We should be conserving this precious natural resource. It's not renewable, you know!
Don't worry, once we get massive arrays of seawater-powered deuterium fusion reactors online our energy problems will be solved forever and we'll have all the helium we can drink...
But using a tool is not the same as engineering it, and engineering is not the same as science, and science is not the same as math, and math is not the same as philosophy. I'd argue that a substantial part of an undergraduate education involves developing an awareness of these distinctions.
And I'd argue the opposite: that a substantial part of the hardest problems we face today in our highly advanced, interconnected world come from arbitrary divisions between specialities, when in fact most problems cut across multiple specialities. And that rather than increasing this separation, we'd be far better served by teaching students how to integrate knowledge and approaches across multiple domains, and learning how to erase theoretical distinctions which do not in fact exist in reality.
For example: the hard division between "engineering" and "using" software has created atrocities like the current trend toward "usability-expert-designed" user interfaces which don't serve the needs of the actual users. We've seen this occur before our eyes in Apple iDevices, Windows 8 Metro and GNOME3/Unity, but it's especially visible in the open-source world. A project starts out giving voice to the users. Then voices start crying for more "Professionalisation", which means creating teams of experts, separating the experts from the users, and the users themselves into different "use case" classes, and then listening exclusively to the experts come hell or high water. Things which used to be simple become complex; multiple applications and devices are required to do what used to be a single task; workflows which cut across multiple theoretical "use cases" become difficult to impossible to manage. All because of this absurd and arbitrary decision to create distinctions and specialisations where there were none before.
This is exactly the wrong direction to go on, and on a blog like this, we really ought to know better. The whole idea of free software / open source is that there is no hard division between tool use and tool design. That's the point of it all. Don't throw this hard-earned wisdom away.
At my university, the CS department are, counter-intuitively, some of the most reluctant to use our online capabilities and classroom presentation tech.
Why counter-intuitively? Dijkstra has been very vocal on this topic throughout his whole life. And you can hardly get more CS-y than him.
Yes, and that right there explains how come the Software Engineering world ignores people like Dijkstra in the Computer Science world. If you don't actually use computer systems, you won't get a feel for how they actually work - as opposed to how they 'should' work 'in theory' 'in a perfect world' of abstract mathematics which cannot not in fact exist in our physical universe.
Software Engineering desperately needs some solid theoretical underpinnings, as opposed to what passes for theory right now: Object Oriented Design and Rapid Development. But if the CS guys can't be bothered to actually use a computer, and check if their theories are relevant to today's problems, what's the point of listening to them? CS might have as much to do with computers as astronomy does with telescopes, but an astronomer who never touches a telescope isn't going to produce a whole lot of good science, are they?
And that's how we end up with things like the current Internet security apocalypse. Those who claim to know the mathematics of computation, and could solve the hard problems of security, consistency checking, etc, in their sleep, aren't talking to the people who actually have to shovel the bits into the compiler.
Why isn't academia seeing this hard firewall between practitioners and theorists as a bug, rather than a feature?
In December 1981, additional laws were enacted clarifying permissible military assistance to civilian law enforcement agencies
That's interesting. So Posse Comitatus isn't a fundamental Constitutional principle at all and can be arbitrarily rewritten by Congress at whim. I presume a future Congress could "clarify" the Act further to say that the military doing anything in US domestic territory short of dropping a nuke is perfectly legal.
Leave it to a politician to explain how the IT field is going to disappear. "As we move toward the cloud and technology gets easier to use",
Explain it to the politicians like this: Outsourcing your corporate IT needs to The Cloud is the information equivalent of outsourcing your beef needs to Tesco.
You might think that not having to pony up the cash yourself means it's a sure thing, but if you don't know your provider's track record, it could turn into a shambles.
would create so much entropy, it would be nearly uncrackable. Something like the names of the people who lived next door when I was a kid, in order of age
That's nice. Now do it 30 times with a different list of people for every website you visit. And change each of those every year.
The problem isn't so much keeping one password secure for life. It's keeping track of a separate, secure-for-life, password for every. single. data. service. you will ever interact with in your life. Because you can't trust any one of them not to save your password and use it to hack into the others.
Ok, lets infringe a bit of copyrights from around the world... think in the number pi.
Oh hi! It's Darren Aronofsky and Ang Lee at the door. They're having an argument about which one owns your number. Darren reckons he owns everything involving an electric drill, and Ang will settle for anything with a tiger in it.
Why not focus on making AI BETTER than humans? Perhaps we aren't the best model to imitate.
How would we know if we've made something better than ourselves? Wouldn't recognising it as "better" require the ability in us to understand what it was trying to achieve?
From a certain point of view, vacuum has pretty much taken out the top evolutionary niche in our universe. There's more of it than anything else anywhere, ever. Do we consider it "better" than us? And if not, why not?
Aww, you Americans with your unlimited Internet. You think everywhere is like that! It's so cute!
There's nothing "strangely territorial" about not letting strangers use my Wi-Fi in New Zealand. All our ISPs have monthly transfer caps in the tens-of-gigabytes range (I maxed my 20 GB limit out in three weeks this month). If we use more than the limit, we get charged - around $1 per gigabyte.
If I open my Wi-Fi for strangers to use -- even not taking into account legal liability from our new "Skynet" Three Strikes copyright law -- then I'm basically handing a blank cheque to the world, which I'll have to pay for.
they should not be using a consumer-level OS and browser, but something a bit more realtime.
Like...?
A Cyberdyne Investment Systems T-1989 Model 101 Tradinator (tm) rapid-response tactical securities infiltration, acquisition, monetisation and arbitrage platform. With optional cup holder and social-gaming connector.
The worst bit about this is that their "good name"
um
What good name? Anonymous are already the Hells Angels/Crips/Bloods of the Internet. Now it's just quibbling over just how pointless and disruptive they are.
Company does a bunch of research work, and then says "Hey, we're now going to force everyone in the world to use our research work and pay us to do that, even if they'd prefer to use someone else's work for cheaper or free"
I forget, are we for or against authoritarianism? Depends who's paying the corporate standard committees, I guess.
Yeah! And now that you mention it... they really should make a sequel to "The Matrix" some day. It really is surprising that such a big hit was never followed up on...
Yeah...now that I think about it, that's really--- ---ut it, that's reall--- ---'s really--- odd. Whoa. I just saw a black cat walk past my doorway twice
Now, what were we talking about? I can't quite put my finger on it, but something tells me I'll be much happier not remembering...
You might very well think that, but then you encounter the non-Euclidean badness that is Unity/Gnome3 and all sanity goes out the window.
A million distributions, all simultaneously worse than each other is entirely possible with the way that Linux desktop development is trending at the moment.
Generally I am repulsed by those repulsed by the profit motive
And I'm repulsed by those repulsed by those repulsed by the profit motive. It's repulsors all the way down.
They didn't owe me a job in the first place so if I'm let go, so be it.
Hear, hear! Good clean social Darwinism. There shouldn't be any kind of "social contract" at all. Our corporations should be sleek, vicious, beautiful monsters, utterly amoral, streamlined of every impulse except a ravening urge to destroy the competition and feast on the juices of sweet, sweet captive markets, the blood and ichor of consumer franchises trickling down their fangs.
We don't need none of this Commie socialist "empathy" or "compassion" or "rational planning" or "thinking about the issues". That's for sissies.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that end users pay the cost of both sending and receiving data. It's just that home users tend to receive more data than they send (and vice versa for server owners).
You'd know this if you were on a data-capped home Internet service and ever ran BitTorrent. You can chew through gigabytes of cap pretty fast if you live a torrent uploading.
The problem is that raising prices or introducing data caps (there's none in France) is clearly not going to be popular with customers at the best of times
And yet that's exactly how it works here in New Zealand - the customer pays for as much data as they download via data caps - and the telcos are doing just fine.
It's a radical notion, I know, for a customer to pay the cost of a commodity that they use, and for the supplier to charge the customer the cost of that service.
Slashdot Mirror
...we'll soon run out of it.
We should be conserving this precious natural resource. It's not renewable, you know!
Don't worry, once we get massive arrays of seawater-powered deuterium fusion reactors online our energy problems will be solved forever and we'll have all the helium we can drink...
oops.
It's 2013, can we please stop using "cyber" now?
I always liked "information superhighway" myself.
If a university professor doesn't understand the difference between singular and plural verbs, the English language is pretty much doomed.
Thee Inglish lanngwij iz orlreddee duumd. Its just a mattu uv tim beefor it eevulvz intuu a truulee fonetik tung.
Then orl huuminkiind wil injory a gloreeis yuutopeeu.
But using a tool is not the same as engineering it, and engineering is not the same as science, and science is not the same as math, and math is not the same as philosophy. I'd argue that a substantial part of an undergraduate education involves developing an awareness of these distinctions.
And I'd argue the opposite: that a substantial part of the hardest problems we face today in our highly advanced, interconnected world come from arbitrary divisions between specialities, when in fact most problems cut across multiple specialities. And that rather than increasing this separation, we'd be far better served by teaching students how to integrate knowledge and approaches across multiple domains, and learning how to erase theoretical distinctions which do not in fact exist in reality.
For example: the hard division between "engineering" and "using" software has created atrocities like the current trend toward "usability-expert-designed" user interfaces which don't serve the needs of the actual users. We've seen this occur before our eyes in Apple iDevices, Windows 8 Metro and GNOME3/Unity, but it's especially visible in the open-source world. A project starts out giving voice to the users. Then voices start crying for more "Professionalisation", which means creating teams of experts, separating the experts from the users, and the users themselves into different "use case" classes, and then listening exclusively to the experts come hell or high water. Things which used to be simple become complex; multiple applications and devices are required to do what used to be a single task; workflows which cut across multiple theoretical "use cases" become difficult to impossible to manage. All because of this absurd and arbitrary decision to create distinctions and specialisations where there were none before.
This is exactly the wrong direction to go on, and on a blog like this, we really ought to know better. The whole idea of free software / open source is that there is no hard division between tool use and tool design. That's the point of it all. Don't throw this hard-earned wisdom away.
At my university, the CS department are, counter-intuitively, some of the most reluctant to use our online capabilities and classroom presentation tech.
Why counter-intuitively? Dijkstra has been very vocal on this topic throughout his whole life. And you can hardly get more CS-y than him.
Yes, and that right there explains how come the Software Engineering world ignores people like Dijkstra in the Computer Science world. If you don't actually use computer systems, you won't get a feel for how they actually work - as opposed to how they 'should' work 'in theory' 'in a perfect world' of abstract mathematics which cannot not in fact exist in our physical universe.
Software Engineering desperately needs some solid theoretical underpinnings, as opposed to what passes for theory right now: Object Oriented Design and Rapid Development. But if the CS guys can't be bothered to actually use a computer, and check if their theories are relevant to today's problems, what's the point of listening to them? CS might have as much to do with computers as astronomy does with telescopes, but an astronomer who never touches a telescope isn't going to produce a whole lot of good science, are they?
And that's how we end up with things like the current Internet security apocalypse. Those who claim to know the mathematics of computation, and could solve the hard problems of security, consistency checking, etc, in their sleep, aren't talking to the people who actually have to shovel the bits into the compiler.
Why isn't academia seeing this hard firewall between practitioners and theorists as a bug, rather than a feature?
In December 1981, additional laws were enacted clarifying permissible military assistance to civilian law enforcement agencies
That's interesting. So Posse Comitatus isn't a fundamental Constitutional principle at all and can be arbitrarily rewritten by Congress at whim. I presume a future Congress could "clarify" the Act further to say that the military doing anything in US domestic territory short of dropping a nuke is perfectly legal.
Leave it to a politician to explain how the IT field is going to disappear. "As we move toward the cloud and technology gets easier to use",
Explain it to the politicians like this: Outsourcing your corporate IT needs to The Cloud is the information equivalent of outsourcing your beef needs to Tesco.
You might think that not having to pony up the cash yourself means it's a sure thing, but if you don't know your provider's track record, it could turn into a shambles.
I don't know what a "Humble Bundle" is
Then you're not interested in video games.
Flash is for games and video on the Web, and occasionally offline.
would create so much entropy, it would be nearly uncrackable. Something like the names of the people who lived next door when I was a kid, in order of age
That's nice. Now do it 30 times with a different list of people for every website you visit. And change each of those every year.
The problem isn't so much keeping one password secure for life. It's keeping track of a separate, secure-for-life, password for every. single. data. service. you will ever interact with in your life. Because you can't trust any one of them not to save your password and use it to hack into the others.
Ok, lets infringe a bit of copyrights from around the world... think in the number pi.
Oh hi! It's Darren Aronofsky and Ang Lee at the door. They're having an argument about which one owns your number. Darren reckons he owns everything involving an electric drill, and Ang will settle for anything with a tiger in it.
Why not focus on making AI BETTER than humans? Perhaps we aren't the best model to imitate.
How would we know if we've made something better than ourselves? Wouldn't recognising it as "better" require the ability in us to understand what it was trying to achieve?
From a certain point of view, vacuum has pretty much taken out the top evolutionary niche in our universe. There's more of it than anything else anywhere, ever. Do we consider it "better" than us? And if not, why not?
Aww, you Americans with your unlimited Internet. You think everywhere is like that! It's so cute!
There's nothing "strangely territorial" about not letting strangers use my Wi-Fi in New Zealand. All our ISPs have monthly transfer caps in the tens-of-gigabytes range (I maxed my 20 GB limit out in three weeks this month). If we use more than the limit, we get charged - around $1 per gigabyte.
If I open my Wi-Fi for strangers to use -- even not taking into account legal liability from our new "Skynet" Three Strikes copyright law -- then I'm basically handing a blank cheque to the world, which I'll have to pay for.
*blink* Why would I do that?
they should not be using a consumer-level OS and browser, but something a bit more realtime.
Like...?
A Cyberdyne Investment Systems T-1989 Model 101 Tradinator (tm) rapid-response tactical securities infiltration, acquisition, monetisation and arbitrage platform. With optional cup holder and social-gaming connector.
I'LL BE BANK.
The worst bit about this is that their "good name"
um
What good name? Anonymous are already the Hells Angels/Crips/Bloods of the Internet. Now it's just quibbling over just how pointless and disruptive they are.
Company does a bunch of research work, and then says "Hey, we're now going to force everyone in the world to use our research work and pay us to do that, even if they'd prefer to use someone else's work for cheaper or free"
I forget, are we for or against authoritarianism? Depends who's paying the corporate standard committees, I guess.
And we have a perfect right to say "that's crap, and they'd have to duct tape me to the chair to get me to watch it" if appropriate.
Roger Ebert once thought as you do.
J. J. will show you the true meaning of the final episode of Lost. He is your master now.
It is pointless to resist, my son.
If it takes 1,000 years to digest you, doesn't that mean it's significantly less corrosive than air and water?
So that's where Lazarus Pits come from!
You are so correct. Look at all the Christian beheading and bombings recently.
We call those "drone strikes" now.
Star wars 7: There is a knock at Luke's front door. A bunch of people invite themselves in and eat all his food.
Far over the Endor forest green
To Yavin IV and Tattooine
We must arrive by hyperdrive
And stick a fork in Palpatine...
Yeah! And now that you mention it... they really should make a sequel to "The Matrix" some day. It really is surprising that such a big hit was never followed up on...
Yeah...now that I think about it, that's really---
---ut it, that's reall---
---'s really---
odd. Whoa. I just saw a black cat walk past my doorway twice
Now, what were we talking about? I can't quite put my finger on it, but something tells me I'll be much happier not remembering...
They can't all be the worst!
You might very well think that, but then you encounter the non-Euclidean badness that is Unity/Gnome3 and all sanity goes out the window.
A million distributions, all simultaneously worse than each other is entirely possible with the way that Linux desktop development is trending at the moment.
Generally I am repulsed by those repulsed by the profit motive
And I'm repulsed by those repulsed by those repulsed by the profit motive. It's repulsors all the way down.
They didn't owe me a job in the first place so if I'm let go, so be it.
Hear, hear! Good clean social Darwinism. There shouldn't be any kind of "social contract" at all. Our corporations should be sleek, vicious, beautiful monsters, utterly amoral, streamlined of every impulse except a ravening urge to destroy the competition and feast on the juices of sweet, sweet captive markets, the blood and ichor of consumer franchises trickling down their fangs.
We don't need none of this Commie socialist "empathy" or "compassion" or "rational planning" or "thinking about the issues". That's for sissies.
All forms of government central planning of the economy are inevitably totalitarian.
All forms? Even partial central planning?
Seems like that would be partialitarian.
the 'receiver pays' model of end users
Actually, I'm pretty sure that end users pay the cost of both sending and receiving data. It's just that home users tend to receive more data than they send (and vice versa for server owners).
You'd know this if you were on a data-capped home Internet service and ever ran BitTorrent. You can chew through gigabytes of cap pretty fast if you live a torrent uploading.
The problem is that raising prices or introducing data caps (there's none in France) is clearly not going to be popular with customers at the best of times
And yet that's exactly how it works here in New Zealand - the customer pays for as much data as they download via data caps - and the telcos are doing just fine.
It's a radical notion, I know, for a customer to pay the cost of a commodity that they use, and for the supplier to charge the customer the cost of that service.