Well, you had me agreeing with you until the part about killing newborns and being a vegitarian, since I don't see how that could be "infinitely self-consistent." Certainly a newborn has more intelligence than veal and the same capacity for suffering. Of course, whether or not either the veal or the baby are sentient is up for grabs. Anyways, you have enough good opinions that, for future reference, you should maybe leave out all those irrelivant self-deprecating remarks that'll alienate your audience. Unless your goal was trolling, in which case you should focus on the irrelivant remarks and tone down the relevant ones.
>IMHO, the American school system is going down
>the shit hole. Yuppie parents are coming in for
>every little thing that happens to little Johnny.
>They say nothing when he parties and goes out
>with a different girl every night. But let him
>get suspended, and they will be the first ones in
>the school, yelling about their son being singled
>out.
Reminds me of our high school's Student Body President who was caught breaking into the school, with intended valdalism, and had his lawyer daddy get him off with a few hours community service and a virtual gag order on what actually went down that night.
Parents who support their kids when their kids are making a moral stand rock. Parents who support their kids when the kids are being pricks are morons.
And schools that give pricks a slap on the wrist but vehemently attack student freedom of speech have their priorities totally out of whack.
>engineers that disobey the laws of mathematics
>and physics.
Reality check. You're talking about two different sets. A: The Laws of Nature. B: The Laws of Man.
Set A is apparently immutable, therefore conformity is pretty mandatory. Set B is clearly mutable and sometimes corrupt, therefore conformity is neither mandatory nor virtuous.
It could be argued that often these "bright kids" are smarter than the conformist administrators that pass judgement over them. Giving them absolute free range might not be a good idea, but neither is forcing them to adhere to an obsolete status quo.
>Well, I guess that the constitution really isn't
>worth much these days anyways. Remind me again
>why public-school students have no First
>Amendment rights?
Oh, because in 1988 the Supreme Court didn't think it was okay for a high school student newspaper to discuss birth control and divorce.
Remind me again why so many people in power are hypocrites? Sigh.
>Yes because schools are not there to pass on ALL information.
Do you want to know why so many kids don't take the dangers associated with drug use seriously? Because campaigns such as "Just Say No" hammer in the idea that drugs are 100% bad and there is no good reason to use drugs. Then reality sets in and a kid tries ecstasy for the first time. "Wow," they exclaim. "The adults were lying, this stuff feels good. Therefore, the adults were also lying about how this stuff can kill people." Trust is gained through honesty and disclosure.
"[T]hough all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?" John Milton, Areopagitica, A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England (1644).
>Oh please, that argument has been heard a million
>times and it wasn't that original to begin with.
Uh, since when does an argument have to be original to be valid?
>Porn is defined as such by a general consensus.
Community decency standards vary between communities and as a function of time. There was a time when it was illegal to mail information about contraception through the mail.
>For that age group it's reasonable to block
>racist websites. ie. sites that say that niggers
>[sic] are a pestilence.
Gee, that's the exact same logic that people use to advocate banning classic literature, like Huckleberry Finn. But, who wants a generation of young adults who understand satire anyways, since satire can be used to criticize the status quo!
Oh, and thanks to your post and the use of the keyword "nigger", this Slashdot discussion is now blocked. Oh well.
irony (ìre-nê, ìer-) noun
plural ironies
1.a. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning. b. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning. c. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect. See synonyms at wit1.
2.a. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain). b. An occurrence, a result, or a circumstance notable for such incongruity. See Usage Note at ironic.
3.Dramatic irony.
4.Socratic irony.
[French ironie, from Old French, from Latin ìronìa, from Greek eironeia, feigned ignorance, from eiron, dissembler, probably from eirein, to say.]
Dang it, TNT was just about the coolest thing around. It was an AIM client, supported by AOL, if I recall correctly, that was written in elisp. It meant that I could IM my friends from any box that had, or could telnet to, a *NIX prompt. I used to use it to keep in touch with my online friends during school breaks at home when all I had was a 10-year-old 8088 with a 9600 baud modem to keep me company.
Cokie Roberts came and spoke at my journalism school a few weeks ago and joked that with minute-to-minute Neilsens, the news networks can actually watch as people change channels when there's international news.
"That's the gist of what academics and engineers told IT workers gathered here this week for the three-day Association for Computing Machinery
conference."
Get it straight, this article is about the failure of IT professionals to make intuitive computers... NOT computer scientists. Half the people quoted in this article ARE computer scientists. The IT community contains everything from useless MSCE's to computer scientists, to pointy-haired bosses. Get a clue.
IANAL, and it's been a few semesters since I took
communications law, but that doesn't sound correct
to me. Absence of malice only works for public
figures. Whether or not eFront's CEO is a public
figure might be debatable, but I know that I've
never heard of him before now. For private
citizens, all the you need to prove is
negligence. That is to say, if Slashdot didn't
take reasonable measures to check the validity
of the story (do they ever?) then they're screwed
if it's false.
However, I am taking media ethics right now
and, in my opinion, furthering gossip isn't
wonderful, even if all signs point to this guy
being a jerk.
I remember that when I was very young, my family
found one of those Pong-only systems at Goodwill.
It was pretty cool. Except, eventually my brother
tricked me into cutting random wires for an
experiment. Oh well, at least I didn't wreck
the Timex Sinclair or the PCjr. I can sleep
at night knowing that it's not a huge collector's
item, since this one is only selling for 30 bucks on eBay.
Yes, I wrote that post in haste, so I'll try to elaborate. I'm sorry I misunderstood your non-student status.
>Your eagerness to promote your egalitarian agenda
>is getting in the way of reading what was
>actually written.
You say "egalitarian agenda" as if it were a bad thing. Do you disagree with the second paragraph of the United States Declaration of Independence?
First of all, you're basing your argument about "average intelligence" on anecdotal evidence from your own life and your brother's life. Unless your brother teaches statistics, I don't see how his opinion is relevant. I also don't understand the importance of open-door Catholic schools to your point, since the average American isn't Catholic and doesn't want a Catholic education. You might also want to brush up on the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights if you do indeed believe that private schools are the answer to raising intelligence.
I am basing my argument on a social constructionist point of view. That is to say, people are mostly the product of their environment. Therefore, if the average student in your brother's classes aren't up to his standard of intelligence, then something about their surroundings is amiss. In my earlier post, I hypothesized that cynical teachers contribute to an anti-learning environment. In fact, a quick google search turned up this study, which confirms that teachers' expectations do affect student learning.
Of course there are stupid people in the world, and there always will be. However, it is elitist and undemocratic for people in power, (read: teachers and lawyers) to assume that the average person is hopelessly stupid.
Re:Invention without Ethics
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 1
>I am suddenly reminded of a conversation with my
>brother several years ago. I was a law student;
>he taught in a public high school. After
>something I said about "average intelligence", he
>told me that my notion of average intelligence
>was *far* too high, and biased by having attended
>private schools.
So, basically, you're saying that rich people are more intelligent than people who can't afford private school. Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason that the world is full of dumbasses is because teachers like your brother have no expectation of intelligence from their students? Did it occur to you that the clients sent to a law _student_ probably couldn't afford private school?
>Remember, there's no lower limit to human
>intelligence . . .
Prove this statement.
In short, your idea of intelligence is still incredibly biased.
The analogy between modern western civilization
and the fall of Rome has occured to me as well.
But, the million dollar question is: If you were
sent back in time to the beginning of Rome's fall,
how would you stop it? How many voices are needed
to reverse the momentum and how do you organize
the voices to turn the hearts of the majority?
>I have been led astray several times by
>incompetant advisors; on one occasion, only
>intervention from the Dean of
>Students kept my graduation date from being
>threatened. Had I taken the time to truly
>understand University policy, I could have saved
>myself the headache.
Were these IU University Division advisors? because, 99% of the time I knew more about a topic by looking in the Bulletin than asking a UD advisor (who would flip through said Bulletin anyways before saying "I don't know.") There _are_ competent advisors, but you don't get access to them until you're an upperclassman, at which time you probably don't need one. (This is the case for the School of Journalism, at least). The main CS advisor at IU is pretty on the ball, as well.
Okay, enough ranting. The moral of the story is that, ideally, you should track down whoever is the expert when a tricky question arrives and shoot them off an email.
>I always thought that Scheme might just be a
>waste of time
Oh man, I used to hate Scheme, and then I discovered that Scheme had the do-until looping structure. All this time, my profs were pretending that ugly tail-recursion was the only way to loop in Scheme. Ugh. What still bothers me about Scheme is that, for such a pedagogic language, there are few, if any, good, concise references for it on the web. Is a complete, scannable list of syntax so much to ask for?
> There is such a thing as irrefutable fact, and > we would do well to leave our ivory towers and > preach to the public of its existance,
> before they are lost to a medieval belief > system.
Please give me an example of an irrefutable fact.
(Hint: Read some Kierkegaard first, or at least Plato.)
A couple semesters ago, I co-authored a journalism project about distance learning that can be found here. The most important thing that I learned from my sources is that teaching classes online requires two learning curves: one for the subject matter and one for the technology. It's all good if you're teaching a class to Slashdot readers, but elsewhere, you'll find lots of people will be confounded by simple computerized tasks. To steal a famous quote, "The medium is the message."
Re:But that's most engineering curriculums
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 1
If you're willing to go to a big, impersonal university, there's nothing to stop you from building your own curriculum that satisfies artistic and technical curiousities. At Indiana University they have a BA program in CS. It's been really easy to mix that with a double major and I've been able to take classes like digital design, visual communications, online journalism, philosophy, creative writing, history of photography, bicycling etc.. The only problem I have with the breadth of my education is that it's hard to find people who will discuss tech one minute and existentialism the next.:P
Slashdot Mirror
>Though I have to wonder sometimes if he just used :-)
>to make a lot of words up
Methinks he invented quite a few. (e.g. critical, monumental, obscene, majestic)
Well, you had me agreeing with you until the part about killing newborns and being a vegitarian, since I don't see how that could be "infinitely self-consistent." Certainly a newborn has more intelligence than veal and the same capacity for suffering. Of course, whether or not either the veal or the baby are sentient is up for grabs. Anyways, you have enough good opinions that, for future reference, you should maybe leave out all those irrelivant self-deprecating remarks that'll alienate your audience. Unless your goal was trolling, in which case you should focus on the irrelivant remarks and tone down the relevant ones.
>IMHO, the American school system is going down
>the shit hole. Yuppie parents are coming in for
>every little thing that happens to little Johnny.
>They say nothing when he parties and goes out
>with a different girl every night. But let him
>get suspended, and they will be the first ones in
>the school, yelling about their son being singled
>out.
Reminds me of our high school's Student Body President who was caught breaking into the school, with intended valdalism, and had his lawyer daddy get him off with a few hours community service and a virtual gag order on what actually went down that night.
Parents who support their kids when their kids are making a moral stand rock. Parents who support their kids when the kids are being pricks are morons.
And schools that give pricks a slap on the wrist but vehemently attack student freedom of speech have their priorities totally out of whack.
>engineers that disobey the laws of mathematics
>and physics.
Reality check. You're talking about two different sets. A: The Laws of Nature. B: The Laws of Man.
Set A is apparently immutable, therefore conformity is pretty mandatory. Set B is clearly mutable and sometimes corrupt, therefore conformity is neither mandatory nor virtuous.
It could be argued that often these "bright kids" are smarter than the conformist administrators that pass judgement over them. Giving them absolute free range might not be a good idea, but neither is forcing them to adhere to an obsolete status quo.
>Well, I guess that the constitution really isn't
>worth much these days anyways. Remind me again
>why public-school students have no First
>Amendment rights?
Oh, because in 1988 the Supreme Court didn't think it was okay for a high school student newspaper to discuss birth control and divorce.
Remind me again why so many people in power are hypocrites?
Sigh.
>Yes because schools are not there to pass on ALL information.
Do you want to know why so many kids don't take the dangers associated with drug use seriously? Because campaigns such as "Just Say No" hammer in the idea that drugs are 100% bad and there is no good reason to use drugs. Then reality sets in and a kid tries ecstasy for the first time. "Wow," they exclaim. "The adults were lying, this stuff feels good. Therefore, the adults were also lying about how this stuff can kill people." Trust is gained through honesty and disclosure.
"[T]hough all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?" John Milton, Areopagitica, A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England (1644).
>Oh please, that argument has been heard a million
>times and it wasn't that original to begin with.
Uh, since when does an argument have to be original to be valid?
>Porn is defined as such by a general consensus.
Community decency standards vary between communities and as a function of time. There was a time when it was illegal to mail information about contraception through the mail.
>For that age group it's reasonable to block
>racist websites. ie. sites that say that niggers
>[sic] are a pestilence.
Gee, that's the exact same logic that people use to advocate banning classic literature, like Huckleberry Finn. But, who wants a generation of young adults who understand satire anyways, since satire can be used to criticize the status quo!
Oh, and thanks to your post and the use of the keyword "nigger", this Slashdot discussion is now blocked. Oh well.
>These are schools for crying out loud. There are
>some things that should be blocked out of
>schools.
"And today kids, we're going to learn about the United States Constitution, but you don't need to take notes because it doesn't apply to you anyways."
irony (ìre-nê, ìer-) noun
plural ironies
1.a. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning. b. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning. c. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect. See synonyms at wit1.
2.a. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain). b. An occurrence, a result, or a circumstance notable for such incongruity. See Usage Note at ironic.
3.Dramatic irony.
4.Socratic irony.
[French ironie, from Old French, from Latin ìronìa, from Greek eironeia, feigned ignorance, from eiron, dissembler, probably from eirein, to say.]
Excerpted from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from INSO Corporation; further reproduction and distribution in accordance with the Copyright Law of the United States. All rights reserved.
Slashdot trolling Slashdot. It's supposed to be
ironic.
Dang it, TNT was just about the coolest thing around. It was an AIM client, supported by AOL, if I recall correctly, that was written in elisp. It meant that I could IM my friends from any box that had, or could telnet to, a *NIX prompt. I used to use it to keep in touch with my online friends during school breaks at home when all I had was a 10-year-old 8088 with a 9600 baud modem to keep me company.
Cokie Roberts came and spoke at my journalism school a few weeks ago and joked that with minute-to-minute Neilsens, the news networks can actually watch as people change channels when there's international news.
Mmm. I sure do love wading through y/n prompts.
"That's the gist of what academics and engineers told IT workers gathered here this week for the three-day Association for Computing Machinery conference."
Get it straight, this article is about the failure of IT professionals to make intuitive computers... NOT computer scientists. Half the people quoted in this article ARE computer scientists. The IT community contains everything from useless MSCE's to computer scientists, to pointy-haired bosses. Get a clue.
IANAL, and it's been a few semesters since I took communications law, but that doesn't sound correct to me. Absence of malice only works for public figures. Whether or not eFront's CEO is a public figure might be debatable, but I know that I've never heard of him before now. For private citizens, all the you need to prove is negligence. That is to say, if Slashdot didn't take reasonable measures to check the validity of the story (do they ever?) then they're screwed if it's false. However, I am taking media ethics right now and, in my opinion, furthering gossip isn't wonderful, even if all signs point to this guy being a jerk.
I remember that when I was very young, my family
found one of those Pong-only systems at Goodwill.
It was pretty cool. Except, eventually my brother
tricked me into cutting random wires for an
experiment. Oh well, at least I didn't wreck
the Timex Sinclair or the PCjr. I can sleep
at night knowing that it's not a huge collector's
item, since this one is only selling for 30 bucks on eBay.
Yes, I wrote that post in haste, so I'll try to elaborate. I'm sorry I misunderstood your non-student status.
>Your eagerness to promote your egalitarian agenda
>is getting in the way of reading what was
>actually written.
You say "egalitarian agenda" as if it were a bad thing. Do you disagree with the second paragraph of the United States Declaration of Independence?
First of all, you're basing your argument about "average intelligence" on anecdotal evidence from your own life and your brother's life. Unless your brother teaches statistics, I don't see how his opinion is relevant. I also don't understand the importance of open-door Catholic schools to your point, since the average American isn't Catholic and doesn't want a Catholic education. You might also want to brush up on the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights if you do indeed believe that private schools are the answer to raising intelligence.
I am basing my argument on a social constructionist point of view. That is to say, people are mostly the product of their environment. Therefore, if the average student in your brother's classes aren't up to his standard of intelligence, then something about their surroundings is amiss. In my earlier post, I hypothesized that cynical teachers contribute to an anti-learning environment. In fact, a quick google search turned up this study, which confirms that teachers' expectations do affect student learning.
Of course there are stupid people in the world, and there always will be. However, it is elitist and undemocratic for people in power, (read: teachers and lawyers) to assume that the average person is hopelessly stupid.
>I am suddenly reminded of a conversation with my
>brother several years ago. I was a law student;
>he taught in a public high school. After
>something I said about "average intelligence", he
>told me that my notion of average intelligence
>was *far* too high, and biased by having attended
>private schools.
So, basically, you're saying that rich people are more intelligent than people who can't afford private school. Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason that the world is full of dumbasses is because teachers like your brother have no expectation of intelligence from their students? Did it occur to you that the clients sent to a law _student_ probably couldn't afford private school?
>Remember, there's no lower limit to human
>intelligence . . .
Prove this statement.
In short, your idea of intelligence is still incredibly biased.
The analogy between modern western civilization
and the fall of Rome has occured to me as well.
But, the million dollar question is: If you were
sent back in time to the beginning of Rome's fall,
how would you stop it? How many voices are needed
to reverse the momentum and how do you organize
the voices to turn the hearts of the majority?
>I have been led astray several times by
>incompetant advisors; on one occasion, only
>intervention from the Dean of
>Students kept my graduation date from being
>threatened. Had I taken the time to truly
>understand University policy, I could have saved
>myself the headache.
Were these IU University Division advisors? because, 99% of the time I knew more about a topic by looking in the Bulletin than asking a UD advisor (who would flip through said Bulletin anyways before saying "I don't know.") There _are_ competent advisors, but you don't get access to them until you're an upperclassman, at which time you probably don't need one. (This is the case for the School of Journalism, at least). The main CS advisor at IU is pretty on the ball, as well.
Okay, enough ranting. The moral of the story is that, ideally, you should track down whoever is the expert when a tricky question arrives and shoot them off an email.
>I always thought that Scheme might just be a
>waste of time
Oh man, I used to hate Scheme, and then I discovered that Scheme had the do-until looping structure. All this time, my profs were pretending that ugly tail-recursion was the only way to loop in Scheme. Ugh. What still bothers me about Scheme is that, for such a pedagogic language, there are few, if any, good, concise references for it on the web. Is a complete, scannable list of syntax so much to ask for?
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/7156/ laser.htm
With a couple laser pointers and a few bucks worth of parts, you too can build your own RS232 Laser Transceiver for your home laser network.
> There is such a thing as irrefutable fact, and > we would do well to leave our ivory towers and > preach to the public of its existance, > before they are lost to a medieval belief > system. Please give me an example of an irrefutable fact. (Hint: Read some Kierkegaard first, or at least Plato.)
A couple semesters ago, I co-authored a journalism project about distance learning that can be found here. The most important thing that I learned from my sources is that teaching classes online requires two learning curves: one for the subject matter and one for the technology. It's all good if you're teaching a class to Slashdot readers, but elsewhere, you'll find lots of people will be confounded by simple computerized tasks. To steal a famous quote, "The medium is the message."
If you're willing to go to a big, impersonal university, there's nothing to stop you from building your own curriculum that satisfies artistic and technical curiousities. At Indiana University they have a BA program in CS. It's been really easy to mix that with a double major and I've been able to take classes like digital design, visual communications, online journalism, philosophy, creative writing, history of photography, bicycling etc.. The only problem I have with the breadth of my education is that it's hard to find people who will discuss tech one minute and existentialism the next. :P