Communism isn't an inherently evil and nasty system.. The communist governments of Russia and China were/are vicious and corrupt, but that's more a statement about the people that lead them than of the basic systems themselves.
You are totally wrong. The concept of Communism itself is not intrinsically evil, but the problem is that it's impossible to implement without oppression and tight, central control.
The lesson of Einstein is that even if you are an absolutely brilliant person in physics, perhaps one of the smartest people who ever lived, you can be a complete ignorant moron when it comes to politics and human relations.
A LOT of Slashdotters could learn this lesson. Just because you are a good programmer (or pick your geek subject) doesn't mean you know beans about how the world should be run.
And dare I say it -- Socialists should learn this lesson. If you are a socialist, then you have no clue about how the world should be run, and should just stay away. Socialism is intrinsically anti-freedom.
And you, Sir, are the sort of parent that should not have kids.
Actually, I am exactly the sort of parent that should have kids. Fortunately, I have two of them. I have to admit, I am a great father.
You are the sort of self-pompous jerk that opposes teachers striking so they can get a fair wage.
And you are the sort of person who needs to take basic economics. People are paid exactly what they are worth, no more and no less. People are not paid based on their worth to society. They are paid based on supply and demand. Teachers are low paid because there is a glut of teachers. If you want teachers to be paid more, then create a demand for better teachers. This can be done by privitizing education, because giving parents more control over the public schools means that parents would tend to pick the better schools, which also would tend to have the best teachers.
Ironically, I assume you are a defender of teacher unions. Unions, since they protect the worst teachers and completely remove any sort of merit-based pay, artificially hold down salaries to the lowest common denominators. Of course, it's also worth pointing out that the teacher unions have done more to destroy education than any outside enemy of the United States ever could have.
If you actually took the time to raise your child, you would prepare the kid to rationally discuss opposing view points.
If you would take the time to actually read what I'm saying, that is exactly what I'm advocating. You and those like you are the ones advocating that teachers indoctrinate the students to only the teacher's point of view.
Back on Aug 02 of last year, I asked Carmack about his future goals the last time this came up. His answers were very enlightening, and I encourage people to check them out.
I would be curious to hear from him if any of his goals have changed, either more or less ambitiously.
Why does having, or even expressing, an opinion mean that I "care" what opinion a student ends up with?
Having an opinion, and expressing an opinion, are two radically different ideas. That you mix them here implies that I'm not being understood.
Everybody understands, including the students, that teachers have opinions. But who cares? Go back to first principles: The purpose of you being there is to EDUCATE THE STUDENTS to the best of your abilities. Ideally, we would like the students to engage critical thinking, and not just memorize facts.
How do we engage critical thinking? There's the rub. One way to do that is by getting the student to debate the subject against a foil, either other students or even the teacher. But notice that it's the process of debate that's important, not the opinion's themselves.
A good teacher ought to be able to debate any side of an issue, or add new questions to a debate between students, on both sides. Note that it's not necessary for a teacher to agree with either side, it's only necessary that the teacher be able to keep the debate engaged.
The ideal of a totally unbiased presentation, of only the true "facts", remains just that: an ideal, unattainable.
That's like saying that since all software has bugs, therefore we shouldn't strive to fix any of the bugs.
It is a much more powerful lesson for students to learn that all sources of information, be it a propaganda scandal sheet or a trusted teacher, must be evaluated and weighed.
Exactly. And that should be the goal of the teacher: to present all the sources of information and allow the debate to happen. Never forget that standing at the podium gives you a privileged position that it shouldn't. Yes, some students will "debate the teacher", but others who are more "follower" type personalities tend to assume that teacher knows what they're talking about.
When you learn to see biases, no matter the source, you begin to compensate for them and weight them. And at that point, you begin to have some hope of actually finding the truth.
By all means, teach the students about bias. But use other sources. Your job is to TEACH in the best way possible, not to be the bad example of bias.
But a debate among students with different opinions in a classroom serves the same purpose, and probably does it better.
Exactly. The teacher's job is foster the debate by introducing new facts -- to BOTH sides.
And where exactly did the original poster say he cared what opinion his students left his class with?
The original poster said: "Not only do I refer to Microsoft as M$, but I make sure my students are well aware of my M$ bias by relating to them the underhanded marketing practices M$ engages in. The truth hurts, but I'm sure you'll get over it."
I think I can prove you wrong in a very simple way. Consider this:
Often enough, they disagree, vocieferously. Then we have a discussion, a debate, sometimes even an argument.
Great! And what if they AGREE with you? What has THAT student learned? Absolutely nothing, except that they agree with the teacher. No thought process has been engaged. So are only students that disagree with you to benefit from the active debate of an issue?
A good teacher can -- and should -- debate a student from the complete opposite of whatever position the student takes. The student should be engaged to defend WHY they think what they think.
Note that debating a student does not require any consideration of the opinion of the teacher. It only requires that the teacher be knowledgeable enough of the subject to be able to argue either side of a debate.
That's what I'm saying. Debate is when all sides of an issue are considered, and teacher doesn't care about which side a student takes as long as the student is thinking about it. Indoctrination is when the teacher cares about what opinion the student ends up with.
I don't see him saying he indoctrinates them. He informs them of MS marketing practices that he thinks are bad, and tells them he thinks they're bad. In my experience, teachers like that respond well to arguments against their positions.
Do you still feel that way if the teacher "informs" them that Microsoft produces the best software in the industry, and that's all anyone should ever use? Or "informs" them that Open Source software is used for criminal hacking, and that it should be avoided? Or that OSS is generally inferior to Microsoft?
And again, I have to ask: Is it therefore OK for a teacher to give their personal "opinions" about religion and the fact that everyone is going to hell that is not a Christian?
Are you serious??? You would fire every single teacher in the country! Nobody can possibly teach anything without expressing their personal evaluation of what they are teaching.
Bullshit. I don't know about your teachers, but I didn't have my Chemistry teacher ranting about DuPont's policies, or whatever. I'm not saying that the history teacher has to be neutral on whether Nazis were the bad guys, but I am saying that they should not go out of their way to inject their personal opinions.
Put it this way: Would it still be acceptable to you if you had a technology teacher who was pro-Microsoft and told the students every day that only good software comes from Microsoft? Would it be OK if they railed against open source software? Hey, it's just their opinion, right?
Or if the history teacher does a little "tangent" about historically only Christians go to heaven, and everyone else goes to hell? That's OK, right?
What the fuck are you thinking? I didn't see anywhere where this guy said he badmouths M$ in the classroom.
He said, "Not only do I refer to Microsoft as M$, but I make sure my students are well aware of my M$ bias by relating to them the underhanded marketing practices M$ engages in."
Critical thinking and acting on your analyses are good things, not bad. Teaching people to gloss over things and not have an opinion is the real evil.
Exactly where did I say that people shouldn't have opinions? I said that teachers shouldn't indoctrinate their students, and should allow the STUDENTS to form their opinions based on critical thinking through the presenting of all the facts.
Unfortunately, you just don't get it. And far too many teachers are like you.
That's really open minded of you to "allow" your students to disagree with you and think for themselves. But that totally misses the point.
The point is that the students shouldn't HAVE to block out your opinions. If you structure your lessons such that they have all the information at their disposal, and let them draw their own conclusions without your tainting the evidence, they will learn much better.
Now, you might tell me that you DO present all the evidence. My respons is that I highly doubt it. If you are so misguided that you can't even keep your opinions out of your lessons, it's highly improbable that you have a higher standard of presenting all evidence so the students can come to an informed opinion on their own.
I would hope that you have instilled, as a responsible parent, a strong belief system in your own children, so that they might be able to better appreciate their own beliefs through opposing viewpoints.
Do you realize that what you just wrote directly contradicts your teaching philosophy??? I'm the one arguing that I want my children exposed to all sides of an issue -- without bias. You are the one saying it's OK to expose them to only your point of view. You try and cushion that by saying that it's "their right to express their own opinions, even if it disagrees with my own", as if that matters a hill of beans.
The point is that you are taking a group of kids and indoctrinating them from a position of power. That gives you an unfair advantage in filtering what they see, hear and learn. I can't stress this highly enough: YOUR OPINION IS COMPLETELY WORTHLESS TO THEIR EDUCATION. What is valuable is presenting ALL the evidence, and structuring the lesson such that they can come to their own conclusions. And that conclusion might be opposite to your own.
I strongly hope that you will rethink your philosophy. It's a huge position of responsibility that you hold, and frankly you are abusing it.
If the teacher you rant against is discussing the ethics of licensing, and the conclusion is that certain practices of certain business units is "unethical," then he should not be fired.
The typical way to teach ethics is to give an ethical dilemma to the class, and then divide the class into "camps" to debate each side. It is NOT the teacher getting up in front of the class and "drawing conclusions" for the class.
Somewhere along the line, the people at Microsoft responsible for designing and enforcing these ELUAs learned that either (a) they were acceptably ethical or (b) the ends justify the means or (c) ethics really don't matter in business.
You seem to imply that if the teacher feels strongly enough in his opinion, then it's OK to indoctrinate the class with it. What I'm saying is that the teacher has no business giving his opinion on ANYTHING under any circumstances.
If the well-reasoned conclusion happens to coincide with the teacher's own philosophies (e.g. don't kill someone else in anger), should that conclusion NOT be taught because it falls into "personal politics"?
What I'm saying is that it should be irrelevent what the teacher's opinion is. Present the facts -- the HONEST, UNBIASED facts -- and let the students debate it out. The teacher should be able to argue from any side of the argument to keep the debate going. If the teacher can't make arguments for EULA's as they are written (and yes, you can make arguments for them), then that teacher should not be teaching the lesson.
Or to put it another way, if the students know what the teacher's opinion is at the end of the lesson, then that teacher has failed.
I have to be honest with you. I detest teachers like you who can't keep their personal politics out of the classroom. You, sir, should be fired immediately and NEVER allowed to teach students ever again. If I had my child in your classroom, I would make it my mission to see this happen.
And yes, I don't give a shit whether what you preach is "true" or not. It's totally irrelevent. Even if you were teaching a class about politics, I would be offended that you are letting your personal biases affect education.
I hope someday you will realize that your purpose in school is NOT to indoctrinate your students, any more than you would like a teacher to, say, indoctrinate your children with their opinions about that fact that your children should follow the teacher's religion.
Microsoft is clearly ignoring history here. They should learn from the example of one of the oldest open-source programs out there. Clearly if there are lessons to be learned, we should learn from this piece of brilliantly designed software.
When I was in school, we discussed all these problems and I recall that there were plans presented, that would eliminate starvation on this planet for about 20 billion US $.
There are a lot of things you can learn in school, but how to eliminate starvation is usually not one of them.
It has helped 1.7 Million people so far and they don't starve for 20 years now! So it's not a one-day solution.
Ah, but it is. Does the organization still exist? Yes -- therefore, the problem wasn't "eliminated", it was only solved for a day, and then the organization needed more money for another day.
Think about the words "eliminate starvation". To me, that means making people self-sufficient such that they don't need handouts anymore. Unfortunately, history proves to us that the more you hand out something, the more people show up to accept the handouts. They become dependent on the handouts, because it's human nature for most people to want the "easy" solution rather than work hard to support themselves. But a stable, healthy society requires everyone to support themselves.
If $20 or $40 billion or whatever could educate the world to be able to grow their own crops and become self sufficient, the money would be donated tomorrow. But it's just not that simple. You can't discount the effect that corrupt governments have on the ability of a people to become self-sufficient.
And the truth about the USA is, it wasnt built by capitalism, it was built by slavery
Uh, no. In fact, Slavery held back the American economy. Look at any economic analysis of slavery: SLAVERY IS NOT ECONOMICAL. When you factor in all the costs of slavery, it's much cheaper to pay someone a wage and let them take care of themselves.
So your solution is to use the $40 billion to convert everyone to communism, thereby eliminating the very process that produced the $40 billion in the first place?
Actually, I was arguing exactly the opposite: The cure for hunger is MORE freedom and MORE capitalism.
how exactly do you propose we distribute capitalism and freedom evenly?
Unfortunately, there are only two ways:
1) Go in, overthrow the government, install a new one, and do "nation building", or
2) Subtly push and prod various governments to give more freedom to their people.
(1) is the most direct (and arguably, most successful) way to go, but it does have the downside of being kind of socially unacceptible to a lot of the world.:) Which leaves us with (2), which is where we currently find ourselves.
What we know DOESN'T work is dropping food and money on a place that can't handle it. The problem is that it tends not to find the people it's supposed to help, and just gets diverted to the corrupt government and/or corrupt "warlords".
People very often discount the effect that the lack of infrastructure has on even the best intentions. Unfortunately, intentions aren't enough. [
And what do you do the next day once the money's gone? Oh my god! The hungry are still there!
When you realize that the reason people are hungry is not lack of food, you will be Enlightened.
The reason people are hungry is not unequal distribution of wealth, it's because of unequal distribution of capitalism and freedom. Lack of food and money is a symptom, not a root cause.
What if there was a lot of time where things were happening, but not towards our development as human beings?
I think there was a lot of time developing the "infrastructure" needed to support self-aware intelligence. Clearly you can't jump from a single cell to human brain overnight. I'm not going to venture a guess what the "minimum" time-line would be, but there have clearly been a LOT of failures before we came along.
Well, our galaxy is about 150,000 light years across. [nasa.gov] It also has about 400 billion [gmu.edu] stars. Even if we had the capability to transport lots of people at the speed of light, we could only send 1 person to every ~40 stars!
The theory is that once a civilization achieves space travel, after a couple of centuries (or 1000 years, pick your number) they would tend to seed the nearest star systems using multigeneration sub-light ships. Of course, once those are seeded, the cycle begins again and more systems get seeded in a geometric progression. It only takes a few million years give or take to fill a galaxy. That sounds like a lot, but it's a wink of an eye compared to the age of the galaxy. Given that we weren't seeded by now and had the time to develop, it argues that this galaxy at least has never had intelligent life before us. It's possible that we are developing "simultaneously" (i.e., in the same million-year window) with other species, but again the odds are very unlikely given the billions of years we're talking about.
Of course, it's highly unlikely that a civilization would seed other galaxies, since the typical distance between galaxies is too immense even for multigeneration ships. So this argument only suggests that our own galaxy is empty other than us. But it still suggests that intelligent, self-aware life is extremely unlikely.
The most dumbfounding was at the Fort Gates Ferry, a ramshackle barge that crosses the St. Johns River near Welaka. Priest would often demonstrate the invention there, transmitting video from a computer on one side of the river to a partner on the other side. It seemed, the Zekko executives thought, an impossible test to fake.
Then they saw more than a half-mile of coaxial cable coiled on the dock.
"Madison had actually run co-ax under the St. Johns River there," Mons said.
Man, it might be hoax, but this dude worked HARD to keep the hoax alive. It makes you wonder how far he would get in life he put all this energy into something worthwhile.
I hate to admire someone who's basically a thief, but anyone who goes to that much trouble almost deserves to get away with it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Communism isn't an inherently evil and nasty system.. The communist governments of Russia and China were/are vicious and corrupt, but that's more a statement about the people that lead them than of the basic systems themselves.
You are totally wrong. The concept of Communism itself is not intrinsically evil, but the problem is that it's impossible to implement without oppression and tight, central control.
The lesson of Einstein is that even if you are an absolutely brilliant person in physics, perhaps one of the smartest people who ever lived, you can be a complete ignorant moron when it comes to politics and human relations.
A LOT of Slashdotters could learn this lesson. Just because you are a good programmer (or pick your geek subject) doesn't mean you know beans about how the world should be run.
And dare I say it -- Socialists should learn this lesson. If you are a socialist, then you have no clue about how the world should be run, and should just stay away. Socialism is intrinsically anti-freedom.
And you, Sir, are the sort of parent that should not have kids.
Actually, I am exactly the sort of parent that should have kids. Fortunately, I have two of them. I have to admit, I am a great father.
You are the sort of self-pompous jerk that opposes teachers striking so they can get a fair wage.
And you are the sort of person who needs to take basic economics. People are paid exactly what they are worth, no more and no less. People are not paid based on their worth to society. They are paid based on supply and demand. Teachers are low paid because there is a glut of teachers. If you want teachers to be paid more, then create a demand for better teachers. This can be done by privitizing education, because giving parents more control over the public schools means that parents would tend to pick the better schools, which also would tend to have the best teachers.
Ironically, I assume you are a defender of teacher unions. Unions, since they protect the worst teachers and completely remove any sort of merit-based pay, artificially hold down salaries to the lowest common denominators. Of course, it's also worth pointing out that the teacher unions have done more to destroy education than any outside enemy of the United States ever could have.
If you actually took the time to raise your child, you would prepare the kid to rationally discuss opposing view points.
If you would take the time to actually read what I'm saying, that is exactly what I'm advocating. You and those like you are the ones advocating that teachers indoctrinate the students to only the teacher's point of view.
Back on Aug 02 of last year, I asked Carmack about his future goals the last time this came up. His answers were very enlightening, and I encourage people to check them out.
I would be curious to hear from him if any of his goals have changed, either more or less ambitiously.
Why does having, or even expressing, an opinion mean that I "care" what opinion a student ends up with?
Having an opinion, and expressing an opinion, are two radically different ideas. That you mix them here implies that I'm not being understood.
Everybody understands, including the students, that teachers have opinions. But who cares? Go back to first principles: The purpose of you being there is to EDUCATE THE STUDENTS to the best of your abilities. Ideally, we would like the students to engage critical thinking, and not just memorize facts.
How do we engage critical thinking? There's the rub. One way to do that is by getting the student to debate the subject against a foil, either other students or even the teacher. But notice that it's the process of debate that's important, not the opinion's themselves.
A good teacher ought to be able to debate any side of an issue, or add new questions to a debate between students, on both sides. Note that it's not necessary for a teacher to agree with either side, it's only necessary that the teacher be able to keep the debate engaged.
The ideal of a totally unbiased presentation, of only the true "facts", remains just that: an ideal, unattainable.
That's like saying that since all software has bugs, therefore we shouldn't strive to fix any of the bugs.
It is a much more powerful lesson for students to learn that all sources of information, be it a propaganda scandal sheet or a trusted teacher, must be evaluated and weighed.
Exactly. And that should be the goal of the teacher: to present all the sources of information and allow the debate to happen. Never forget that standing at the podium gives you a privileged position that it shouldn't. Yes, some students will "debate the teacher", but others who are more "follower" type personalities tend to assume that teacher knows what they're talking about.
When you learn to see biases, no matter the source, you begin to compensate for them and weight them. And at that point, you begin to have some hope of actually finding the truth.
By all means, teach the students about bias. But use other sources. Your job is to TEACH in the best way possible, not to be the bad example of bias.
But a debate among students with different opinions in a classroom serves the same purpose, and probably does it better.
Exactly. The teacher's job is foster the debate by introducing new facts -- to BOTH sides.
And where exactly did the original poster say he cared what opinion his students left his class with?
The original poster said: "Not only do I refer to Microsoft as M$, but I make sure my students are well aware of my M$ bias by relating to them the underhanded marketing practices M$ engages in. The truth hurts, but I'm sure you'll get over it."
Sounds like he cares to me.
I think I can prove you wrong in a very simple way. Consider this:
Often enough, they disagree, vocieferously. Then we have a discussion, a debate, sometimes even an argument.
Great! And what if they AGREE with you? What has THAT student learned? Absolutely nothing, except that they agree with the teacher. No thought process has been engaged. So are only students that disagree with you to benefit from the active debate of an issue?
A good teacher can -- and should -- debate a student from the complete opposite of whatever position the student takes. The student should be engaged to defend WHY they think what they think.
Note that debating a student does not require any consideration of the opinion of the teacher. It only requires that the teacher be knowledgeable enough of the subject to be able to argue either side of a debate.
That's what I'm saying. Debate is when all sides of an issue are considered, and teacher doesn't care about which side a student takes as long as the student is thinking about it. Indoctrination is when the teacher cares about what opinion the student ends up with.
I don't see him saying he indoctrinates them. He informs them of MS marketing practices that he thinks are bad, and tells them he thinks they're bad. In my experience, teachers like that respond well to arguments against their positions.
Do you still feel that way if the teacher "informs" them that Microsoft produces the best software in the industry, and that's all anyone should ever use? Or "informs" them that Open Source software is used for criminal hacking, and that it should be avoided? Or that OSS is generally inferior to Microsoft?
And again, I have to ask: Is it therefore OK for a teacher to give their personal "opinions" about religion and the fact that everyone is going to hell that is not a Christian?
Are you serious??? You would fire every single teacher in the country! Nobody can possibly teach anything without expressing their personal evaluation of what they are teaching.
Bullshit. I don't know about your teachers, but I didn't have my Chemistry teacher ranting about DuPont's policies, or whatever. I'm not saying that the history teacher has to be neutral on whether Nazis were the bad guys, but I am saying that they should not go out of their way to inject their personal opinions.
Put it this way: Would it still be acceptable to you if you had a technology teacher who was pro-Microsoft and told the students every day that only good software comes from Microsoft? Would it be OK if they railed against open source software? Hey, it's just their opinion, right?
Or if the history teacher does a little "tangent" about historically only Christians go to heaven, and everyone else goes to hell? That's OK, right?
You seem to have a reading comprehension problem.
What the fuck are you thinking? I didn't see anywhere where this guy said he badmouths M$ in the classroom.
He said, "Not only do I refer to Microsoft as M$, but I make sure my students are well aware of my M$ bias by relating to them the underhanded marketing practices M$ engages in."
Critical thinking and acting on your analyses are good things, not bad. Teaching people to gloss over things and not have an opinion is the real evil.
Exactly where did I say that people shouldn't have opinions? I said that teachers shouldn't indoctrinate their students, and should allow the STUDENTS to form their opinions based on critical thinking through the presenting of all the facts.
Unfortunately, you just don't get it. And far too many teachers are like you.
That's really open minded of you to "allow" your students to disagree with you and think for themselves. But that totally misses the point.
The point is that the students shouldn't HAVE to block out your opinions. If you structure your lessons such that they have all the information at their disposal, and let them draw their own conclusions without your tainting the evidence, they will learn much better.
Now, you might tell me that you DO present all the evidence. My respons is that I highly doubt it. If you are so misguided that you can't even keep your opinions out of your lessons, it's highly improbable that you have a higher standard of presenting all evidence so the students can come to an informed opinion on their own.
I would hope that you have instilled, as a responsible parent, a strong belief system in your own children, so that they might be able to better appreciate their own beliefs through opposing viewpoints.
Do you realize that what you just wrote directly contradicts your teaching philosophy??? I'm the one arguing that I want my children exposed to all sides of an issue -- without bias. You are the one saying it's OK to expose them to only your point of view. You try and cushion that by saying that it's "their right to express their own opinions, even if it disagrees with my own", as if that matters a hill of beans.
The point is that you are taking a group of kids and indoctrinating them from a position of power. That gives you an unfair advantage in filtering what they see, hear and learn. I can't stress this highly enough: YOUR OPINION IS COMPLETELY WORTHLESS TO THEIR EDUCATION. What is valuable is presenting ALL the evidence, and structuring the lesson such that they can come to their own conclusions. And that conclusion might be opposite to your own.
I strongly hope that you will rethink your philosophy. It's a huge position of responsibility that you hold, and frankly you are abusing it.
If the teacher you rant against is discussing the ethics of licensing, and the conclusion is that certain practices of certain business units is "unethical," then he should not be fired.
The typical way to teach ethics is to give an ethical dilemma to the class, and then divide the class into "camps" to debate each side. It is NOT the teacher getting up in front of the class and "drawing conclusions" for the class.
Somewhere along the line, the people at Microsoft responsible for designing and enforcing these ELUAs learned that either (a) they were acceptably ethical or (b) the ends justify the means or (c) ethics really don't matter in business.
You seem to imply that if the teacher feels strongly enough in his opinion, then it's OK to indoctrinate the class with it. What I'm saying is that the teacher has no business giving his opinion on ANYTHING under any circumstances.
If the well-reasoned conclusion happens to coincide with the teacher's own philosophies (e.g. don't kill someone else in anger), should that conclusion NOT be taught because it falls into "personal politics"?
What I'm saying is that it should be irrelevent what the teacher's opinion is. Present the facts -- the HONEST, UNBIASED facts -- and let the students debate it out. The teacher should be able to argue from any side of the argument to keep the debate going. If the teacher can't make arguments for EULA's as they are written (and yes, you can make arguments for them), then that teacher should not be teaching the lesson.
Or to put it another way, if the students know what the teacher's opinion is at the end of the lesson, then that teacher has failed.
<rant>
I have to be honest with you. I detest teachers like you who can't keep their personal politics out of the classroom. You, sir, should be fired immediately and NEVER allowed to teach students ever again. If I had my child in your classroom, I would make it my mission to see this happen.
And yes, I don't give a shit whether what you preach is "true" or not. It's totally irrelevent. Even if you were teaching a class about politics, I would be offended that you are letting your personal biases affect education.
I hope someday you will realize that your purpose in school is NOT to indoctrinate your students, any more than you would like a teacher to, say, indoctrinate your children with their opinions about that fact that your children should follow the teacher's religion.
</rant>
Microsoft is clearly ignoring history here. They should learn from the example of one of the oldest open-source programs out there. Clearly if there are lessons to be learned, we should learn from this piece of brilliantly designed software.
Of course, I am speaking of Sendmail.
Oops...
How much is that, about 10 bucks American?
When I was in school, we discussed all these problems and I recall that there were plans presented, that would eliminate starvation on this planet for about 20 billion US $.
There are a lot of things you can learn in school, but how to eliminate starvation is usually not one of them.
It has helped 1.7 Million people so far and they don't starve for 20 years now! So it's not a one-day solution.
Ah, but it is. Does the organization still exist? Yes -- therefore, the problem wasn't "eliminated", it was only solved for a day, and then the organization needed more money for another day.
Think about the words "eliminate starvation". To me, that means making people self-sufficient such that they don't need handouts anymore. Unfortunately, history proves to us that the more you hand out something, the more people show up to accept the handouts. They become dependent on the handouts, because it's human nature for most people to want the "easy" solution rather than work hard to support themselves. But a stable, healthy society requires everyone to support themselves.
If $20 or $40 billion or whatever could educate the world to be able to grow their own crops and become self sufficient, the money would be donated tomorrow. But it's just not that simple. You can't discount the effect that corrupt governments have on the ability of a people to become self-sufficient.
unequal distribution of natural resources is much higher on the list.
Nope.
Japan: Natural resource poor, economically rich.
South America: Natural resource rich (hugely so), economically poor.
Heck, let's not even talk about the natural resources of Russia, and how they screwed it up.
That was child abuse, not poverty.
I personally would be happy to pay reparations to former slaves.
Oh wait, they're all dead.
Oh, you mean you want to give out money to people who are totally unaffected by slavery? Sorry, that's a different matter.
And the truth about the USA is, it wasnt built by capitalism, it was built by slavery
Uh, no. In fact, Slavery held back the American economy. Look at any economic analysis of slavery: SLAVERY IS NOT ECONOMICAL. When you factor in all the costs of slavery, it's much cheaper to pay someone a wage and let them take care of themselves.
I don't know about other countries, but point me to an article about someone in the United States who died of starvation. It NEVER happens.
intentions aren't enough.
I think I'm going to make that my new .sig. :)
So your solution is to use the $40 billion to convert everyone to communism, thereby eliminating the very process that produced the $40 billion in the first place?
Actually, I was arguing exactly the opposite: The cure for hunger is MORE freedom and MORE capitalism.
how exactly do you propose we distribute capitalism and freedom evenly?
Unfortunately, there are only two ways:
1) Go in, overthrow the government, install a new one, and do "nation building", or
2) Subtly push and prod various governments to give more freedom to their people.
(1) is the most direct (and arguably, most successful) way to go, but it does have the downside of being kind of socially unacceptible to a lot of the world. :) Which leaves us with (2), which is where we currently find ourselves.
What we know DOESN'T work is dropping food and money on a place that can't handle it. The problem is that it tends not to find the people it's supposed to help, and just gets diverted to the corrupt government and/or corrupt "warlords".
People very often discount the effect that the lack of infrastructure has on even the best intentions. Unfortunately, intentions aren't enough. [
Or feed all the hungry on this planet...
And what do you do the next day once the money's gone? Oh my god! The hungry are still there!
When you realize that the reason people are hungry is not lack of food, you will be Enlightened.
The reason people are hungry is not unequal distribution of wealth, it's because of unequal distribution of capitalism and freedom. Lack of food and money is a symptom, not a root cause.
What if there was a lot of time where things were happening, but not towards our development as human beings?
I think there was a lot of time developing the "infrastructure" needed to support self-aware intelligence. Clearly you can't jump from a single cell to human brain overnight. I'm not going to venture a guess what the "minimum" time-line would be, but there have clearly been a LOT of failures before we came along.
Well, our galaxy is about 150,000 light years across. [nasa.gov] It also has about 400 billion [gmu.edu] stars. Even if we had the capability to transport lots of people at the speed of light, we could only send 1 person to every ~40 stars!
The theory is that once a civilization achieves space travel, after a couple of centuries (or 1000 years, pick your number) they would tend to seed the nearest star systems using multigeneration sub-light ships. Of course, once those are seeded, the cycle begins again and more systems get seeded in a geometric progression. It only takes a few million years give or take to fill a galaxy. That sounds like a lot, but it's a wink of an eye compared to the age of the galaxy. Given that we weren't seeded by now and had the time to develop, it argues that this galaxy at least has never had intelligent life before us. It's possible that we are developing "simultaneously" (i.e., in the same million-year window) with other species, but again the odds are very unlikely given the billions of years we're talking about.
Of course, it's highly unlikely that a civilization would seed other galaxies, since the typical distance between galaxies is too immense even for multigeneration ships. So this argument only suggests that our own galaxy is empty other than us. But it still suggests that intelligent, self-aware life is extremely unlikely.
The most dumbfounding was at the Fort Gates Ferry, a ramshackle barge that crosses the St. Johns River near Welaka. Priest would often demonstrate the invention there, transmitting video from a computer on one side of the river to a partner on the other side. It seemed, the Zekko executives thought, an impossible test to fake.
Then they saw more than a half-mile of coaxial cable coiled on the dock.
"Madison had actually run co-ax under the St. Johns River there," Mons said.
Man, it might be hoax, but this dude worked HARD to keep the hoax alive. It makes you wonder how far he would get in life he put all this energy into something worthwhile.
I hate to admire someone who's basically a thief, but anyone who goes to that much trouble almost deserves to get away with it. :)