My problem, briefly put, is this: Believing what I do about the nature of information assimilation, on an individual as well as a mass scale -- believing, as I state in the book, that "information is not knowledge" -- and watching an entire generation of young people grow up to become virtual machines capable of storing informational bits like biocomputers but not of assembling those bits into meaningful bodies of knowledge, I thought long and hard about ways to make information technology more socially beneficial.
The biggest flaws in Carr's arguments center around three things:
Information Is not Knowledge. Nowhere does Carr indicate how limiting access to specific kinds of content would enable people to think for themselves, turning information into knowledge. Rather, he suggests that information should be restricted so that we can be sure that the information we obtain is "factual." All that does, it seems to me, is prevent us from determining for ourselves the relative value of information.
Bureaucracy. Carr suggests that the government must determine what is factual. Can you imagine how long it would take for this to happen? And to whose satisfaction would factuality be determined? If you think it takes a long time to get a response from a government agency now, how long do you think it will take to receive an approval for your treatise's factuality from the Bureau of Information? It would be a renaissance for dead tree publication, and end the advantage of the Internet as a source of fresh news.
Making Information Technology more Socially Beneficial. In what way does limiting access to information and increasing the amount of time required to publish information improve the social benefit of IT? If Open Source operated in this modality, the 2.4 kernel wouldn't be available for another two to three years!
Carr's essay seems exclusively to be a lure for tech-types to buy and read his dystopian Killing Time, rather than a realistic attempt at outlining solutions to the issues he addresses.Ironically, essays such as this would likely never become pixels (although they'd certainly see print) under the program he proposes
You can't expect a child of today to waste hours and hours of their life plodding through a book.
Reading a book, even those of relatively low quality, almost always is superior to watching someone else's interpretation of a book on screen. Reading requires more imagination, thought, and focus than watching most films. Reading is seldom, if ever, a "waste."
... other quality work like Piers Anthony and the Dragon Lance stuff...
I own more than a dozen Piers Anthony books (Incarnations of Immortality, Xanth, Cluster, Bio of a Space Tyrant, and other series), and have read at least a dozen others. But great literature, they ain't. Furthermore, I can't imagine that any filmmaker would do a quality job of producing many, if any, of the Piers Anthony works -- they'd play up the sex and violence and play down the social satire, puns, and curious mix of liberal and conservative political philosophy that make his work so much fun to read.
We also need the second half of both Watership Down and the Neverending Story to be finished.
I've also read the original English-language translation of The Neverending Story in hardback (red and green -- not black -- ink!). While I agree that The Neverending Story is an amazing book -- one of my all-time favorites -- the movie sucked. The sequels sucked worse (I've got kids, so I've seen 'em, too). The second half? You've got to be kidding.
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and "Johnny Mnemonic" were both short stories -- not even novellas, let alone full-length books -- before they were made into films.
Let's see... Franny and Zooey (1961), Nine Stories (1953), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction (1963), Hapworth 16, 1924 (2002 -- not yet published). So. He's written ONE book since 1963, and it's not even available yet?
If you doubt that, write a brilliant book and try to get a publication deal while saying, "I don't think I'm going to write any more books. Isn't this one enough?"
Didn't J.D. Salinger do just that with The Catcher in the Rye?
Although the Authors Guild is signatory to this letter, I suspect that the whole scenario is similar to the current conflict between musicians and the RIAA on one side and consumers, MP3.com and Napster on the other. In that case, a few, very high profile, musicians have sided with the RIAA to try to eliminate fair use (e.g. My MP3.com) as well as unfair distribution (e.g., Napster) in one fell swoop. The less-well-known authors, or those who are not beholden to a single publishing company (e.g., Stephen King and Orson Scott Card) may very well have no objections to Amazon.com's completely legal and ethical desire to facilitate the transfer of physical copies of copyrighted works from person to person.
...this would be a fantastic avenue for issues with broad public support but little chance of congressional action, for example, Campaign Finance, Line-Item Veto, Same-Subject Legislation, or Term Limits. Unfortunately, it could also be a fast track for less constitutionally-appropriate, but popular, "hot button" issues like Internet Porn or Flag Burning.
Your latter point, whether the scary issues are defined as porn, flag burning, abortion rights, cross-species marriage, or whatever, is precisely why most people (including me) wouldn't support a constitutional convention.
I do, however, support single subject rules. The House and Senate at the start of each session adopt rules for each body. Usually, they carry over rules from the prior sessions with a few minor modifications. One of the rules they should add is a single-subject provision. That's worth writing to your representative or senator about.
Ironically, there are also a lot of people in Utah who are afraid of their government and highly protective of their privacy. I guess the cognitive dissonance of supporting penalties for the use of encryption doesn't bother many of them. Or enough of them to keep Hatch from being re-elected.
California, Colorado, Maryland, Florida, and several other states have a similar single subject requirement for legislation. The scope in each state varies; sometimes the single subject rules apply only to acts of the legislature, other times only to the acts of the people in a referendum, still other times to both.
If your state doesn't have such a rule,
the Hastings School of Law has information about making a change.
In an admittedly short search, I couldn't find any current movement to enact a federal single subject law or constitutional ammendment. I believe such a rule is necessary to avoid repeats of just such actions as those of Senator Hatch, despite what this guy has to say about it.
This sort of thing is not new; I am, frankly, surprised that there isn't more of an outcry for federal single subject rules. I guess the people who work the system for a living don't want it to change.
Before you start, determine your purpose and your audience: what do you want to communicate, and with whom?
Some suggestions:
First, meet with management to determine what they want to communicate, and with whom they believe they will be communicating. (if they don't want to meet with you, run like hell and find a different project).
Next, meet with a group of customers. You don't mention whether you're designing for a local government agency, something statewide, something federal, a UN agency, a provincial government not in the US, or whatever; but your customer is the person who either receives services from your agency or is required to pay your agency directly, whether your agency renders services or not. Meet one-on-one and with small groups of your customers to discover what they expect from your agency, and by extension, your agency's website. Take lots of notes.
Evaluate how managements' and customers' views differ and complement one another. Write a project scope that accounts for these, including detailed explanations for features and design elements that management has not requested. be sure to include reasonable estimates of the time and cost involved in developing the project within the scope you have envisioned.
Receive written management approval for your project scope and budget before proceeding.
Don't start coding yet:
Draw a document hierarchy for your site. This can be done with pencil and paper, with Visio, whatever. But establish the relationships among the areas of the website before you make coding decisions.
Sketch or mockup with a graphics tool the general look of your home page, index pages, content pages, form pages, etc.
Receive written management approval for your hierarchy and visual design before proceeding.
Now it's time to choose your platform.
Choose your platform wisely. Whether the site's going to be built from static HTML, upon an open source platform like Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL, with a commercial product like NT, IIS, ASP, and SQL7, or in some combination, be sure your choice will meet the established scope and objectives -- and stay within budget.
Don't choose a product because "that's what Department CYA is using." Every project is different.
Think you're ready to write some code? Not yet:
Read Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen. Feel free to disagree with some of his conclusions.
Read Web by Design: The Complete Guide by Molly Holzschlag. Feel free to disagree with some of her conclusions.
The joke would be funnier if it took into account that it's Earth's gravity that is reduced by the launch of Cassini (in direct proportion to the combined mass of probe, fuel expended, etc.), not that of any other extraterrestrial object. What Cassini is stealing from other objects is angular momentum. As it slingshots around various objects, the energy it derives is converted from planetary inertia to probe speed.
Hence, if we continue launching probes and using other planets to slingshot them up to escape speed, Venus (and other planets) will eventually spiral into Sol as Earth spirals outward toward Pluto.
Implicitly act as if they were guilty and just waste the state's money ?
Accept this money if there's a doubt it may not be due ?
Two factors are at work here:
The City of Virginia Beach is a public entity, and as such is subject to open records laws, including federal, state, and local statutes.
The shrinkwrap licenses included with Microsoft products permit Microsoft to "demand" an audit of installed software and associated licenses.
Whether a shrinkwrap license is an enforceable contract is a subject of considerable debate. However, because Virginia has passed UCITA, cities (and other customers, including individuals) in that state would appear to have little recourse.
Do they actually have any right to check on whether the software you use is legal?
Two factors are at work here:
The City of Virginia Beach is a public entity, and as such is subject to open records laws, including federal, state, and local statutes.
The shrinkwrap licenses included with Microsoft products permit Microsoft to "demand" an audit of installed software and associated licenses. Whether a shrinkwrap license is an enforceable contract is a subject of considerable debate. However, because Virginia has passed UCITA, cities (and other customers, including individuals) in that state would appear to have little recourse.
I hope this information helps.
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
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· Score: 1
Years ago the WordPerfect for Windows 5.1 was released. A WYSIWYG word processer that ran with 8 mb ram, and about 40 meg hard drive space. The fact is: there is no reason that WinME should take 550 Meg alone on my hard drive.
WordPerfect for Windows 5.1 isn't a particularly good example of full features in a small footprint. One of the things that really bugged me about that particular release was that, although I could create documents with pages oriented in both landscape and portrait, I couldn't use TrueType fonts in those documents, only BitStream or other "jaggy" fonts. That was really annoying, particularly when working with WordPerfect's excellent long document management features.
WordPerfect eventually squashed this bug (in version 5.2), but IIRC, later versions had much larger footprints.
Linux on Laptops is a good resource for laptop configuration tweaking and driver support. They might have information about an open source driver for your audio chipset.
Many of Dell's newer laptops seem to have LCD display artifacting problems under X... Customizing XF86Config can eliminate this, but I haven't found a distro that will support their LCDs and chipsets out of the box. Linux on Laptops is a good resource for making laptops work with Linux, however.
I loved that conclusion to the C|Net piece; reporting about how the academics rambled on and on about the touchy-feelie aspects of life in Santa Clara County and then concluding with a very concrete example of how none of it really matters when we disenfranchise women and short people. Where's enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act when we need it?
If the French government thought this one through, they could earn a tremendous amount from the "taxation" of speech on the Internet. Their fines aren't nearly high enough to dissuade global media companies from doing whatever they want.
Witness the actual fines levied against Yahoo! (From Juriscom.net):
Condemns Yahoo! Inc. to pay to LICRA the amount of 10,000 Francs on the basis of article 700 of the New \code of Civil Procedure;
Condemns Yahoo! Inc. and Yahoo France to pay to UEJF an amount of 10,000 Francs on the basis of article 700 of the New Code of Civil Procedure;
Declares that no further measures are appropriate at this juncture;
Awards the costs of LICRA's action to be borne by Yahoo! Inc. and those of the UEJF by Yahoo! Inc. and Yahoo France.
Yahoo! should chalk this up as a "cost of doing business" and keep doing whatever it is they've been doing.
This is not the first time OSC has used an electronic medium to allow his readers to get an advance look at a novel. IIRC, the Hatrack River area on (gasp) AOL was a popular hangout for Card fans some years back... I don't know whether it still exists, as I haven't subscribed to AOL in many years. However, when I was a subscriber, OSC released the entire text of Children of the Mind before the book hit the presses. I downloaded my copy, read it voraciously, and then bought a dead tree version in hardback.
Recommended OSC books:
Ender's Game
Speaker for the Dead
Ender's Shadow
Stone Tables
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
Lovelock (first in an unfinished trilogy)
Check out Hatrack River for more official details about OSC's work, and the Philotic Web for the unofficial details.
"I just came right now from the counselor's office," one student e-mailed me. "I scored a thousand. I had on a long coat, was wearing black and loudly told the jerk sitting next to me that I'd do my best to kill him if he ever called me a "trench coat freak" again. I am now officially on probation. He is not."
Followed by:
And then there's freedom. Why does the First Amendment end at the school door, when many kids, especially geeks, have spent much of their lives in the freest part of American culture -- the Internet? Online, people can speak about anything: dump on God, talk about sex, flame pundits, express themselves politically and rebelliously. In school, no one can.
I particularly like the part about flaming pundits; but that's not my point. My point is that what it looks like Katz is saying here is that it's okay for a 'trench coat freak' to voice a threat, but not jocks - or their 'non-weird peers'.
Katz goes on:
Geeks, perhaps, who are more accustomed to free expression than their non-weird peers, increasingly and disturbingly refer to schools as "fascistic" environments in which they are censored and oppressed. All kids can't have absolute freedom all the time, but many kids, especially older ones raised in the Digital Age, need more than they're getting. Without it, they will become increasingly alienated.
Now that part I agree with. One hundred percent, even though it comes remarkably close to demonstrating Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies.
Most states have an equivalent to FOIA... but in any case, virtually all local schools accept (a very small amount of) federal funding. IIRC, he Supreme Court has ruled that non-federal government agencies receiving federal funding must comply with federal rules, including those of FOIA.
Start with the school district office (not the school site office, necessarily -- they probably won't have a clue what you're talking about). Generally, one person at the district office is in charge of public relations/public information. That person may be the superintendent or the responsibility may lie (pun intended) with a director of public relations or some similar title.
Tell your contact you want to make a request for public records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). There may be paperwork and a fee for document reproduction involved, which will vary from district to district. Depending on the district, your liaison will contact the appropriate staff person to obtain the logs, or may refer you to her directly.
If the district resists your request, you now have precedent (at least in New Hampshire) in your favor. Have a good time!
Slashdot Mirror
Says Carr:
The biggest flaws in Carr's arguments center around three things:
Carr's essay seems exclusively to be a lure for tech-types to buy and read his dystopian Killing Time, rather than a realistic attempt at outlining solutions to the issues he addresses.Ironically, essays such as this would likely never become pixels (although they'd certainly see print) under the program he proposes
A privacy policy can be:
Choose any two.
You can't expect a child of today to waste hours and hours of their life plodding through a book.
Reading a book, even those of relatively low quality, almost always is superior to watching someone else's interpretation of a book on screen. Reading requires more imagination, thought, and focus than watching most films. Reading is seldom, if ever, a "waste."
I own more than a dozen Piers Anthony books (Incarnations of Immortality, Xanth, Cluster, Bio of a Space Tyrant, and other series), and have read at least a dozen others. But great literature, they ain't. Furthermore, I can't imagine that any filmmaker would do a quality job of producing many, if any, of the Piers Anthony works -- they'd play up the sex and violence and play down the social satire, puns, and curious mix of liberal and conservative political philosophy that make his work so much fun to read.
We also need the second half of both Watership Down and the Neverending Story to be finished.
I've also read the original English-language translation of The Neverending Story in hardback (red and green -- not black -- ink!). While I agree that The Neverending Story is an amazing book -- one of my all-time favorites -- the movie sucked. The sequels sucked worse (I've got kids, so I've seen 'em, too). The second half? You've got to be kidding.
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and "Johnny Mnemonic" were both short stories -- not even novellas, let alone full-length books -- before they were made into films.
Let's see... Franny and Zooey (1961), Nine Stories (1953), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction (1963), Hapworth 16, 1924 (2002 -- not yet published). So. He's written ONE book since 1963, and it's not even available yet?
If you doubt that, write a brilliant book and try to get a publication deal while saying, "I don't think I'm going to write any more books. Isn't this one enough?"
Didn't J.D. Salinger do just that with The Catcher in the Rye?
Although the Authors Guild is signatory to this letter, I suspect that the whole scenario is similar to the current conflict between musicians and the RIAA on one side and consumers, MP3.com and Napster on the other. In that case, a few, very high profile, musicians have sided with the RIAA to try to eliminate fair use (e.g. My MP3.com) as well as unfair distribution (e.g., Napster) in one fell swoop. The less-well-known authors, or those who are not beholden to a single publishing company (e.g., Stephen King and Orson Scott Card) may very well have no objections to Amazon.com's completely legal and ethical desire to facilitate the transfer of physical copies of copyrighted works from person to person.
Your latter point, whether the scary issues are defined as porn, flag burning, abortion rights, cross-species marriage, or whatever, is precisely why most people (including me) wouldn't support a constitutional convention.
I do, however, support single subject rules. The House and Senate at the start of each session adopt rules for each body. Usually, they carry over rules from the prior sessions with a few minor modifications. One of the rules they should add is a single-subject provision. That's worth writing to your representative or senator about.
Ironically, there are also a lot of people in Utah who are afraid of their government and highly protective of their privacy. I guess the cognitive dissonance of supporting penalties for the use of encryption doesn't bother many of them. Or enough of them to keep Hatch from being re-elected.
California, Colorado, Maryland, Florida, and several other states have a similar single subject requirement for legislation. The scope in each state varies; sometimes the single subject rules apply only to acts of the legislature, other times only to the acts of the people in a referendum, still other times to both.
If your state doesn't have such a rule, the Hastings School of Law has information about making a change.
In an admittedly short search, I couldn't find any current movement to enact a federal single subject law or constitutional ammendment. I believe such a rule is necessary to avoid repeats of just such actions as those of Senator Hatch, despite what this guy has to say about it.
This sort of thing is not new; I am, frankly, surprised that there isn't more of an outcry for federal single subject rules. I guess the people who work the system for a living don't want it to change.
Before you start, determine your purpose and your audience: what do you want to communicate, and with whom?
Some suggestions:
Don't start coding yet:
Now it's time to choose your platform.
Think you're ready to write some code? Not yet:
Okay. Now you can write code:
Good Luck!
The joke would be funnier if it took into account that it's Earth's gravity that is reduced by the launch of Cassini (in direct proportion to the combined mass of probe, fuel expended, etc.), not that of any other extraterrestrial object. What Cassini is stealing from other objects is angular momentum. As it slingshots around various objects, the energy it derives is converted from planetary inertia to probe speed.
Hence, if we continue launching probes and using other planets to slingshot them up to escape speed, Venus (and other planets) will eventually spiral into Sol as Earth spirals outward toward Pluto.
Is legal to
Two factors are at work here:
Whether a shrinkwrap license is an enforceable contract is a subject of considerable debate. However, because Virginia has passed UCITA, cities (and other customers, including individuals) in that state would appear to have little recourse.
So, it appears that "that" is legal.
Do they actually have any right to check on whether the software you use is legal?
Two factors are at work here:
I hope this information helps.
Years ago the WordPerfect for Windows 5.1 was released. A WYSIWYG word processer that ran with 8 mb ram, and about 40 meg hard drive space. The fact is: there is no reason that WinME should take 550 Meg alone on my hard drive.
WordPerfect for Windows 5.1 isn't a particularly good example of full features in a small footprint. One of the things that really bugged me about that particular release was that, although I could create documents with pages oriented in both landscape and portrait, I couldn't use TrueType fonts in those documents, only BitStream or other "jaggy" fonts. That was really annoying, particularly when working with WordPerfect's excellent long document management features.
WordPerfect eventually squashed this bug (in version 5.2), but IIRC, later versions had much larger footprints.
Linux on Laptops is a good resource for laptop configuration tweaking and driver support. They might have information about an open source driver for your audio chipset.
Many of Dell's newer laptops seem to have LCD display artifacting problems under X... Customizing XF86Config can eliminate this, but I haven't found a distro that will support their LCDs and chipsets out of the box. Linux on Laptops is a good resource for making laptops work with Linux, however.
As a daily user of Debian's Gnu/Linux with the Gnome desktop on a Dell OptiPlex GX110, I can tell you how happy this news makes me.
It took two full weeks to get X configured properly for my desktop; having Dell's support for this hardware would have made things so much easier.
I hope that Dell begins full support for their laptop models soon, also. That would be sweet.
I loved that conclusion to the C|Net piece; reporting about how the academics rambled on and on about the touchy-feelie aspects of life in Santa Clara County and then concluding with a very concrete example of how none of it really matters when we disenfranchise women and short people. Where's enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act when we need it?
If the French government thought this one through, they could earn a tremendous amount from the "taxation" of speech on the Internet. Their fines aren't nearly high enough to dissuade global media companies from doing whatever they want.
Witness the actual fines levied against Yahoo! (From Juriscom.net):
Condemns Yahoo! Inc. to pay to LICRA the amount of 10,000 Francs on the basis of article 700 of the New \code of Civil Procedure;
Condemns Yahoo! Inc. and Yahoo France to pay to UEJF an amount of 10,000 Francs on the basis of article 700 of the New Code of Civil Procedure;
Declares that no further measures are appropriate at this juncture;
Awards the costs of LICRA's action to be borne by Yahoo! Inc. and those of the UEJF by Yahoo! Inc. and Yahoo France.
Yahoo! should chalk this up as a "cost of doing business" and keep doing whatever it is they've been doing.
This is not the first time OSC has used an electronic medium to allow his readers to get an advance look at a novel. IIRC, the Hatrack River area on (gasp) AOL was a popular hangout for Card fans some years back... I don't know whether it still exists, as I haven't subscribed to AOL in many years. However, when I was a subscriber, OSC released the entire text of Children of the Mind before the book hit the presses. I downloaded my copy, read it voraciously, and then bought a dead tree version in hardback.
Recommended OSC books:
Check out Hatrack River for more official details about OSC's work, and the Philotic Web for the unofficial details.
Reports Katz:
"I just came right now from the counselor's office," one student e-mailed me. "I scored a thousand. I had on a long coat, was wearing black and loudly told the jerk sitting next to me that I'd do my best to kill him if he ever called me a "trench coat freak" again. I am now officially on probation. He is not."
Followed by:
And then there's freedom. Why does the First Amendment end at the school door, when many kids, especially geeks, have spent much of their lives in the freest part of American culture -- the Internet? Online, people can speak about anything: dump on God, talk about sex, flame pundits, express themselves politically and rebelliously. In school, no one can.
I particularly like the part about flaming pundits; but that's not my point. My point is that what it looks like Katz is saying here is that it's okay for a 'trench coat freak' to voice a threat, but not jocks - or their 'non-weird peers'.
Katz goes on:
Geeks, perhaps, who are more accustomed to free expression than their non-weird peers, increasingly and disturbingly refer to schools as "fascistic" environments in which they are censored and oppressed. All kids can't have absolute freedom all the time, but many kids, especially older ones raised in the Digital Age, need more than they're getting. Without it, they will become increasingly alienated.
Now that part I agree with. One hundred percent, even though it comes remarkably close to demonstrating Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies.
Most states have an equivalent to FOIA... but in any case, virtually all local schools accept (a very small amount of) federal funding. IIRC, he Supreme Court has ruled that non-federal government agencies receiving federal funding must comply with federal rules, including those of FOIA.
Start with the school district office (not the school site office, necessarily -- they probably won't have a clue what you're talking about). Generally, one person at the district office is in charge of public relations/public information. That person may be the superintendent or the responsibility may lie (pun intended) with a director of public relations or some similar title.
Tell your contact you want to make a request for public records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). There may be paperwork and a fee for document reproduction involved, which will vary from district to district. Depending on the district, your liaison will contact the appropriate staff person to obtain the logs, or may refer you to her directly.
If the district resists your request, you now have precedent (at least in New Hampshire) in your favor. Have a good time!
There are two phrases I should have quoted, mostly knowing that there are people like User 240151 out there.
Heaven knows I like to be part of the in crowd! Maybe I should run for Homecoming King?