Of course the state is going to fail to set the proper curriculum. It's beholden to politics. All governments are. This is nothing new.
Children need to be taught both to memorize and to learn. You must first memorize what you cannot understand; only then can you keep it within your mental grasp long enough to ponder it and mull it over. It's central to all right models of learning. This is nothing new.
What is new is how we've completely given up on trying to solve this problem. We're overrun with apathy in a world where we see that our parents have failed and see that our children are failing their children. "Why bother? It's inevitable." And that's a reprehensible attitude for you to take.
Learning comes from the grasp of the ability to distinguish differences. You must have a base of knowledge before you may learn to recognize other data and build analogies from there. This is why it's more important than ever for children to be given truth that they can trust, so that they may form opinions of the uncalculated and unprocessed world out there. To do otherwise would be to insist that their lives always consist of pre-chewed pablum.
Out of the many facts you learned as a child, exactly how many of these do you remember today?
Most all, I would say. I still remember how many legs horses have and how many legs pigs have. And that knowledge has served me well.
Many? If this is the case, how many do your peers remember?
My peers? I reckon they're doing ok, because my generation wasn't exposed to these abominable teaching philosophies as much as yours was. "Debate"? Sure, we had debate. We also had plenty of other things. Don't criticize what you don't understand, son.
If things are constant, then it's only a greater sign that the system has failed us and has failed our children. We must learn from our mistakes and strive to do better than our parents did. You haven't emigrated back to where your great grandparents (my parents) came from, right? Why? Because you've learned better. We made this country the best in the world through hard effort and hard choices.
The status quo is not a choice. You must learn to grow.
What are churches but a school for divine thought? They're both instances of the profound advancement of human thought: we, unlike animals, build temples to knowledge. Sometimes they are the science buildings your fellow students inhabit. Sometimes they are the parishes that guide schoolboard decisions. Either way, it's a beautiful thing.
Reread what I advocated: I'm advocating a balanced approach, incorporating the best of both worlds in a magnificent compromise. Students should be taught both what to think as well as how to think. The only way they'll succeed in this dark world is if they can do both.
You can't argue against this point, because it's tautological. The only argument you can propose is that we can't expect so much of our students and their teachers. But that's a lazy good-for-nothing cop out. I'd be embarassed to live in a society that can't expect the most of those who would weave its moral and social fabric. You're not actually arguing that, are you?
So, to summarize everything here, school today is not about remembering answers. It's how to get answers to infinite amounts of problems.
Kids aren't getting any answers, today. Whatever your philosophy, it's important to realize when you must throw your hands up and try something new. It's called the scientific method. You're the one advocating dogma, here.
The problem with anecdotes is that they're precisely that: anecdotes. A single datum in a vast world of contradictory stories. I'll share one of my own, if you want.
But getting back on point: teaching people what to think is the only way our species can survive in the new millennium. We only live on this earth for eighty years or so. There's far too little precious time to reinvent the wheel by having each person perform the same elementary experiment or reading of primary sources. Heck, kids can't even manage to do the reading as it is -- they'd rather read the cliff notes.
Teaching them what to think is the only way to end this vicious cycle. Teach them what we already know to be true so that they may be freed up to discover what we do not yet know. That's what you guys like to call the "open source" method, and as philosophies go, it's one of the better ones. Don't reinvent the wheel. Build on what your forefathers built.
They haven't been implemented because they don't work, and not the other way around. The usual liberal mantra is to throw more money at it and just "try harder". It's a waste of resources and a waste of time.
You don't seem to think that teachers investigate their teaching methods before they implement them. That's an insult to teachers, in my opinion. Back in the day, they were the most respected branch of the public sector because of the leadership and influence they held over our children. They still do, in spite of what you're claiming.
How can you expect teachers to thrive if you won't give them the respect they are due? That's the question you should be asking.
If they don't have an immediate and apparent application, then they're not worth pursuing. It's not that things can't be nice or pleasant, and perhaps someone is willing to pay for such commodities in the free market. But if we're going to finance public education with public taxes, then we'd better show some results now. Waiting for the frilly possibilities and hopes for tomorrow just won't cut it.
Engineering's worth is self-evident.
Classics are what the great civilizations were founded on. If we are to surpass the great empires of Rome, Athens, and Mongolia, then we must understand their cultures and not the cultures of systematically oppressed peoples (who've been weeded out of the memepool), no matter how much sympathy we may feel for their plight.
Physics is overrated. All the great minds are like my fellow engineers at IBM. The physicists are the ones who'd rather sit around, pontificating on what the particles feel, rather than how they can be put together into useful building blocks.
Art is vulnerable to misuse by tyrrants in propaganda.
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are wonderful unattainable quanitities. We shouldn't fill our children's minds with false hopes of what cannot be achieved. We should give them the skills to make it in this life the best they can, before they eventually succumb to their mortal fate. It's the compassionate thing to do.
It's not just kids' memories, though they're the ones who are feeling the brunt of it, having spent the most time in the environment our society has created for them and for us. People everywhere have been experiencing deteriorating memories, and I'd say it has to do with how we teach them in school.
It used to be that you'd learn facts in school. You'd get a big textbook or two and carry it around in your burlap sack, go to classes and get orally quizzed on your ability to recall facts, and go home and get the snot beaten out of you if you didn't show any progress. You had to learn how to recall trivial things, because it was the only way to survive and prosper. The best minds of my day were like that.
Today? The emphasis is on task-based learning and goal-oriented teaching. Kids are being taught how to think, instead of what to think, out of some liberal notion that we shouldn't make their beliefs conform to our own experienced ones. It sounds great on paper, but in reality, kids are not only failing to learn how to think, they don't even know what to think about anymore. This is why you see much greater emphasis on arts and other trivial applications of human talents, instead of engineering and classical studies. For better or worse, we're breeding a generation of mental invalids.
You can't teach a whole generation to drive society by encouraging them to feel about driving. You have to give them rigid rules and test them on their grasp thereof. And if they don't conform, then you make them conform. It's not totalitarianism; it's just common sense.
What's needed is a better combination of the two methods. We should insist that our children learn both what and how to think. Only that way can we insure that the new generations can learn from my generation's mistakes and fulfill our promises of greatness.
It's a question I've been pondering for a while, and I think I've arrived at an answer ("no") which many of you share. But for me, it's for an entirely different reason from most. RMS just doesn't go far enough.
Let's face it, he's coasting. Ever since the lisp machine went out of style, he's been coasting. Ever since he founded the FSF, he's been coasting. He's been coasting on the name recognition he gets, and he's been coasting on his few small legal victories (notably over Apple for the objective-c extensions of gcc). What has he done lately?
He hasn't released a new version of emacs in years, and frankly, that can only be a good thing. Gcc is now in other people's hands, so he's not actively helping with that development. He still heads up the FSF, which still owns much of the free software out there (through voluntary transfer of copyright), but what've they done lately besides bitch and moan? What new groundbreaking software have they developed?
They haven't, and RMS hasn't. All the innovation has been coming from outside, from the people doing GNOME, GNUStep and all the rest. But you never see those people giving these keynotes. It's entirely undemocratic, really. We need real representation of the up-and-coming talent, not a tired rehash of a wizened hippy which may have been revolutionary for its time but is now old hat. Give us new blood.
RMS doesn't define the free-software movement anymore, anymore than ESR ever did. They're both playing the same tune, singing the same song, dancing the same dance, and mowing the same lawn that they've been mowing for the past twenty years. And where has it gotten us? Well, it hasn't exactly gotten in the way of progress to the point where we couldn't get anything done, but it hasn't exactly made our progress smooth.
We need doers, not talkers. We need doers to give these keynote addresses, because only then can people be inspired to pursue our dreams and do our bidding. RMS is letting his morality get in the way of progress again, whereas someone who is actually engineering our progress could tell us exactly how to go about helping.
We don't need activists, anymore. Those battles have already been won. It's time to retire RMS, ESR, and the rest to pasture (or better yet, to the knackery), and let the free-software movement cast forth its green shoots and flourish. The old must give way to the new; I know this only too well. It's time to abolish RMS. Without apology.
Now that we have cloning (or are about to, in any event), it's clear that we need to remove some redundancy from the human species by abolishing gender. No longer is it necessary to have two separate beings for the purposes of propagating the species, so it's safe to do away with the separation between the sexes.
I don't advocate abolishing only men, and I don't advocate abolishing only women. We should abolish both, in one fell swoop.
Andrea Dworkin describes such a utopian future future of the "androgynous community" where the perceived "deviance" of sexualities disappear and we're all free to become what we already feel we are but repress. So many of the problems our society faces are because of these artificial attributes we assign to gender (which itself is completely artificial), but it's always been hard to get rid of gender before; the presence of biological "sexes" always breathed life into the outmoded and pernicious fact of gender.
Now that we can get rid of sexes altogether, we can finally slay the vile gender beast and realize Andrea Dworkin's vision. I'm tingling in anticipation.
There hasn't been a US war worth fighting in aeons now, and I can't see there being a worthwhile one in the future. My generation stormed the beaches at Normandy but decided to prop up Nazi West Germany after the war. Hmph, no one asked me, I tell you.
You know, I laughed when I saw kids burning their draft cards in the sixties. Sometimes, I did more than laugh. Sometimes I hurled insults, fists, and even other stuff at them. Damn pipsqueaks didn't know what it meant to bleed for your country. For my country. Jimmy's never coming back, but these kids got to smoke their pot and shrooms and bras and whatever else they could fit in their pipes and mouths. It made me sick.
But not every war is worth fighting like 'Nam was. I'll even admit, 'Nam had its problems, and they weren't problems you could sweep under the front-porch's rug, neither. Deep issues, but I wonder whether those kids were right, now. I'd hate to learn something from someone half my age, but I have a closed mind, sometimes. It's not just that we had it better back then. Stuff was more real. You could taste your fried eggs on toast, and you didn't have to have someone slice your meat for you. I'll even let you in on a secret: the world wasn't black and white back then, no matter what those Hollywood films try to tell you. It's all lies and serpents.
Why should we fight China? What does China have to offer in conquest that we can't already obtain by getting them to immigrate? We already build better domestic Chinese food than they've got.
There's nothing in the world that can't be learned from a quick search via google, be it bomb recipes or the correct spelling for "partner". As search engines become more complex, directory listings (especially human-crafted ones) will become increasingly irrelevant.
What matters now is not where your data are hosted, but how others can access them. That's why it's far more important to get government-subsidized network access for our schools than it is to give them physical access to dead-tree books. Textbooks are just an excuse to milk readers out of $100 and rising, and I won't be sad to see them go.
When I first heard of distance learning, I thought it was a great idea, letting engaging teachers confer knowledge upon dedicated pupils without regard to the physical or sociocultural boundaries between them. But the more I read about it, the more I'm left wondering: can't this same technology be used for illegitimate purposes?
If there's no longer a physical boundary between students in New York and teachers in Montana, then can't militias in Montana start recruiting new members from New York via educational fronts that these technologies would permit? Technology is blind to politics, and so plenty of presently marginalized groups will step forward to claim their spot at the fountain of knowledge. Except instead of bringing forth the sweet fruits of education, they will poison the fount with the acids and agents of hate.
The solution is clear: those who are writing distance-learning software should incorporate a clause into their liscenses which would forbid the use of the software for illegitimate "educational" purposes. There are accreditation boards already in place for conventional educational facilities which would be ideal for judging the new online ones. Only then can we be sure that our children will be safe from the hate that looms on the horizon of the new millennium.
I hate to disagree with such a fine mind as yours, but you fail to realize the true depths of geek-centricity of the vampire meme.
Vampires, throughout history, have not been so much a metaphor for that which is outside but for that which is inside but reviled. In particular, the homoerotic nature of the male-vampire/male-victim interplay presents perhaps the first example of Eastern Europe's peoples' hopes to confront their inner-sexual turmoil. Rather than doing so, they chose to segregate it and deride it as the work of demons.
The geek, in the cultural pantheon of post-columbine era, is the modern homosexual. Columbine itself was an attempt to purge the nation of geeks, just as Eastern Europe attempted to do with vampires and homosexuals in the imported version of the Inquisition.
Shadow of the Vampire is the latest movie to appeal directly to the geek demographic, as I see it. Katz alludes to this here:
Murnau's vampire is nothing like the poised, elegant, sometimes erotic vampires in American films, from Bela Lugosi to Tom Cruise. Count Orlock is the pre-sanitized version, a bitter, loathesome plague, a repulsive creature who's not superhuman but a half-dead thing you couldn't stand to be anywhere near, let alone have feast on you in the dead of night. Once powerful and rich, he's reduced to the occasional rodent and vial of delivered blood. His hunting days are over. He has pallid skin, talon-like fingernails, and a dessicated face. There is nothing erotic or charismatic about him.
The vampire is a metaphor for the geek, lost in a sea of sexually potent others, his sexual impotence imprinted on his face like the mark of Cain. Rodentlike, he scurries from printspool to printspool, only partaking of carnal desires voyeuristically through his mouth (consuming the red blood of wizened pizzas), with all fleeing from his presence.
This movie will make a bundle precisely because it knows how to target its audience: geeks who will never get laid in their life, and who like to pretend they have super powers (hence the comic-books and magic-the-gathering obsessions) but who will die alone and unloved.
Instinct is something we have to put up with because it was hardwired into us. It's not a reason for doing anything. If anything, it's a sign that whatever's being done ought not to be done.
Millions of children are waiting out there to be adopted, and yet we're spending fortunes on perfecting techniques of dubious ethical pedigree? Why? Because we're still hung up on the idea that your "bloodline" has any value? That your own genetics, in a sea of six billion other bags of dna, actually have any significance? The lengths people will go to to avoid facing up to the reality that they just don't matter! It's obscene.
For crying out loud, you're going to be dead in fifty years. Do something now to make a difference in this world by adopting and caring for an exisitng human being.
Kubrick is dead. Nothing we can do can bring him back. What we can say is only an inadequate expression of what we carry in our hearts. Words pale in the shadow of grief; they seem insufficient even to measure the brave sacrifice of this great director. Their truest testimony will not be in the words we speak, but in the way he led his life and in the way he spent his life -- with dedication, honor and an unquenchable desire to explore this mysterious and beautiful universe through the lens of his camera.
The best we can do is remember Stanley; remember him as he lived, bringing life and love and joy to those who knew him and pride to a nation of cinema goers.
The way not to remember Stanley is to give his unfinished films to Spielberg to finish. What's done is done, and what's passed is passed. When Kubrick died, he never wished for others to bastardize his work. He was a visionary, one of the best directors of this century (and consequently, of all time), and to entrust his vision with a second-rate charlatan like Spielberg would be like giving Schubert's unfinished symphony to Yanni to complete. There are some things never to be done in this world.
Anyone who gives pays Sony's admission price to see this film is committing an abomination against Kubrick's art. AA Milne didn't intend Winnie the Pooh to be Disney's cash cow, and Kubrick didn't intend A.I. to be finished after his death. It mocks his death and mocks the life he led which we cherish so dearly.
What you do has consequences. The way you treat wronghoods in this world has important meaning for how others will commit wrongs anew. You know in your heart what is best, so don't debase it by giving in to oppression, however small it may seem or however insignificant it may appear. No evil is too insignificant to go unnoticed. We must respect Kubrick's wishes, because if we do not, then we cannot claim to have respected Kubrick himself. That is all.
Microsoft, I mean. They never knew how to play their hand right. Gates was moneyed from the start, with his father's fortune from the bootlegging days, and Bill's Harvard degree. But he never had the sense knocked into him, y'know?
When I first got started in this industry, it took me thirty years for me to hear the name "Microsoft", and it wasn't because I was off on Madagascar with the lemurs or nothing. It was because Microsoft didn't even exist yet. Didn't even exist. Do you remember what that was like? Some day you kids will tell your young rascals about what it was like to walk to school up-hill both ways knee-deep in AOL cds, but there was a time when these conglomerates didn't exist. That was when IBM was all we needed, the big blue momma. Man, could IBM shine. And then they were shoved out of the PC industry by that devil Microsoft and that whore Intel. I will never forget that day when my boss came in and gave us the news. Wow.
And here's Microsoft getting shoved around by Sun, now. And with the law on someone else's side, too. You never saw IBM make that mistake, no sir. IBM knew how to play its antitrust hand, and IBM knew how to deal with upstarts. IBM is up there next to General Motors in my book, and not just because they made me the man I am (just as GM made me the man I was in the backseat of that Chevy Sport Coupe that summer back in, well darn, it's slipped my mind). Microsoft? No one will remember them in twenty years. Heh, and I won't be around to see it happen, neither.
Sun can keep Java. As long as they don't touch my cobol. It wasn't my first language, but man could I make that baby fly like a greased pig out of an oil can. Object oriented? Object sharing? Classes? My parents' generation taught us in primary school to share, and anything we wanted to learn about classes we learned in the streets with a switchblade. That's why Bill and Microsoft never got off the ground. No common sense. No street sense. If he'd have walked for one mile in another man's long underwear, he'd have known that you don't mess with another man's shoes. Or his Java, either.
Good riddens, Microsoft. I spit on the mockery you've made of us all. You are not welcome at the family barbequeue in Jersey.
To make an omelette, you have to break some eggs. To become a successful self-employed contract worker, you have to take a few risks with your livelihood. But risk-taking is what life's all about. My advice:
Quit your existing job now. They're just draining your time and energy, and you obviously don't like them if you're considering starting out on your own.
Get some business cards. I don't know how many people fail to recognize the most rudimentary of marketing skills like presenting your product (yourself) in its best light. If it's not worth summarizing in three lines on a piece of index paper, then it's not worth saying.
Call in all your favors. If you've been a good employee in the industry, then you've met lots of other programmers at conventions and parties. Chances are you've caught some of them in compromising situations. Blackmail isn't always pretty, but it's a surefire way to get people's attention.
Post flyers on lampposts and traffic signs. Common leafleting is not just for garage sales anymore; legitimate businesses are using the plebeian means of advertising to their own advantage, and so should you.
Keep in touch with your parents. Even the best laid plans are laid to waste every now and then, and it's important to keep a lifeline with people who have deep pockets. If your parents don't have any money, then I suggest exchanging them for a different pair at the local shelter.
Pray. A lot. It's a tough time, and it takes tough people to make it through. Don't do it alone.
I haven't been on salary for almost thirty years now, and I'm doing quite alright. I wish you the best of luck.
Why should we be happy when the spammers get spammed? Ponder this.
Lex Talionis, the principle of an eye for an eye, is a morally bankrupt code of law we've been moving away from for the past few thousand years, thankfully. It can't deal with the complexities of the modern legal order, and it ignores all proper justifications for systems of punishment: rehabilitation, prophylaxis, etc. It makes an assertion of rigid judgment in an attempt to avoid judgment itself. We can't live in a world without judgment.
Ask yourself this: should we rape the rapist? If not, why not? (Ignore for a moment that we essentially do rape rapists by committing them to so-called "maximum security" prisons where they get systematically brutalized and raped by guards and other inmates.) It's not a morally tenable position to lower ourselves to the level of brutes just so we can vindicate some idea of retribution.
Therefore, ask yourself why we should be happy when the spammer gets spammed? No one should have to endure the pain and annoyance of spam: it's the scurge of the online world. Not even the spammer, who may be in his business because of factors outside his control like debt or bills for an illness in the family, etc. We should be outraged when anyone is spammed, and we should put the full force of the state and the law against the perpetrator no matter who the victim! Picking and choosing among which victims to protect is something the legal order of former barbaric times did. I'd be disgusted if our government returned to those days.
Spam == bad. Victimization == bad. Why do people conflate the two? What kind of giddy moral superiority to you get from seeing anyone hurt?
Nike has its swoosh. Cocacola has its swooshed "Coca Cola" logo. Tuxtops has a fat penguin. Where's the swoosh?
You might laugh, but trademarks make a big difference in directing public perception about one's product. Trademarks are a constitutionally protected property (under Article I) for the very reason that consumers are better able to judge the quality of an item by the quality of its trademark: good products have good marks, and bad products don't have the time put into making good marks. That's how the economy works, and that's how it ought to be.
But where's Tuxtops's brilliant trademark? All it has is a goofy penguin with a top hat. If you're a first-time laptop buyer, is that the kind of company you'd have a gut-instinct to give your money to? I would conjecture it isn't. Tux may make for good stuffed animals, but on the screen he looks fat and bloated, two characteristics Linux is not supposed to have (as compared to is competition from Redmond). If Tuxtops insists on having a penguin, then they should have a single abstract dot (the penguin) riding a blue swoosh. Now there's a trademark worth its salt!
This, more than anything else, is why I fear Tuxtops will go under, soon. I'm disappointed Nathan Myers didn't include it in his list at all, much less at the top of his list where it belongs. You should call Graham Hine, CEO of Tuxtops, at 877-735-0638 to let him know you care but share my reservations.
I thought it did a good job, though
on
Antitrust
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· Score: 2
Warning: major spoilers ahead.
We haven't had a movie that shows anything about the hacker mentality except a few horrible and misguided ones like Hackers, the Net, and the Matrix, so when I saw that Antitrust was coming out, I was very excited. Here was a chance to show the world just what we were made of, and I think it did an admirable job.
When Milo stayed up all night on his project with a case of Mountain Dew and an eightball, I knew exactly how he felt. That's how we used to get by in the old days, too.
The characters, while stereotyped, were accurate in my experience. You had the "Young Ambitious Geeks Who Just Want To Get Along" who got shafted in the end and the "Obsessive, Unscrupulous CEO" who never got the girl but who still managed to rule the world. I didn't think the shafting would have to include subterfuge and attacks on his pets, but otherwise, it was spot-on.
Ryan Phillippe played the ultimate geek role, and while we can all agree he's more attractive than the average geek, he wasn't so attractive as to discredit the film. When he got acid thrown in his face in the penultimate scene, it was like a reaching out to our childhoods where we all got bullied around and shown who was boss. I'm surprised Katz with his Hellmouth series didn't pick up on this in his review.
Remember: for all its foibles, Antitrust is still a good film by a good director. Ryan Philippe owned the screen last year in Varsity Blues. He's followed up that performance with a real gem in Antitrust.
Having prominent female writers like Julian sends a strong message to aspiring young girls who feel neglected by our school systems which channel them into clerical work or other low-paying fields saturated by women. The old-boys network is a tough one to crack, so thank you Julian for doing your part.
My advice to all the young people I meet today is: don't sign anything. They'll come after you with big words and pretty ladies, but don't give in. Don't ever let them take your signature. Once they have your signature, they can start extracting things from your bank account, and soon you won't have anything but your social security check to fall back on. And then where will you be?
I haven't signed anything in over thirty years. When the UPS guy comes to my front door with a package slip for me, I hide in the shrubbery. When bill solicitors show up demanding compensation for overdue ballances, I pretend I'm Swiss and don't speak the language. They've cut off my gas and water a couple times, sure, but that's the price you pay for true freedom in this country.
After Posnik Yakovlev completed Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, Ivan the Terrible had Yakovlev's eyes poked out so he could never build another building to compete with St Basil's beauty. Now there's a real do-not-compete clause. You kids these days have it easy.
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Of course the state is going to fail to set the proper curriculum. It's beholden to politics. All governments are. This is nothing new.
Children need to be taught both to memorize and to learn. You must first memorize what you cannot understand; only then can you keep it within your mental grasp long enough to ponder it and mull it over. It's central to all right models of learning. This is nothing new.
What is new is how we've completely given up on trying to solve this problem. We're overrun with apathy in a world where we see that our parents have failed and see that our children are failing their children. "Why bother? It's inevitable." And that's a reprehensible attitude for you to take.
Learning comes from the grasp of the ability to distinguish differences. You must have a base of knowledge before you may learn to recognize other data and build analogies from there. This is why it's more important than ever for children to be given truth that they can trust, so that they may form opinions of the uncalculated and unprocessed world out there. To do otherwise would be to insist that their lives always consist of pre-chewed pablum.
Out of the many facts you learned as a child, exactly how many of these do you remember today?
Most all, I would say. I still remember how many legs horses have and how many legs pigs have. And that knowledge has served me well.
Many? If this is the case, how many do your peers remember?
My peers? I reckon they're doing ok, because my generation wasn't exposed to these abominable teaching philosophies as much as yours was. "Debate"? Sure, we had debate. We also had plenty of other things. Don't criticize what you don't understand, son.
If things are constant, then it's only a greater sign that the system has failed us and has failed our children. We must learn from our mistakes and strive to do better than our parents did. You haven't emigrated back to where your great grandparents (my parents) came from, right? Why? Because you've learned better. We made this country the best in the world through hard effort and hard choices.
The status quo is not a choice. You must learn to grow.
What are churches but a school for divine thought? They're both instances of the profound advancement of human thought: we, unlike animals, build temples to knowledge. Sometimes they are the science buildings your fellow students inhabit. Sometimes they are the parishes that guide schoolboard decisions. Either way, it's a beautiful thing.
Reread what I advocated: I'm advocating a balanced approach, incorporating the best of both worlds in a magnificent compromise. Students should be taught both what to think as well as how to think. The only way they'll succeed in this dark world is if they can do both.
You can't argue against this point, because it's tautological. The only argument you can propose is that we can't expect so much of our students and their teachers. But that's a lazy good-for-nothing cop out. I'd be embarassed to live in a society that can't expect the most of those who would weave its moral and social fabric. You're not actually arguing that, are you?
So, to summarize everything here, school today is not about remembering answers. It's how to get answers to infinite amounts of problems.
Kids aren't getting any answers, today. Whatever your philosophy, it's important to realize when you must throw your hands up and try something new. It's called the scientific method. You're the one advocating dogma, here.
The problem with anecdotes is that they're precisely that: anecdotes. A single datum in a vast world of contradictory stories. I'll share one of my own, if you want.
But getting back on point: teaching people what to think is the only way our species can survive in the new millennium. We only live on this earth for eighty years or so. There's far too little precious time to reinvent the wheel by having each person perform the same elementary experiment or reading of primary sources. Heck, kids can't even manage to do the reading as it is -- they'd rather read the cliff notes.
Teaching them what to think is the only way to end this vicious cycle. Teach them what we already know to be true so that they may be freed up to discover what we do not yet know. That's what you guys like to call the "open source" method, and as philosophies go, it's one of the better ones. Don't reinvent the wheel. Build on what your forefathers built.
They haven't been implemented because they don't work, and not the other way around. The usual liberal mantra is to throw more money at it and just "try harder". It's a waste of resources and a waste of time.
You don't seem to think that teachers investigate their teaching methods before they implement them. That's an insult to teachers, in my opinion. Back in the day, they were the most respected branch of the public sector because of the leadership and influence they held over our children. They still do, in spite of what you're claiming.
How can you expect teachers to thrive if you won't give them the respect they are due? That's the question you should be asking.
It's not just kids' memories, though they're the ones who are feeling the brunt of it, having spent the most time in the environment our society has created for them and for us. People everywhere have been experiencing deteriorating memories, and I'd say it has to do with how we teach them in school.
It used to be that you'd learn facts in school. You'd get a big textbook or two and carry it around in your burlap sack, go to classes and get orally quizzed on your ability to recall facts, and go home and get the snot beaten out of you if you didn't show any progress. You had to learn how to recall trivial things, because it was the only way to survive and prosper. The best minds of my day were like that.
Today? The emphasis is on task-based learning and goal-oriented teaching. Kids are being taught how to think, instead of what to think, out of some liberal notion that we shouldn't make their beliefs conform to our own experienced ones. It sounds great on paper, but in reality, kids are not only failing to learn how to think, they don't even know what to think about anymore. This is why you see much greater emphasis on arts and other trivial applications of human talents, instead of engineering and classical studies. For better or worse, we're breeding a generation of mental invalids.
You can't teach a whole generation to drive society by encouraging them to feel about driving. You have to give them rigid rules and test them on their grasp thereof. And if they don't conform, then you make them conform. It's not totalitarianism; it's just common sense.
What's needed is a better combination of the two methods. We should insist that our children learn both what and how to think. Only that way can we insure that the new generations can learn from my generation's mistakes and fulfill our promises of greatness.
It's a question I've been pondering for a while, and I think I've arrived at an answer ("no") which many of you share. But for me, it's for an entirely different reason from most. RMS just doesn't go far enough.
Let's face it, he's coasting. Ever since the lisp machine went out of style, he's been coasting. Ever since he founded the FSF, he's been coasting. He's been coasting on the name recognition he gets, and he's been coasting on his few small legal victories (notably over Apple for the objective-c extensions of gcc). What has he done lately?
He hasn't released a new version of emacs in years, and frankly, that can only be a good thing. Gcc is now in other people's hands, so he's not actively helping with that development. He still heads up the FSF, which still owns much of the free software out there (through voluntary transfer of copyright), but what've they done lately besides bitch and moan? What new groundbreaking software have they developed?
They haven't, and RMS hasn't. All the innovation has been coming from outside, from the people doing GNOME, GNUStep and all the rest. But you never see those people giving these keynotes. It's entirely undemocratic, really. We need real representation of the up-and-coming talent, not a tired rehash of a wizened hippy which may have been revolutionary for its time but is now old hat. Give us new blood.
RMS doesn't define the free-software movement anymore, anymore than ESR ever did. They're both playing the same tune, singing the same song, dancing the same dance, and mowing the same lawn that they've been mowing for the past twenty years. And where has it gotten us? Well, it hasn't exactly gotten in the way of progress to the point where we couldn't get anything done, but it hasn't exactly made our progress smooth.
We need doers, not talkers. We need doers to give these keynote addresses, because only then can people be inspired to pursue our dreams and do our bidding. RMS is letting his morality get in the way of progress again, whereas someone who is actually engineering our progress could tell us exactly how to go about helping.
We don't need activists, anymore. Those battles have already been won. It's time to retire RMS, ESR, and the rest to pasture (or better yet, to the knackery), and let the free-software movement cast forth its green shoots and flourish. The old must give way to the new; I know this only too well. It's time to abolish RMS. Without apology.
Now that we have cloning (or are about to, in any event), it's clear that we need to remove some redundancy from the human species by abolishing gender. No longer is it necessary to have two separate beings for the purposes of propagating the species, so it's safe to do away with the separation between the sexes.
I don't advocate abolishing only men, and I don't advocate abolishing only women. We should abolish both, in one fell swoop.
Andrea Dworkin describes such a utopian future future of the "androgynous community" where the perceived "deviance" of sexualities disappear and we're all free to become what we already feel we are but repress. So many of the problems our society faces are because of these artificial attributes we assign to gender (which itself is completely artificial), but it's always been hard to get rid of gender before; the presence of biological "sexes" always breathed life into the outmoded and pernicious fact of gender.
Now that we can get rid of sexes altogether, we can finally slay the vile gender beast and realize Andrea Dworkin's vision. I'm tingling in anticipation.
There hasn't been a US war worth fighting in aeons now, and I can't see there being a worthwhile one in the future. My generation stormed the beaches at Normandy but decided to prop up Nazi West Germany after the war. Hmph, no one asked me, I tell you.
You know, I laughed when I saw kids burning their draft cards in the sixties. Sometimes, I did more than laugh. Sometimes I hurled insults, fists, and even other stuff at them. Damn pipsqueaks didn't know what it meant to bleed for your country. For my country. Jimmy's never coming back, but these kids got to smoke their pot and shrooms and bras and whatever else they could fit in their pipes and mouths. It made me sick.
But not every war is worth fighting like 'Nam was. I'll even admit, 'Nam had its problems, and they weren't problems you could sweep under the front-porch's rug, neither. Deep issues, but I wonder whether those kids were right, now. I'd hate to learn something from someone half my age, but I have a closed mind, sometimes. It's not just that we had it better back then. Stuff was more real. You could taste your fried eggs on toast, and you didn't have to have someone slice your meat for you. I'll even let you in on a secret: the world wasn't black and white back then, no matter what those Hollywood films try to tell you. It's all lies and serpents.
Why should we fight China? What does China have to offer in conquest that we can't already obtain by getting them to immigrate? We already build better domestic Chinese food than they've got.
There's nothing in the world that can't be learned from a quick search via google, be it bomb recipes or the correct spelling for "partner". As search engines become more complex, directory listings (especially human-crafted ones) will become increasingly irrelevant.
What matters now is not where your data are hosted, but how others can access them. That's why it's far more important to get government-subsidized network access for our schools than it is to give them physical access to dead-tree books. Textbooks are just an excuse to milk readers out of $100 and rising, and I won't be sad to see them go.
When I first heard of distance learning, I thought it was a great idea, letting engaging teachers confer knowledge upon dedicated pupils without regard to the physical or sociocultural boundaries between them. But the more I read about it, the more I'm left wondering: can't this same technology be used for illegitimate purposes?
If there's no longer a physical boundary between students in New York and teachers in Montana, then can't militias in Montana start recruiting new members from New York via educational fronts that these technologies would permit? Technology is blind to politics, and so plenty of presently marginalized groups will step forward to claim their spot at the fountain of knowledge. Except instead of bringing forth the sweet fruits of education, they will poison the fount with the acids and agents of hate.
The solution is clear: those who are writing distance-learning software should incorporate a clause into their liscenses which would forbid the use of the software for illegitimate "educational" purposes. There are accreditation boards already in place for conventional educational facilities which would be ideal for judging the new online ones. Only then can we be sure that our children will be safe from the hate that looms on the horizon of the new millennium.
I hate to disagree with such a fine mind as yours, but you fail to realize the true depths of geek-centricity of the vampire meme.
Vampires, throughout history, have not been so much a metaphor for that which is outside but for that which is inside but reviled. In particular, the homoerotic nature of the male-vampire/male-victim interplay presents perhaps the first example of Eastern Europe's peoples' hopes to confront their inner-sexual turmoil. Rather than doing so, they chose to segregate it and deride it as the work of demons.
The geek, in the cultural pantheon of post-columbine era, is the modern homosexual. Columbine itself was an attempt to purge the nation of geeks, just as Eastern Europe attempted to do with vampires and homosexuals in the imported version of the Inquisition.
This movie will make a bundle precisely because it knows how to target its audience: geeks who will never get laid in their life, and who like to pretend they have super powers (hence the comic-books and magic-the-gathering obsessions) but who will die alone and unloved.
Instinct is something we have to put up with because it was hardwired into us. It's not a reason for doing anything. If anything, it's a sign that whatever's being done ought not to be done.
Millions of children are waiting out there to be adopted, and yet we're spending fortunes on perfecting techniques of dubious ethical pedigree? Why? Because we're still hung up on the idea that your "bloodline" has any value? That your own genetics, in a sea of six billion other bags of dna, actually have any significance? The lengths people will go to to avoid facing up to the reality that they just don't matter! It's obscene.
For crying out loud, you're going to be dead in fifty years. Do something now to make a difference in this world by adopting and caring for an exisitng human being.
Kubrick is dead. Nothing we can do can bring him back. What we can say is only an inadequate expression of what we carry in our hearts. Words pale in the shadow of grief; they seem insufficient even to measure the brave sacrifice of this great director. Their truest testimony will not be in the words we speak, but in the way he led his life and in the way he spent his life -- with dedication, honor and an unquenchable desire to explore this mysterious and beautiful universe through the lens of his camera.
The best we can do is remember Stanley; remember him as he lived, bringing life and love and joy to those who knew him and pride to a nation of cinema goers.
The way not to remember Stanley is to give his unfinished films to Spielberg to finish. What's done is done, and what's passed is passed. When Kubrick died, he never wished for others to bastardize his work. He was a visionary, one of the best directors of this century (and consequently, of all time), and to entrust his vision with a second-rate charlatan like Spielberg would be like giving Schubert's unfinished symphony to Yanni to complete. There are some things never to be done in this world.
Anyone who gives pays Sony's admission price to see this film is committing an abomination against Kubrick's art. AA Milne didn't intend Winnie the Pooh to be Disney's cash cow, and Kubrick didn't intend A.I. to be finished after his death. It mocks his death and mocks the life he led which we cherish so dearly.
What you do has consequences. The way you treat wronghoods in this world has important meaning for how others will commit wrongs anew. You know in your heart what is best, so don't debase it by giving in to oppression, however small it may seem or however insignificant it may appear. No evil is too insignificant to go unnoticed. We must respect Kubrick's wishes, because if we do not, then we cannot claim to have respected Kubrick himself. That is all.
Microsoft, I mean. They never knew how to play their hand right. Gates was moneyed from the start, with his father's fortune from the bootlegging days, and Bill's Harvard degree. But he never had the sense knocked into him, y'know?
When I first got started in this industry, it took me thirty years for me to hear the name "Microsoft", and it wasn't because I was off on Madagascar with the lemurs or nothing. It was because Microsoft didn't even exist yet. Didn't even exist. Do you remember what that was like? Some day you kids will tell your young rascals about what it was like to walk to school up-hill both ways knee-deep in AOL cds, but there was a time when these conglomerates didn't exist. That was when IBM was all we needed, the big blue momma. Man, could IBM shine. And then they were shoved out of the PC industry by that devil Microsoft and that whore Intel. I will never forget that day when my boss came in and gave us the news. Wow.
And here's Microsoft getting shoved around by Sun, now. And with the law on someone else's side, too. You never saw IBM make that mistake, no sir. IBM knew how to play its antitrust hand, and IBM knew how to deal with upstarts. IBM is up there next to General Motors in my book, and not just because they made me the man I am (just as GM made me the man I was in the backseat of that Chevy Sport Coupe that summer back in, well darn, it's slipped my mind). Microsoft? No one will remember them in twenty years. Heh, and I won't be around to see it happen, neither.
Sun can keep Java. As long as they don't touch my cobol. It wasn't my first language, but man could I make that baby fly like a greased pig out of an oil can. Object oriented? Object sharing? Classes? My parents' generation taught us in primary school to share, and anything we wanted to learn about classes we learned in the streets with a switchblade. That's why Bill and Microsoft never got off the ground. No common sense. No street sense. If he'd have walked for one mile in another man's long underwear, he'd have known that you don't mess with another man's shoes. Or his Java, either.
Good riddens, Microsoft. I spit on the mockery you've made of us all. You are not welcome at the family barbequeue in Jersey.
I haven't been on salary for almost thirty years now, and I'm doing quite alright. I wish you the best of luck.
Why should we be happy when the spammers get spammed? Ponder this.
Lex Talionis, the principle of an eye for an eye, is a morally bankrupt code of law we've been moving away from for the past few thousand years, thankfully. It can't deal with the complexities of the modern legal order, and it ignores all proper justifications for systems of punishment: rehabilitation, prophylaxis, etc. It makes an assertion of rigid judgment in an attempt to avoid judgment itself. We can't live in a world without judgment.
Ask yourself this: should we rape the rapist? If not, why not? (Ignore for a moment that we essentially do rape rapists by committing them to so-called "maximum security" prisons where they get systematically brutalized and raped by guards and other inmates.) It's not a morally tenable position to lower ourselves to the level of brutes just so we can vindicate some idea of retribution.
Therefore, ask yourself why we should be happy when the spammer gets spammed? No one should have to endure the pain and annoyance of spam: it's the scurge of the online world. Not even the spammer, who may be in his business because of factors outside his control like debt or bills for an illness in the family, etc. We should be outraged when anyone is spammed, and we should put the full force of the state and the law against the perpetrator no matter who the victim! Picking and choosing among which victims to protect is something the legal order of former barbaric times did. I'd be disgusted if our government returned to those days.
Spam == bad. Victimization == bad. Why do people conflate the two? What kind of giddy moral superiority to you get from seeing anyone hurt?
Nike has its swoosh. Cocacola has its swooshed "Coca Cola" logo. Tuxtops has a fat penguin. Where's the swoosh?
You might laugh, but trademarks make a big difference in directing public perception about one's product. Trademarks are a constitutionally protected property (under Article I) for the very reason that consumers are better able to judge the quality of an item by the quality of its trademark: good products have good marks, and bad products don't have the time put into making good marks. That's how the economy works, and that's how it ought to be.
But where's Tuxtops's brilliant trademark? All it has is a goofy penguin with a top hat. If you're a first-time laptop buyer, is that the kind of company you'd have a gut-instinct to give your money to? I would conjecture it isn't. Tux may make for good stuffed animals, but on the screen he looks fat and bloated, two characteristics Linux is not supposed to have (as compared to is competition from Redmond). If Tuxtops insists on having a penguin, then they should have a single abstract dot (the penguin) riding a blue swoosh. Now there's a trademark worth its salt!
This, more than anything else, is why I fear Tuxtops will go under, soon. I'm disappointed Nathan Myers didn't include it in his list at all, much less at the top of his list where it belongs. You should call Graham Hine, CEO of Tuxtops, at 877-735-0638 to let him know you care but share my reservations.
We haven't had a movie that shows anything about the hacker mentality except a few horrible and misguided ones like Hackers, the Net, and the Matrix, so when I saw that Antitrust was coming out, I was very excited. Here was a chance to show the world just what we were made of, and I think it did an admirable job.
Remember: for all its foibles, Antitrust is still a good film by a good director. Ryan Philippe owned the screen last year in Varsity Blues. He's followed up that performance with a real gem in Antitrust.
Having prominent female writers like Julian sends a strong message to aspiring young girls who feel neglected by our school systems which channel them into clerical work or other low-paying fields saturated by women. The old-boys network is a tough one to crack, so thank you Julian for doing your part.
My advice to all the young people I meet today is: don't sign anything. They'll come after you with big words and pretty ladies, but don't give in. Don't ever let them take your signature. Once they have your signature, they can start extracting things from your bank account, and soon you won't have anything but your social security check to fall back on. And then where will you be?
I haven't signed anything in over thirty years. When the UPS guy comes to my front door with a package slip for me, I hide in the shrubbery. When bill solicitors show up demanding compensation for overdue ballances, I pretend I'm Swiss and don't speak the language. They've cut off my gas and water a couple times, sure, but that's the price you pay for true freedom in this country.
Don't sign anything. Just trust me on this one.
After Posnik Yakovlev completed Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, Ivan the Terrible had Yakovlev's eyes poked out so he could never build another building to compete with St Basil's beauty. Now there's a real do-not-compete clause. You kids these days have it easy.