If it weren't so tough to pull off, I would suggest that you set up an extra account, so you could get more valid feedback on your stories, and less flaming simply because people are used to you posting drivel. That being said, I think there are some pretty valid critiques of this story. Mitnick commited several very morally questionable activities, and is being held for them. Yes, the FBI's current paranoia on computer crime is abhorrent, but I think you obscured the essentials of the problem by writing several more pages of unrelated stuff. And I think the responses that you get back show that to a certain degree,/.ers DON'T think this is important. There's not a lot you can do about it, their priorities are their own.
Geek-grrl in training "Leave it to the computer industry to shorten the year 2000 problem to Y2K. It was thinking like this that got us into this trouble to begin with."
It may not be censorship, but it IS getting annoying... I have to set my level at -1, because a lot of the posts I want to read are getting marked down. And why did a post mentioning that the article had already been posted get marked down as flamebait? That was relevant criticism, IMHO... Moderation is rule by the masses, and while your average slashdotter is a bit brighter than your average, say, american, democracy still has the same woeful results... Unfortunately, like democracy, it's what we've got, and I can't say as I have any better ideas.
Geek-grrl in training. "Television is the religion of the 90's. I'm an atheist."--me
> Sooo... what's your point, some people can see this, some people are oblivious to it. Thats the way people are, are you trying to educate > them? Methinks that's pretty arrogant of you if you are. My point, in case you missed it, is that for any one person to tell another what group they are or are not part of, they must make a statement based only on their own limited perceptions of both that person and that group. Katz has writen this article as if he were the ultimate arbiter of geek-dom. He writes must of his articles that way. If I were to say to you, based on only the email that I have read that you are gay/stupid/straight/brilliant, you'd be pretty offended, right? But he has neatly divided the world into geeks and non-geeks on the basis of how they feel about 2 hours of fiction. Should I be impressed at his omniscience? Or maybe wonder about his conclusions?
Thanks for telling me who I am, Jon, I just love it when you decide to define me... I hate to tell you this, but geeks are no more a homogenous group than any other. Personally, I love the Matrix, but there's plenty of "real geeks" out there who probably don't, whose geek status you have just shot down in flames on the basis of your own definition of geekdom. While I find your essays provoke more discussion than anybody else's on Slashdot, the reason seems to be that you polarize people by making sweeping generalizations that half the people think are totally idiotic and inane, and the other half think are self evident. You might be doing us a service by stirring up the pot, but I'm still trying to decide if you're just doing it for the sake of making people think, or if you really do believe these naive generalizations. I realize that in effect, I have just flamed you, but please don't take it personally. My issues are with your writing style, not you as a human being.
I hate to tell you this, but homeschooling doesn't help as much as everyone thinks it does... I was home schooled all the way through, K-12. I hit the real world and bounced. I had no social skills, I'd never had to develop them. It meant that when I had to go out and get a job/get a boyfriend/go to college, I had to suddenly do a LOT of catching up just to make it. I was literally socially handicapped, which made me an outcast everywhere I went. I had the same alienation and torment as everybody else, I just got it in different places at different times. The only advantage is that I got to go to college early.
A crepe is just a really thin pancake, in essence, and cottage cheese is a pretty standard crepe filling at most restaurants. I don't know about the 7-up, but it's mildly acidic, so you'd probably wind up with a fluffier pancake... Kind of like adding lemon juice.
There was an article in Popular Science a couple of months ago (sorry, don't have the issue with me) about a group that was doing just that... they had built a robot with next to no initial programming and were gradually exposing it to external stimuli. They said it had learned to move in a suprisingly organic fashion, and was displaying some interesting spontaneous behaviors. I'll track down the article when I get home and post the issue and title, unless someone else knows what it is.
Funny, I thought that social engineering is exactly what both school and the media are about, and both of them are very effective at what they do. You seem to have just focused purely on restrictive and punitive measures. It is possible to engineer creative and supportive solutions that do actually help people, and it is possible to engineer society by having better PR than anyone else.
Jon, while I applaud your attention to these stories, you are beginning to get a little redundant. Instead of showing us more and more of the insanity which parents are willing to perpetrate (which doesn't really show me anything new or shocking), how about a little more attention to potential solutions, instead of this hand-wringing. We know how the horror goes. Many of us lived through it. While my deepest sympathies go out to these people, I feel that I am betraying them, if the only thing I can do is sit around and say how horrible it is. That makes us as bad as the regular media.
If all you got out of it was the stuff on AI, then you really weren't reading it very closely...:) IMHO, GEB really isn't a book for everyone. If you're a conclusion/goal oriented person, then GEB is NOT for you. There is no earth shattering conclusion. GEB is a book for people who believe that the journey is more important than the goal, that all the little tangents really are important, and the thoughts that are inspired by a book are just as important as the thoughts that get spoon fed to you.
Slashdot Mirror
If it weren't so tough to pull off, I would suggest that you set up an extra account, so you could get more valid feedback on your stories, and less flaming simply because people are used to you posting drivel. That being said, I think there are some pretty valid critiques of this story. Mitnick commited several very morally questionable activities, and is being held for them. Yes, the FBI's current paranoia on computer crime is abhorrent, but I think you obscured the essentials of the problem by writing several more pages of unrelated stuff. And I think the responses that you get back show that to a certain degree, /.ers DON'T think this is important. There's not a lot you can do about it, their priorities are their own.
Geek-grrl in training
"Leave it to the computer industry to shorten the year 2000 problem to Y2K. It was thinking like this that got us into this trouble to begin with."
It may not be censorship, but it IS getting annoying... I have to set my level at -1, because a lot of the posts I want to read are getting marked down. And why did a post mentioning that the article had already been posted get marked down as flamebait? That was relevant criticism, IMHO... Moderation is rule by the masses, and while your average slashdotter is a bit brighter than your average, say, american, democracy still has the same woeful results... Unfortunately, like democracy, it's what we've got, and I can't say as I have any better ideas.
Geek-grrl in training.
"Television is the religion of the 90's. I'm an atheist."--me
> Sooo ... what's your point, some people can see this, some people are oblivious to it. Thats the way people are, are you trying to educate
> them? Methinks that's pretty arrogant of you if you are.
My point, in case you missed it, is that for any one person to tell another what group they are or are not part of, they must make a statement based only on their own limited perceptions of both that person and that group. Katz has writen this article as if he were the ultimate arbiter of geek-dom. He writes must of his articles that way. If I were to say to you, based on only the email that I have read that you are gay/stupid/straight/brilliant, you'd be pretty offended, right? But he has neatly divided the world into geeks and non-geeks on the basis of how they feel about 2 hours of fiction. Should I be impressed at his omniscience? Or maybe wonder about his conclusions?
Thanks for telling me who I am, Jon, I just love it when you decide to define me... I hate to tell you this, but geeks are no more a homogenous group than any other. Personally, I love the Matrix, but there's plenty of "real geeks" out there who probably don't, whose geek status you have just shot down in flames on the basis of your own definition of geekdom. While I find your essays provoke more discussion than anybody else's on Slashdot, the reason seems to be that you polarize people by making sweeping generalizations that half the people think are totally idiotic and inane, and the other half think are self evident. You might be doing us a service by stirring up the pot, but I'm still trying to decide if you're just doing it for the sake of making people think, or if you really do believe these naive generalizations. I realize that in effect, I have just flamed you, but please don't take it personally. My issues are with your writing style, not you as a human being.
I hate to tell you this, but homeschooling doesn't help as much as everyone thinks it does... I was home schooled all the way through, K-12. I hit the real world and bounced. I had no social skills, I'd never had to develop them. It meant that when I had to go out and get a job/get a boyfriend/go to college, I had to suddenly do a LOT of catching up just to make it. I was literally socially handicapped, which made me an outcast everywhere I went. I had the same alienation and torment as everybody else, I just got it in different places at different times. The only advantage is that I got to go to college early.
A crepe is just a really thin pancake, in essence, and cottage cheese is a pretty standard crepe filling at most restaurants. I don't know about the 7-up, but it's mildly acidic, so you'd probably wind up with a fluffier pancake... Kind of like adding lemon juice.
There was an article in Popular Science a couple of months ago (sorry, don't have the issue with me) about a group that was doing just that... they had built a robot with next to no initial programming and were gradually exposing it to external stimuli. They said it had learned to move in a suprisingly organic fashion, and was displaying some interesting spontaneous behaviors. I'll track down the article when I get home and post the issue and title, unless someone else knows what it is.
Funny, I thought that social engineering is exactly what both school and the media are about, and both of them are very effective at what they do. You seem to have just focused purely on restrictive and punitive measures. It is possible to engineer creative and supportive solutions that do actually help people, and it is possible to engineer society by having better PR than anyone else.
What can we, as a community, do about it?
If all you got out of it was the stuff on AI, then you really weren't reading it very closely... :) IMHO, GEB really isn't a book for everyone. If you're a conclusion/goal oriented person, then GEB is NOT for you. There is no earth shattering conclusion. GEB is a book for people who believe that the journey is more important than the goal, that all the little tangents really are important, and the thoughts that are inspired by a book are just as important as the thoughts that get spoon fed to you.
No longer anonymous, geek-grrl in training