My teenage girls have both taken Media Studies in high school, and I now find they're more sophisticated about what they read or see than I am. I'm not sure how young you can teach that sort of thing, though -- there are various mental maturity levels that people go through, and HS media studies probably requires a lot more than you'd expect from an 11-year old like my son. What sort of training in 'questioning information' did you have in mind? and for what age level?
I noticed your comment about car mechanic versus IT worker. We might do well to encourage our kids to head in the 'skilled trades' direction rather than IT. There's a shortage of skilled tradespeople in North America, and they get good salaries. I despair of teaching my kids anything about plumbing or carpentry though -- I'm a definite computing geek. My grandfather could have done it, though.
And no _real_ canadian talks about it being cold until at least (most?) -20 C.
When I was in grad school at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh (where slush falls from the sky, instead of honest snow), there were four of us Canadians in the department. The guy from Vancouver started feeling cold in October. I (from Ottawa) started admitting to being cold in December. And the guy from Calgary was never cold.
That was 3. For 4:
We never saw the guy from Toronto go outdoors.
He's pointing out an intersting quirk of US tax laws that protects a certain kind of non-profit corporation from being taken over by commercial interests. He's suggesting, I think, that "free stuff" - intellectual property like music (his topic) and (presumably) software -- could be owned by such a corporation; it apparently then could never be transferred to/owned by any commercial organization.
I didn't quite follow how that prevents "cease and desist" orders that would insist said corporation stop making such software available, though.
When they boot it up (and some inevitably will) it can send itself to predetermined ftp sites. The origin can be traced but the distributers were just mules in the deal.
I think that relying on a mini-virus may well turn out to be a bad idea; every time someone has proposed a "good" virus idea, someone has eventually shot it down. In any case, legal systems are perfectly happy to prosecute mules, too, leading to a socialization that says "don't ever use an unknown CDrom" -- especially the FTP site mules; they'd be subject to "cease and desist" that prevents them from accepting software for which they can't identify the author.
Wouldn't it be great if you could claim open-source work as a charity/tax deduction?
Yes, but AFAIK tax regulators in both USA and Canada refuse to allow donations of any professional services to be tax deductible.
I suppose they've decided not to trouble themselves over issues of verification. With donation of a physical artifact, I imagine an auditor could ask to see it if there was a lot of doubt.
The article has the issue square to rights by referring to canonical sources - established dictionaries. But dictionaries merely record the dictionary writers' beliefs about current usage. I'm told that North American English-speakers tend to treat dictionaries as Revealed Truth -- while British English-speakers are more likely to treat them as mere suggestions.
Very few attempts to engineer the use of language are successful. Unless you're writing for a popular medium, and get to engineer such usage as you like. Crackers called themselves hackers, and media representatives copied the usage without caring to check that the word was far better established as meaning "enthusiastic and talented programmer".
For what it's worth, I sent the following note to the author of the CBC article:
Your article at http://cbc.ca/news/indepth/words/hack.html expresses the view that the news media are just using the term most understandable to their readers. In my opinion (having been a "hacker" at Carnegie-Mellon in the mid 1970's), the new media are responsible for the misuse of the term because they uncritically accepted the crackers' use of "hacker" in the first place. The claim of the need to keep misusing the word for "clarity" is disingenous, at best, and perhaps even irresponsible.
I am now a Professor of Computer Science, and have never broken into any computer system.
I'd hope that not too many of us bombard his mailbox, but decided I was a special case as a Canadian taxpayer (CBC is partly tax-funded) and in a position of minor authority on the subject.
So I guess I'd rather see all this energy go into coming up with good examples for how to use the existing (robust, working, tried-and-true) tools
Lots of us who write tools do so to solve a specific set of problems we face every day. We know what the issues are that face us, and focus on fixing them. Few of us start by saying "how is the average Joe Programmer going to use this stuff?" Maybe we (the contestants) should have focused more on user-centred design approaches, like O-O use cases or XP stories -- or even Fred Brooks' suggestion of writing the manual first; you get some reasonably friendly descriptions of "how to do X with this tool" up front.
Maybe the SC folks can push user-centred design as a requirement for the deferred category (the one where they realized they needed to rewrite the requirements and run a second contest).
Of course, however, all those tools assume that your approach to documentation is placing specially formatted comments (Javadoc-style or otherwise) above each of your module/type/function definitions... but it surely isn't the only approach.
Knuth's Literate Programming is the complementary approach -- putting the code inside the documentation. There was some clunkiness in the original tools, but that has probably improved by now.
Both approaches are great for encouraging programmers to keep code-level documentation in sync with the code (though, of course, they can't guarantee it). Unfortunately IMHO this undervalues documenting your analysis and design -- you CAN put such documentation in your code, but I'd guess that most people don't.
Comments on the gaming newsgroups (e.g. rec.games.frp.industry) in the past few weeks have claimed that Hasbro, for decades, has had a habit of legal challenges to anyone making anything similar to one of their own properties (which only recently started including computer games and role-playing games). They are very big and have a lot of money with which to pursue such lawsuits. Any prolonged lawsuit can bankrupt a small competitor regardless of its true legal position. It does not matter whether the litigant's claims are legally suspect (e.g. ridiculously overbroad copyright claims) when the little guy has to settle or die financially. A barratry (misue of the courts) countersuit seems to me to be likely to fail, especially in the USA.
If there were, then we would have seen significant advances in AI already (which we haven't). Allen Newell once said that the trouble with advances in AI is that as soon as an AI problem becomes well enough understood, it ceases to be considered AI. Translating "high level programming languages" into machine language used to be considered AI; now it's "just" compiler construction. I've never been a member of the "Artificial Intelligencia", but those of us on the outside need to be fair: "AI" will never be "possible" as long as we keep raising the bar and insisting intelligence is something magical.
Slashdot Mirror
Colbert fans add his name to online polls that have nothing whatsoever to do with him. It would be wonderfully ironic to get a plague named after him.
My teenage girls have both taken Media Studies in high school, and I now find they're more sophisticated about what they read or see than I am. I'm not sure how young you can teach that sort of thing, though -- there are various mental maturity levels that people go through, and HS media studies probably requires a lot more than you'd expect from an 11-year old like my son. What sort of training in 'questioning information' did you have in mind? and for what age level?
I noticed your comment about car mechanic versus IT worker. We might do well to encourage our kids to head in the 'skilled trades' direction rather than IT. There's a shortage of skilled tradespeople in North America, and they get good salaries. I despair of teaching my kids anything about plumbing or carpentry though -- I'm a definite computing geek. My grandfather could have done it, though.
When I was in grad school at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh (where slush falls from the sky, instead of honest snow), there were four of us Canadians in the department. The guy from Vancouver started feeling cold in October. I (from Ottawa) started admitting to being cold in December. And the guy from Calgary was never cold.
That was 3. For 4: We never saw the guy from Toronto go outdoors.
last I heard somebody even spotted a human in canada.
No, that was either a sasquatch or a grizzly on hind legs. Everybody knows Canada is uninhabitable by humans.
And here I was trying to figure out whether I was a lichen or an alga. I imagine they must have meant the high arctic.
He's pointing out an intersting quirk of US tax laws that protects a certain kind of non-profit corporation from being taken over by commercial interests. He's suggesting, I think, that "free stuff" - intellectual property like music (his topic) and (presumably) software -- could be owned by such a corporation; it apparently then could never be transferred to/owned by any commercial organization.
I didn't quite follow how that prevents "cease and desist" orders that would insist said corporation stop making such software available, though.
I think that relying on a mini-virus may well turn out to be a bad idea; every time someone has proposed a "good" virus idea, someone has eventually shot it down. In any case, legal systems are perfectly happy to prosecute mules, too, leading to a socialization that says "don't ever use an unknown CDrom" -- especially the FTP site mules; they'd be subject to "cease and desist" that prevents them from accepting software for which they can't identify the author.
Yes, but AFAIK tax regulators in both USA and Canada refuse to allow donations of any professional services to be tax deductible. I suppose they've decided not to trouble themselves over issues of verification. With donation of a physical artifact, I imagine an auditor could ask to see it if there was a lot of doubt.
But dictionaries merely record the dictionary writers' beliefs about current usage. I'm told that North American English-speakers tend to treat dictionaries as Revealed Truth -- while British English-speakers are more likely to treat them as mere suggestions.
Very few attempts to engineer the use of language are successful.
Unless you're writing for a popular medium, and get to engineer such usage as you like. Crackers called themselves hackers, and media representatives copied the usage without caring to check that the word was far better established as meaning "enthusiastic and talented programmer".
Lots of us who write tools do so to solve a specific set of problems we face every day. We know what the issues are that face us, and focus on fixing them. Few of us start by saying "how is the average Joe Programmer going to use this stuff?" Maybe we (the contestants) should have focused more on user-centred design approaches, like O-O use cases or XP stories -- or even Fred Brooks' suggestion of writing the manual first; you get some reasonably friendly descriptions of "how to do X with this tool" up front.
Maybe the SC folks can push user-centred design as a requirement for the deferred category (the one where they realized they needed to rewrite the requirements and run a second contest).
Knuth's Literate Programming is the complementary approach -- putting the code inside the documentation. There was some clunkiness in the original tools, but that has probably improved by now.
Both approaches are great for encouraging programmers to keep code-level documentation in sync with the code (though, of course, they can't guarantee it). Unfortunately IMHO this undervalues documenting your analysis and design -- you CAN put such documentation in your code, but I'd guess that most people don't.
Comments on the gaming newsgroups (e.g. rec.games.frp.industry) in the past few weeks have claimed that Hasbro, for decades, has had a habit of legal challenges to anyone making anything similar to one of their own properties (which only recently started including computer games and role-playing games). They are very big and have a lot of money with which to pursue such lawsuits. Any prolonged lawsuit can bankrupt a small competitor regardless of its true legal position. It does not matter whether the litigant's claims are legally suspect (e.g. ridiculously overbroad copyright claims) when the little guy has to settle or die financially. A barratry (misue of the courts) countersuit seems to me to be likely to fail, especially in the USA.
If there were, then we would have seen significant advances in AI already (which we haven't).
Allen Newell once said that the trouble with advances in AI is that as soon as an AI problem becomes well enough understood, it ceases to be considered AI. Translating "high level programming languages" into machine language used to be considered AI; now it's "just" compiler construction. I've never been a member of the "Artificial Intelligencia", but those of us on the outside need to be fair: "AI" will never be "possible" as long as we keep raising the bar and insisting intelligence is something magical.