While it is a serious issue, I'll give Slashdot readers enough credit to actually read this story based on its importance, rather than an exaggerated, attention-grabbing title.
Men require more calories on a day to day basis, so an all female crew would require less resources than a male crew, but women are also much more social creatures, and being without contact to the wider world, would likely affect them more. (In the wild) It has been seen how males would often lead solitary lives (bull elephants, lions, bears) while a lone female (among mammals) is very rare. Women might find it a lot harder to leave everything behind them and go on a trip like this. And for this reason it would be interesting to see a similar project with women and compare the results
Trust me, you don't want to. If you really insist on it, just read FSTDT, don't try to deal with them in person or they might infect you with Fundy-ism.
It's true that most Christians are ignorant of the Bible and are only token religious. This is (generally) a good thing, because it's the first step for it to be phased out naturally - relegated to the role of a traditional social custom, then gradually be followed less and less. For every reasoning person who rejects religion, there are ten who can't bear to deviate so much from the way they were raised as a child, and who will want the semblance of being religious, if nothing else.
You sound like you'd enjoy living in British Columbia, then. They have referendums on controversial issues far more often than other provinces, basically where the public needs to decide.
I also dislike some of the people in this thread who condemned him for not taking as much care of his family as he could, and put that as the most important thing. Honestly, in the long run, his family just does not matter, because it deals with potential things. His children could have been geniuses if he spent more time with them - and they also might have been idiots. Whereas he was a brilliant man who was right there, right then, and should have written as much as he could (which he did). It also puts all of his humanist outlook on life and interest in politics and international affairs (such as Leopold II's rule of the Congo) to the side, as if it was less important than raising a family.
If everyone was a "family man", we'd never have political activism or great works of art - simply because people sometimes need to put things forward as more important than having, maintaining, and protecting a family. That kind of selflessness is what the rest of society, the "family men" rely on.
Yet they might have been necessary. If you went back in time, would you try to prevent the Industrial Revolution? It revolutionized industry and increased everyone's quality of life by providing cheap, mass-produced goods... yet it set us onto the path that we're on now. Would it be worth the sacrifice?
There's a difference between a "successful person" and someone who's beyond successful, like Mark Twain. To have the writing output he did, you need to devote much more of your time to writing. If your family is hugely dependent on you, then that's a sacrifice someone would have to make.
Ultimately, it's a question of priority. People have to sacrifice their family life and hobbies to concentrate on their great work, which is why so many writers have had terrible lives. It's better that Twain gave us something that will last us through the ages (his words) than to have been another generic family man.
Yet is it your right to restrict this information from them without them having any choice in the matter? You also talk about "distracting content" - when I was in high school, my random browsing taught me far more than any of the teachers did. Downloading games and movies at school gave me things to do that I otherwise could never have afforded to pay for. In fact, most kids will do the same. Just about every tech-literate high school kid now knows about proxies, and won't hesitate to use them. Then the proxies and anonymizers are blocked, and kids find new ones, etc. The only end result is either the schools giving up (which they won't, because the companies that sell web filters want to make money) or the school networks being completely locked down.
You talk about life experience. Seeing these things and doing these things are life experience. If kids are sheltered and protected from it, they only learn about it when they're older and have more room to screw up because of it.
Part of the problem in K-12 seems to be the semester system. If you're unfamiliar with it, the semester system divides up the school year into 2 semesters, with (usually) 4 classes taught each semester, for a total of 8. The result is that classes can now be twice as long. When I was in high school, classes were 70 minutes long, while my father's classes (in the 50s) were 35 minutes long.
In school, he got far more done. Teachers gave less homework and had more concentrated and fast-paced lectures than mine had in high school. Even with a 20- or 30-minute lecture and a few minutes of class discussion, the rest of the time seemed to just be wasted, either with the kids trying to focus on an enormous pile of work or just playing around. They did this more or less because they were given time to settle, rather than going from class to class at faster intervals.
The left constantly aligns itself with terrorists, militants, and dictators.
First of all, I find it ironic that you use this to describe the modern descendants of the peace movement. You're also ignoring the dozens of right-wing dictatorships in the past and future. Groups who want to control a populace find it easier when they can use religion to do it, and to create a closed, conservative society.
If the sales people were annoyed about people returning them, it's their fault for selling Linux netbooks to idiots. It's likely that the sales people didn't know what Linux was themselves, and the guy doing the buying just picked the cheaper one that had the same hardware specs.
The problem with this discussion (in general, not just us two) is that it takes 3-4 separate issues and tries to deal with them simultaneously.
When only a few people were well-educated, people believed that education was all that was necessary for a democratic populace. What they didn't take into account were the people who could be well-educated, but would never apply their learning. Not because there are no applications, but because they simply don't learn well. Most people are fairly stupid, and sending them all to university just means having lots of stupid, well-educated people.
On the other hand, as more and more industries continue to mechanize, we'll need less and less dumb labour, so in the future, just about everyone will need to have a high level of specialized education to do their jobs.
Honestly, the best programs teach something like Scheme, and rely on people to learn the languages themselves. At a trade school you'd just learn languages, but with a real CS program, you learn more important concepts like how to properly structure your code. One teaches people how to be codemonkeys and churn out crappy software, the other people are generally better coders.
That assumes equal quality of schooling, which is ridiculous. Almost no university or college, regardless of program or teaching staff, will have a quality of education as low as that in high schools.
Forgetting job satisfaction for a moment, it's more of a case of how desperate a person would have to be to do phone support. Someone who has so few options is probably not the best or most experienced person to help you.
While we are all technically related, I think what he means is "let me be more closely related to a variety of other people than to this person." It's a technicality, but so was your argument.
Language doesn't matter. I understand your issues, but it's a lack of emotional investment in their job and a lack of knowledge that's worse than language barriers. English or not, someone who is being paid minimum wage to work the telephones won't want to do too much work to help you.
Seems to paint the picture of a very Dickensian universe, the one exception of debtor's prison.
Step 1: Inmates work for free/cheap
Step 2: People with regular jobs lose those jobs
Step 3: People go to debtor's prison, have to work for free/cheap
Step 4: Permanent lower-class
The only exception is that, now, there's even more of a stigma towards people who have spent time in jail, and it's easier for employers to find out.
This is a bad phenomenon that I believe will only get worse. With internet filtering, monitoring of bathroom breaks, and other attempts to spy on and regulate the way people act at work, they're trying to squeeze every bit of productivity out of people for as long as they can while they're at work.
I'm an Arch Linux user, and besides high CPU usage, I don't have any real problems with Flash. No browser crashing, stability problems, etc. On the other hand, I would still prefer to use HTML5 for streaming video, for ideological and other reasons (multiple videos open, or running CPU-intensive applications as well as Flash video tend to really bog things down.)
Slashdot Mirror
While it is a serious issue, I'll give Slashdot readers enough credit to actually read this story based on its importance, rather than an exaggerated, attention-grabbing title.
Men require more calories on a day to day basis, so an all female crew would require less resources than a male crew, but women are also much more social creatures, and being without contact to the wider world, would likely affect them more. (In the wild) It has been seen how males would often lead solitary lives (bull elephants, lions, bears) while a lone female (among mammals) is very rare. Women might find it a lot harder to leave everything behind them and go on a trip like this. And for this reason it would be interesting to see a similar project with women and compare the results
Parent will be modded down in 3... 2... 1...
Or Scroogle, which encrypts search queries.
Trust me, you don't want to. If you really insist on it, just read FSTDT, don't try to deal with them in person or they might infect you with Fundy-ism.
It's true that most Christians are ignorant of the Bible and are only token religious. This is (generally) a good thing, because it's the first step for it to be phased out naturally - relegated to the role of a traditional social custom, then gradually be followed less and less. For every reasoning person who rejects religion, there are ten who can't bear to deviate so much from the way they were raised as a child, and who will want the semblance of being religious, if nothing else.
You sound like you'd enjoy living in British Columbia, then. They have referendums on controversial issues far more often than other provinces, basically where the public needs to decide.
I also dislike some of the people in this thread who condemned him for not taking as much care of his family as he could, and put that as the most important thing. Honestly, in the long run, his family just does not matter, because it deals with potential things. His children could have been geniuses if he spent more time with them - and they also might have been idiots. Whereas he was a brilliant man who was right there, right then, and should have written as much as he could (which he did). It also puts all of his humanist outlook on life and interest in politics and international affairs (such as Leopold II's rule of the Congo) to the side, as if it was less important than raising a family.
If everyone was a "family man", we'd never have political activism or great works of art - simply because people sometimes need to put things forward as more important than having, maintaining, and protecting a family. That kind of selflessness is what the rest of society, the "family men" rely on.
Yet they might have been necessary. If you went back in time, would you try to prevent the Industrial Revolution? It revolutionized industry and increased everyone's quality of life by providing cheap, mass-produced goods... yet it set us onto the path that we're on now. Would it be worth the sacrifice?
There's a difference between a "successful person" and someone who's beyond successful, like Mark Twain. To have the writing output he did, you need to devote much more of your time to writing. If your family is hugely dependent on you, then that's a sacrifice someone would have to make.
Ultimately, it's a question of priority. People have to sacrifice their family life and hobbies to concentrate on their great work, which is why so many writers have had terrible lives. It's better that Twain gave us something that will last us through the ages (his words) than to have been another generic family man.
Yet is it your right to restrict this information from them without them having any choice in the matter? You also talk about "distracting content" - when I was in high school, my random browsing taught me far more than any of the teachers did. Downloading games and movies at school gave me things to do that I otherwise could never have afforded to pay for. In fact, most kids will do the same. Just about every tech-literate high school kid now knows about proxies, and won't hesitate to use them. Then the proxies and anonymizers are blocked, and kids find new ones, etc. The only end result is either the schools giving up (which they won't, because the companies that sell web filters want to make money) or the school networks being completely locked down.
You talk about life experience. Seeing these things and doing these things are life experience. If kids are sheltered and protected from it, they only learn about it when they're older and have more room to screw up because of it.
Part of the problem in K-12 seems to be the semester system. If you're unfamiliar with it, the semester system divides up the school year into 2 semesters, with (usually) 4 classes taught each semester, for a total of 8. The result is that classes can now be twice as long. When I was in high school, classes were 70 minutes long, while my father's classes (in the 50s) were 35 minutes long.
In school, he got far more done. Teachers gave less homework and had more concentrated and fast-paced lectures than mine had in high school. Even with a 20- or 30-minute lecture and a few minutes of class discussion, the rest of the time seemed to just be wasted, either with the kids trying to focus on an enormous pile of work or just playing around. They did this more or less because they were given time to settle, rather than going from class to class at faster intervals.
The left constantly aligns itself with terrorists, militants, and dictators.
First of all, I find it ironic that you use this to describe the modern descendants of the peace movement. You're also ignoring the dozens of right-wing dictatorships in the past and future. Groups who want to control a populace find it easier when they can use religion to do it, and to create a closed, conservative society.
If the sales people were annoyed about people returning them, it's their fault for selling Linux netbooks to idiots. It's likely that the sales people didn't know what Linux was themselves, and the guy doing the buying just picked the cheaper one that had the same hardware specs.
It should imply competence. If someone can get a 4-year degree and not be at least somewhat competent, there are many, many things wrong.
This might actually succeed, given that most of the competition I've seen is either clunky XP or a low-powered version of Win 7.
The problem with this discussion (in general, not just us two) is that it takes 3-4 separate issues and tries to deal with them simultaneously.
When only a few people were well-educated, people believed that education was all that was necessary for a democratic populace. What they didn't take into account were the people who could be well-educated, but would never apply their learning. Not because there are no applications, but because they simply don't learn well. Most people are fairly stupid, and sending them all to university just means having lots of stupid, well-educated people.
On the other hand, as more and more industries continue to mechanize, we'll need less and less dumb labour, so in the future, just about everyone will need to have a high level of specialized education to do their jobs.
Honestly, the best programs teach something like Scheme, and rely on people to learn the languages themselves. At a trade school you'd just learn languages, but with a real CS program, you learn more important concepts like how to properly structure your code. One teaches people how to be codemonkeys and churn out crappy software, the other people are generally better coders.
This to me speaks volumes; the number of intelligent, educated people who are liberal.
That assumes equal quality of schooling, which is ridiculous. Almost no university or college, regardless of program or teaching staff, will have a quality of education as low as that in high schools.
Forgetting job satisfaction for a moment, it's more of a case of how desperate a person would have to be to do phone support. Someone who has so few options is probably not the best or most experienced person to help you.
While we are all technically related, I think what he means is "let me be more closely related to a variety of other people than to this person." It's a technicality, but so was your argument.
Language doesn't matter. I understand your issues, but it's a lack of emotional investment in their job and a lack of knowledge that's worse than language barriers. English or not, someone who is being paid minimum wage to work the telephones won't want to do too much work to help you.
Seems to paint the picture of a very Dickensian universe, the one exception of debtor's prison. Step 1: Inmates work for free/cheap Step 2: People with regular jobs lose those jobs Step 3: People go to debtor's prison, have to work for free/cheap Step 4: Permanent lower-class The only exception is that, now, there's even more of a stigma towards people who have spent time in jail, and it's easier for employers to find out.
This is a bad phenomenon that I believe will only get worse. With internet filtering, monitoring of bathroom breaks, and other attempts to spy on and regulate the way people act at work, they're trying to squeeze every bit of productivity out of people for as long as they can while they're at work.
I'm an Arch Linux user, and besides high CPU usage, I don't have any real problems with Flash. No browser crashing, stability problems, etc. On the other hand, I would still prefer to use HTML5 for streaming video, for ideological and other reasons (multiple videos open, or running CPU-intensive applications as well as Flash video tend to really bog things down.)