Sort of, yes. This is how everyone expected the case to come out, because it's really hard to convince nine intelligent people whose brilliant and successful clerks grew up playing mortal kombat that violent video games mess kids up... and it's doubly hard to do so without somehow implying that the government can ban books.
Does anybody know of any really good studies on the subject of violent video games? (Something that actually has a control group, for example?)
If your first real project is in C++ and the beginning programmers don't have major issues with it, you're already ahead of the game. In undergrad we once did a project with four CS upperclassmen, and two of us discovered after the project began that the other two really had no idea how pointers worked.
I think you underestimate the value of those things. Most of these classes aren't strictly about history, english, and the like, but enhance your overall mental ability - such as the ability to write, comprehend, and reason, which frankly, is generally missing from those in our field.
If you don't have those things, that's fine, but that's not a BS or a BA, thats a trade school education.
Yes and no. Most of these classes, taken together, will have that effect. Most of the classes, taken individually and if you have moderately high standards, will be mediocre and not extend your ability to write, comprehend, and reason, even at the best institutions in the world. But the diamonds in the rough will.
Sometimes. Sometimes not. I've had these fights behind closed doors in administrations. Some people see schools as businesses; others see them also as something more, where that "something more" should have an influence on policy decisions. Everyone recognizes the need to stay in the black and to fund-raise.
> It astonishes me how many people don't understand that college is about learning to be a life long learner
Didn't need college for that.
If you needed college for that then you were never really "college material" to begin with.
Silly bit of mythology really.
College exposes you to new disciplines and sources of information--many of us didn't read academic articles in high school. Many people don't even read them till college. But they are an awesome well of new sources of learning--each new field you jump into is great.
A good college also gives you networking, an automatic connection to a university's reputation, and a community of smart people in many different disciplines to learn from and form lifelong friendships with. And financial aid.
People from outside America probably can't comprehend the psychological differences between America and basically the rest of the world when it comes to education.
Americans are groomed from a young age to not give a damn about anything outside of America. At an individual level, this in turn encourages them not to give a damn about anything outside of their immediate lives.
Education is affected by this attitude. An individual will have a core interest, but anything outside of this narrow viewpoint will be considered a "waste of time". In many cases, the individual won't even like their core stream of study, but will just be doing it to get a degree to supposedly "get a good job and to get the money" later on (even if it puts them hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with no chance of earning that much back).
It's not limited to any field. Those who focus on English literature, for instance, will often go out of their way to avoid even the most basic math courses. This is unfortunate, as they'll need these basic math skills when making change at their future careers as baristas and cashiers.
The same goes for those who focus on Comp. Sci. They often avoid the most basic courses that involve the English language, thus never acquiring necessary skills like the ability to use capitalization and punctuation when writing.
This is one of the most ignorant and narrow-minded statements I have ever read. You are generalizing on a level that is vast beyond reason, from some very limited set of experiences or very opinionated statements someone tells you about Americans.
Many people take and avoid courses in college for a variety of reasons: they may like them, they may like the professor or the subject, they may hate the subject, they may need to make a requirement.
In addition, Americans can travel far before getting out of the country--it's easier to be international when you live in a country smaller than most US states. That doesn't make Americans automatically hostile. It means we have less exposure.
You are also describing an archtype of success, not a reality of individuality.
Clearly, you are not someone who values 'superior writing skills.'
I think that's why he put it in quotes.
Most English majors are a joke in terms of any requirement that someone know how to write well. People ask English majors for advice, and English majors give advice based on what they learned in Eighth grade.
The English major is not a writing major. (Writing majors tend to get good at editing, but they don't always get good at writing.)
Colleges with a large "core" curriculum serve two ends--they serve the philosophy of a well-rounded or well-educated curriculum, and they are much cheaper for schools because they can have large "gut" courses with a higher student/teacher ratio.
Don't pass up the non-CS stuff. Enrichment can be awesome--at least a little bit. Find out who the good professors are and take a course or two from them. You can always pick up new material--you cannot always learn from great professors.
> Lots of people won't even tell somebody they know that their fly is open, let alone tell them that they don't like their manner of speech.
What an interesting priority of taboos you have. =)
Some people use "whom" regularly, or regularly in certain contexts or for a certain effect. Others think it sounds stuffy. Still others think it sounds stuffy only in certain contexts. And lots of people use it incorrectly, especially if English is their only language. (You learn objective case better if you have at least basic latin, for example.)
I find "alright" to be more jarring. It is spelled "all right." "Alright" bespeaks an ignorance or laziness much more noticeable than someone misusing "whom."
Transparency in Government is important, but not always practical. Undercover operations, signals intelligence, military development or deployment, counterintelligence work, and plenty of other areas exist which should function with very limited transparency--but still with accountability. A culture that accepts lawbreaking and promotes covering the back of fellow officers (or soldiers) in any law enforcement community, is a massive problem for justice, because it actively works to prevent justice and it passively allows criminals to thrive. Whistleblowing to superiors or to the appropriate government agency about a superior's conduct should never be something that one should need to fear reprisal for.
If someone is an ass--whether a superior or reporting a superior, that can be noted. But they should never get fired for doing the right thing.
The problems with not having such a culture are massively magnified where there is no transparency. Where there are legitimate reasons for the lack of transparency, a culture which does not tolerate lawbreaking and which encourages reporting of it (ideally without entrapment) will go a long way toward making sure people stay on task. It's not just toleration of lawbreaking that lets people break the law--it's living around people where breaking the law is commonplace.
From TFA, it looked like a per-book listing fee--discourage spamming by making there be an incentive not to publish 10,000 similar books, since each one will net less than the $10 in profit, but any work someone actually is remotely serious about they can be expected to pay ten bucks.
Did he just criticize the idea of a ten dollar listing fee as a barrier to entry for reducing spam?
No way. Maybe for a booklet you'd want it to be less, but if you put one *thousandth* of the amount of time and effort into a book that any decent author does, five or ten bucks for the book listing is much less than that. A listing fee is not, realistically, a barrier to entry.
You know, when I see a 700 million dollar settlement over a garbage patent that was later overturned, and I think about how that would have affected me as a small software developer, what I do *not* think is "all hype and no bite." What I think is "I could lose my house." And so I work for a corporation
You can start your own corporation. You have to keep your personal assets and corporate assets distinct from one another and some other fun accounting headaces, but it serves as the exact protection it sounds like you want.
Which is why we keep the lawyers. Risk management.
One encapsulated concepts by reference which a sharp mind will decode: Collateral damage includes hundreds of thousands of sometimes complex tech support calls, which are financially beneficial to the tech support community, perhaps, but which cost society more than having the computers not fail because some criminal with an e-crowbar (i.e. scareware) came along and smashed up their windows, as the windows broken in the broken window fallacy.
I had crashed three cars by the time I was three. Not on the farm. I think I only took off in the tractor once at that age...
I once saw an eighty-year-old man parallel park by driving his car forward until he hit the car in front, angling the wheel, driving back till he hit the car in back, angling the wheel, and repeating this process as the two eighty-year-old women in the back seat appeared to be growing more and more concerned.
In retrospect, it seemed to sum up a great deal about everything.
IIIRC, direct damages were in the high tens of millions. Collateral damage is massive--lots of tech support broken window fallacy stuff. Lots of frustration.
Small businesses have fewer resources to allocate to high barriers to entry, and need to enter the market to participate. High barriers to entry make the market less competitive. The patent system, to encourage an active market in innovation, should minimize barriers to entry--otherwise, it is not doing the thing it's designed to do (i.e., give people some of the benefit of their inventions/incentivize invention), it's only serving a small subset of inventors.
From the summary: "and put the United States under the same filing system as the rest of the industrialized world."
Parent is right. This will absolutely help big businesses at the expense of small inventors and companies. The United States is perhaps unique in the world in caring about who invented a thing first, rather than who filed a thing first, and in caring somewhat about the individual inventor. Despite all of the clamor about it, there are maybe a hundred interference proceedings (i.e. who invented it first) a year--they're VERY rare. Companies and academia are just afraid of them because they (1) require a lot more auditing internally, (2) are a little less administrable than a first-to-file system, (3) are not what everyone else in the world does, and a lot of patent work is international, (4) sometimes a patent is worth billions, and secret prior art is in theory a massive risk, and (5) litigating the point costs money and lots of legal and inventor time when it comes up.
That being said, these reforms are proposed every year. They very rarely get passed. The first-to-file reform has been "likely to change this year" for twenty or thirty years at this point.
The patent system is already nontrivial to deal with for a newcomer, taking years, being very precise and arcane, and costing thousands unless you do everything yourself--and most people who try to do it themselves fail miserably. A patent examiner I know has seen *one* pro se application that was done well. The money is pocket change for a big corporation (maybe more if litigated or if it's an important of complicated patent), reasonable fees but ridiculous delays for a little corporation, doable for the upper middle class when you're not in the middle of an economic recession, and practically prohibitive for a small inventor who is lower middle-class or poor (without backers, anyway, and disclosing it to backers beforehand starts all kinds of legal clocks). The system encourages some innovation, but it doesn't do much about bootstrapping.
You said "When they were in power they got congressional approval, and followed the law."
I assumed you were referring to republicans, but it's unclear to me what exactly you were talking about. Congressional approval for what? Following the law for what? And what about this lawsuit do you think the Obama administration is doing differently?
The solicitor general's office responded for the TVA to a lawsuit from private parties and states seeking regulation of carbon emission caps through the federal courts, using the common law. The Government argued that the EPA had been given the power to regulate carbon emissions by a law enacted by Congress, which trumps the federal common law. None of this has to do with getting approval from Congress, it has to do with figuring out what the existing law is and whether private or state actors can legally seek carbon emissions caps without going through the regulatory process, which has its own politics.
If you are talking about Libya, when you talk about getting approval from Congress, you should say that. Republicans don't have the cleanest bill there--they may have had better Congressional support for Iraq under the War Powers Resolution, but they clearly arranged for a security council resolution to legalize the war that let every other country sign off on it while claiming they hadn't signed off for it, and they also take the blame for talking up bad intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
> we non-puritans just won a 7-2 victory
Sort of, yes. This is how everyone expected the case to come out, because it's really hard to convince nine intelligent people whose brilliant and successful clerks grew up playing mortal kombat that violent video games mess kids up... and it's doubly hard to do so without somehow implying that the government can ban books.
Does anybody know of any really good studies on the subject of violent video games? (Something that actually has a control group, for example?)
If your first real project is in C++ and the beginning programmers don't have major issues with it, you're already ahead of the game. In undergrad we once did a project with four CS upperclassmen, and two of us discovered after the project began that the other two really had no idea how pointers worked.
Does anybody have an OED entry?
I agree that "who" predominates, but don't always consider "whom" jarring if it's used properly.
That there are educated people in their 20s making that mistake regularly is a bit surprising.
I like your argument. :)
I think you underestimate the value of those things. Most of these classes aren't strictly about history, english, and the like, but enhance your overall mental ability - such as the ability to write, comprehend, and reason, which frankly, is generally missing from those in our field.
If you don't have those things, that's fine, but that's not a BS or a BA, thats a trade school education.
Yes and no. Most of these classes, taken together, will have that effect. Most of the classes, taken individually and if you have moderately high standards, will be mediocre and not extend your ability to write, comprehend, and reason, even at the best institutions in the world. But the diamonds in the rough will.
Sometimes. Sometimes not. I've had these fights behind closed doors in administrations. Some people see schools as businesses; others see them also as something more, where that "something more" should have an influence on policy decisions. Everyone recognizes the need to stay in the black and to fund-raise.
> It astonishes me how many people don't understand that college is about learning to be a life long learner
Didn't need college for that.
If you needed college for that then you were never really "college material" to begin with.
Silly bit of mythology really.
College exposes you to new disciplines and sources of information--many of us didn't read academic articles in high school. Many people don't even read them till college. But they are an awesome well of new sources of learning--each new field you jump into is great.
A good college also gives you networking, an automatic connection to a university's reputation, and a community of smart people in many different disciplines to learn from and form lifelong friendships with. And financial aid.
Not only that, my general ed classes had girls in them.
This comment should be modded up to six.
People from outside America probably can't comprehend the psychological differences between America and basically the rest of the world when it comes to education.
Americans are groomed from a young age to not give a damn about anything outside of America. At an individual level, this in turn encourages them not to give a damn about anything outside of their immediate lives.
Education is affected by this attitude. An individual will have a core interest, but anything outside of this narrow viewpoint will be considered a "waste of time". In many cases, the individual won't even like their core stream of study, but will just be doing it to get a degree to supposedly "get a good job and to get the money" later on (even if it puts them hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with no chance of earning that much back).
It's not limited to any field. Those who focus on English literature, for instance, will often go out of their way to avoid even the most basic math courses. This is unfortunate, as they'll need these basic math skills when making change at their future careers as baristas and cashiers.
The same goes for those who focus on Comp. Sci. They often avoid the most basic courses that involve the English language, thus never acquiring necessary skills like the ability to use capitalization and punctuation when writing.
This is one of the most ignorant and narrow-minded statements I have ever read. You are generalizing on a level that is vast beyond reason, from some very limited set of experiences or very opinionated statements someone tells you about Americans.
Many people take and avoid courses in college for a variety of reasons: they may like them, they may like the professor or the subject, they may hate the subject, they may need to make a requirement.
In addition, Americans can travel far before getting out of the country--it's easier to be international when you live in a country smaller than most US states. That doesn't make Americans automatically hostile. It means we have less exposure.
You are also describing an archtype of success, not a reality of individuality.
Clearly, you are not someone who values 'superior writing skills.'
I think that's why he put it in quotes.
Most English majors are a joke in terms of any requirement that someone know how to write well. People ask English majors for advice, and English majors give advice based on what they learned in Eighth grade.
The English major is not a writing major. (Writing majors tend to get good at editing, but they don't always get good at writing.)
Colleges with a large "core" curriculum serve two ends--they serve the philosophy of a well-rounded or well-educated curriculum, and they are much cheaper for schools because they can have large "gut" courses with a higher student/teacher ratio.
Don't pass up the non-CS stuff. Enrichment can be awesome--at least a little bit. Find out who the good professors are and take a course or two from them. You can always pick up new material--you cannot always learn from great professors.
> Lots of people won't even tell somebody they know that their fly is open, let alone tell them that they don't like their manner of speech.
What an interesting priority of taboos you have. =)
Some people use "whom" regularly, or regularly in certain contexts or for a certain effect. Others think it sounds stuffy. Still others think it sounds stuffy only in certain contexts. And lots of people use it incorrectly, especially if English is their only language. (You learn objective case better if you have at least basic latin, for example.)
I find "alright" to be more jarring. It is spelled "all right." "Alright" bespeaks an ignorance or laziness much more noticeable than someone misusing "whom."
Transparency in Government is important, but not always practical. Undercover operations, signals intelligence, military development or deployment, counterintelligence work, and plenty of other areas exist which should function with very limited transparency--but still with accountability. A culture that accepts lawbreaking and promotes covering the back of fellow officers (or soldiers) in any law enforcement community, is a massive problem for justice, because it actively works to prevent justice and it passively allows criminals to thrive. Whistleblowing to superiors or to the appropriate government agency about a superior's conduct should never be something that one should need to fear reprisal for.
If someone is an ass--whether a superior or reporting a superior, that can be noted. But they should never get fired for doing the right thing.
The problems with not having such a culture are massively magnified where there is no transparency. Where there are legitimate reasons for the lack of transparency, a culture which does not tolerate lawbreaking and which encourages reporting of it (ideally without entrapment) will go a long way toward making sure people stay on task. It's not just toleration of lawbreaking that lets people break the law--it's living around people where breaking the law is commonplace.
From TFA, it looked like a per-book listing fee--discourage spamming by making there be an incentive not to publish 10,000 similar books, since each one will net less than the $10 in profit, but any work someone actually is remotely serious about they can be expected to pay ten bucks.
Did he just criticize the idea of a ten dollar listing fee as a barrier to entry for reducing spam?
No way. Maybe for a booklet you'd want it to be less, but if you put one *thousandth* of the amount of time and effort into a book that any decent author does, five or ten bucks for the book listing is much less than that. A listing fee is not, realistically, a barrier to entry.
You know, when I see a 700 million dollar settlement over a garbage patent that was later overturned, and I think about how that would have affected me as a small software developer, what I do *not* think is "all hype and no bite." What I think is "I could lose my house." And so I work for a corporation
You can start your own corporation. You have to keep your personal assets and corporate assets distinct from one another and some other fun accounting headaces, but it serves as the exact protection it sounds like you want.
Which is why we keep the lawyers. Risk management.
An Oxymoron and an Anonymass walk into a bar...
One encapsulated concepts by reference which a sharp mind will decode: Collateral damage includes hundreds of thousands of sometimes complex tech support calls, which are financially beneficial to the tech support community, perhaps, but which cost society more than having the computers not fail because some criminal with an e-crowbar (i.e. scareware) came along and smashed up their windows, as the windows broken in the broken window fallacy.
The other re'd to hmmmm.
I had crashed three cars by the time I was three. Not on the farm. I think I only took off in the tractor once at that age...
I once saw an eighty-year-old man parallel park by driving his car forward until he hit the car in front, angling the wheel, driving back till he hit the car in back, angling the wheel, and repeating this process as the two eighty-year-old women in the back seat appeared to be growing more and more concerned.
In retrospect, it seemed to sum up a great deal about everything.
IIIRC, direct damages were in the high tens of millions. Collateral damage is massive--lots of tech support broken window fallacy stuff. Lots of frustration.
> you have to be really roundabout and portray your software more as linkages between different human and hardware elements.
This is not what I've heard from the patent office. But it probably varies by examiner group.
> "small business" good "big business" bad
Small businesses have fewer resources to allocate to high barriers to entry, and need to enter the market to participate. High barriers to entry make the market less competitive. The patent system, to encourage an active market in innovation, should minimize barriers to entry--otherwise, it is not doing the thing it's designed to do (i.e., give people some of the benefit of their inventions/incentivize invention), it's only serving a small subset of inventors.
From the summary: "and put the United States under the same filing system as the rest of the industrialized world."
Parent is right. This will absolutely help big businesses at the expense of small inventors and companies. The United States is perhaps unique in the world in caring about who invented a thing first, rather than who filed a thing first, and in caring somewhat about the individual inventor. Despite all of the clamor about it, there are maybe a hundred interference proceedings (i.e. who invented it first) a year--they're VERY rare. Companies and academia are just afraid of them because they (1) require a lot more auditing internally, (2) are a little less administrable than a first-to-file system, (3) are not what everyone else in the world does, and a lot of patent work is international, (4) sometimes a patent is worth billions, and secret prior art is in theory a massive risk, and (5) litigating the point costs money and lots of legal and inventor time when it comes up.
That being said, these reforms are proposed every year. They very rarely get passed. The first-to-file reform has been "likely to change this year" for twenty or thirty years at this point.
The patent system is already nontrivial to deal with for a newcomer, taking years, being very precise and arcane, and costing thousands unless you do everything yourself--and most people who try to do it themselves fail miserably. A patent examiner I know has seen *one* pro se application that was done well. The money is pocket change for a big corporation (maybe more if litigated or if it's an important of complicated patent), reasonable fees but ridiculous delays for a little corporation, doable for the upper middle class when you're not in the middle of an economic recession, and practically prohibitive for a small inventor who is lower middle-class or poor (without backers, anyway, and disclosing it to backers beforehand starts all kinds of legal clocks). The system encourages some innovation, but it doesn't do much about bootstrapping.
You said "When they were in power they got congressional approval, and followed the law."
I assumed you were referring to republicans, but it's unclear to me what exactly you were talking about. Congressional approval for what? Following the law for what? And what about this lawsuit do you think the Obama administration is doing differently?
The solicitor general's office responded for the TVA to a lawsuit from private parties and states seeking regulation of carbon emission caps through the federal courts, using the common law. The Government argued that the EPA had been given the power to regulate carbon emissions by a law enacted by Congress, which trumps the federal common law. None of this has to do with getting approval from Congress, it has to do with figuring out what the existing law is and whether private or state actors can legally seek carbon emissions caps without going through the regulatory process, which has its own politics.
If you are talking about Libya, when you talk about getting approval from Congress, you should say that. Republicans don't have the cleanest bill there--they may have had better Congressional support for Iraq under the War Powers Resolution, but they clearly arranged for a security council resolution to legalize the war that let every other country sign off on it while claiming they hadn't signed off for it, and they also take the blame for talking up bad intelligence.
Do you mean they add CO2 emissions because of the power used to maintain them?