You're completely right, however, to address these issues is EXPENSIVE. It requires hiring a lot of very skilled workers, who demand high salaries and it requires a lot of time. For a corporation, it is more economical to simply restrict traffic in ways which reduce strain on their network, rather than improving their network.
I don't even mean this in a bitter way. They're behaving as responsible corporations by delivering the highest profits possible to their investors.It's just that this doesn't always overlap with providing the best goods and services to the customers.
Not all of us knew what we wanted to do in middle school.
I thought through middle school and high school that I wanted to be a professional musician, but after one year of that in college I decided to study chemistry, which I wouldn't have known I liked had I not been forced to take it in high school, nor would I be able to study it had I not been forced to go through trigonometry and advanced algebra.
tl;dr You're required to study different subjects in school because there can only be so many firemen and veterinarians in the world.
I love that this comment implies that the/. user base would not only like scientific research to favor the production of trivial amusement devices rather than preventing massive death tolls from illnesses, but would prefer that those amusement devices be almost suicidal to use.
So, you're saying that if we insert money at the top, it benefits the guys at the bottom because high level executives and such create lots of jobs directly from their personal income?
Well, no, the idea is that the wealthy have a higher tendency to invest their money in stocks and startups than those with lower incomes, who, as you said, will most likely spend it immediately. It's related to the idea that part of the reason the wealthy tend to stay wealthy is because they tend to invest and make their money grow instead of putting their money into banks and having it more or less stay the same when adjusted for inflation.
So essentially, the idea is more that the wealthy will use extra personal money to allow new or existing businesses to expand, creating more jobs. It's not completely stupid, but I agree that it doesn't work, if only because the wealthy currently comprise far too small a percentage of the population for the, admittedly disproportionately large, gains from their investments to overcome the stimulating effect of giving 98+% of earners a tax break which they will likely spend on goods or services.
It is probably a bit harder to frame for distrbution, but I wouldn't say too hard. Just upload a torrent of a file (or even download it from one) and you've distributed it.
Also, I think you're overreaching a bit saying that possession should NEVER be illegal. I can definitely agree that possession of information shouldn't be, because in the digital age it's far too easy for anyone to plant files on a computer, but for things like explosives possession laws serve a real purpose. If someone illegally has enough dynamite to blow up New York City, and there is some evidence to give reasonable certainty that they intend to do exactly that, it may not be possible to convict them of conspiracy or whatever, but police would at least have the power to confiscate all of the explosives. I'm not saying they should be allowed to imprison anyone for simple possession, but if possession of everything and anything were totally legal it would kind of render police impotent.
Governments are only going to get so much mileage out of crying wolf by invoking "Because...well...BECAUSE...CHILD PORNOGRAPHY".
If they keep this up, it's going to dilute honest, real efforts to fight child pornography because people will be conditioned to equate "child pornography" with "government power grab".
I really wish I could share your optimism, but I seriously doubt that will happen.
Even if they do run out of the ability to initiate it at the legislative level, there's always the option to astroturf a community of "concerned parents who really'd like it if you'd think about the children and consider signing this petition to make the internet "safe again" by making sure that anyone who traipses onto any site deemed inappropriate, by any means, will be shot." And it'll work, because child porn really is one of those things that pretty much everyone can agree is a bad thing that we'd like to not exist anymore, and it's easy to rally people for it.
They didn't actually show Muhammed in Cartoon Wars. They just made reference to him, which is why there was no controversy over it. They only ever showed him in a season five episode called "Super Best Friends" in which he was a member of the titular group. Which was long before this was really an issue.
Of course, that fact suggests that extremists aren't actually offended by his depiction, because they sure as hell weren't seven years ago, but rather that they're just looking for any excuse to justify their anger. Which I guess isn't really that surprising.
I don't think they're really being that marginalized. The Constellation program (which I assuming is the source of most of the marginalization talk) wasn't making effective use of money and wasn't delivering much. But with no plans to replace it (at least that I've heard of) manned space travel definitely seems to be being put on the back burner.
Beyond that though, holding competitions like this is a great use of their budget. The rewards they give are relatively small compared to what it would take to develop the technology in house, and it gets companies that are flirting with the idea of developing space-related tech to produce when they might otherwise not, because the monetary reward lowers the financial risk of developing it.
I don't think that this will die for security concerns, though it does have tremendous potential to cause them. I think this will die because it's unnecessary, impractical, and redundant. Because this requires gestures much larger than would be required with a mouse or traditional touchscreen; and it doesn't really provide much in the way of increased functionality for the cost of the experimental technology. Lastly, it's because we can already make webcams small enough to fit right above laptop LCD screens which could realistically be used in the same way for a lot less money. Think of it like Sony's Eyetoy, both in how it will be innovative and how it will completely flop.
The data is very interesting, but I wouldn't take from this that we should teach the math later, but rather that we should just teach it differently.
TFA says that the kids have a hard time applying the skills learned in elementary school math to real-life situations, which makes sense. Math is abstract and the ability to apply abstract concepts to real life situations is a learned one; which is something a lot of people have a hard time with through adulthood. However, I also know that the algebra taught to me in high school and that some of my friends didn't learn until college is middle school equivalent curriculum in most other first world countries (I'm from the U.S.). These other countries seem to be doing just fine teaching more advanced math earlier on, which suggests to me that we're probably doing it wrong rather than too early.
Because many bad parents would rather have a scapegoat to blame all of their troubles on than hear that they should have been parenting while little Billy was searching for filthy porn online.
Seriously, it may not be easy to raise kids, but don't blame the medium whenever your kid uses it to find questionable material. I like that the article mentioned an education program, which would probably be more effective and less costly than a massive filter anyway. It's just too bad that the knee-jerk reaction is always to censor.
Here in Canada
Though this reminds me, aren't we supposed to be blaming Canada?
I fail to see how the fact that NASA will get the funding anyway makes this not hypocritical. The project in question has had a lot of money spent on it and hasn't really worked very well in the past few years. I think the comment about the tea parties from the parent came from them being mostly Republicans, which you're correct in saying that it doesn't necessarily make them agree with the Tea Party protesters. However, this does mean that five out of seven of their congressmen are from a party which ran mostly on the promise of reduced spending and belt-tightening in the last couple election cycles. This does raise some questions as to why it is they can do this and not have their fellow party members claim that they're socialists or spend-thrifts.
This also comes at the same time that one of Alabama's senators is holding up all confirmations of administration officials in order to block spending cuts in the state. Which seems to color these actions, perhaps incorrectly, as being intended to save their pork.
You think that kids are only called nerds or geeks in the U.S.? This is a global phenomenon, yet it doesn't stop everyone else from making progress. Hell, even in the rest of the Anglophone world there's Tall Poppy Syndrome, which isn't entirely unrelated to American anti-intellectualism.
It could definitely be argued that the politicization of anti-intellectualism is what really is driving downward, but it's a fairly complex issue. Education certainly has a hand in this. We've been falling massively behind in our science EDUCATION for a while now. I would say that we should try to increase the exposure of students to the sciences from a primary level, and then keep using more flashy or exciting demonstrations in the classroom. I mean, hey, it might be shameless, but I'd also be lying if I claimed that the fact that I like explosions didn't factor at all into my pursuit of Chemistry early on.
Now of course that doesn't solve everything, and I think anti-intellectualism plays a part in all of this, but it's certainly not everything.
Also, I have to make the obligatory comment that if you think evolution is about the survival of the "best" or "smartest" then you clearly learned about it in an American school.
To be fair, those are most likely due to copyright and license concerns, and not censorship, so it's not really the same.
Still, I don't think this is terribly surprising and I fail to see why people are shocked. China is a HUGE market, especially in technology. Any profit seeking entity has a lot to gain there, and would be extremely irresponsible to their shareholders if they weren't to do whatever they had to to get into the market.
I don't mean to say I approve of censorship, I'm just saying that it isn't surprising.
Exactly right, that's why when I accidentally grazed the stove top with my hand, I learned that next time I should slam my face on it repeatedly.
I think that the advertisers that are dumb enough to continue or increase business practices that led to the creation of adblockers in the first place will die out like the dodo and the ones that adapt successfully to the changing paradigm will thrive. Though the scenario you mentioned with integration of content with advertising on the internet seems almost inevitable, as it occurs in just about every other medium, the more obtrusive ones will turn off consumers just like egregious product placement does.
RTFA indeed, if you read as far as the third paragraph you'd know that it was also proven on mice, dogs, and baboons. That makes this pretty likely to apply to humans as well.
Though I'm confused as to why the summary says that tryptophan also has this property, as the article doesn't even use the word. I couldn't find the original Nature article, but the linked one certainly said nothing about it.
And the public defender encouraging him to plead guilty? That lawyer should be fired for incompetance. How can someone be guilty of a crime they never had any intention of committing, and took active steps to actually avoid committing it?
Well, there's a concept called mens rea in the U.S. legal system (and appears in some form in many others) that states that this shouldn't be allowed to happen specifically because he had no intention of committing the crime. The actus reus (actual guilt of the crime accused)in most cases needs to be paired with the fact that they willfully and knowingly committed the crime. Barring negligence or recklessness most crimes in the U.S. do have some requirement of mens rea. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea for more details.
So, not being a lawyer, I too think there would be a pretty decent case for the kid if they took it to court. Of course, not being a lawyer, I have a pretty damned limited understanding of this stuff. Though I'd really like to see the EFF take a stance on this.
I wouldn't say that Americans are particularly bad about anti-intellectualism. There is certainly some level of that present in our society, but I think that the same sensitivity to "elitism" can be found to varying degrees in any society.
This really struck me during the presidential campaign in 2008 where elitism was made an issue. To say nothing of the political games involved, I think this worked primarily because no one likes to look or feel stupid, or hell, even inferior in any way to anyone else.
Science can easily be perceived as threatening intellectually by those not well versed in it. It has come a long way in the last century or so and it is almost impossible to get a good grasp of any discipline in a short period of time. Because of this attainability of the knowledge for many, it is threatening and often ignored. I remember seeing many creationist videos using this for a political advantage. It is easy to demonize that which isn't understood.
I just think we in the US get a little more militant about superiority issues because of a fairly aggressive attitude towards success. As mentioned by mpapet, we are a pretty individualistic society, and as such we might fear what could be threatening to our individual success, like the intellectual superiority of another.
Slashdot Mirror
You're completely right, however, to address these issues is EXPENSIVE. It requires hiring a lot of very skilled workers, who demand high salaries and it requires a lot of time. For a corporation, it is more economical to simply restrict traffic in ways which reduce strain on their network, rather than improving their network.
I don't even mean this in a bitter way. They're behaving as responsible corporations by delivering the highest profits possible to their investors.It's just that this doesn't always overlap with providing the best goods and services to the customers.
That these appliances will crash often and fall apart after a year of normal use?
Not all of us knew what we wanted to do in middle school.
I thought through middle school and high school that I wanted to be a professional musician, but after one year of that in college I decided to study chemistry, which I wouldn't have known I liked had I not been forced to take it in high school, nor would I be able to study it had I not been forced to go through trigonometry and advanced algebra.
tl;dr You're required to study different subjects in school because there can only be so many firemen and veterinarians in the world.
I think the American Association of Cocaine Dealers would object to arbitrarily getting rid of the kilogram!
We PREFER the term American Chemical Society.
Way to not invent a hover-board again science.
I love that this comment implies that the /. user base would not only like scientific research to favor the production of trivial amusement devices rather than preventing massive death tolls from illnesses, but would prefer that those amusement devices be almost suicidal to use.
So, you're saying that if we insert money at the top, it benefits the guys at the bottom because high level executives and such create lots of jobs directly from their personal income?
Well, no, the idea is that the wealthy have a higher tendency to invest their money in stocks and startups than those with lower incomes, who, as you said, will most likely spend it immediately. It's related to the idea that part of the reason the wealthy tend to stay wealthy is because they tend to invest and make their money grow instead of putting their money into banks and having it more or less stay the same when adjusted for inflation.
So essentially, the idea is more that the wealthy will use extra personal money to allow new or existing businesses to expand, creating more jobs. It's not completely stupid, but I agree that it doesn't work, if only because the wealthy currently comprise far too small a percentage of the population for the, admittedly disproportionately large, gains from their investments to overcome the stimulating effect of giving 98+% of earners a tax break which they will likely spend on goods or services.
Hey, at least they figured out a way to actually get people to RTFA.
It is probably a bit harder to frame for distrbution, but I wouldn't say too hard. Just upload a torrent of a file (or even download it from one) and you've distributed it.
Also, I think you're overreaching a bit saying that possession should NEVER be illegal. I can definitely agree that possession of information shouldn't be, because in the digital age it's far too easy for anyone to plant files on a computer, but for things like explosives possession laws serve a real purpose. If someone illegally has enough dynamite to blow up New York City, and there is some evidence to give reasonable certainty that they intend to do exactly that, it may not be possible to convict them of conspiracy or whatever, but police would at least have the power to confiscate all of the explosives. I'm not saying they should be allowed to imprison anyone for simple possession, but if possession of everything and anything were totally legal it would kind of render police impotent.
Governments are only going to get so much mileage out of crying wolf by invoking "Because...well...BECAUSE...CHILD PORNOGRAPHY".
If they keep this up, it's going to dilute honest, real efforts to fight child pornography because people will be conditioned to equate "child pornography" with "government power grab".
I really wish I could share your optimism, but I seriously doubt that will happen.
Even if they do run out of the ability to initiate it at the legislative level, there's always the option to astroturf a community of "concerned parents who really'd like it if you'd think about the children and consider signing this petition to make the internet "safe again" by making sure that anyone who traipses onto any site deemed inappropriate, by any means, will be shot." And it'll work, because child porn really is one of those things that pretty much everyone can agree is a bad thing that we'd like to not exist anymore, and it's easy to rally people for it.
They didn't actually show Muhammed in Cartoon Wars. They just made reference to him, which is why there was no controversy over it. They only ever showed him in a season five episode called "Super Best Friends" in which he was a member of the titular group. Which was long before this was really an issue.
Of course, that fact suggests that extremists aren't actually offended by his depiction, because they sure as hell weren't seven years ago, but rather that they're just looking for any excuse to justify their anger. Which I guess isn't really that surprising.
I don't think they're really being that marginalized. The Constellation program (which I assuming is the source of most of the marginalization talk) wasn't making effective use of money and wasn't delivering much. But with no plans to replace it (at least that I've heard of) manned space travel definitely seems to be being put on the back burner.
Beyond that though, holding competitions like this is a great use of their budget. The rewards they give are relatively small compared to what it would take to develop the technology in house, and it gets companies that are flirting with the idea of developing space-related tech to produce when they might otherwise not, because the monetary reward lowers the financial risk of developing it.
I don't think that this will die for security concerns, though it does have tremendous potential to cause them. I think this will die because it's unnecessary, impractical, and redundant. Because this requires gestures much larger than would be required with a mouse or traditional touchscreen; and it doesn't really provide much in the way of increased functionality for the cost of the experimental technology. Lastly, it's because we can already make webcams small enough to fit right above laptop LCD screens which could realistically be used in the same way for a lot less money. Think of it like Sony's Eyetoy, both in how it will be innovative and how it will completely flop.
The data is very interesting, but I wouldn't take from this that we should teach the math later, but rather that we should just teach it differently.
TFA says that the kids have a hard time applying the skills learned in elementary school math to real-life situations, which makes sense. Math is abstract and the ability to apply abstract concepts to real life situations is a learned one; which is something a lot of people have a hard time with through adulthood. However, I also know that the algebra taught to me in high school and that some of my friends didn't learn until college is middle school equivalent curriculum in most other first world countries (I'm from the U.S.). These other countries seem to be doing just fine teaching more advanced math earlier on, which suggests to me that we're probably doing it wrong rather than too early.
being that I'm an American and don't ever leave my couch. All this bill will do is biochemically endorse our greatest stereotype.
Timey-wimey ball.
Because many bad parents would rather have a scapegoat to blame all of their troubles on than hear that they should have been parenting while little Billy was searching for filthy porn online.
Seriously, it may not be easy to raise kids, but don't blame the medium whenever your kid uses it to find questionable material. I like that the article mentioned an education program, which would probably be more effective and less costly than a massive filter anyway. It's just too bad that the knee-jerk reaction is always to censor.
Here in Canada
Though this reminds me, aren't we supposed to be blaming Canada?
I fail to see how the fact that NASA will get the funding anyway makes this not hypocritical. The project in question has had a lot of money spent on it and hasn't really worked very well in the past few years. I think the comment about the tea parties from the parent came from them being mostly Republicans, which you're correct in saying that it doesn't necessarily make them agree with the Tea Party protesters. However, this does mean that five out of seven of their congressmen are from a party which ran mostly on the promise of reduced spending and belt-tightening in the last couple election cycles. This does raise some questions as to why it is they can do this and not have their fellow party members claim that they're socialists or spend-thrifts.
This also comes at the same time that one of Alabama's senators is holding up all confirmations of administration officials in order to block spending cuts in the state. Which seems to color these actions, perhaps incorrectly, as being intended to save their pork.
Now that's just stupid.
You think that kids are only called nerds or geeks in the U.S.? This is a global phenomenon, yet it doesn't stop everyone else from making progress. Hell, even in the rest of the Anglophone world there's Tall Poppy Syndrome, which isn't entirely unrelated to American anti-intellectualism.
It could definitely be argued that the politicization of anti-intellectualism is what really is driving downward, but it's a fairly complex issue. Education certainly has a hand in this. We've been falling massively behind in our science EDUCATION for a while now. I would say that we should try to increase the exposure of students to the sciences from a primary level, and then keep using more flashy or exciting demonstrations in the classroom. I mean, hey, it might be shameless, but I'd also be lying if I claimed that the fact that I like explosions didn't factor at all into my pursuit of Chemistry early on.
Now of course that doesn't solve everything, and I think anti-intellectualism plays a part in all of this, but it's certainly not everything.
Also, I have to make the obligatory comment that if you think evolution is about the survival of the "best" or "smartest" then you clearly learned about it in an American school.
To be fair, those are most likely due to copyright and license concerns, and not censorship, so it's not really the same.
Still, I don't think this is terribly surprising and I fail to see why people are shocked. China is a HUGE market, especially in technology. Any profit seeking entity has a lot to gain there, and would be extremely irresponsible to their shareholders if they weren't to do whatever they had to to get into the market.
I don't mean to say I approve of censorship, I'm just saying that it isn't surprising.
Exactly right, that's why when I accidentally grazed the stove top with my hand, I learned that next time I should slam my face on it repeatedly. I think that the advertisers that are dumb enough to continue or increase business practices that led to the creation of adblockers in the first place will die out like the dodo and the ones that adapt successfully to the changing paradigm will thrive. Though the scenario you mentioned with integration of content with advertising on the internet seems almost inevitable, as it occurs in just about every other medium, the more obtrusive ones will turn off consumers just like egregious product placement does.
It's mainly in case you ever want to sue any girl you knock up for patent infringement.
RTFA indeed, if you read as far as the third paragraph you'd know that it was also proven on mice, dogs, and baboons. That makes this pretty likely to apply to humans as well. Though I'm confused as to why the summary says that tryptophan also has this property, as the article doesn't even use the word. I couldn't find the original Nature article, but the linked one certainly said nothing about it.
And the public defender encouraging him to plead guilty? That lawyer should be fired for incompetance. How can someone be guilty of a crime they never had any intention of committing, and took active steps to actually avoid committing it?
Well, there's a concept called mens rea in the U.S. legal system (and appears in some form in many others) that states that this shouldn't be allowed to happen specifically because he had no intention of committing the crime. The actus reus (actual guilt of the crime accused)in most cases needs to be paired with the fact that they willfully and knowingly committed the crime. Barring negligence or recklessness most crimes in the U.S. do have some requirement of mens rea. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea for more details. So, not being a lawyer, I too think there would be a pretty decent case for the kid if they took it to court. Of course, not being a lawyer, I have a pretty damned limited understanding of this stuff. Though I'd really like to see the EFF take a stance on this.
I wouldn't say that Americans are particularly bad about anti-intellectualism. There is certainly some level of that present in our society, but I think that the same sensitivity to "elitism" can be found to varying degrees in any society. This really struck me during the presidential campaign in 2008 where elitism was made an issue. To say nothing of the political games involved, I think this worked primarily because no one likes to look or feel stupid, or hell, even inferior in any way to anyone else. Science can easily be perceived as threatening intellectually by those not well versed in it. It has come a long way in the last century or so and it is almost impossible to get a good grasp of any discipline in a short period of time. Because of this attainability of the knowledge for many, it is threatening and often ignored. I remember seeing many creationist videos using this for a political advantage. It is easy to demonize that which isn't understood. I just think we in the US get a little more militant about superiority issues because of a fairly aggressive attitude towards success. As mentioned by mpapet, we are a pretty individualistic society, and as such we might fear what could be threatening to our individual success, like the intellectual superiority of another.