I find myself once again responding to Mister I-dont-look-for-replies. I swear, I'm not stalking, and I have nothing against you. But this idea that you don't have any interest in hearing what people have to say about what you say is about to get my highest insult: "Positively Bush-esque."
That was low of me. I'm sorry.
You're right that 'right to sales' isn't the only possible right a student might want to exercise over her work. Your example is a good one, but it doesn't strike me as relevant to the debate. First and least relevant, because in this situation Turnitin wouldn't have the anthology on file. But let's say that the student did turn one of the poems in for academic credit. Otherwise, she just wants to give it out to friends.
Under the system we're discussing, Turnitin now has a copy of the poem in their database. This fact not only doesn't affect present or future sales, but fails to impede any reasonable use she might ever have for her poem. It doesn't stop her from selling it, giving it to friends, printing out copies to put on peoples' windshields, etc. All it does is stop her friends from turning it in as their own work.
I keep racking my brain for some 'right' that the students are losing because their work is stored in the Turnitin database. The people siding with the students have been putting forth things like "maybe the student has a moral objection to their work being in an electronic format," which indicates that they're also having trouble coming up with realistic examples. So, can anyone come up with a better example?
Maybe fear that the database will be broken into. But even that seems like a bit of a stretch to me.
You can, in theory, get in trouble. But not because the school necessarily makes claims of ownership. It could be a much more straightforward matter. At my school, for example, part of the honor code says that you will not turn in anything for academic credit if you've previously turned it in for academic credit. While technically this means that your oft-reused LinkedList.cpp file may be grounds for expulsion, I'm not aware of anyone who has been disciplined for recycling such utilities.
My point is, your school may not actually be claiming ownership of your work.
Diploma, degree, high school, college. Sounds like an SAT question, but I don't think you can expand it into an actual criticism of the post's reasoning. A high school diploma is certainly compensation for their work.
You don't pay for your degree. Full stop. What you pay for is the opportunity to be educated, and the opportunity to have that education certified by an institution of higher learning, so long as you jump through the other hoops they put in front of you. For example, you have to turn in assignments, and these assignments have to be your own work, so that the school has some way of knowing that you're certifiable. Wait, that didn't come out right.
Finally, it's a Slashdot strawman, this idea that the school cannot let Turnitin keep a copy of an essay unless the school itself owns the copyright. That would be the only reason this 'work for hire' discussion would be relevant. As far as I'm concerned, the students are only guessing, the administration is only guessing, Slashdot is only guessing, and while Turnitin's lawyers probably have a good idea of the landscape of the legal minefield their business treads, they're keeping mum.
I do hate the idea of treating the students as plagarists until some system clears them. But I also understand how badly plagarism can damage the educational process. Turnitin seems like a fair way to approach the problem, and I don't see that the students are being deprived of any rights to their work that they ought to have.
The difference, Mister I-dont-look-for-replies, is that Turnitin isn't republishing the paper, or making it into a made-for-TV movie starring Judith Light, or anything else that reduces the student's ability to resell her work. Okay, it eliminates her ability to resell the work for one very specific purpose. But that's kind of the point.
In a sense, this has been going on since the invention of the photocopier. Teachers have long been photocopying their students' papers and keeping them on file to prevent plagarism. To say that Turnitin merely automates and expands the process would be disingenuous; after all, simply changing the scale of something or making it faster can fundamentally alter the nature of a thing. But there are precedents here, and in my mind they seem rather innocuous.
The fact that the school is handing the essays over to a third party might be a problem. The fact that the third party is making bank might be a problem. But I really think that Turnitin's keeping a copy on file doesn't present an ethical problem. They're not preventing the students from enjoying any value that their essay might have, except for the one specific value that they arguably have no right to.
If I were doing a service like Turnitin, I might try to avoid the entire infringement issue by taking the students' papers and storing an md5sum of each group of ten words. If lots of groupings show up in a paper being tested, it flags those sections. But I'm not sure whether that solution actually works either technically or legally.
But I believe that generally these types of socially-conscious funds inevitably wind up sacrificing returns for "principals".
As another poster pointed out, the performance differential is in part because green funds are more likely to invest in businesses that are willing to absorb the costs that they could have simply passed on to the rest of society. If we assume that Fidelity and Green Century are run by equally capable and equally lucky groups of people, then the difference between the rates of return is entirely due to the rat-bastardy behavior of the companies that Fidelity is willing to invest in but Green century is not.
If you're willing to sacrifice principles for a slightly higher rate of return, then you never had the former and don't deserve the latter.
The colonies had a population of about three million at the time of the Revolution. It's estimated that about a third of them supported Britain. I don't know how actively Britain was working to undermine the States by the time the traitors to the Crown started writing up the Constitution (I think most of their efforts were devoted to naval harassment, which was a big cause for the War of 1812). But it wouldn't have been hard for the Founding Fathers to slip into the "We have enemies everywhere and we must curb our freedoms until we beat them all" mentality that seems so common today.
Poor Apple, with all that information leaking out of them. No wonder they haven't been able to turn a profit, with all those valuable bits and bytes slipping through their fingers...
In actuality, they're still able to make lots of money. If anything, all the grist for the rumor mill serves to keep the fanchildren running in circles. I doubt leaks are nearly as important as most people think. The reaction you often get to corporate leaks has less to do with the actual damage done, and everything to do with CEOs who can't stand the idea of something happening in the company without his explicit authorization.
If something good leaks, they should just say "we're not confirming that" until they're ready to confirm it.
If something bad leaks, they should work on fixing the problem and taking responsibility, rather than wasting their time wandering the halls with loaded pistols, looking for a messenger to shoot.
Tragedy of the commons all over again. We might have to lure China in by altering the cap and trade system to better reflect the areas where China has an advantage (read: not-quite-outright bribery), and possibly by subsidizing their green initiatives. Asking them to cut back on overall economic development seems really hypocritical to me.
They'll come under greater internal and international pressure if seemingly climate-change-related disasters like Katrina continue and as water levels continue to rise. It seems to be having an effect here in the US. I don't think we'll sign onto Kyoto any time this administration, but the next one will have to take a close, serious look into doing so. I don't believe that the targets outlined in Kyoto are nearly sufficient, but I think the mechanisms it's developing for tracking carbon output and sequestration are laying the groundwork for a global CO2 regulator. From there, it will be much easier to reduce overall CO2 emissions with the flip of a switch.
My long term solution to global warming is 'space elevators + space-based solar panels = all the energy we want = power processes that remove CO2 from the air'. But that's probably a hundred years out. Fifty at least.
If anything, the problem is that nobody, anywhere along the chain of consumption, is being charged for the damages caused by greenhouse emissions. Instead, these costs will show up randomly and possibly without warning, causing harm to arbitrary actors across the globe who may have made almost no contribution to global warming. The list of potential costs includes everything from refugees fleeing rising water to the forced movement of industries to a decreased ability to plan for the future.
Say I'm a Utah ski resort. No, wait, that would be anthropomorphic in the extreme. Say I was the owner of a Utah ski resort. I know the climate will change drastically over the next twenty years, but I don't know what it will change to. It's very likely that snowpacks will disappear entirely, destroying most of the value of my industry. It's going to cost me hundreds of millions of dollars that I could have earned had the climate stayed more in line with the last hundred years.
Or imagine that I live in Germany, which global warming is either going to change into a desert or a lush, verdant paradise in thirty years. What do I do? Do I plant fruit trees and hope for lushness? Or do I move away? Climate change makes it hard to plan for the future, which makes everything less efficient, causing great damage to the economy.
So it's hard to argue that the damages done (yes, primarily by cars) to the state of California are illusory. Why did they pick auto manufacturers? Primarily because California had already passed regulations limiting greenhouse gases from cars, and the auto industry immediately sued to have them thrown out.
Admittedly, it's hard to know exactly how great the costs are going to be, so putting a dollar tag on emissions is somewhat difficult. I think the 'cap and trade' systems make a lot of sense, if you figure that there is a limited amount of pollution our planet can handle, and you want that pollution to be used for maximum benefit.
I guess what I'm saying is that, when it comes to the cost difference between a low emission car and a standard car, it's not the difference between paying the premium and not paying it. It's more like the difference between paying the costs of pollution yourself, and letting the costs be born by flood refugees in Malaysia. But, as with anything I say, this is a gross oversimplification.
Unfortunately, at the moment, government plays favorites as well. Some disenfranchised groups have more difficulty than others when it comes to lobbying Congress and drumming up public support for their causes. Worse, none of them can bring the sort of clout to bear that 'industry' enjoys (with the possible exception of the AARP). Very often, the things the populace wants government to focus on have nothing to do with what is best for the country.
But I believe that the solution is to reform government, not to wash its hands of its responsibilities toward the poor before turning those responsibilities over to the private sector. We need more transparency in government. We need an electoral system that doesn't give incumbents a free pass. We need a Congress that doesn't police its own ethics violations. We need a voting system that allows people to display a preference for third party candidates without 'splitting the vote'. We need laws that force our congresscritters to engage more openly with the people they represent, and to be forthright about the potential conflicts of interest.
Beyond that, we need a citizenry that has the time and energy to engage in local civic affairs. For me, that's liberal codespeak for 'raising the minimum wage.' You can't be working two full-time, minimum wage jobs, and still have the time and energy to be an active participant in the democracy we aspire to having.
I think that, with such reforms in place, government really could become a tremendous force for social good, while minimizing the potential for tyranny.
The laws of supply and demand don't cover the situation as simply as you suggest. I think the problem with your analysis is that the health care industry is devoted to ensuring that a very specific type of machine runs for as long and as well as possible. So the ideal system would be devoted to detecting problems as soon as they arise, and make small changes now to avoid larger, more expensive operations in the future.
So when you claim that the major problem with the health care industry is that people use unneeded services, I disagree. To me, the major problem is that people who require strong preventative medical services are instead going without, making the entire system less efficient at delivering ideal outcomes.
Another problem with the application of 'supply and demand': In the case of most commodities, people who have greater wealth can exert greater 'demand' on the system. The vast majority of people (myself included) accept some level of wealth inequality as acceptable, if not downright beneficial. But when you start saying that a rich person has a greater right to live a long and healthy life, you tread on shaky ground.
Catastrophic insurance coverage doesn't eliminate the possibility of people overusing services. They just time elective procedures for years when their expenses are already high. A better system might be to give everyone a certain amount of money, that covers their anticipated expenses for a given year. They decide how it gets spent, and if they don't spend it by the end of the year, they get to keep, say, 70%. Throw in one or two free checkups a year (to catch problems early), and some system of catastrophic coverage, and I think you'd have a fairly ideal system: responsive to market forces, yet providing for everyone's health care needs.
And why did they vote for him? Jon Stewart summed it up very nicely a few nights ago. After rolling a clip where George Bush tells Matt Lauer repeatedly that 'terrorists want to kill your family':
"Matt! Matt! I want you to do somethin' for me. I want you to imagine your family dead. Are you doin' it, Matt? Do you have that picture in your head? Good, now go vote. Heh heh heh."
If your kid is okay with this, then expect him to live with you until he's 45. Because he has absolutely no need for an independent identity, and therefore little incentive to seek any independence at all.
If your kid is normal, on the other hand, expect nightly screaming matches, much sneaking off to use the 'net at libraries or at friends' houses, and probably a serious bid for emancipated minor status at the age of sixteen.
You sound like the sort of parent who gives his kids rigid boundaries, while giving himself no boundaries at all.
In short, no child could live with this, no child should have to live with this, and if you succeed in your aims you'll most likely turn the kid into a self-destructive partier the moment he's out of your sight. Open, honest communication beats ironfisted control any day.
That's a point I hadn't thought to make last time this story came around. I started programming on a Commodore64 when I was 7. Not a prodigy; I programmed about as well as you'd expect a 7 year old to program. Copied short snippets from books and whatnot. By ten, I was using basic programming flow to draw interesting patterns on the screen. At the age of thirteen, I tried my first truly ambitious project: a 'Dragon Warrior'-style RPG.
It was a catastrophe. When I first started composing this, I was going to blame it on BASIC itself, then on the crappy line editor I was trying to use. But as frustrating as these things were, my greatest shortcoming was that I had no adult supervision. When you try and teach yourself, rather than learning from an expert, you tend to not realize when you've missed something very, very important.
I feel a deep sense of shame even today for admitting this level of stupidity, but I didn't know what a subroutine was. Knowing that I could have called the same snippet of code from different parts of the program would have saved me much heartache, but I had the concept of a flowchart firmly in my head, and it seemed to demand a single, unbroken flow of execution. Which demanded cut-n-paste. Which I couldn't do with that crappy line editor.
Thinking on it, I should probably try tackling that project again, so that next time I set down to writing a long anti-BASIC diatribe, I'll at least know what the hell I'm talking about.
Where does the input even hint at the concept of iterators? Python does hide a lot of stuff behind the scenes, which makes it deficient if you're trying to show a kid "how the computer thinks." I don't see this as a serious issue, since you could do the same thing with a while statement
i = 0 while True:
print i
i += 1
if i >= 99:
break
but more importantly, because the high level concepts of variables, statements, program control, etc. are the same.
Okay, what part of x86 assembly coding does not mutilate your brain beyond recognition?:)
While I'm at a loss to explain Brin's obsession with BASIC, I think that you and Brin are saying the same thing. There isn't much exposure to the inner workings of the computer by default. If you have Linux, the kid might have a chance, but what comes with Windows by default? cmd.exe? Yech. More important, even on Linux, there is no need to touch the command line in order to do all the fun, eye-popping things that computers are already trained to do. You could become quite adept at manipulating your computer without learning anything about how the computer operates.
Nor do most kids have an adult on hand to guide them, or even get them started. If a kid tells his parents, "I want to learn to program," they might go out and buy him a computer, then scour all over the Start Menu for the programming program. Teachers generally aren't any better when it comes to knowing how to get a kid on the path to 1337-ness.
I'm trying to think what a simple programming curriculum for grade schoolers would look like. What programming language would I use? What concepts would I try to teach, and how would I make them comprehensible to the rugrats? I think I'd start with Python, teaching them to use it as a calculator, then teaching them to output, then teaching them to get input and use it as output, then basic program flow. Objects would be a whole big ball of wax that I might not want to start them on straight off...
Python is easy enough to learn. Easier than BASIC, and much more powerful to boot.
python Python 2.4.3 (#2, Apr 27 2006, 14:43:58) [GCC 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> print "Hello, World" Hello, World >>> 4 + 4 8 >>> while True: ... print 'sex' ... sex sex sex sex sex [and so on]
Then, when this gets frustrating, teach the rugrat how to save the program in a file, and run it that way.
I've been reading over the many, many letters that this article generated at Salon, and I'm blown away by the sheer number of people who claim that BASIC programs are somehow interacting with the computer on a lower level than C++, that BASIC somehow underpins the whole object-oriented system. Can someone explain what they're talking about?
So, if an individual who has authority over you (a boss, or some government flunkie) discovers something about your personal life that he disagrees with, and uses that authority to make your life difficult, then somehow this means that all of society has agreed that you deserve punishment? What if your boss fired you for being a Presbyterian? Or for voting Republican?
It doesn't take all of society agreeing that something is bad. All it takes is one arrogant bastard who thinks ill of some aspect of your life, who feels that he has the right to punish you for it.
But I forgot, the people you're talking about aren't harmless, socially acceptable things like Presbyterians and Republicans. They're freaks. And we have the right and obligation to humiliate and censure people who are really different from us.
This line you're spouting is no different from the "you don't need privacy if you're not doing anything wrong" canard. Both are nonsense, because they both assume that society has a monolithic opinion about right and wrong, illegal and legal, and that people are only embarassed about the things they believe to be wrong. How hard is it to grasp the concept of, "I feel I'm behaving in a morally appropriate way, but there are others who disagree, and I'm more comfortable with them not knowing it?"
Or, let me put it a different way: imagine that your wife/girlfriend/whatever was on a nationally televised interview. All your friends and family have tuned in to see it. The interviewer started asking probing questions about your sex life, and she answers all of them as comprehensively as she can. There is probably a lot of stuff there you don't feel guilty about having done, but you very much didn't want it known to the rest of the world. Especially to your boss, who considers half of what you've done 'sick and perverted.'
Finally, you cannot yet say that you think these people 'deserved what they got,' because for most of them the other shoe is still waiting to drop. Some are still wondering if she's going to write back. What if X's wife decides to try out the bondage thing, Y's wife divorces him, and Z's wife puts two bullets in the back of his skull? Did they each get what they deserved? What if Y ended up on the list because his neighbor was playing a stupid practical joke on him? While you may not particularly feel sorry for what happens to any given victim, you can't say they 'deserve it' unless you believe the outcome is fair, and that requires that the outcomes bear some proportionality to the offense.
Point the first: Not knowing one thing is a far cry from not knowing anything.
Point the second: You seem confused about what a compiler optimization is. You make it sound like the application tries to determine at runtime whether or not the variable is needed. After all, if the decision was made at compile time, why would you care how many resources it devoted to the task? It would slow down the compilation, but the overall application would be faster.
Point the third: "Used usefully" isn't just a "human term." It's something a compiler can successfully evaluate in many circumstances. A simple example: if your code asks for a program that assigns a new variable, then exits scope before using that variable, a decent compiler should be able to recognize that the code doesn't use it for anything, and eliminate it. Hell, an IDE can perform the same analysis and warn you about an unused variable. Or if you say i = 5, and the next statement is j = 5 * i, the compiler can recognize that j will always evaluate to the same result, and replace it with what is essentially 'j = 25'.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your assertion, but it sounds like you don't believe that compiler optimizations can happen at all.
Point the fourth: The reason university types and DeVry types go after each other tooth and nail like this is because both sides hate to consider the possibility that they chose the wrong path. It's a universal truth that people are loath to consider information that might have caused them to choose differently, and eager to find information that validates their choices. When you hear people talking about how universities waste students' time with pointless classes, you're likely to agree, because you didn't take them, while a student like myself gets all indignant because I did sit through them, and I'd hate to think that it didn't benefit me.
You and I took very different career paths, with different strengths and weaknesses. You can find talent on both sides, you can find crap on both sides, and on both sides you're more likely to find the latter. You are not without skill, but you don't know everything. So please do get over yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
I find myself once again responding to Mister I-dont-look-for-replies. I swear, I'm not stalking, and I have nothing against you. But this idea that you don't have any interest in hearing what people have to say about what you say is about to get my highest insult: "Positively Bush-esque."
That was low of me. I'm sorry.
You're right that 'right to sales' isn't the only possible right a student might want to exercise over her work. Your example is a good one, but it doesn't strike me as relevant to the debate. First and least relevant, because in this situation Turnitin wouldn't have the anthology on file. But let's say that the student did turn one of the poems in for academic credit. Otherwise, she just wants to give it out to friends.
Under the system we're discussing, Turnitin now has a copy of the poem in their database. This fact not only doesn't affect present or future sales, but fails to impede any reasonable use she might ever have for her poem. It doesn't stop her from selling it, giving it to friends, printing out copies to put on peoples' windshields, etc. All it does is stop her friends from turning it in as their own work.
I keep racking my brain for some 'right' that the students are losing because their work is stored in the Turnitin database. The people siding with the students have been putting forth things like "maybe the student has a moral objection to their work being in an electronic format," which indicates that they're also having trouble coming up with realistic examples. So, can anyone come up with a better example?
Maybe fear that the database will be broken into. But even that seems like a bit of a stretch to me.
You can, in theory, get in trouble. But not because the school necessarily makes claims of ownership. It could be a much more straightforward matter. At my school, for example, part of the honor code says that you will not turn in anything for academic credit if you've previously turned it in for academic credit. While technically this means that your oft-reused LinkedList.cpp file may be grounds for expulsion, I'm not aware of anyone who has been disciplined for recycling such utilities.
My point is, your school may not actually be claiming ownership of your work.
Diploma, degree, high school, college. Sounds like an SAT question, but I don't think you can expand it into an actual criticism of the post's reasoning. A high school diploma is certainly compensation for their work.
You don't pay for your degree. Full stop. What you pay for is the opportunity to be educated, and the opportunity to have that education certified by an institution of higher learning, so long as you jump through the other hoops they put in front of you. For example, you have to turn in assignments, and these assignments have to be your own work, so that the school has some way of knowing that you're certifiable. Wait, that didn't come out right.
Finally, it's a Slashdot strawman, this idea that the school cannot let Turnitin keep a copy of an essay unless the school itself owns the copyright. That would be the only reason this 'work for hire' discussion would be relevant. As far as I'm concerned, the students are only guessing, the administration is only guessing, Slashdot is only guessing, and while Turnitin's lawyers probably have a good idea of the landscape of the legal minefield their business treads, they're keeping mum.
I do hate the idea of treating the students as plagarists until some system clears them. But I also understand how badly plagarism can damage the educational process. Turnitin seems like a fair way to approach the problem, and I don't see that the students are being deprived of any rights to their work that they ought to have.
The difference, Mister I-dont-look-for-replies, is that Turnitin isn't republishing the paper, or making it into a made-for-TV movie starring Judith Light, or anything else that reduces the student's ability to resell her work. Okay, it eliminates her ability to resell the work for one very specific purpose. But that's kind of the point.
In a sense, this has been going on since the invention of the photocopier. Teachers have long been photocopying their students' papers and keeping them on file to prevent plagarism. To say that Turnitin merely automates and expands the process would be disingenuous; after all, simply changing the scale of something or making it faster can fundamentally alter the nature of a thing. But there are precedents here, and in my mind they seem rather innocuous.
The fact that the school is handing the essays over to a third party might be a problem. The fact that the third party is making bank might be a problem. But I really think that Turnitin's keeping a copy on file doesn't present an ethical problem. They're not preventing the students from enjoying any value that their essay might have, except for the one specific value that they arguably have no right to.
If I were doing a service like Turnitin, I might try to avoid the entire infringement issue by taking the students' papers and storing an md5sum of each group of ten words. If lots of groupings show up in a paper being tested, it flags those sections. But I'm not sure whether that solution actually works either technically or legally.
If you're willing to sacrifice principles for a slightly higher rate of return, then you never had the former and don't deserve the latter.
/me searches vainly for the point to your post.
/me scratches his head.
/me wanders off confused.
All one million of them?
The colonies had a population of about three million at the time of the Revolution. It's estimated that about a third of them supported Britain. I don't know how actively Britain was working to undermine the States by the time the traitors to the Crown started writing up the Constitution (I think most of their efforts were devoted to naval harassment, which was a big cause for the War of 1812). But it wouldn't have been hard for the Founding Fathers to slip into the "We have enemies everywhere and we must curb our freedoms until we beat them all" mentality that seems so common today.
Poor Apple, with all that information leaking out of them. No wonder they haven't been able to turn a profit, with all those valuable bits and bytes slipping through their fingers...
In actuality, they're still able to make lots of money. If anything, all the grist for the rumor mill serves to keep the fanchildren running in circles. I doubt leaks are nearly as important as most people think. The reaction you often get to corporate leaks has less to do with the actual damage done, and everything to do with CEOs who can't stand the idea of something happening in the company without his explicit authorization.
If something good leaks, they should just say "we're not confirming that" until they're ready to confirm it.
If something bad leaks, they should work on fixing the problem and taking responsibility, rather than wasting their time wandering the halls with loaded pistols, looking for a messenger to shoot.
Tragedy of the commons all over again. We might have to lure China in by altering the cap and trade system to better reflect the areas where China has an advantage (read: not-quite-outright bribery), and possibly by subsidizing their green initiatives. Asking them to cut back on overall economic development seems really hypocritical to me.
They'll come under greater internal and international pressure if seemingly climate-change-related disasters like Katrina continue and as water levels continue to rise. It seems to be having an effect here in the US. I don't think we'll sign onto Kyoto any time this administration, but the next one will have to take a close, serious look into doing so. I don't believe that the targets outlined in Kyoto are nearly sufficient, but I think the mechanisms it's developing for tracking carbon output and sequestration are laying the groundwork for a global CO2 regulator. From there, it will be much easier to reduce overall CO2 emissions with the flip of a switch.
My long term solution to global warming is 'space elevators + space-based solar panels = all the energy we want = power processes that remove CO2 from the air'. But that's probably a hundred years out. Fifty at least.
Just don't tell us you're one of those 'natural logarithm' freaks. We'd have to put you to the torch.
It's almost as though the pictures taken after 1970 have been... dare we say it... altered somehow?
Nah. Not OUR governments. They'd never lie about something like that.
Maybe I'll feel less trusting when my tinfoil hat gets back from the cleaners.
If anything, the problem is that nobody, anywhere along the chain of consumption, is being charged for the damages caused by greenhouse emissions. Instead, these costs will show up randomly and possibly without warning, causing harm to arbitrary actors across the globe who may have made almost no contribution to global warming. The list of potential costs includes everything from refugees fleeing rising water to the forced movement of industries to a decreased ability to plan for the future.
Say I'm a Utah ski resort. No, wait, that would be anthropomorphic in the extreme. Say I was the owner of a Utah ski resort. I know the climate will change drastically over the next twenty years, but I don't know what it will change to. It's very likely that snowpacks will disappear entirely, destroying most of the value of my industry. It's going to cost me hundreds of millions of dollars that I could have earned had the climate stayed more in line with the last hundred years.
Or imagine that I live in Germany, which global warming is either going to change into a desert or a lush, verdant paradise in thirty years. What do I do? Do I plant fruit trees and hope for lushness? Or do I move away? Climate change makes it hard to plan for the future, which makes everything less efficient, causing great damage to the economy.
So it's hard to argue that the damages done (yes, primarily by cars) to the state of California are illusory. Why did they pick auto manufacturers? Primarily because California had already passed regulations limiting greenhouse gases from cars, and the auto industry immediately sued to have them thrown out.
Admittedly, it's hard to know exactly how great the costs are going to be, so putting a dollar tag on emissions is somewhat difficult. I think the 'cap and trade' systems make a lot of sense, if you figure that there is a limited amount of pollution our planet can handle, and you want that pollution to be used for maximum benefit.
I guess what I'm saying is that, when it comes to the cost difference between a low emission car and a standard car, it's not the difference between paying the premium and not paying it. It's more like the difference between paying the costs of pollution yourself, and letting the costs be born by flood refugees in Malaysia. But, as with anything I say, this is a gross oversimplification.
Unfortunately, at the moment, government plays favorites as well. Some disenfranchised groups have more difficulty than others when it comes to lobbying Congress and drumming up public support for their causes. Worse, none of them can bring the sort of clout to bear that 'industry' enjoys (with the possible exception of the AARP). Very often, the things the populace wants government to focus on have nothing to do with what is best for the country.
But I believe that the solution is to reform government, not to wash its hands of its responsibilities toward the poor before turning those responsibilities over to the private sector. We need more transparency in government. We need an electoral system that doesn't give incumbents a free pass. We need a Congress that doesn't police its own ethics violations. We need a voting system that allows people to display a preference for third party candidates without 'splitting the vote'. We need laws that force our congresscritters to engage more openly with the people they represent, and to be forthright about the potential conflicts of interest.
Beyond that, we need a citizenry that has the time and energy to engage in local civic affairs. For me, that's liberal codespeak for 'raising the minimum wage.' You can't be working two full-time, minimum wage jobs, and still have the time and energy to be an active participant in the democracy we aspire to having.
I think that, with such reforms in place, government really could become a tremendous force for social good, while minimizing the potential for tyranny.
The laws of supply and demand don't cover the situation as simply as you suggest. I think the problem with your analysis is that the health care industry is devoted to ensuring that a very specific type of machine runs for as long and as well as possible. So the ideal system would be devoted to detecting problems as soon as they arise, and make small changes now to avoid larger, more expensive operations in the future.
So when you claim that the major problem with the health care industry is that people use unneeded services, I disagree. To me, the major problem is that people who require strong preventative medical services are instead going without, making the entire system less efficient at delivering ideal outcomes.
Another problem with the application of 'supply and demand': In the case of most commodities, people who have greater wealth can exert greater 'demand' on the system. The vast majority of people (myself included) accept some level of wealth inequality as acceptable, if not downright beneficial. But when you start saying that a rich person has a greater right to live a long and healthy life, you tread on shaky ground.
Catastrophic insurance coverage doesn't eliminate the possibility of people overusing services. They just time elective procedures for years when their expenses are already high. A better system might be to give everyone a certain amount of money, that covers their anticipated expenses for a given year. They decide how it gets spent, and if they don't spend it by the end of the year, they get to keep, say, 70%. Throw in one or two free checkups a year (to catch problems early), and some system of catastrophic coverage, and I think you'd have a fairly ideal system: responsive to market forces, yet providing for everyone's health care needs.
And why did they vote for him? Jon Stewart summed it up very nicely a few nights ago. After rolling a clip where George Bush tells Matt Lauer repeatedly that 'terrorists want to kill your family':
"Matt! Matt! I want you to do somethin' for me. I want you to imagine your family dead. Are you doin' it, Matt? Do you have that picture in your head? Good, now go vote. Heh heh heh."
If your kid is okay with this, then expect him to live with you until he's 45. Because he has absolutely no need for an independent identity, and therefore little incentive to seek any independence at all.
If your kid is normal, on the other hand, expect nightly screaming matches, much sneaking off to use the 'net at libraries or at friends' houses, and probably a serious bid for emancipated minor status at the age of sixteen.
You sound like the sort of parent who gives his kids rigid boundaries, while giving himself no boundaries at all.
In short, no child could live with this, no child should have to live with this, and if you succeed in your aims you'll most likely turn the kid into a self-destructive partier the moment he's out of your sight. Open, honest communication beats ironfisted control any day.
It's been months since I had any problems getting into Salon. I'm using Firefox with flashblock.
If you're still interested in trying, you might want to see if Firefox + safe mode works for you.
That's a point I hadn't thought to make last time this story came around. I started programming on a Commodore64 when I was 7. Not a prodigy; I programmed about as well as you'd expect a 7 year old to program. Copied short snippets from books and whatnot. By ten, I was using basic programming flow to draw interesting patterns on the screen. At the age of thirteen, I tried my first truly ambitious project: a 'Dragon Warrior'-style RPG.
It was a catastrophe. When I first started composing this, I was going to blame it on BASIC itself, then on the crappy line editor I was trying to use. But as frustrating as these things were, my greatest shortcoming was that I had no adult supervision. When you try and teach yourself, rather than learning from an expert, you tend to not realize when you've missed something very, very important.
I feel a deep sense of shame even today for admitting this level of stupidity, but I didn't know what a subroutine was. Knowing that I could have called the same snippet of code from different parts of the program would have saved me much heartache, but I had the concept of a flowchart firmly in my head, and it seemed to demand a single, unbroken flow of execution. Which demanded cut-n-paste. Which I couldn't do with that crappy line editor.
Thinking on it, I should probably try tackling that project again, so that next time I set down to writing a long anti-BASIC diatribe, I'll at least know what the hell I'm talking about.
I wouldn't suggest it. With a Diebold calculator, you give it the problem, and also the solution you want it to give you when it's done calculating.
I see his point, though.
for i in range(0, 100):
print i
Where does the input even hint at the concept of iterators? Python does hide a lot of stuff behind the scenes, which makes it deficient if you're trying to show a kid "how the computer thinks." I don't see this as a serious issue, since you could do the same thing with a while statement
i = 0
while True:
print i
i += 1
if i >= 99:
break
but more importantly, because the high level concepts of variables, statements, program control, etc. are the same.
Okay, what part of x86 assembly coding does not mutilate your brain beyond recognition? :)
While I'm at a loss to explain Brin's obsession with BASIC, I think that you and Brin are saying the same thing. There isn't much exposure to the inner workings of the computer by default. If you have Linux, the kid might have a chance, but what comes with Windows by default? cmd.exe? Yech. More important, even on Linux, there is no need to touch the command line in order to do all the fun, eye-popping things that computers are already trained to do. You could become quite adept at manipulating your computer without learning anything about how the computer operates.
Nor do most kids have an adult on hand to guide them, or even get them started. If a kid tells his parents, "I want to learn to program," they might go out and buy him a computer, then scour all over the Start Menu for the programming program. Teachers generally aren't any better when it comes to knowing how to get a kid on the path to 1337-ness.
I'm trying to think what a simple programming curriculum for grade schoolers would look like. What programming language would I use? What concepts would I try to teach, and how would I make them comprehensible to the rugrats? I think I'd start with Python, teaching them to use it as a calculator, then teaching them to output, then teaching them to get input and use it as output, then basic program flow. Objects would be a whole big ball of wax that I might not want to start them on straight off...
Python is easy enough to learn. Easier than BASIC, and much more powerful to boot.
... print 'sex'
...
python
Python 2.4.3 (#2, Apr 27 2006, 14:43:58)
[GCC 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> print "Hello, World"
Hello, World
>>> 4 + 4
8
>>> while True:
sex
sex
sex
sex
sex
[and so on]
Then, when this gets frustrating, teach the rugrat how to save the program in a file, and run it that way.
I've been reading over the many, many letters that this article generated at Salon, and I'm blown away by the sheer number of people who claim that BASIC programs are somehow interacting with the computer on a lower level than C++, that BASIC somehow underpins the whole object-oriented system. Can someone explain what they're talking about?
So, if an individual who has authority over you (a boss, or some government flunkie) discovers something about your personal life that he disagrees with, and uses that authority to make your life difficult, then somehow this means that all of society has agreed that you deserve punishment? What if your boss fired you for being a Presbyterian? Or for voting Republican?
It doesn't take all of society agreeing that something is bad. All it takes is one arrogant bastard who thinks ill of some aspect of your life, who feels that he has the right to punish you for it.
But I forgot, the people you're talking about aren't harmless, socially acceptable things like Presbyterians and Republicans. They're freaks. And we have the right and obligation to humiliate and censure people who are really different from us.
This line you're spouting is no different from the "you don't need privacy if you're not doing anything wrong" canard. Both are nonsense, because they both assume that society has a monolithic opinion about right and wrong, illegal and legal, and that people are only embarassed about the things they believe to be wrong. How hard is it to grasp the concept of, "I feel I'm behaving in a morally appropriate way, but there are others who disagree, and I'm more comfortable with them not knowing it?"
Or, let me put it a different way: imagine that your wife/girlfriend/whatever was on a nationally televised interview. All your friends and family have tuned in to see it. The interviewer started asking probing questions about your sex life, and she answers all of them as comprehensively as she can. There is probably a lot of stuff there you don't feel guilty about having done, but you very much didn't want it known to the rest of the world. Especially to your boss, who considers half of what you've done 'sick and perverted.'
Finally, you cannot yet say that you think these people 'deserved what they got,' because for most of them the other shoe is still waiting to drop. Some are still wondering if she's going to write back. What if X's wife decides to try out the bondage thing, Y's wife divorces him, and Z's wife puts two bullets in the back of his skull? Did they each get what they deserved? What if Y ended up on the list because his neighbor was playing a stupid practical joke on him? While you may not particularly feel sorry for what happens to any given victim, you can't say they 'deserve it' unless you believe the outcome is fair, and that requires that the outcomes bear some proportionality to the offense.
Point the first: Not knowing one thing is a far cry from not knowing anything.
Point the second: You seem confused about what a compiler optimization is. You make it sound like the application tries to determine at runtime whether or not the variable is needed. After all, if the decision was made at compile time, why would you care how many resources it devoted to the task? It would slow down the compilation, but the overall application would be faster.
Point the third: "Used usefully" isn't just a "human term." It's something a compiler can successfully evaluate in many circumstances. A simple example: if your code asks for a program that assigns a new variable, then exits scope before using that variable, a decent compiler should be able to recognize that the code doesn't use it for anything, and eliminate it. Hell, an IDE can perform the same analysis and warn you about an unused variable. Or if you say i = 5, and the next statement is j = 5 * i, the compiler can recognize that j will always evaluate to the same result, and replace it with what is essentially 'j = 25'.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your assertion, but it sounds like you don't believe that compiler optimizations can happen at all.
Point the fourth: The reason university types and DeVry types go after each other tooth and nail like this is because both sides hate to consider the possibility that they chose the wrong path. It's a universal truth that people are loath to consider information that might have caused them to choose differently, and eager to find information that validates their choices. When you hear people talking about how universities waste students' time with pointless classes, you're likely to agree, because you didn't take them, while a student like myself gets all indignant because I did sit through them, and I'd hate to think that it didn't benefit me.
You and I took very different career paths, with different strengths and weaknesses. You can find talent on both sides, you can find crap on both sides, and on both sides you're more likely to find the latter. You are not without skill, but you don't know everything. So please do get over yourself.