I've thought that the reason for the triumph of the bourgeoisie in Europe is that in the middle ages, the aristocracy needed the products of the towns -- but the towns didn't need the aristocracy, and managed to obtain some independence of the aristocracy. This meant that, later on, when there were direct clashes, the aristocracy could never win, because they depended upon the products of the towns to control the towns.
So, I've thought that by analogy, if we want to move past capitalism, we want to develop facets of the economy which are socially owned, upon which capitalism will come to depend, but which do not depend upon capitalism. And it occurred to me that there are only a few entities in evidence that look like this, and the strongest (and the one I could most likely find a way to play a part in) was free software.
About the time I was thinking this, I was reading Free Software, Free Society and Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. The former appealed to my radical left sensibilities (and my hankering for heterodoxy), and the latter, while a good read, irritated me in that almost every essay made a point of stating that open source software was not socialist.
It occurred to me, however, that if the idea I had in mind was to work at all, it would be necessary to both maintain the independence of free software, and to encourage businesses and governments to use it; thus, some sort of compromise between the (apparent) two approaches would be necessary.
Last I checked, only about 5% of people in the US are involved in agriculture. And much of agriculture and food production is already heavily automated. For that matter, so is heavy industry in general.
Mass production depends upon repetitive work that is readily automated. Automation multiplies the effect of human creativity, meaning that you need fewer workers to produce the same amount. People have the idea that US doesn't produce anything real anymore, when the US still dominates global industrial production. But if you walk into an actual working factory, you see dozens of workers, not the hundreds or more it took to do the same work a generation ago.
More and more, I think the real challenge is reorganizing society on the basis of a recognition that we ought to be doing a lot less work, that we're producing things needed only in order to support unnecessarily high levels of productivity, and that we'd all be better off if we spent less time and energy on production.
Before I say anything else: what BART did is disturbing and objectionable, and I don't want to suggest otherwise. But, I think there's a real problem with describing any authoritarianism or overextension of police authority as fascism, because there is an important, recurrent phenomenon, best labeled as "fascism", which isn't simply right-wing extremism, and it isn't always connected to the establishment of a police state; people need to have some way to identify that particular phenomenon.
Fascism involves extra-governmental, ultra-nationalist, right wing thugs, who go around and use violence against groups that they believe oppose them: organizations of oppressed minorities, labor unions, left groups of all sorts. In Italy, Germany, and Spain, in the years leading to World War II, such groups captured control of the government and instituted police states; there were similar groups elsewhere that tried to do the same thing. However, fascists gained their initial support from sections of the ruling class who were frightened of the rise of oppressed groups and the left; crushing such groups was the primary concern.
It's often useful to an authoritarian government to have paramilitary groups, ostensibly acting independently of the government, who will spontaneously act to crush dissent.
A recurrent pattern in Latin America, where right-wing governments are trying to suppress communities that are centers for dissent, is to just happen to have government troops stationed on one side of a village while paramilitaries sweep through. It's pretty implausible, as plausible deniability goes, but I expect it's good enough for the US State Department.
Within the US, there are the various "KKK" groups. I've been in arguments about whether the KKK is exactly fascist, but if it isn't, it's quite similar.
Perhaps a trivial example, but one that was close to home for me: In the early 00s, the right-wing writer David Horowitz worked with groups of students who were on the right of the Republican Party, encouraging them to harass student activists and intimidate left academics, especially anyone criticizing US foreign policy in the Middle East, opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or expressing support for Arab-Americans. As far as I know, this never actually came to violence, but Horowitz did single out by name friends of mine, who got telephone death threats and verbal harassment from his student supporters, and Horowitz and his supporters frequently called for anti-war activists to be tried for treason and executed. Particularly delusional of Horowitz was that he called his targets "fascists".
If the rebels are trying to achieve a more democratic society, then they need to convince as many people as possible to become rebels. You can't expect most people to learn covert organizing techniques; a rebellion based on covert organizing techniques will either fail, or produce a new order that isn't democratic.
From the photographs, they opened up the battery compartment and poked around, before deciding the device was dangerous and had to be destroyed with explosives.
If they were worried it was a bomb, why were they playing around with it first?
Every drug store has blank DVDs and CDs at the front counter, in the impulse buy section, near the chewing gum and candy bars. Most computers come with a standard DVD/CD burner, and have for years. Why do you think people buy them? Look at the way personal computers are advertised: you buy a computer for Internet access, and you use the Internet for free music and video.
It's been obvious to most people for years now that there's no practical limitation on copying digital media. It's been common practice to do so for most people for years. First the technology changed, then popular practiced changed, then popular social standards changed. The law is the last thing to change.
The media industries are in the position of Wiley Coyote, having already run off a cliff, and just realizing that he's impossibly suspended in mid-air. They're just buying time, to crank out the last profits while they can. They know they're doomed.
Well, there's the thing. At some point, you're supposed to ask why you're following distasteful orders from distasteful managers. Is there some worthwhile goal at the end of this?
To back up a little, in Alfie Kohn's essay, he's not arguing against self-discipline altogether, just against the way it is cited, almost universally, as an unqualified virtue. In the context of public education, it's understood to mean that that a student follows the program without prompting. Kohn distinguishes this sort of self-discipline from a person's initiative in pursuing goals that seem intrinsically worthwhile. The larger point -- Kohn's larger agenda -- is to criticize how our education system works in general. Conventional schools are not good at teaching life skills or academic skills, and this becomes clear to almost everyone involved, student or teacher. I think each of us has some story about how when we really learned something interesting when we blew off what we were ostensibly expected to learn and studied something that really interested us. Even those of us who are strongly motivated to be studious see much of school as so much nonsense that we have to push through to get to the interesting bits later on. A lot of people make the rational calculation that they're not going to get that far, and so don't see the point of pushing.
More broadly, as I said elsewhere in this thread, I increasingly suspect that much of the global economy is now based upon the fallacy of the broken window, in which the only accepted measure of economic progress is ever-escalating production, even if we're producing useless junk, or disposable crap that quickly becomes useless junk (instead of durable goods that would last a long time), or we're serving bagels and coffee to commuters who are rushing to work to produce disposable crap, or we're assuring five nines for the load-balanced Exchange servers that circulate the emails inquiring about the emails inquiring about the emails inquiring about the Powerpoint decks summarizing the reports on how to displace one brand of disposable crap with another brand of disposable crap.
And I think to no small extent, the ultimate point of self-discipline is to refrain from thinking about the long-term implications of all this, or to compartmentalize that train of thought so it doesn't get in the way. But we really need to think hard about how we're living and why we're doing what we're doing, and why we keep producing more and more, yet don't live any better, even in the narrow terms that mainstream economists consider. At some point, self-discipline needs to stop, and we need to ask what we actually want -- in itself a very difficult question -- and how to move in the direction of what we want, not just in the direction of what we're supposed to do.
You're still working from the assumption that standardized testing is actually a meaningful test of whether someone has learned a subject. That's widely disputed. There's abundant evidence that tests and grades fail to predict anything other than future success on tests and future grades. They don't predict future professional success or future happiness.
Educators have lots of suggestions for alternative models of education; I've often heard something like my suggestion for teaching writing, for instance, and that's not even a radical suggestion. Educator's suggestions for improvements to education are generally ignored by politicians, at least for public and most private schools in the US -- it's an open secret that the only institutions where modern education theory is taken seriously and is actually implemented are elite private schools. Grading and testing are most rigorous in public schools, and the poorer the community, the more rigorous the testing. Teachers are stuck "teaching to the test", even though they know it's grossly counterproductive and makes it all but impossible to actually teach students; if they don't keep up test scores, they lose their jobs. Some rebel, and lose their jobs. I've never known a public school teacher who didn't loathe "teaching to the test" for this reason, and they all love to describe their covert efforts to actually help their students learn.
There's a popular essay, A Mathematician's Lament, in which Paul Lockhart argues that the math curriculum standardized throughout the United States is completely ineffective at teaching mathematics. One upshot is, given that most people graduate from school and promptly forget the mathematics they learned in school, presumably we can get by without that many people learning advanced mathematics; anything we do that actually involves at least some people actually learning what mathematics is really about, before graduate school, would be a significant improvement.
Given that tests, grades, certificates, and even college degrees are notoriously almost useless as predictors of actual competence and productivity on the job, the only value of such things is that they are quantifiable, and thus seem like rational means to decide who gets to advance to higher levels of education or which job applications escape the circular file. But they're rational only in the sense of being quantifiable; they aren't actually fair.
Overall, I increasingly suspect that many of us are very busy doing things that are essentially useless; that much apparently productive work amounts to supplying resources to others rushing to work to supply resources to others rushing to work to sit there and do nothing useful; that our entire global economy is based, fundamentally, on the fallacy of the broken window, and overall we'd all be leading richer and better lives if we stayed home more and only worked about ten or so hours per week. But that's a suspicion, and even beginning to test it would require radical changes.
It's hard to know, out of context, whether the grad student grading the paper was making an insightful criticism or a stupid one. Stupid grad student tricks abound, but stupid undergraduate tricks are even more common. It rather depends upon the work under analysis and what the student actually wrote.
With Shakespeare,, most of what we know about what he thought is from literary analysis of his plays and sonnets, supplemented with inferences drawn from general historical knowledge of the period, and what we know of his patronage and business dealings. When a student writes, "Shakespeare believed in the Great Chain of Being; therefore, he must have meant it was wrong for Brutus to assassinate Julius Caesar", the student is getting things backwards, because most interpretations of Shakespeare's beliefs about aristocracy are based upon what he wrote in Julius Caesar and the various history plays.
My partner is just starting an MA teaching program, and she's been ranting a lot about the utter uselessness of grades and standardized testing. Apparently, there are decades of research establishing that standardized tests fail to measure anything but performance on standardized tests, and grades measure little besides conformism, self-discipline, and a lack of creativity. (And self-discipline is not always a good thing -- why are you working so hard at doing things you don't really believe are worth doing?)
My first reaction to the headline was that, if computers are better at grading than people, and we know many of the essays are plagiarized from essays found through Google, why have any human participation in the process?
More seriously, one learns to write well through reading a lot, writing a lot, and occasionally listening to criticism. I think we'd do a better job teaching writing by having students in a class read each other's writing and make comments, and simply pass those who participate and fail those who don't, with no further assessment than that.
Of course, that presumes an education system designed to help people learn to become fully participating members of a community and to lead rich, fulfilling lives. As things stand, mass education systems seem designed to produce some dubious justification for burying most people alive, while selecting a conformist and quiescent minority for middle-class careers.
If you want to spend time, do it for his victims. What where their dreams, ideas, visions? Try to use your words to keep their memory alive, not some sick bastards.
Using the expression "politically correct" to label something you dislike is nothing but coded language used by cowardly bigots who know their beliefs are indefensible.
From what I've read -- mostly by following tweets by Skud on the subject -- there are a significant number of people inside Google who aren't happy with the "real names" policy. Even accepting the intent, it's poorly executed, as it makes some classic blunders in its assumptions about what forms names take. It strikes me as a case in which someone at the top of the food chain insisted on a simple, stupid idea.
I think you're quite right: there's a real opening for Google to express contrition, revamp its policy, differentiate Google+ from Facebook, and come out of this as the big damned hero.
The apparent object of the fight is not the real object of the fight.
Basically, the Republicans realized they had a tactical advantage, so they forced a fight with the Democrats in order to win more concessions and further weaken the Democrats.
My phone is a T-Mobile G2. I've got the "Unlimited" data plan, which means 5 GB/month. I haven't run into any problem with hitting the limit, and it looks like I've used about 700 MB in ten days, so perhaps I'm just not streaming that much. Looking at the numbers, though, it does look like I'd be better off just filling up my SD card with music when I'm at home.
Given the trends with mobile providers, I probably shouldn't recommend that people get worked up about streaming audio to their phone, regardless of the nature streaming server -- we're probably headed for an ugly crunch in a year.
For clarification: the audio streaming was for the personal use of me and my family, and in practice, only I ever used it. I made a point of making sure it was only accessible through passwords I'd assigned, in order to be able to claim, credibly, that I was only making my music collection available to members of my household. Initially, I was using Ampache as a Web-based front end for controlling the audio stream; later, I found I had better results using mpd to generate an http stream, and MPDroid to control it and listen to it on my phone.
So, to get to your questions: I use Comcast, and I checked their acceptable use policy. It prohibits "public servers", but permits providing network services for "personal and non-commercial residential use". I'm fairly sure that covers the sort of use I'm describing.
As for bandwidth use: using the approximation of one megabyte of data per minute of audio, a month of continuous audio is roughly 42 GB of bandwidth, out of a 250 GB limit on bandwidth per month. In practice, I was listening to no more than a few hours a day, so the bandwidth use was considerably better than that.
Other ISPs doubtless have different rules, but at least in the case of Comcast, running your own personal streaming audio server is viable within the rules with a typical residential broadband account.
The reason it even occurred to me to set up a personal streaming audio server is that there's a fair amount of discussion about how best to do it on the Ubuntu user forums, and the software used has been around since well before Ubuntu One was introduced. I'm sure it's not as convenient as uploading content to be hosted through Ubuntu One, but there are similar services being offered by Google, Amazon, and Apple.
Perhaps I shouldn't have described Ubuntu One as useless, as the music hosting service seems at least comparable to the services others are rushing to offer.
About two months ago, I bought a new Gateway computer, which had just come on the market, with a CPU that had just come on the market in February. I knew I was taking a risk, as Linux is notorious for poor support for new hardware, especially consumer-oriented hardware.
I mounted a second hard drive on the removable hard disk enclosure the computer came with, and installed Ubuntu 11.04, using the default setup. It worked perfectly. There wasn't a single issue with manually installing kernel modules or with unsupported hardware. The only difficulty in the process was switching the default boot drive in the BIOS, so that GRUB would be installed to the second hard drive and the dual boot setup would work -- which would only be a difficulty for someone setting up a dual boot system, and really wasn't that hard.
I usually get testy about people who complain a distribution upgrade sucks because they overgeneralize from their peculiar difficulties, so I don't want to make the opposite mistake and claim that installing the latest version of Ubuntu will be easy for everyone. But I do believe that installation has gotten significantly smoother and easier.
I don't understand this knee-jerk rejection of anything to do with cloud computing services. As far as I can tell, cloud computing is the mainstay of the IT industry right now, at least outside of desktop support and support for legacy applications.
I signed up for the Ubuntu One beta test as soon as it went public, so I've had an Ubuntu One account for quite a while, but I've never found any use for it.
At the time of its introduction, the only available use for Ubuntu One was file syncing between computers running Ubuntu. Later, you could sync your Tomboy notes and Evolution address books between computers running Ubuntu. I would guess that there are relatively few Ubuntu users with Ubuntu running on multiple personal computers. Even for the narrow purpose of file syncing, before Ubuntu One was released, Dropbox and other apps were available, for free, and were cross-platform solutions. (I've since switched from Dropbox to Spideroak, which works on all the computers I use, as well as my smart phone.)
More recently, Ubuntu One has added premium services -- mostly to do with syncing contacts and music to smart phones. Again, there are better, free, an alternatives for syncing music to my phone -- including running an audio streaming server on my computer -- and given that I'm using Gmail and an Android phone, and all my contacts are in Google Contacts already, there's no point in using a premium service to sync contacts indirectly. I had an email from the Free Software Foundation that noted that about 50% of subscribers to the FSF were subscribed with Gmail accounts; I would guess that the proportion of Ubuntu users who use Gmail is equal or greater.
A lot of Ubuntu supporters were excited about Ubuntu One as a way to secure ongoing financing for Ubuntu, but this project looks to me to be a dead end.
I haven't got around to trying it, but I thought it was basically just Firefox, Thunderbird, and a few other odds and ends, with a common menu system. I used the Mozilla Suite ages ago, which was fine, but I didn't see any particular benefit to that arrangement.
It does seem like Seamonkey has some committed partisans, so there must be some advantage, but I don't know what it is.
There's better evidence that contradicts that claim.
This article could be interpreted to mean that there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between the popularity of an operating system: that malware authors tend to jump on the bandwagon, for instance. (I was trying to come up with a good way to describe the model mathematically, but the flashbacks to calculus were making my hands shake.)
Let's assume, for sake of argument, that the browsers mentioned are all of equal quality, and each can be used for every browser application, but each is slightly better than others for some specific application. It would follow that for any specific application, one has a choice of using the default browser, or installing some other browser; let's assume that knowing which browser is better for a specific application is an indication of intelligence, and the more obscure the browser, the more intelligence is indicated by the knowledge that the obscure browser is better for a specific application. The effects would be moderated by the assumption that the default browser is better for a specific application.
The upshot would be that, assuming all browsers are of equal quality overall, the average intelligence of users of the default browser would be lower than that of users of non-default browsers, especially obscure non-default browsers.
Internet Explorer is the default browser in all versions of Windows since Windows 95, and Windows is the most widely used operating system by far; I think my argument would explain why the average IQ of Internet Explorer users is slightly lower than the average IQ of users of other browsers, and that therefore the study cited doesn't really say anything about Internet Explorer, per se.
(I prefer Firefox -- which is the default in Ubuntu and in Fedora, but not in Windows.)
$95 is a more realistic price for Windows 7 for most users willing and able to pay for software. However, even in wealthy parts of the world, people who think it's reasonable to buy computer hardware often don't think it's reasonable to buy software, since it's so easy to get bootleg software. In much of the world, "legit" proprietary software is practically unheard of, and since you want bootleg Windows XP to run bootleg Microsoft Office or bootleg Starcraft, you don't have any interest in Fedora or Ubuntu or SUSE.
I'm coming to think the real challenge to FLOSS isn't the people who will spend $500 on proprietary software rather than $0 on free (as in speech) software, but the people who will spend $0 on bootleg proprietary software instead of $0 on free software.
that adds no real value for their customers and does something that almost anyone could replicate very quickly and cheaply.
Come to think of it, you could advertise a sublet on Craigslist for free, and maintain your control over the entire process, including running background checks on the renters, getting insurance, and all the rest. It doesn't sound like Airbnb adds anything useful at all.
AFAICT, sounds like an absolutely classic dot-com disaster waiting to happen.
The other day, I was looking at yet another hyperbolic report from Symantec that 60,000 new malware variants are released per day. Among the many reasons I find this claim dubious is that it's pretty damned obvious that most malware infections are on old Windows XP installations, which is significantly less secure than newer versions of Windows, especially if they're not being updated regularly. And in those circumstances, why would anyone be wasting time and effort writing new malware, when old malware can already move in and claim the PC as part of a botnet?
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I've thought that the reason for the triumph of the bourgeoisie in Europe is that in the middle ages, the aristocracy needed the products of the towns -- but the towns didn't need the aristocracy, and managed to obtain some independence of the aristocracy. This meant that, later on, when there were direct clashes, the aristocracy could never win, because they depended upon the products of the towns to control the towns.
So, I've thought that by analogy, if we want to move past capitalism, we want to develop facets of the economy which are socially owned, upon which capitalism will come to depend, but which do not depend upon capitalism. And it occurred to me that there are only a few entities in evidence that look like this, and the strongest (and the one I could most likely find a way to play a part in) was free software.
About the time I was thinking this, I was reading Free Software, Free Society and Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. The former appealed to my radical left sensibilities (and my hankering for heterodoxy), and the latter, while a good read, irritated me in that almost every essay made a point of stating that open source software was not socialist.
It occurred to me, however, that if the idea I had in mind was to work at all, it would be necessary to both maintain the independence of free software, and to encourage businesses and governments to use it; thus, some sort of compromise between the (apparent) two approaches would be necessary.
Last I checked, only about 5% of people in the US are involved in agriculture. And much of agriculture and food production is already heavily automated. For that matter, so is heavy industry in general.
Mass production depends upon repetitive work that is readily automated. Automation multiplies the effect of human creativity, meaning that you need fewer workers to produce the same amount. People have the idea that US doesn't produce anything real anymore, when the US still dominates global industrial production. But if you walk into an actual working factory, you see dozens of workers, not the hundreds or more it took to do the same work a generation ago.
More and more, I think the real challenge is reorganizing society on the basis of a recognition that we ought to be doing a lot less work, that we're producing things needed only in order to support unnecessarily high levels of productivity, and that we'd all be better off if we spent less time and energy on production.
Before I say anything else: what BART did is disturbing and objectionable, and I don't want to suggest otherwise. But, I think there's a real problem with describing any authoritarianism or overextension of police authority as fascism, because there is an important, recurrent phenomenon, best labeled as "fascism", which isn't simply right-wing extremism, and it isn't always connected to the establishment of a police state; people need to have some way to identify that particular phenomenon.
Fascism involves extra-governmental, ultra-nationalist, right wing thugs, who go around and use violence against groups that they believe oppose them: organizations of oppressed minorities, labor unions, left groups of all sorts. In Italy, Germany, and Spain, in the years leading to World War II, such groups captured control of the government and instituted police states; there were similar groups elsewhere that tried to do the same thing. However, fascists gained their initial support from sections of the ruling class who were frightened of the rise of oppressed groups and the left; crushing such groups was the primary concern.
It's often useful to an authoritarian government to have paramilitary groups, ostensibly acting independently of the government, who will spontaneously act to crush dissent.
A recurrent pattern in Latin America, where right-wing governments are trying to suppress communities that are centers for dissent, is to just happen to have government troops stationed on one side of a village while paramilitaries sweep through. It's pretty implausible, as plausible deniability goes, but I expect it's good enough for the US State Department.
Within the US, there are the various "KKK" groups. I've been in arguments about whether the KKK is exactly fascist, but if it isn't, it's quite similar.
Perhaps a trivial example, but one that was close to home for me: In the early 00s, the right-wing writer David Horowitz worked with groups of students who were on the right of the Republican Party, encouraging them to harass student activists and intimidate left academics, especially anyone criticizing US foreign policy in the Middle East, opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or expressing support for Arab-Americans. As far as I know, this never actually came to violence, but Horowitz did single out by name friends of mine, who got telephone death threats and verbal harassment from his student supporters, and Horowitz and his supporters frequently called for anti-war activists to be tried for treason and executed. Particularly delusional of Horowitz was that he called his targets "fascists".
If the rebels are trying to achieve a more democratic society, then they need to convince as many people as possible to become rebels. You can't expect most people to learn covert organizing techniques; a rebellion based on covert organizing techniques will either fail, or produce a new order that isn't democratic.
From the photographs, they opened up the battery compartment and poked around, before deciding the device was dangerous and had to be destroyed with explosives.
If they were worried it was a bomb, why were they playing around with it first?
Every drug store has blank DVDs and CDs at the front counter, in the impulse buy section, near the chewing gum and candy bars. Most computers come with a standard DVD/CD burner, and have for years. Why do you think people buy them? Look at the way personal computers are advertised: you buy a computer for Internet access, and you use the Internet for free music and video.
It's been obvious to most people for years now that there's no practical limitation on copying digital media. It's been common practice to do so for most people for years. First the technology changed, then popular practiced changed, then popular social standards changed. The law is the last thing to change.
The media industries are in the position of Wiley Coyote, having already run off a cliff, and just realizing that he's impossibly suspended in mid-air. They're just buying time, to crank out the last profits while they can. They know they're doomed.
Well, there's the thing. At some point, you're supposed to ask why you're following distasteful orders from distasteful managers. Is there some worthwhile goal at the end of this?
To back up a little, in Alfie Kohn's essay, he's not arguing against self-discipline altogether, just against the way it is cited, almost universally, as an unqualified virtue. In the context of public education, it's understood to mean that that a student follows the program without prompting. Kohn distinguishes this sort of self-discipline from a person's initiative in pursuing goals that seem intrinsically worthwhile. The larger point -- Kohn's larger agenda -- is to criticize how our education system works in general. Conventional schools are not good at teaching life skills or academic skills, and this becomes clear to almost everyone involved, student or teacher. I think each of us has some story about how when we really learned something interesting when we blew off what we were ostensibly expected to learn and studied something that really interested us. Even those of us who are strongly motivated to be studious see much of school as so much nonsense that we have to push through to get to the interesting bits later on. A lot of people make the rational calculation that they're not going to get that far, and so don't see the point of pushing.
More broadly, as I said elsewhere in this thread, I increasingly suspect that much of the global economy is now based upon the fallacy of the broken window, in which the only accepted measure of economic progress is ever-escalating production, even if we're producing useless junk, or disposable crap that quickly becomes useless junk (instead of durable goods that would last a long time), or we're serving bagels and coffee to commuters who are rushing to work to produce disposable crap, or we're assuring five nines for the load-balanced Exchange servers that circulate the emails inquiring about the emails inquiring about the emails inquiring about the Powerpoint decks summarizing the reports on how to displace one brand of disposable crap with another brand of disposable crap.
And I think to no small extent, the ultimate point of self-discipline is to refrain from thinking about the long-term implications of all this, or to compartmentalize that train of thought so it doesn't get in the way. But we really need to think hard about how we're living and why we're doing what we're doing, and why we keep producing more and more, yet don't live any better, even in the narrow terms that mainstream economists consider. At some point, self-discipline needs to stop, and we need to ask what we actually want -- in itself a very difficult question -- and how to move in the direction of what we want, not just in the direction of what we're supposed to do.
You're still working from the assumption that standardized testing is actually a meaningful test of whether someone has learned a subject. That's widely disputed. There's abundant evidence that tests and grades fail to predict anything other than future success on tests and future grades. They don't predict future professional success or future happiness.
Educators have lots of suggestions for alternative models of education; I've often heard something like my suggestion for teaching writing, for instance, and that's not even a radical suggestion. Educator's suggestions for improvements to education are generally ignored by politicians, at least for public and most private schools in the US -- it's an open secret that the only institutions where modern education theory is taken seriously and is actually implemented are elite private schools. Grading and testing are most rigorous in public schools, and the poorer the community, the more rigorous the testing. Teachers are stuck "teaching to the test", even though they know it's grossly counterproductive and makes it all but impossible to actually teach students; if they don't keep up test scores, they lose their jobs. Some rebel, and lose their jobs. I've never known a public school teacher who didn't loathe "teaching to the test" for this reason, and they all love to describe their covert efforts to actually help their students learn.
There's a popular essay, A Mathematician's Lament, in which Paul Lockhart argues that the math curriculum standardized throughout the United States is completely ineffective at teaching mathematics. One upshot is, given that most people graduate from school and promptly forget the mathematics they learned in school, presumably we can get by without that many people learning advanced mathematics; anything we do that actually involves at least some people actually learning what mathematics is really about, before graduate school, would be a significant improvement.
Given that tests, grades, certificates, and even college degrees are notoriously almost useless as predictors of actual competence and productivity on the job, the only value of such things is that they are quantifiable, and thus seem like rational means to decide who gets to advance to higher levels of education or which job applications escape the circular file. But they're rational only in the sense of being quantifiable; they aren't actually fair.
Overall, I increasingly suspect that many of us are very busy doing things that are essentially useless; that much apparently productive work amounts to supplying resources to others rushing to work to supply resources to others rushing to work to sit there and do nothing useful; that our entire global economy is based, fundamentally, on the fallacy of the broken window, and overall we'd all be leading richer and better lives if we stayed home more and only worked about ten or so hours per week. But that's a suspicion, and even beginning to test it would require radical changes.
It's hard to know, out of context, whether the grad student grading the paper was making an insightful criticism or a stupid one. Stupid grad student tricks abound, but stupid undergraduate tricks are even more common. It rather depends upon the work under analysis and what the student actually wrote.
With Shakespeare,, most of what we know about what he thought is from literary analysis of his plays and sonnets, supplemented with inferences drawn from general historical knowledge of the period, and what we know of his patronage and business dealings. When a student writes, "Shakespeare believed in the Great Chain of Being; therefore, he must have meant it was wrong for Brutus to assassinate Julius Caesar", the student is getting things backwards, because most interpretations of Shakespeare's beliefs about aristocracy are based upon what he wrote in Julius Caesar and the various history plays.
My partner is just starting an MA teaching program, and she's been ranting a lot about the utter uselessness of grades and standardized testing. Apparently, there are decades of research establishing that standardized tests fail to measure anything but performance on standardized tests, and grades measure little besides conformism, self-discipline, and a lack of creativity. (And self-discipline is not always a good thing -- why are you working so hard at doing things you don't really believe are worth doing?)
My first reaction to the headline was that, if computers are better at grading than people, and we know many of the essays are plagiarized from essays found through Google, why have any human participation in the process?
More seriously, one learns to write well through reading a lot, writing a lot, and occasionally listening to criticism. I think we'd do a better job teaching writing by having students in a class read each other's writing and make comments, and simply pass those who participate and fail those who don't, with no further assessment than that.
Of course, that presumes an education system designed to help people learn to become fully participating members of a community and to lead rich, fulfilling lives. As things stand, mass education systems seem designed to produce some dubious justification for burying most people alive, while selecting a conformist and quiescent minority for middle-class careers.
If you want to spend time, do it for his victims. What where their dreams, ideas, visions? Try to use your words to keep their memory alive, not some sick bastards.
Well said.
Using the expression "politically correct" to label something you dislike is nothing but coded language used by cowardly bigots who know their beliefs are indefensible.
From what I've read -- mostly by following tweets by Skud on the subject -- there are a significant number of people inside Google who aren't happy with the "real names" policy. Even accepting the intent, it's poorly executed, as it makes some classic blunders in its assumptions about what forms names take. It strikes me as a case in which someone at the top of the food chain insisted on a simple, stupid idea.
I think you're quite right: there's a real opening for Google to express contrition, revamp its policy, differentiate Google+ from Facebook, and come out of this as the big damned hero.
The apparent object of the fight is not the real object of the fight.
Basically, the Republicans realized they had a tactical advantage, so they forced a fight with the Democrats in order to win more concessions and further weaken the Democrats.
My phone is a T-Mobile G2. I've got the "Unlimited" data plan, which means 5 GB/month. I haven't run into any problem with hitting the limit, and it looks like I've used about 700 MB in ten days, so perhaps I'm just not streaming that much. Looking at the numbers, though, it does look like I'd be better off just filling up my SD card with music when I'm at home.
Given the trends with mobile providers, I probably shouldn't recommend that people get worked up about streaming audio to their phone, regardless of the nature streaming server -- we're probably headed for an ugly crunch in a year.
For clarification: the audio streaming was for the personal use of me and my family, and in practice, only I ever used it. I made a point of making sure it was only accessible through passwords I'd assigned, in order to be able to claim, credibly, that I was only making my music collection available to members of my household. Initially, I was using Ampache as a Web-based front end for controlling the audio stream; later, I found I had better results using mpd to generate an http stream, and MPDroid to control it and listen to it on my phone.
So, to get to your questions: I use Comcast, and I checked their acceptable use policy. It prohibits "public servers", but permits providing network services for "personal and non-commercial residential use". I'm fairly sure that covers the sort of use I'm describing.
As for bandwidth use: using the approximation of one megabyte of data per minute of audio, a month of continuous audio is roughly 42 GB of bandwidth, out of a 250 GB limit on bandwidth per month. In practice, I was listening to no more than a few hours a day, so the bandwidth use was considerably better than that.
Other ISPs doubtless have different rules, but at least in the case of Comcast, running your own personal streaming audio server is viable within the rules with a typical residential broadband account.
The reason it even occurred to me to set up a personal streaming audio server is that there's a fair amount of discussion about how best to do it on the Ubuntu user forums, and the software used has been around since well before Ubuntu One was introduced. I'm sure it's not as convenient as uploading content to be hosted through Ubuntu One, but there are similar services being offered by Google, Amazon, and Apple.
Perhaps I shouldn't have described Ubuntu One as useless, as the music hosting service seems at least comparable to the services others are rushing to offer.
About two months ago, I bought a new Gateway computer, which had just come on the market, with a CPU that had just come on the market in February. I knew I was taking a risk, as Linux is notorious for poor support for new hardware, especially consumer-oriented hardware.
I mounted a second hard drive on the removable hard disk enclosure the computer came with, and installed Ubuntu 11.04, using the default setup. It worked perfectly. There wasn't a single issue with manually installing kernel modules or with unsupported hardware. The only difficulty in the process was switching the default boot drive in the BIOS, so that GRUB would be installed to the second hard drive and the dual boot setup would work -- which would only be a difficulty for someone setting up a dual boot system, and really wasn't that hard.
I usually get testy about people who complain a distribution upgrade sucks because they overgeneralize from their peculiar difficulties, so I don't want to make the opposite mistake and claim that installing the latest version of Ubuntu will be easy for everyone. But I do believe that installation has gotten significantly smoother and easier.
I don't understand this knee-jerk rejection of anything to do with cloud computing services. As far as I can tell, cloud computing is the mainstay of the IT industry right now, at least outside of desktop support and support for legacy applications.
I signed up for the Ubuntu One beta test as soon as it went public, so I've had an Ubuntu One account for quite a while, but I've never found any use for it.
At the time of its introduction, the only available use for Ubuntu One was file syncing between computers running Ubuntu. Later, you could sync your Tomboy notes and Evolution address books between computers running Ubuntu. I would guess that there are relatively few Ubuntu users with Ubuntu running on multiple personal computers. Even for the narrow purpose of file syncing, before Ubuntu One was released, Dropbox and other apps were available, for free, and were cross-platform solutions. (I've since switched from Dropbox to Spideroak, which works on all the computers I use, as well as my smart phone.)
More recently, Ubuntu One has added premium services -- mostly to do with syncing contacts and music to smart phones. Again, there are better, free, an alternatives for syncing music to my phone -- including running an audio streaming server on my computer -- and given that I'm using Gmail and an Android phone, and all my contacts are in Google Contacts already, there's no point in using a premium service to sync contacts indirectly. I had an email from the Free Software Foundation that noted that about 50% of subscribers to the FSF were subscribed with Gmail accounts; I would guess that the proportion of Ubuntu users who use Gmail is equal or greater.
A lot of Ubuntu supporters were excited about Ubuntu One as a way to secure ongoing financing for Ubuntu, but this project looks to me to be a dead end.
Why Seamonkey?
I haven't got around to trying it, but I thought it was basically just Firefox, Thunderbird, and a few other odds and ends, with a common menu system. I used the Mozilla Suite ages ago, which was fine, but I didn't see any particular benefit to that arrangement.
It does seem like Seamonkey has some committed partisans, so there must be some advantage, but I don't know what it is.
There's better evidence that contradicts that claim.
This article could be interpreted to mean that there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between the popularity of an operating system: that malware authors tend to jump on the bandwagon, for instance. (I was trying to come up with a good way to describe the model mathematically, but the flashbacks to calculus were making my hands shake.)
Let's assume, for sake of argument, that the browsers mentioned are all of equal quality, and each can be used for every browser application, but each is slightly better than others for some specific application. It would follow that for any specific application, one has a choice of using the default browser, or installing some other browser; let's assume that knowing which browser is better for a specific application is an indication of intelligence, and the more obscure the browser, the more intelligence is indicated by the knowledge that the obscure browser is better for a specific application. The effects would be moderated by the assumption that the default browser is better for a specific application.
The upshot would be that, assuming all browsers are of equal quality overall, the average intelligence of users of the default browser would be lower than that of users of non-default browsers, especially obscure non-default browsers.
Internet Explorer is the default browser in all versions of Windows since Windows 95, and Windows is the most widely used operating system by far; I think my argument would explain why the average IQ of Internet Explorer users is slightly lower than the average IQ of users of other browsers, and that therefore the study cited doesn't really say anything about Internet Explorer, per se.
(I prefer Firefox -- which is the default in Ubuntu and in Fedora, but not in Windows.)
$95 is a more realistic price for Windows 7 for most users willing and able to pay for software. However, even in wealthy parts of the world, people who think it's reasonable to buy computer hardware often don't think it's reasonable to buy software, since it's so easy to get bootleg software. In much of the world, "legit" proprietary software is practically unheard of, and since you want bootleg Windows XP to run bootleg Microsoft Office or bootleg Starcraft, you don't have any interest in Fedora or Ubuntu or SUSE.
I'm coming to think the real challenge to FLOSS isn't the people who will spend $500 on proprietary software rather than $0 on free (as in speech) software, but the people who will spend $0 on bootleg proprietary software instead of $0 on free software.
that adds no real value for their customers and does something that almost anyone could replicate very quickly and cheaply.
Come to think of it, you could advertise a sublet on Craigslist for free, and maintain your control over the entire process, including running background checks on the renters, getting insurance, and all the rest. It doesn't sound like Airbnb adds anything useful at all.
AFAICT, sounds like an absolutely classic dot-com disaster waiting to happen.
This is the disaster unfolding.
The other day, I was looking at yet another hyperbolic report from Symantec that 60,000 new malware variants are released per day. Among the many reasons I find this claim dubious is that it's pretty damned obvious that most malware infections are on old Windows XP installations, which is significantly less secure than newer versions of Windows, especially if they're not being updated regularly. And in those circumstances, why would anyone be wasting time and effort writing new malware, when old malware can already move in and claim the PC as part of a botnet?