain and simple, and neither is said training going to be able to allow you to navigate Microsoft's website.
Even if you're googling to get to the information, you're still going to have to deal with the crappy presentation of information eventually.
Seriously, how do you collect rent from somebody using a cyber-exoskeleton strength-enhancing crazy suit? I, for one, would just beat the snot out of the people trying to reclaim it!
For instance, what did the targets look like? What did the people look like? How bizarre was the juxtaposition of the targets in an environment where, presumably, people would be more natural? If, all other things being considered equal, the people look more natural in the environment than the targets look, basic logic can be used to postulate that people will focus on the targets that look out of place instead of the billboard ads, whereas they would notice the ads if everything else looked natural.
I suspect this to be a consequence of Google's PageRank algorithm itself, though. Or, at least, part of it. The part that makes links from high PageRank sites bump up your own PageRank, specifically. You can't expect to demand Google (a site with high PageRank) to not link to your content and expect your PageRank to stay the same.
What they want is for Google to boost their PageRank to where it would be with the Google linklove, without wanting Google's linklove. Which seems like a perfectly unreasonable demand to me.
Find the venture capital required to provide an infrastructure to compete with Comcast/AT&T/whoever and have fun competing. You're looking at a whole crapload of money, and if you think you can get ahead in the cable/fiber game simply by telling people that your company is nicer than the other companies, you are sorely mistaken.
That was a rough calculation based off the money deposited in my bank account last friday based off my hourly pay rate times the amount of hours I worked.
My taxes are only about 16%, and I work/live in Chicago. So I guess there are some places where it can be found, but I don't know how many. It probably also helps that I make very little, though:P
My friends and I have had a long and illustrious history of playing games using peripherals not designed for those games. For instance:
Powerpad NES gaming
Super Smash Brothers Melee Classic Mode (normal difficulty, 3 lives, no continues) with Donkey Kong Jungle Beat Bongos
DDR-pad Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (my friend tells me she beat it on Richter mode on the pad, but I suspect she was lying; nevertheless, I have played it on Richter mode on a DDR-pad and it is AWESOME)
Remember the Taiko Drum Master drum? That was fun, too
Vaus:D
Okay, heck, just about any accessory for the NES was hilarious to use with a game it wasn't made for
I know this is long after discussion has ended, but it seems to me that an acceptable solution then would be to put a torrent file in a RAR archive and combine it with a JPEG.
Of course, at that point it is probably way too much work for the average user.
Speaking personally, I would rather get paid less and be able to retain all of the rights to what I create, but I don't really know if that is much of an option anywhere... It seems to me like many industries (including academic research) are so oversaturated with content producers that, if you want to get your content out to people, you have to play by the rules of the people who can distribute it and pretty much let them take your money.
I mean, there's something to be said for independent production, but it's still a long way away from being a viable option for most people (and, indeed, most industries). Sometimes it seems like the options are:
The creative commons license is a copyright, it's just a different (more permissive) kind of copyright.
The idea of copyright isn't a bad thing, it's just that the execution of it can often (most of the time) benefits people who can legalese their way around the actual creators of content.
In my opinion, there is absolutely no reason that the copyright for something should be held solely by the person(s) who created it; regrettably this is a very hard call to make with music, but with academia it seems a rather clear-cut answer. Even more criminal than journals seizing the copyrights to this work, though, is the university situation. Most universities force researchers to fork over all of the copyright licensing to them on some sort of bizarre idea that "because you used our stuff to do that, it's ours." (this, actually, is part of what intellectual property rights were created to stop; the idea is that other people could make the same thing that you have made but the important part is you did it. The tools are not important, it's the idea that matters)
I suspect the music industry operates on a similar reasoning, but it's also much fuzzier. For instance, if a hip-hop artist lays down a beat and rhymes, but the rest of the music surrounding that is made by an in-house music producer, it's hard to say whose contribution was more important. Would people even listen to the "song" if it didn't have all of the other music? It's a hard question, and that's why I don't even want to try to address it.
So, tl;dr, copyrights should be held by the people who make content, not the distributors of that content.
And I say,
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
That's the way we do things, lad, we're making s*** up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'cause if we find we're in a bind, we just make some s*** up
Slashdot Mirror
Do you not remember how scarce Gmail invites were back when it launched? You picked a poor example.
That fear only exists in countries that still function primarily on private, for-profit, deregulated health insurance companies out to screw you out of money, though. And the number of countries like that is dwindling fast.
Consider France. As far as I understand (correct me if I'm wrong), people who have chronic illnesses and/or more debilitating diseases actually pay LESS (or nothing at all) for their health care expenses. This health care system is consistently rated the best in the entire world by the WHO, and has more or less been running phenomenally for more than half a century.
You realize that they need to raise taxes to support all of the social programs that help millions of Americans every day, particularly welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, public schools, food stamps, police, fire departments, public transportation, water departments, libraries, and broadcasting.
You can't seriously expect the government to help you out without the money they need to do it. You also cannot hope that private industry would handle any of these services better than the government; they are all about price-fixing and maximizing profits while minimizing their own risk. In other words, they're out to get their hands in your pockets and make like bandits.
Letting the government run your life is not a democracy its a monarch a socialist counrtry a dictatorship but it is not a free one with people taking responsibilities onto themselves.
Do you even understand the differences between socialism and dictatorship? I ask because they are on complete opposite ends of the political spectrum, and you can't accuse a government of being both. It's not possible to be both.
One has a better fantasy world than the other, though, and a much less destructive one.
Okay, now we're getting somewhere; for the most part, I have to agree with you, I simply have a few points of contention:
I suspect that if this were true, then the divorce rate would not be so high, but then, actors have not been the best role models for this one. I also draw a distinction between superficial acquaintences who talk about the weather and pop culture versus real friends who share everything and are deeply involved in each other's lives. The asymmetric relationship between the fan and the entertainer is a terrible model for the latter type.
I don't really believe there are a terribly large number of people that try to reconcile the two different relationships; indeed, I believe we are all either naturally or artificially equipped with the mechanisms we need to distinguish the two and be perfectly functional people. In fact, it seems to me that, in a way, these asymmetric relationships they form with celebrities are a way in which they enjoy learning; the tendency seems to be treating celebrities less as people and more as a subject that's continually evolving, one that their friends also find interesting.
It's funny that so many people don't seem to recognize a connection between an educational system based on rote memorization instead of curiosity and discovery, and a general population that is turned off to learning and often views it as a terrible burden (have you ever worked a tech support line?). To quote Samuel Clemens, I believe that the Slashdot crowd never allowed their schooling to interfere with their education. For that reason, they have a natural appreciation of knowledge and discovery. I believe that all people are born with this (just consider how many "why" questions small children constantly ask about the world) but often lose by the time they go through the meat-grinder known as public schooling.
So I agree with you that most people undervalue learning and education. I just see that as a product of artificial conditioning and do not view it as the way human beings inherently are. That means it is not set in stone, that people who are this way are not doomed to remain this way for their entire lives. It means it's a matter of what we value, which is something that can change, especially if enough concerned people are willing to speak about it. To think otherwise would be a defeatist attitude.
Oh, believe me, I understand this all too well. I think most of us can even see it in ourselves (I highly doubt there is a single person here who can claim they have not grown to be slightly less inquisitive than they were as a child), and it's an incredibly distressing subject. That being said, there are already a ton of people that have been turned off to learning, and we can't really fault them for it, nor can we fault anything that panders to them; indeed, it seems that it only resonates with the people who are already part of its culture and does not seem to actively draw people in. It will likely die off (or, more likely, simply scale down) if/when public schooling becomes better, but I feel it's more of a symptom than a problem. I don't feel like it's an offensive symptom, either, just an unfortunate one.
I'll say it this way. If most human beings had deep and abiding meaning and purpose in their lives, we would find ourselves in a much better world. Much of the celebrity-worship, consumerism, and politics of control are actually substitutes for a truly fulfilling existence. So are these roller-coaster personal relationships where people say they love each other, yet act in an adversarial, manipulative manner towards the other person. So is the belief that climbing the corporate ladder in order to make more money is the only worthy use of your time, that the years devoted to your formal education served no purpose other than to obtain for you a position in a hierarchy.
I agree with you wholeheartedly here, but I also feel like it's a subject that's fairly hard to
I was clearly trolling with a topical claim, but, since you want a serious discussion (or, appear to), let's have one:
I feel like you are underestimating the role of entertainers in our culture; certainly we live in a world where their importance has been inflated beyond belief, but the claim that news related to them is irrelevant and wasteful is flat-out wrong; the people who spend time watching it and absorbing it are not asocial and do not form asymmetric relationships, as you seem to be predicting, but rather use that knowledge they gather to foster their relationships with other people. Knowledge of popular culture actually helps people socialize and form relationships with other people.
Furthermore, you claim that they should be using their time to educate themselves, find meaningful relationships with other people (as I said earlier, pop culture news helps level the playing field here, making it easier to connect with new people, which is where any meaningful relationship has to start), and find real purpose and meaning in their life.
While I can't argue that their time would not be better spent educating themselves, I do posit that our own view of how valuable education is comes at least partially from the culture most Slashdot users come from; we are a community mostly consisting of people that actually like to learn things, which is a trait that doesn't appear in everybody. To the people it doesn't appear in, educating themselves is not going to make their life better, it's more or less going to be worthless.
On top of that, you claim that they should be using their time to find real meaning and purpose in their life; you seem to be assuming that there needs to be more to life than maintaining a healthy and successful social life while being a (generally) productive member of society (or at least being one of the gears that keeps the machine turning). If I'm wrong in this assumption, please call me out on this; I mostly want to clarify this point.
I've always felt that games need to adapt more realistic AI that adapts to the players actions as they go on. I fully understand that what I'm about to describe is an incredibly complicated system that would be pretty difficult to implement, but it does seem like a good guide to go by.
Say I'm playing Splinter Cell. I've been going pretty stealthy throughout this mission, and the guards should be getting more and more wary of this, paying more attention to air vents, shadowy areas, et cetera. Because of this, they're leaving the more bombastic pathways a little bit less guarded, meaning I could tear in through the front door, guns blazing, taking them completely by surprise. Or, if I have a history of disabling people in a particular way, the guards could start protecting themselves from those particular attacks.
Maybe I'm just crazy, but I think this seems entirely reasonable!
Who wants to dig up his cables and cut them next time we think he breaks the law he wants in place? I'd be up for it, if I lived in France, and I think it would be a pretty great message.
I believe most high schools teach 1984 in their normal curriculum already, so I don't think it's necessary to put it in this class. It should certainly be mentioned, but I believe Brave New World is probably more appropriate for this class (and, as far as I know, isn't as often taught as 1984 is).
Also please please please don't ruin Sci-Fi for these kids. Your choices very much so need to allow them to reflect upon the parallels between the worlds of these novels and our own, and traditional high school English courses tend to utterly fail at doing this. Please work as hard as you can to make this one different.
You're misunderstanding what Tim Anderson wrote. He said that it was hard to get past all of the marketing blather, which is an entirely different thing. He's saying that it's hard to find information in the sea of advertising-speak that Microsoft's website heaps upon you (as opposed to plain, useful information), not that it is hard to navigate because they advertise.
I'm sorry, but no amount of training is going to make you better able to find information when it is presented to you as tiny text in a sea of tiny text than when it is presented to you plain and simple, and neither is said training going to be able to allow you to navigate Microsoft's website.
Even if you're googling to get to the information, you're still going to have to deal with the crappy presentation of information eventually.
Seriously, how do you collect rent from somebody using a cyber-exoskeleton strength-enhancing crazy suit? I, for one, would just beat the snot out of the people trying to reclaim it!
Parents are teachers, too. Perhaps he's talking about people who teach, not people who have teaching as their profession?
For instance, what did the targets look like? What did the people look like? How bizarre was the juxtaposition of the targets in an environment where, presumably, people would be more natural? If, all other things being considered equal, the people look more natural in the environment than the targets look, basic logic can be used to postulate that people will focus on the targets that look out of place instead of the billboard ads, whereas they would notice the ads if everything else looked natural.
I suspect this to be a consequence of Google's PageRank algorithm itself, though. Or, at least, part of it. The part that makes links from high PageRank sites bump up your own PageRank, specifically. You can't expect to demand Google (a site with high PageRank) to not link to your content and expect your PageRank to stay the same.
What they want is for Google to boost their PageRank to where it would be with the Google linklove, without wanting Google's linklove. Which seems like a perfectly unreasonable demand to me.
Find the venture capital required to provide an infrastructure to compete with Comcast/AT&T/whoever and have fun competing. You're looking at a whole crapload of money, and if you think you can get ahead in the cable/fiber game simply by telling people that your company is nicer than the other companies, you are sorely mistaken.
That was a rough calculation based off the money deposited in my bank account last friday based off my hourly pay rate times the amount of hours I worked.
So, yes, all of the taxes combined.
It's not a luxury item if most of the population needs one to function as a productive member of society.
My taxes are only about 16%, and I work/live in Chicago. So I guess there are some places where it can be found, but I don't know how many. It probably also helps that I make very little, though :P
My friends and I have had a long and illustrious history of playing games using peripherals not designed for those games. For instance:
Man, I miss those days.
I know this is long after discussion has ended, but it seems to me that an acceptable solution then would be to put a torrent file in a RAR archive and combine it with a JPEG.
Of course, at that point it is probably way too much work for the average user.
Speaking personally, I would rather get paid less and be able to retain all of the rights to what I create, but I don't really know if that is much of an option anywhere... It seems to me like many industries (including academic research) are so oversaturated with content producers that, if you want to get your content out to people, you have to play by the rules of the people who can distribute it and pretty much let them take your money.
I mean, there's something to be said for independent production, but it's still a long way away from being a viable option for most people (and, indeed, most industries). Sometimes it seems like the options are:
Pick two, because you can't have all three.
The creative commons license is a copyright, it's just a different (more permissive) kind of copyright.
The idea of copyright isn't a bad thing, it's just that the execution of it can often (most of the time) benefits people who can legalese their way around the actual creators of content.
In my opinion, there is absolutely no reason that the copyright for something should be held solely by the person(s) who created it; regrettably this is a very hard call to make with music, but with academia it seems a rather clear-cut answer. Even more criminal than journals seizing the copyrights to this work, though, is the university situation. Most universities force researchers to fork over all of the copyright licensing to them on some sort of bizarre idea that "because you used our stuff to do that, it's ours." (this, actually, is part of what intellectual property rights were created to stop; the idea is that other people could make the same thing that you have made but the important part is you did it. The tools are not important, it's the idea that matters)
I suspect the music industry operates on a similar reasoning, but it's also much fuzzier. For instance, if a hip-hop artist lays down a beat and rhymes, but the rest of the music surrounding that is made by an in-house music producer, it's hard to say whose contribution was more important. Would people even listen to the "song" if it didn't have all of the other music? It's a hard question, and that's why I don't even want to try to address it.
So, tl;dr, copyrights should be held by the people who make content, not the distributors of that content.
And I say,
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
That's the way we do things, lad, we're making s*** up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'cause if we find we're in a bind, we just make some s*** up