US policy is to deliberately create unnecessary nuclear waste, instead of recycling it via proven technology, when one of the biggest objections to nuclear power generation is the production of nuclear waste?
The game publishers fight against the spread of the games they published. I expect that game developers are divided on the subject, but that at least some of them agree with us and would prefer that their games be given away freely and appreciated in perpetuity.
The real joke here is, the problem with digital storage is that the only way to preserve digital information in the long term is to make many copies of it, and recopy it frequently. So, the best available way to preserve digitized cultural artifacts -- music, videos, games, etc. -- is to get them out on the peer-to-peer networks and keep them circulating. The "pirates" are doing more for the long term welfare of humanity than their opponents.
That's a foolish argument. No one designed our DNA, and even if someone did, it doesn't follow that we should obey that design intention.
I strongly suspect that narrative memory is one of humanity's early inventions. That is, we are constantly revising and repeating to ourselves the stories of our lives. If we were not doing this, we would forget. I believe this was actually an invention we stumbled across. We are self-conscious through constructing a narrative model of our identities and criticizing those models. Introspection and internal monologue were the first step; writing was the second.
So, I think we've already socially engineered around that limitation of our DNA, and moreover, most of what we value about ourselves and our cultures is based upon that social engineering.
From that, I think there are two reasons to argue against the value of cultural forgetting. First, it cuts against the logic of what makes modern humans what we are. Second, as the method we use to remember is subject to gradually creeping distortions, it is important to check our narrative memory against material artifacts from time to time.
In that essay, he's got the clearest explanation of the concepts of "modern" and "postmodern" that I've ever seen -- and I used to be a literature student.
The Modern period was not misnamed. True, the ordinary word ``modern'' is associated with ``new'' and ``now'', but the historical period we call Modern chose to associate itself with the ``new'' and the ``now'' in such a deep way that we actually see the breakdown of the whole notion of periods. The Modern period is the period that refuses to die. The world is now an odd mix of the Modern and the postmodern. Oddly, it's not just because the Modern refuses to die, but also because the postmodern refuses to kill the Modern. But then, the postmodern refuses to kill anything completely.
Yes, you could buy a netbook for less. But, I don't want a netbook. I don't want to have a keyboard and a mouse. I want something I can use laying down for casual usage. You wouldn't use it for extensive work -- though, with something to prop it up and a bluetooth keyboard, you could use it much more extensively for document editing.
I can't afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a computing device I can't use for extensive work. I don't think I'm alone in that.
City College of San Francisco has a lot of online courses, and a lot of hybrid courses that are mostly online, with occasional face-to-face meetings. I found that the quality varied a great deal, but ultimately, it depended upon the instructor.
There are a few distinctions between online classes and face-to-face classes, in practice. First, there's the quality of the instructor's writing. I had a few instructors who posted notes online that, in scope and quality, were as good or better than our textbooks. I had one instructor who posted almost no notes at all. Second, there's the quality of the online discussion. In that context, the quality of your fellow students' participation is as important, if not more important, than the quality of the instructor's participation. At least sometimes, I found having excellent fellow students made up for having a lousy instructor.
Finally, last semester I took all my classes online or mostly online, and that proved to be a mistake. There is something to be said for immediate, real-time interaction between an instructor and students, and it takes more independent work to make up for that.
The trouble with many uses of MMORPGs to supply evidence for social science theories is that the MMORPGs are designed, manipulated, and controlled to conform to those theories. I get particularly tired of the crowing about MMORPGs demonstrating the validity of economic theories, when the developers regularly tweak the game world so that it will conform to their understanding of economics.
Of course in MMORPGs people avoid social networks of enemies. This is encouraged by game design, when not outright mandated. MMORPGs often include mechanics for detecting those social networks, to allow for avoiding them or engaging them in combat. In games in general, violent conflict is exaggerated, and in MMORPGs, in the past you would often see complaints from players about game mechanics allowing cooperation between members of groups defined within the game as enemies. Nowadays, MMORPGs are designed to limit or prohibit that.
In the real world, when you're walking around, you don't see friends of friends labeled in blue, or friends of enemies labeled in red. Yet that's a standard practice in MMORPGs.
There are doubtlessly some social science observations worth making about MMORPG player interactions. But observations about designed and constrained behavior isn't really valid.
Seriously, as far as I've ever understood the concept of a "free market," I've never understood how it could not be unstable and temporary.
That is, in an ideal free market, equally capitalized businesses compete for profits. It's a competition, meaning some businesses win more profits than others. The profits become capital in the next round of investment -- that's what capitalism means. So, in the next round, the businesses are not equally capitalized, and the businesses with more capital have significant competitive advantages over those with less.
In effect, the subject of competition in a free market is control of the market, ending the free market.
From the scenario described above, the problem isn't that the Internet preserved the memory of a youthful mistake; the problem is that a potential employer made a hiring decision on the basis of that mistake. Hiding the truth is an imperfect solution to an unjust world; a just human world would never forget, but would understand and forgive, when there has been an effort to make amends.
In fact, I think we could argue that deliberate forgetting, instead of making amends, is part of the problem. Some people are better at hiding the truth than others. And come to think of it, for a lot of potential employers, someone skilled at hiding their own past is likely someone skilled at hiding their employers' mistakes.
Take a look at the big black splotch in the Gulf of Mexico as a reminder of the consequences of forgetting mistakes and going on as if they hadn't happened.
So, this is a case of, "I have a stereotyped expectation about a culture, which doesn't match my encounter with this culture. Why isn't the culture conforming to my stereotyped expectation?"
It can also be easier to describe in written form or verbally how to do something by using a terminal.
That's a major advantage. Support forums for Windows have to rely on series of screenshots, plus descriptions, or else grainy YouTube videos. For Linux, it's just, "copy and paste this to a terminal prompt."
Well, except I'm starting to see instructions for Windows that refer to the command line, and there are Ubuntu tutorials that do new users the "favor" of using screenshots and narration instead of commands for the terminal.
Frankly, people just need to get over the idea that there's anything scary or primitive about the terminal. People still read books after the invention of television.
In a fresh install of Windows 7, I need to download or purchase and install an office suite, an archive manager, a program to display Acrobat files, a photo editor, and several other applications and utilities, and a few device drivers. Each is a separate installation process from a different Website.
In a fresh install of Ubuntu Linux, all of these things are already installed.
To install additional software in Windows 7, I have to find the Websites to download them from. In Ubuntu Linux, everything is in the repository.
A recurring problem with Windows is version conflicts between DLLs. In Linux, installation, removal, and resources are all managed by the package manager.
Windows 7 has some good points. But it's much, much easier to get a working system set up with Ubuntu Linux.
There's a tendency, in US at least, of assuming that the Bill of Rights covers all possible contingencies. As Lessig laid out in Code 2.0, laws were designed with contemporary or foreseeable contingencies in mind. In the late 18th century, they wouldn't have anticipated a scenario in which one private organization was in a position to accumulate enormous amounts of publicly available data, index it thoroughly, and make it available to anyone anywhere instantly.
We're in a new situation, and need to have a rational and democratic discussion of what new principles and rules we should have.
My impression is that the key is finding some way to get the encrypted passwords off the target system, so they can be tested at leisure. For instance, the password files on most *nix systems can be read by any user -- so, if an attacker can get access to a legitimate account, or finagle downloading an arbitrary file, then they can run the dictionary attack on their own machine.
In the repositories for Ubuntu, there are two utilities that generate random, pronounceable words: apg, and pwgen. The passwords produced by apg are more easily pronounced, and are displayed with pronunciation guides, but not quite as secure -- though I expect they're secure enough. The programs are generally available, but the Ubuntu version of apg has a nice configuration file -- which seems to be an undocumented addition.
I find that pronounceable passwords help with the first few times I enter a password, before it's totally memorized, and entering the password is mostly a matter of muscle memory.
People already know to keep track of their wallets. They already know that they need to report lost credit cards, etc., if they lose their wallets -- reporting a lost password would follow that familiar pattern.
Microsoft's online support database is pretty good. But if there's no answer there, there's no answer. With a little more digging, you can find Microsoft's official support forums, in which trained professional Microsoft technicians admit they don't understand your problems and can't fix them.
It's much, much easier to find fixes to problems on Ubuntu. FLOSS makes it possible for skilled users to discover how things work; the relative popularity of Ubuntu means that problems and fixes can be found readily online.
The last straw that led me to switch to Linux primarily was trying to fix a problem with a security suite, Kaspersky, that kept disabling my LAN connectivity. I checked the official forums -- there were lots of discussions of the problem. No one knew how to fix it. There were various guesses about fixing it by renaming DLL files to disable some feature, and some guesses about what the configuration options might do, but no one was sure. I never fixed the problem.
My typical experience with technical problems in Microsoft software is that they're usually very easy to fix. When they're not easy to fix, they can't be fixed at all.
With open source software, there's a continous chain, from the original developers of an application, to users with comparable knowledge who can read the source code, to those with enough technical knowledge to go over the documentation and edit the configuration files and write up how-to guides, to the people who know enough to Google the problem, to the raw beginners. With closed-source software, there is a large gap in that chain -- and moreover, software isn't designed with the assumption that the user should be able to modify it, meaning that much that could be clarified is obscured.
Totally agreed. Centralized repositories and intelligent package management are the biggest practical advantages to using a coherent Linux distribution like Ubuntu. The second biggest, which is related, is that the basic installation of Ubuntu includes all the standard applications a typical user needs: Firefox, Evolution, OpenOffice, etc.
You can complain about those applications -- in fact, you probably will -- but they do their jobs.
That would at least go some way in taking the edge off the British nationalism.
One thing I miss about the older Doctor Who series was that at least sometimes there were companions and major characters who were not from Earth -- even if they were aliens who conveniently looked and behaved exactly like humans from Earth.
I found it puzzling that my stepson was required to have a (very expensive) graphing calculator, when his introductory algebra classes haven't yet reached plotting curves. Graphing "2X + 1 = 0" is better done, and more easily, with a pencil and a straight edge.
Slashdot Mirror
US policy is to deliberately create unnecessary nuclear waste, instead of recycling it via proven technology, when one of the biggest objections to nuclear power generation is the production of nuclear waste?
I hadn't realized this. This is pretty appalling.
The game publishers fight against the spread of the games they published. I expect that game developers are divided on the subject, but that at least some of them agree with us and would prefer that their games be given away freely and appreciated in perpetuity.
The real joke here is, the problem with digital storage is that the only way to preserve digital information in the long term is to make many copies of it, and recopy it frequently. So, the best available way to preserve digitized cultural artifacts -- music, videos, games, etc. -- is to get them out on the peer-to-peer networks and keep them circulating. The "pirates" are doing more for the long term welfare of humanity than their opponents.
It's built into our DNA.
That's a foolish argument. No one designed our DNA, and even if someone did, it doesn't follow that we should obey that design intention.
I strongly suspect that narrative memory is one of humanity's early inventions. That is, we are constantly revising and repeating to ourselves the stories of our lives. If we were not doing this, we would forget. I believe this was actually an invention we stumbled across. We are self-conscious through constructing a narrative model of our identities and criticizing those models. Introspection and internal monologue were the first step; writing was the second.
So, I think we've already socially engineered around that limitation of our DNA, and moreover, most of what we value about ourselves and our cultures is based upon that social engineering.
From that, I think there are two reasons to argue against the value of cultural forgetting. First, it cuts against the logic of what makes modern humans what we are. Second, as the method we use to remember is subject to gradually creeping distortions, it is important to check our narrative memory against material artifacts from time to time.
In that essay, he's got the clearest explanation of the concepts of "modern" and "postmodern" that I've ever seen -- and I used to be a literature student.
Bah. It just lists rubbish. And it's pathologically eclectic.
Some people are less afraid of SkyNet than they are of regular expressions.
Yes, you could buy a netbook for less. But, I don't want a netbook. I don't want to have a keyboard and a mouse. I want something I can use laying down for casual usage. You wouldn't use it for extensive work -- though, with something to prop it up and a bluetooth keyboard, you could use it much more extensively for document editing.
I can't afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a computing device I can't use for extensive work. I don't think I'm alone in that.
City College of San Francisco has a lot of online courses, and a lot of hybrid courses that are mostly online, with occasional face-to-face meetings. I found that the quality varied a great deal, but ultimately, it depended upon the instructor.
There are a few distinctions between online classes and face-to-face classes, in practice. First, there's the quality of the instructor's writing. I had a few instructors who posted notes online that, in scope and quality, were as good or better than our textbooks. I had one instructor who posted almost no notes at all. Second, there's the quality of the online discussion. In that context, the quality of your fellow students' participation is as important, if not more important, than the quality of the instructor's participation. At least sometimes, I found having excellent fellow students made up for having a lousy instructor.
Finally, last semester I took all my classes online or mostly online, and that proved to be a mistake. There is something to be said for immediate, real-time interaction between an instructor and students, and it takes more independent work to make up for that.
The trouble with many uses of MMORPGs to supply evidence for social science theories is that the MMORPGs are designed, manipulated, and controlled to conform to those theories. I get particularly tired of the crowing about MMORPGs demonstrating the validity of economic theories, when the developers regularly tweak the game world so that it will conform to their understanding of economics.
Of course in MMORPGs people avoid social networks of enemies. This is encouraged by game design, when not outright mandated. MMORPGs often include mechanics for detecting those social networks, to allow for avoiding them or engaging them in combat. In games in general, violent conflict is exaggerated, and in MMORPGs, in the past you would often see complaints from players about game mechanics allowing cooperation between members of groups defined within the game as enemies. Nowadays, MMORPGs are designed to limit or prohibit that.
In the real world, when you're walking around, you don't see friends of friends labeled in blue, or friends of enemies labeled in red. Yet that's a standard practice in MMORPGs.
There are doubtlessly some social science observations worth making about MMORPG player interactions. But observations about designed and constrained behavior isn't really valid.
Seriously, as far as I've ever understood the concept of a "free market," I've never understood how it could not be unstable and temporary.
That is, in an ideal free market, equally capitalized businesses compete for profits. It's a competition, meaning some businesses win more profits than others. The profits become capital in the next round of investment -- that's what capitalism means. So, in the next round, the businesses are not equally capitalized, and the businesses with more capital have significant competitive advantages over those with less.
In effect, the subject of competition in a free market is control of the market, ending the free market.
Is anyone else reminded of the movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?
From the scenario described above, the problem isn't that the Internet preserved the memory of a youthful mistake; the problem is that a potential employer made a hiring decision on the basis of that mistake. Hiding the truth is an imperfect solution to an unjust world; a just human world would never forget, but would understand and forgive, when there has been an effort to make amends.
In fact, I think we could argue that deliberate forgetting, instead of making amends, is part of the problem. Some people are better at hiding the truth than others. And come to think of it, for a lot of potential employers, someone skilled at hiding their own past is likely someone skilled at hiding their employers' mistakes.
Take a look at the big black splotch in the Gulf of Mexico as a reminder of the consequences of forgetting mistakes and going on as if they hadn't happened.
So, this is a case of, "I have a stereotyped expectation about a culture, which doesn't match my encounter with this culture. Why isn't the culture conforming to my stereotyped expectation?"
It can also be easier to describe in written form or verbally how to do something by using a terminal.
That's a major advantage. Support forums for Windows have to rely on series of screenshots, plus descriptions, or else grainy YouTube videos. For Linux, it's just, "copy and paste this to a terminal prompt."
Well, except I'm starting to see instructions for Windows that refer to the command line, and there are Ubuntu tutorials that do new users the "favor" of using screenshots and narration instead of commands for the terminal.
Frankly, people just need to get over the idea that there's anything scary or primitive about the terminal. People still read books after the invention of television.
I'm sick of hearing this nonsense.
In a fresh install of Windows 7, I need to download or purchase and install an office suite, an archive manager, a program to display Acrobat files, a photo editor, and several other applications and utilities, and a few device drivers. Each is a separate installation process from a different Website.
In a fresh install of Ubuntu Linux, all of these things are already installed.
To install additional software in Windows 7, I have to find the Websites to download them from. In Ubuntu Linux, everything is in the repository.
A recurring problem with Windows is version conflicts between DLLs. In Linux, installation, removal, and resources are all managed by the package manager.
Windows 7 has some good points. But it's much, much easier to get a working system set up with Ubuntu Linux.
There's a tendency, in US at least, of assuming that the Bill of Rights covers all possible contingencies. As Lessig laid out in Code 2.0, laws were designed with contemporary or foreseeable contingencies in mind. In the late 18th century, they wouldn't have anticipated a scenario in which one private organization was in a position to accumulate enormous amounts of publicly available data, index it thoroughly, and make it available to anyone anywhere instantly.
We're in a new situation, and need to have a rational and democratic discussion of what new principles and rules we should have.
I used to have a bank account with Bank of America. The most critical password I had was a four-digit number that I wasn't allowed to change.
My impression is that the key is finding some way to get the encrypted passwords off the target system, so they can be tested at leisure. For instance, the password files on most *nix systems can be read by any user -- so, if an attacker can get access to a legitimate account, or finagle downloading an arbitrary file, then they can run the dictionary attack on their own machine.
In the repositories for Ubuntu, there are two utilities that generate random, pronounceable words: apg, and pwgen. The passwords produced by apg are more easily pronounced, and are displayed with pronunciation guides, but not quite as secure -- though I expect they're secure enough. The programs are generally available, but the Ubuntu version of apg has a nice configuration file -- which seems to be an undocumented addition.
I find that pronounceable passwords help with the first few times I enter a password, before it's totally memorized, and entering the password is mostly a matter of muscle memory.
People already know to keep track of their wallets. They already know that they need to report lost credit cards, etc., if they lose their wallets -- reporting a lost password would follow that familiar pattern.
Microsoft's online support database is pretty good. But if there's no answer there, there's no answer. With a little more digging, you can find Microsoft's official support forums, in which trained professional Microsoft technicians admit they don't understand your problems and can't fix them.
It's much, much easier to find fixes to problems on Ubuntu. FLOSS makes it possible for skilled users to discover how things work; the relative popularity of Ubuntu means that problems and fixes can be found readily online.
The last straw that led me to switch to Linux primarily was trying to fix a problem with a security suite, Kaspersky, that kept disabling my LAN connectivity. I checked the official forums -- there were lots of discussions of the problem. No one knew how to fix it. There were various guesses about fixing it by renaming DLL files to disable some feature, and some guesses about what the configuration options might do, but no one was sure. I never fixed the problem.
My typical experience with technical problems in Microsoft software is that they're usually very easy to fix. When they're not easy to fix, they can't be fixed at all.
With open source software, there's a continous chain, from the original developers of an application, to users with comparable knowledge who can read the source code, to those with enough technical knowledge to go over the documentation and edit the configuration files and write up how-to guides, to the people who know enough to Google the problem, to the raw beginners. With closed-source software, there is a large gap in that chain -- and moreover, software isn't designed with the assumption that the user should be able to modify it, meaning that much that could be clarified is obscured.
Totally agreed. Centralized repositories and intelligent package management are the biggest practical advantages to using a coherent Linux distribution like Ubuntu. The second biggest, which is related, is that the basic installation of Ubuntu includes all the standard applications a typical user needs: Firefox, Evolution, OpenOffice, etc.
You can complain about those applications -- in fact, you probably will -- but they do their jobs.
That would at least go some way in taking the edge off the British nationalism.
One thing I miss about the older Doctor Who series was that at least sometimes there were companions and major characters who were not from Earth -- even if they were aliens who conveniently looked and behaved exactly like humans from Earth.
That's an informative response.
I found it puzzling that my stepson was required to have a (very expensive) graphing calculator, when his introductory algebra classes haven't yet reached plotting curves. Graphing "2X + 1 = 0" is better done, and more easily, with a pencil and a straight edge.